Discipleship Lost [Black & White Edition]: The Over-Programming of the Church and the Loss of Vision for the Simplicity and Centrality of Our Greatest

Discipleship Lost: The over-programming of the church and the loss of vision for the simplicity and centrality of our greatest commission.-------------------------------------------"We over-complicate discipleship.And then we somehow miss its only key components.The time to awaken is now."-------------------------------------------Solomon Powell's "Discipleship Lost" is not a work that will take you hours to plod through. The author states his intention to be as succinct as possible to serve his goal of decluttering our already over-complicated views of discipleship. And he holds to that objective, with short, succinct, simple sections, in clear language. Sections include: >Discipleship Prerequisites.>Discipleship's 2 Major Varieties: Upward and Downward.>Discipleship Un-cluttered: The only three necessary and sufficient components of discipleship. >Discipleship De-mythologized.>Ideas Of What This Can Look Like in the Real World for Real People.>Advice for the Over-programmed.>To Pastors and Elders.But make no mistake, succinct and clear does not mean dumbed-down. The author is a trained linguist and New Testament exegete, with thousands of hours logged in componential analysis (the linguistic science of breaking words down into their individual pieces (components) of meaning) in the field of Biblical Greek. Definitions of what it means to "make disciples" are many and varied. Books and ideas abound. But the author asserts that any definition for "making disciples" that ignores the actual components of the Greek word Jesus used in his command to "make disciples" (mathaytevsateh; Mt. 28:19) is, at best, man-made and prone to either deficiency or clutter. If we want to make disciples the way Jesus intended, we cannot ignore the components required by the actual word he used in Mt. 28:19a (mathaytevsateh), nor those required by the supporting/elaborative clauses he adds in Mt.28:19b-20a. The author submits that, from this lexical and contextual perspective, we are really only left with three necessary and sufficient components for making disciples the way Jesus explicitly instructed. Everything else is apparently flexible.The core treasures of the book, then, are the central chapter, in which the author identifies these three components, as well as the third appendix, which serves as a reference tool covering the entire New Testament chronologically.*This fourth edition, in addition to its revisions, has a FAQ section including: "Is there a specific curriculum I should use or specific commands I should start with?", "Wasn't the Great Commission only intended for those first eleven disciples, the apostles?", "Isn't my private relationship with God the most important thing? (Where does this 'making disciples' thing fall in with that?)," & "Isn't this a little legalistic?" With the heart of a pastor, and the training of an exegete, Discipleship Lost calls for the church to throw off "everything that hinders" it (including our over-cluttered views of discipleship and the over-busyness of our lifestyles) and arise to fulfill what is still our greatest commission. In the author's words: "There is now no time to waste. Let the church awaken, and let the discipleship revival arise."