Urban Discipleship Articles
Practical, field-tested thinking and experience on discipleship, mission, and what it means to partner with God in the city. Written by practitioners from across the global learning community focussed on the unique challenges of the urban harvest field.
How You Begin Shapes How You Continue - three ways discovery lays a strong foundation for discipleship
Discipleship pathways that rely on an expert often stall without one. This piece explores why a discovery-based start builds faith that replicates.
I Thought This Wouldn't Work Here
A movement leader and catalyst confesses how he initially dismissed movement principles that he felt would not work in his context, and how God proved him wrong.
He then shares a key principle - how asking for help can open the door to disciple-making - and how Jesus’ choices at a well in Samaria reshaped how he approaches the harvest.
What Can Happen When You Stay With One Person (even when you keep leaving)
We sometimes assume more ground covered means more fruit. But what if the pattern — the biblical pattern — is the opposite?
This is the story of one week in one village, one couple, and what grew from staying rather than moving on. Not a method. Not a programme. Just presence, Word, and Spirit — and then getting out of the way.
Even Introverts Have A Harvest Field
The thought of evangelism makes some people freeze. What’s the answer? Change your personality? Just be more courageous, or learn the right technique?
One leader shares what she learned as an introverted couple in her group got clarity on their passion and focus.
How to See What God Is Doing in Your City
You move into a city carrying a burden for the harvest — and almost immediately the scale overwhelms you. Where do you start?
Ecosystem mapping is one team's answer: a practice of drawing an honest circle around the relationships, spaces, and rhythms where God has currently given you influence, and asking what He is doing there.
What Is Our Evangelism Inviting People Into?
The Pharisees were convinced that successful evangelism would result in people following their practices and rhythms. They were confused when they saw Jesus’ disciples doing something that looked different.
Jesus’ challenge to them should also challenge us. What does our evangelism invite people into?
The Question I Asked From A Grab Car
One Sunday morning taxi ride. A driver's simple question to migrant workers led to a year of discipleship.
What it reveals about trusting the Word to do the work, multiplication, and letting go.
Where Multiplying Disciple-Making Actually Begins
Urban DMM Research Report: Multiplication from the Margins
Multiplying disciples often begins not with the capable and connected, but among the broken and overlooked. The margins are not just a place to serve. They may be where everything starts.
When "Where Do You Go to Church?" Gets Complicated
“Where do you go to church?” A simple, straightforward question for many Christians, but the assumptions it contains make it awkward for disciples whose ministry means that their community doesn’t fit the traditional mould.
One harvest worker shares how God shaped him through his wrestle with this question.
4 Ways To “GO” Together In Cities
Cities scatter us. The communal heart of the Great Commission may feel out of reach. But what if the problem isn't commitment — it's that we're holding a fixed picture of what "going together" has to look like?
Four approaches from Asian cities suggest there may be more options than we think.
From Destination to Journey: Rediscovering the Gospel as a Way of Life
Most of us were invited to a destination. But the earliest followers of Jesus were called people of the Way.
What does it mean to recover a gospel that is less transaction and more way of life — and what does that demand of those of us asking others to follow?
How Your City's History Should Shape Your Prayer Strategy (and Your Team!)
Every people group carries a spiritual history — and that history is still shaping how they see God, themselves, and whether they'll come near Him at all. Spiritual mapping is how you read that terrain before you engage it. It gives your prayer coordinates. And it often starts not with the people you're praying for, but with you.
The Fields Are Dead Because We Stopped Planting
A young man stranded in Kabul told the missionary who'd spent weeks with him: "I really like your Jesus, but I can't stand you."
That line has stayed with Marko for years — and it gets at a potentially uncomfortable reality. The lack of harvest in our cities may not be from a lack of care or vision. It may be because we never stopped to ask what we needed to become.
What is Water? Breaking the Spirit of Divisiveness for City-Wide Impact
The water we swim in shapes us in ways we rarely notice. For those of us in Western Protestant traditions, that water is often individualism — and it runs deep enough to blind us to the New Testament's relentless emphasis on unity. What does it cost the cities we serve when the movements and churches within them remain scattered and competitive? And what becomes possible when they don't?
Field Notes From Asian Cities: Patterns in the Harvest
The same Spirit, working across wildly different cities. Practitioners from East Asia to Central Asia keep reporting the same patterns — brokenness opening doors, simple obedience producing fruit, youth moving without waiting for permission.
These aren't coincidences, and they aren't models to copy. They're fingerprints. What does it mean when God's methods look this consistent across such diverse contexts?
Three Questions That Change Everything For Urban Discipleship
Most disciplemakers are wrestling with two hard questions: what stops people from engaging with those far from Jesus, and what stops discipleship from taking root?
But there's a third question that most practitioners never ask — and it transforms the other two. If discipleship can't replicate without you, you may have built dependence, not disciples.
The Gospel as a Mosaic, Not a Single Message
Have you ever felt the pressure to pack the entire gospel into one coffee session? Let’s look more closely at the message that Jesus asked the disciples to share and how “showing” one bit at a time could be more powerful than “telling”.
Just Start Conversations: Three Things I've Learned About Evangelism
Evangelism may seem intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be. What if we just need to start conversations instead?