Making Disciples Across Cultures - by Charles A Davis (Paperback)

About the Book

Culture affects how we make disciples. In this insightful roadmap, Charles Davis, former director of TEAM, provides a framework for missional disciple making across diverse cultural contexts. With on-the-ground stories from a lifetime of mission experience, Davis navigates cultural tensions to help Christian workers minister more effectively at home or overseas.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Charles Davis has identified the solution to passive church members, nominal Christians and dying churches. It is a refocus on what our Lord said was priority--making disciples. This is not information from class instruction or mental indoctrination but a process of life transformation through modeling and mentoring that touches practical areas of life and impacts cultures. From a lifetime of overseas service and global leadership, Davis is well-equipped to write Making Disciples Across Cultures. The strong biblical foundation and prolific anecdotes strengthen the book's relevancy for Western churches as well as the mission field."

"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."

"If one has a heart for serving God and a passion for His mission, then Making Disciples Across Cultures is certainly a recommended read. I would not hesitate to encourage pastors, theologians, missiologists, and similar scholars to include this book in their respective libraries."

"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."

About the Author

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.