Hand to the Plow

You've been sitting in the pew long enough. It's time to pick up the plow.

What if the reason the church isn't multiplying disciples has nothing to do with money, buildings, or better programs, and everything to do with the fact that nobody ever showed you how to follow the Jesus Pattern of disciple-making?

This is for the business owner whose conversations at the water cooler feel like more than small talk, but who has never been shown what to do next. The stay-at-home mom whose neighborhood looks more like a mission field every day, but who doesn't know how to step into it. The young adult who is completely done with a version of Christianity that asks them to come to church but rarely trains them to be the church.

It's for the burned-out volunteer who has served faithfully for years and still feels like something essential is missing. The bivocational elder doing ministry in the marketplace every single day without a title or a paycheck. And it is absolutely for that 72-year-old woman who has more wisdom, more relational capital, and more love than she gives herself credit for, who just needs someone to tell her that she already has everything she needs to do what Jesus asked her to do.

The Western church has done a remarkable job of producing sincere, faithful, devoted believers. And a far less impressive job producing disciple-makers. The result? Pews full of people waiting for someone else to do what Jesus commissioned all of us to do. The Acts Gap is real, and it is not a passion problem. It is a pathway problem.

In Hand to the Plow, Kevin Beasley hands you the ancient pathway, the one Jesus walked with twelve ordinary, unimpressive, unqualified people on the dusty roads of Galilee. The one Paul carried from city to city, leaving multiplying communities of faith everywhere he went. The one the early church practiced so naturally, so organically, with such breathtaking effectiveness that within three centuries the entire known world had been touched by it.