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.
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.
Movement Is Not The Goal (but it might be the fruit)
If our goal is to produce a disciple-making movement, we are in trouble.
“Chasing the harvest” can quietly replace the people God actually gave us to love and to serve. This piece contemplates what is in the centre of what we do, why our goal is faithfulness, and movement is the fruit God sovereignly grows.
Five Rhythms of Fractal Leadership: Living the Pattern Together
A question every disciplemaking team eventually has to face: are we living what we ask others to live?
One team surfaced five rhythms — patterns that keep resurfacing across Scripture — and put them to the test over time.
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?
Living the Pattern: The Power of Embodied Leadership
“If you want to know how to live, watch me.” Many of us might flinch at such a bold statement!
Do we need to be perfect enough to be copied, or do we need to be willing to live visibly and transparently as we follow Jesus?
How to Map the Spiritual Terrain of a People Group
Spiritual mapping helps build a picture of the spiritual terrain beneath a people group: the lies they believe, the wounds they carry, the patterns passing between generations.
When our prayer gets coordinates, we move from general intercession to strategic ground-taking.
A Cell Leader’s Journey - The Holy Discontent That Led Me Here
Years of faithful and fruitful cell leadership… and a long-running spiritual restlessness.
A cell leader reflects on how God used exposure to disciple-making movements to break her out of a 'maintenance paradigm' and into something new.
You Have the Word. You Have the Holy Spirit. Go.
Maybe making disciples isn’t that complicated? Maybe we’re already qualified?
A practitioner shares his story and what he concluded.
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.
A Pathway to Joy in Community: Immersion, Imitation, and God's Story (Discipleship!)
We know that it doesn’t have to be all work and no joy. But how do we “get” or “find” joy? There is a reliable pathway. Join me on this journey… joy is just down the road.
Called to Serve? 5 Secrets to Starting and Finishing Well in Mission
What are the things we can cultivate now that will serve and sustain us in the long race of life and ministry?
Our posture could be more important than what we do or where we go.