Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes

"Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ."1

I have created this website, as many people do, to be able to put together resources, ideas and my own thoughts so that I can help articulate how I see discipleship in the church today. As I move from lay ministry to ordained ministry I feel that I have both the opportunity and the responsibility to be able to help the congregation and community that I serve to be able to walk ever closer with Christ. This is not an easy thing, and as I did many times in my career as a teacher, many of the ideas I have now will no doubt change as I gain more experience and meet more people. As I always used to say to many of the people I worked with, my ideas will be forever drafts ideas, as there will always be things to change, or add on to make improvements.

So one of the aims of this site is to share resources and ideas to help develop discipleship. Some of these resources I intend to turn into books (print and electronic) that can be used by others, while others will I intend to share resources I have used and think work well. I also aim to share over the coming years some of the ideas I have for a discipleship model to help us all think through what this means for our lives.

I'd encourage you to sign up so that several times I year I can send out a simple newsletter to keep you informed of the updates, blog articles and resources I've made available.

1 (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937, (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 59.)

Image from wikimedia : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer_%28um_1938%29.jpg

I do not intend to go into what discipleship is as a definition in this first post, as that would take more than a simple blog post article to do so. But I wanted to highlight the this quote from Bonhoeffer, as it makes it clear that for Christians, if we are to live as disciples, then we need to put Christ at the centre of all we do. Christ must not just be the Jesus of the bible that is only about the story, it must be about making Jesus as a living breathing part of our lives. Jesus has to come off the page and into our lives, not just once or twice, but on a daily basis.