“I don’t know any pastor who has been more personally fruitful in discipleship ministry than Randy Pope,” Tim Keller observes. “Nor do I know of any church leader who has had a more sustained, lifelong commitment to making the ministry of discipleship a pervasive force throughout his whole church.”
Pope sat down with Mark Mellinger to discuss his vision for and experience with church-anchored discipleship over the past 25 years. “Discipleship is laboring in the lives of a few to give away your life and the gospel,” explains the founding pastor of Atlanta’s Perimeter Church and author of Insourcing: Bringing Discipleship Back to the Local Church (Zondervan, 2013) [written interview | TGC13 workshop]. “If you want to see lives change, you’ve got to do it life-on-life.”
How does this vision get worked out practically? “We start small and invest deeply in the lives of a few,” Pope says. “It’s important to go deep before you go wide.” At Perimeter this process entails small groups that gather weekly to invest time in truth, equipping, accountability, mission, and supplication (“TEAMS”).
Watch the full nine-minute video to see Pope discuss leadership development, training clinics, how this vision fuels global missions, and more.
