The Essential Call

Ask any number of believers to define the word "Christian," and
get a room full of different answers. From "someone who believes
Jesus rose from the dead" to "someone who attends church" to "a
good person who tries to do the right thing". Each answer holds
a fragment of truth but none capture what Jesus Himself meant
when He called people to follow Him.
This book starts with this uncomfortable point: much of Western
church has substituted the word convert for the word disciple. We
have built a new Christianity that asks for a decision but not require
a life - a single decision rather than a lifelong way of walking. But
the risen Christ never once commissioned His followers to make
converts. He commanded them to make disciples (Matthew 28:19).
That is not a semantics. It is the difference between a transaction
and a transformation, between signing a card and taking up a cross.
This vocabulary gap is worth pausing on. The noun "Christian"
occurs three times in the entire New Testament (Acts 11:26; 26:28;
1 Peter 4:16). The word "disciple" or "disciples" occurs more than
260 times in the Gospels and Acts alone. The earliest believers
called themselves disciples, and before that, simply "the Way"
(Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:14, 22).
This book exists to recover what that difference actually means,
and then to put it back into practice.