Making Disciples Across Cultures: Missional Principles for a Diverse World

by Charles A. Davis

Publisher:

IVP

, 2015

Overview

Culture affects how we make disciples. We often unconsciously bring our own cultural assumptions into ministry and mission, not realizing that how we think and operate is not necessarily the best or only way to do things. In today's global environment, disciplemaking requires the cultural humility and flexibility to adapt between different cultural approaches.

Charles Davis, former director of TEAM, provides a framework for missional disciplemaking across diverse cultural contexts. He shows how we can recalibrate our ministry efforts, like adjusting sound levels on a mixer board, to accommodate different cultural assumptions. With on-the-ground stories from a lifetime of mission experience, Davis navigates such tensions as knowledge and behavior, individualism and collectivism, and truth and works to help Christian workers minister more effectively.

Ministry teams, church planters, pastors and missionaries working interculturally at home or overseas can be part of God's movement of making disciples. Discover how the body of Christ grows in the unity and diversity of the global church.

Key Features

• Explores universal missional principles that need to be true in any culture
• Provides a section on Study Questions to encourage further reflection and discussion
• Seeks to provide a set of universal disciple-making principles by which to evaluate the cultural and theological assumptions that make up common behavior in churches and among church leaders

Contents

• Introduction: My Journey as Disciple and Disciple-Maker
• What Is a Disciple, Anyway?
• Disciples Let God Lead from the Invisible World
• Disciples Hear and Obey
• Disciples Develop Relational Interdependence
• Disciples Do What Love Requires
• Disciples Make Disciples
• Leaders Equip Disciples for Ministry
• Disciples Live an Undivided Life
• Disciples Engage in Personal and Cultural Transformation
• Disciples Keep the End in Mind
• Disciples Organize Flexibly and Purposefully
• Glimpses of a Disciple-Making Community
• Study Questions

Praise for Making Disciples Across Cultures

In this book, longtime mission leader Charles Davis applies a distinctively missionary analysis to the worn-out ecclesiologies of our time. But it's not all critique and analysis: built on narrative and experience, he lovingly provides the church with a very useful diagnostic tool that gives us viable pathways toward renewal of church life and mission. I am grateful for this book.

--Alan Hirsch, founding director of Forge Missional Training Network and author of The Forgotten Ways

Discipleship is one of those terms used a lot among Christians but often with little understanding. Ask twenty believers to define it and you'll get twenty different answers. Dr. Charles Davis does the body of Christ a favor by clearly laying out universal principles for growing as disciples and in turn making true disciples. God is calling his body to return to true discipleship and disciple-making, not according to what culture dictates, but what the Bible reveals about moving toward spiritual maturity. Making Disciples Across Cultures is a helpful and provoking resource for every prospective and current message bearer. Overcoming many false assumptions about discipleship, the church and our calling in reaching others, Davis calls us back to Jesus himself and to each other. The book distinctly reminds us of the crucial component of the communal body of Christ in becoming and making true disciples. I highly commend this encouraging book to you.

--Ryan Shaw, international lead facilitator, Student Volunteer Movement 2, author, Spiritual Equipping for Mission

Too many books are being written to promote the latest fad or method. This is not one of them. In Making Disciples Across Cultures, Charlie Davis makes a practical and compelling case for how to live and lead in the center of biblical tension. This book was written out of the wellspring of experience and is filled with real-life stories that bring the principles to life. I highly commend it to you.

--Steve Moore, president, Missio Nexus

Product Details

• Title: Making Disciples across Cultures: Missional Principles for a Diverse World
• Author: Charles A. Davis
• Publisher: IVP
• Print Publication Date: 2015
• Logos Release Date: 2018
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Discipling (Christianity); Intercultural communication › Religious aspects--Christianity; Christianity and culture
• ISBNs: 9780830897162, 083089716X
• Resource ID: LLS:9780830897162
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-06T20:57:48Z

About Charles A. Davis

Charles A. Davis (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the former executive international director of TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission). He has over four decades of crosscultural experience in global disciple making and missional church planting. He was previously president of the Evangelical Seminary of Caracas, and he is a member of the Global Leadership Council of the Mission Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance.