I Am A Disciple

What does it actually look like to follow Christ today? I don’t mean at the conference or in the crisis. I mean today.

The church has spent a long time celebrating intensity: the radical testimony, the retreat breakthrough, the mission trip that changed everything for about six weeks. Those things are real, and I’m not here to dismiss them. But while we celebrated them, we started saying something the New Testament never says. We implied that the ordinary, daily, unglamorous work of following Christ is a holding pattern, a waiting room for the real thing. It isn’t. The ordinary is the race.

Jesus never said, “Come and have an experience.” He said, Come, follow Me (Matthew 4:19). Following is a verb, and it happens in ordinary time: If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me (Luke 9:23).

Past the harbor

The book opens with the harbor pilot climbing down off your ship. He knew the channel and he got you out past the last buoy. Now his work is done, and he was never going on the voyage with you. Out on open water, nothing dramatic is likely to sink you. What sinks a ship at sea is two degrees of uncorrected drift a day, until one morning the rocks appear on the horizon. The Holy Spirit fills the sails. You hold the rudder, which means your actions and your attitudes, the only two things you control. Only consistency saves you at sea.

What’s inside

• A letter to the church. It’s one I wrote to the institution I love and refuse to abandon. It’s about the distance between handing out information and actually forming disciples.
• Two formulas for the soul. Ingest + Impulse = Drift. Meditate + Ruminate = Transformation. Drift and transformation run on the same engine, which is daily repetition. The church is not the only thing discipling you. Your phone is discipling you.
• The four bearings. Follow by Obeying, Log Insights and Reflections, Identify Current Wobble, and Course Correct. That’s one loop, run daily for the rest of your life. This is where the Disciple’s Compass comes from.
• Living at sea for a lifetime. This part covers what daily practice adds up to over years, how to guard the practice, and how to keep it with people who can see your wobble when you can’t.

Where it stands

I Am A Disciple is being edited now, and it’s coming in Fall 2026. The rest of the series hinges on this book, and it asks more of you than the others do.

You don’t have to wait for the book to start the practice. It’s already written down plainly at the Disciple’s Compass, and you can start tomorrow with a pen.

Leave your address, and I’ll send word when the book is ready.