Building a Discipling Culture Quotes

“If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Leaders must always be looking to give away their jobs to people who can do it as well or better than they. This calls for a level of intimacy between the leader and disciple that does not last. The leader begins to disengage; the disciple now becomes a leader. The closeness remains and is no longer defined by the amount of time spent together but by the openness with one another.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“We are creating a culture, even if it’s unintentional. The question is, do we like the culture we are creating?”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“We don’t want people to understand forgiveness or prayer or mission or justice only intellectually. We want people who can forgive, who can hear and respond to God, who actually know Him. We want people who have hearts that break for our world and the people in it and do something about it. We want the kind of people in our communities who resemble the people we see in Scripture.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Prayer was as fundamental an element in the life of Jesus as breathing. He inhaled his Father’s presence so he could exhale his Father’s will.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Here’s the thing that can be difficult to wrap our minds around: If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“We want people who have hearts that break for our world and the people in it and do something about it.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“we are to work from our rest, not rest from our work.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“aim for “low control, high accountability”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“No one Accidentally creates Disciples. Discipleship is an intentional Pursuit..”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“JESUS CREATED A HIGHLY SUPPORTIVE BUT HIGHLY CHALLENGING CULTURE.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Faith always comes to the surface and always produces action. It cannot be contained. Thoughts and intents that are held within and not acted upon are not faith, no matter what we like to say. (“My faith is personal” is a favorite. But that is a self-contradicting statement. Faith is always acted out, never kept bottled up within.)”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“IF WE KNOW WHO GOD HAS MADE US TO BE, WE CAN STOP TRYING TO BE SOMEONE WE ARE NOT AND LET GO OF THE STRESS THAT COMES WITH LIVING THAT KIND OF LIFE.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Discipleship isn’t a random assortment of facts and propositions and behaviors, discipleship is something that is you to the core and is completely incarnated in you.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Many faith communities have become little more than gatherings of isolated individuals, while the number of online communities continues to grow.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Huddles work because they expose people to the learning of a group rather than only one-on-one mentoring. What a member gets to see is not only how the leader is discipling them, but also how the leader is discipling other people as well. Because each person is different, different skills and practices are needed to disciple various personality types.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“From our experience, if you want to make disciples, if you want to build a discipling culture in your community, you are going to need three things: 1.  A discipleship vehicle (I call it a Huddle) 2.  People need access to your life (the texture of Family on Mission) 3.  A discipling language (the discipling language I use is called LifeShapes)”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“another question surfaced. It was a question that people tiptoed around, but never once articulated explicitly. Yet so many responses indicated this was a question that they desperately needed an answer to. It was the question that no one was actually asking, or perhaps that no one had the courage to ask out loud. It is the question people don’t want to admit not having the answer to. Yet it is the question that everything else hinges on. The answer leads to the future of the church. The answer teaches us how to reach people who don’t know Jesus. The answer is everything. And yet, either we haven’t realized we should be asking it, or we can’t seem to push ourselves to ask the question. It’s as if it’s embarrassing to even ask. Isn’t this something we should have figured out by now? You could argue we are the most educated people who have ever lived, thanks to our ever-shifting technology and connectivity. Why are we wrestling with this question, and why don’t we have good answers for it? This is the question. HOW DO WE MAKE DISCIPLES?”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“This is where we pull a chair up to our Father’s table. We acknowledge that he has the means to feed us—whatever our hunger is. We go to him with our most basics needs anticipating he will feed us from his bounty. We ask because it demonstrates not only our need, but our trust in his provision for us.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“When disciples are in stage three, the concept that sets them free is “God is in charge.” They have to acknowledge grace and begin to work it into their lifestyle. This is not easy for most of us, but it is the one thing that will move us on to growth and maturity.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” —Mark 10: 42–45”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Above all else, know that good leaders always define their own reality. No one else can build a discipling culture for you—it must begin in your own life and then overflow into the lives of those you lead. You will not be the perfect example, but you can be a living example.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“As we know it today, discipleship is mostly about that first kind of learning: the classroom experience. And really, that’s about it. We learn from the pastor’s teaching on Sunday. We learn from Bible studies. We go to Sunday School. We learn from small group discussion guides and DVDs. We learn from reading books. We learn from taking classes at church. Notice that all of this is completely information driven, in some sort of classroom-esque experience. There is virtually no apprenticing happening in our churches.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“Scripture really seems to be getting at something here, something about orienting our lives around becoming lifelong learners of Jesus. It is liberating to think that, with God’s Spirit, over time, we can learn the ways of Jesus, doing the things that he did while becoming the same type of person. It doesn’t happen overnight, and the expectation of Scripture isn’t that it happens overnight”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“What we see from Jesus is that success isn’t thousands of people and an ever-expanding church. Success is obedience to what the Father asks.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“For many churches, as they seek to create comfortable environments in the form of worship services or small groups, have lost their ability to challenge people in meaningful ways. Challenge may be given from the pulpit or stage on Sunday mornings, but challenge is always given best in the context of personal relationships. We”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“we should focus on people who don’t know Jesus yet, but Jesus himself gave us the model for doing that: Disciple people.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“The hard reality is that immersion works only when people are actually fluent in something.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“There seem to be three different ways that we learn, but unequivocally, we learn best when there is a dynamic interplay between all three at one time: 1) Classroom/Lecture passing on of information 2) Apprenticeship 3) Immersion”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture

“It is liberating to think that, with God’s Spirit, over time, we can learn the ways of Jesus, doing the things that he did while becoming the same type of person. It doesn’t happen overnight, and the expectation of Scripture isn’t that it happens overnight.”
― Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture