Bill Hull on Discipleship

I never heard of Bill Hull until this morning, browsing Amazon. The man's career has been focused on thinking and teaching and writing about discipleship. His new book is called Choose the Life. He has a website of the same name, in which you can find an article called What Must change Now. Referencing Dallas Willard, he provides the following checklist for how we so often "do church" these days:

1. Worship as performance,
2. Leadership as celebrity,
3. Greatness measured by numbers,
4. Salvation by agreement with religious facts,
5. Evangelism without incarnation,
6. Discipleship as optional,
7. Catering to consumer mentality,

And then this checklist for what we should be aiming at:

1. Worship as a heartfelt answer to God,
2. Leadership as humble service,
3. Greatness measured by character,
4. Salvation by a decision to follow Jesus,
5. Evangelism as love,
6. Discipleship as normative,
7. Catering to the committed.

This is a great article, and I hope you'll read it carefully. If you need another sample, try this:

The evangelical belly is full of CDs, DVDs, sermons, books, seminars, and packaged answers. Leaders look at this sumptuous feast before them and say, "I can’t eat another bite" as they push back from the table. What is required is to find the kind of spiritual food that they are hungry for, that being I believe is the hunger to live and work from a satisfied soul. This means a radical change in what we teach, the environment that we create, what we reward, and what we punish. It will require a different kind of leadership, a rehabilitated clergy detoxified from the mania that drives them to cultural definitions of success. A newly defined laity that sees themselves as ambassadors and that the real action of making disciples is “out there” where they live work and play and, not "in here." The gathered church.