Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results (Church Unique Intentional Leader Series Book 1)

Here is a book on discipleship that is part of a series that challenges: “Please know that this series is not about minor improvements in your ministry. It is written with a higher aim—changed trajectory.” This book is one of the most challenging to my own thinking in quite a while. It is not just a book to read but one to transform our thinking and thus transform our ministry.Here is a book on discipleship that is part of a series that challenges: “Please know that this series is not about minor improvements in your ministry. It is written with a higher aim—changed trajectory.” This book is one of the most challenging to my own thinking in quite a while. It is not just a book to read but one to transform our thinking and thus transform our ministry.In the first chapter entitled “Finding Your Vision Switch” he shows his concern for leaders who tend to a default switch which says, “We want more of the same thing the same way” (9). And in response to the question about future, he states that leaders explain that basically they want “more people” (8). But Mancini is concerned that we see “New Thing—New Way Thinking” (10). So this reviewer found this first chapter challenging my own thinking.Chapter two deals with “Three Kinds of Results.” They are accordingly, “Input Results, Output Results, and Impact Results” (14-18). In other words are you just active or is something happening?Chapter three helps one to see that there are two possibilities: ROI or IRO which mean: “Return on Investment” or “Input Results Only” (21-26). Here is a similar approach where one deals with whether or not what is being done is really producing true discipleship.Chapter four deals with “category complexity” and explains that leaders need a simpler approach. Chapter five explains three approaches to church ministry: “More is more, Less is more, and To Be is more” (37-43). Chapter six speaks of “reimagining, building from the ground up, and integrating your ministry model for better results” (48).Then the last part of chapter six and then chapters seven to nine speak of four elements in this order: maximizing, adapting, infusing, and creating. Chapter ten closes with what the author calls, “Essentials to Limitless Innovation.”Mancini challenges your thinking and encourages innovation in making disciples more effectively. This is not a book for those who do not want to imagine, recreate, and innovate. Read it and innovate.

You need a few short books to meet your reading goals for 2014. You need books that will grow you and stretch you. You need books that will challenge you and set your heart aflame. Will Mancini’s latest book accomplishes all of this and more. Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results is part of what will be a series of titles “written for the hungry-to-learn leader, the passionate dreamer and the disciplined doer. It’s written for the intentional few,” (p. iii). This book is 85 pages from Introduction to Appendix. Do not allow its slim figure deceive you in estimating its value. I devoured this book on a flight to Denver recently for a wedding. I highlighted, underlined, dog-eared pages, and wrote in the white spaces at the back of the book. The question the book helps you answer is, “How do you want your church to be different two years from now?” (p. 7). Whatever result you want, something is going to have to change. This book helps you determine what needs to change, how to design the change, and how to implement that change. Our default position is to do the same thing the same way and expect different results. There’s a word for that. Does anyone know what it is? How do we create the preferred future we envision? Innovating Discipleship provides you with a formula for that. However, this is no “Do this and that to get what you want” self-help motivational exercise. The formula is this: 1 + 2+ 4 + 16 = ∞ Here is what the formula means: One whiteboard drawing defined by two vision decisions reveals four paths to the future that provide sixteen super-questions for limitless ministry innovation. You will enjoy seeing how this formula shapes the outline and content of the book. You will walk away from this book with multiple great ideas that you cannot wait to put into practice. You will read this book, or parts of it, over and over. You will buy it for your staff and friends in ministry. You will recommend it widely.

As a busy pastor constantly preparing sermons, training leaders, and teaching theology classes, I am always pressed for time to read materials outside of my ongoing ministry. Therefore, I especially appreciate books that are short, substantive, and practical. My greatest goal in life is to make as many multiplying disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ as I possibly can. This book has given me some great tools to use in the process of making and multiplying disciples. It's only 83 pages but loaded with great ideas, questions, wisdom, and I believe will help me train my leadership and staff to be more effective and efficient in making and multiplying disciples.Mancini wastes no time in helping church leaders ask the right questions in order to genuinely evaluate their effectiveness in making and multiplying disciples. I didn't count the questions he asks in this book - but there must be over 100 great questions of evaluation to help you become a church that truly makes an impact for the Kingdom in your community and beyond.I would highly recommend this book for staffs of churches, elders, deacons, church planters, and long time pastors. I plan on using this book at my next staff retreat. We are seeking to be a church that is less program driven and more missional. This book will help us evaluate our situation, develop a process to be a high impact church that makes multiplying disciples, and give as a road map to get there by asking great questions.