In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtain on the heart behind Movement-Ready Church, now available for pre-order. You’ll get exclusive author insights, behind-the-scenes stories, and a sneak peek at the content of the book.
Early on in Replicate’s ministry, many pastors we served asked the same question:
“What’s the silver-bullet program that's working?” They were looking for something they could copy and paste to solve a solution.
And honestly? In the early years, we were eager to help. We jumped straight into strategy and tactics: building discipleship pathways, launching D-groups, mapping out steps for transformation.
While many churches saw success with this approach, we neglected a crucial part of the church: the church's culture.
It was because, like Peter Drucker said, "culture eats strategy for breakfast." We had helped churches build structures without thouroughly diving into the culture at play.
We experienced it firsthand at Long Hollow. Robby brought a disciple-making strategy and tactics to the church, but without fully understanding the church's culture.
That realization led to the first major advancement of Movement-Ready Church:
Advancement 1: Change happens from culture and vision first, from strategy and tactics second.
This book focuses not just on what you do, but on who you are and why you do it.
While strategy and tactics are often what we want, a disciple-making culture and vision are what we need. When we work with churches now, we won’t touch the former until we’ve worked on the latter. In part III of the book, we introduce the three levels of your disciple-making movement. This framework represents this great learning. Your strongest methods and maps crumble under a weak motivation. In the original book Replicate, we unpack disciple-making strategy and tactics in deep detail. In Movement-Ready Church, we focus primarily on vision and culture.
Advancement 2: Churches need contextualized principles, not prescriptive practices.
The second lesson we learned was that each church has a unique expression of how they express the same disciple-making principles. In the early years, we would try to achieve simplicity and clarity for churches by giving them prescriptive practices. Not anymore. Instead of providing copy-and-paste practices, we now train them in contextualized principles.
Our goal in the Movement-Ready Church is to provide disciple-making principles that can be applied to churches of any denomination, size, or demographic. We then encourage you to contextualize those principles to resonate best in your context.
In the next post, I’ll unpack the remaining three breakthroughs that reshaped everything for us - especially the shift from making D-groups to making disciple-makers.
Order Movement-Ready Church Now
For years, I’ve walked with pastors who know there’s more—but aren’t always sure where to begin. That’s why we wrote Movement-Ready Church. It’s designed to help you move from vision to a clear, actionable strategy for disciple-making in your context. Inside, you’ll also find access to 15+ practical tools and downloadable resources to guide your next steps. If you’re ready to lead with greater clarity and confidence, I’d encourage you to order your copy today by clicking here and begin the journey toward a disciple-making movement in your church.
