57 Books Like Disciple Making Culture

I’ve never had the words to describe why I knew culture was important to success or why I thought the best way to succeed in the long term was to help others succeed.

This book helped me have the words, examples, and stories to be able to communicate that. One of my most recommended books.

How do you build a disciple-making culture that is at the center of a culture of consumerism? The struggle is real! In this book, the authors offer keen insights that probe the tenets of capitalism and how that has shaped and continues to influence our community culture.

I resonated with most of what they wrote and yearned for something different...a return to making disciples through a community of abundance and cooperation. The authors also understand how to reshape the culture of a local community into one of abundance. I highly recommend this one!

Changing the culture of any organization is a huge challenge. Black is an expert in culture change who teaches others how to do it in the business and non-profit world. This book is full of insights born from Black’s experience.

From the start, he explains how change works, why we often get it wrong, and what’s required to make real change and make it last. The book is organized around the main barriers to change and the solutions to those barriers. This book is focused, clearly written, and full of illustrations and tools.

It’s an easy 10 out of 10 for me because it helped me develop an internal framework of how change works and how to lead others through the change process. 

One of the biggest challenges to building a disciple-making culture is making disciple-makers. This short book is hyper-focused on the biggest obstacles that keep people from the disciple-making game.

In short, the obstacle is fear, not just two-faced fear. However, fear is rarely the obstacle people name. Most people say they don’t make disciples because they don’t know how. This clear and compelling book takes on obstacles (lack of know-how and fear) and challenges the reader to get started.

So many people love this book because it pulls away excuses in a fun way and focuses the reader on the truth that the win is in the attempt. Don’t miss this one!

What are the stages of a disciple’s optimal development? The theoretical path starts with a person not following Jesus and ends with that person helping their own disciples make disciples of Jesus. Having a reliable model that traces the course of a disciple’s development benefits a disciple maker practically, because people have different capacities, needs, and challenges at different stages as they grow.

The most persuasive and useful model yet proposed might be found in this brief book by Harrington and Wiens, who adapt to individuals the Exponential organization’s five-level typology of churches.

This is simply the best book on biblical discipleship I have ever read, and I have read it multiple times in disciplining my own children, grandchildren as well as the college students I have taught for many years. The book is a devotional commentary based on the “Psalms of Ascent”, Psalm 120—134. These psalms are pilgrim songs to sing throughout a lifetime, as we journey from where we are and who we are, to being “brought to completion” as mature disciples of the Lord Jesus. This book is as honest as the psalms themselves dealing with both the hazards of the journey in times and places with people who are hostile to faith as well as the discouragements and confusion all God’s people experience when disappointed by God, emptied of hope and asking, “is this journey worth it?” Peterson’s pastoral heart and poignant wisdom in this book is a priceless… show more.

I really resonated with this book. It reminded me a lot of the Sisters in Christ book where in a mentoring relationship it’s not necessarily defined as a discipleship relationship but more friend/friend.

You aren’t there to lecture, teach, criticize the other person. You both are seeking a relationship with the Lord separately and then your times of coming together are that much sweeter and you grow more in your own personal relationship with Jesus by living life side by side someone else who loves Jesus with all their heart. It’s a give and take, which is exactly what a Sister in Christ relationship is all about.

Lastly, and most importantly, is the prayer aspect. Anyone can “live life together,” but it's when you pray together that God moves mountains.

I love this pre-social-media collection of moral quandaries and relationship-based solutions presented in story form. Much of it is about addiction to substances, but it applies to all kinds of addictions, undermining our ability to deal with dangerous subjects.

I’ve told stories from these pages, and most of my ideas come from reading stories that inevitably remind me of a perfect story from my own life. Stories about release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, and forgiveness offer antidotes to the kind of problems that linear mechanical reasoning can’t solve.

For me, investing in a constant stream of moral stories supports the vital behavioral norms we need as groundwork for developing trusting relationships.

The New Testament has been portrayed as a repetitive and largely ahistorical text, except for the presence of the names of certain individuals (Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate, Jewish King Herod the Great, etc, etc). Otherwise, very little fits with known history of first-century Juda and Galilee. But when one reads this religious narrative, The New Testament, next to the narratives of Josephus—written around the same time—one starts discerning certain recurring patterns. And after a while one realizes that The New Testament is anything but boring. It is actually a fantastic text, skillfully written in layers, where the historical layer lies just beneath the surface. The New Testament is full of incomprehensible elements—unknown names just thrown into the narrative, seeming contradictions, etc—but it is in these strange elements that the clues lie. One needs, however, to have Josephus' historical texts (The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities)… show more.

In his story about Priscilla, Witherington was doing something very similar to what I was trying to do in my book and imagining what Priscilla, the wife of Aquila (who was often cited in both the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul’s letters) might have thought about her life as a Christian in the early Church. Witherington uses his vast knowledge of the world of the 1st century to bring Priscilla’s story to life.