Daniel Im is the lead pastor of Beulah Alliance Church in Edmonton, Alberta, and the author of several books, including most recently, The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World (NavPress). He was also a featured speaker at the 2024 Amplify Conference for forward-focused church leaders and their teams.
In the following interview, we discuss what it looks like to create a church culture that fosters discipleship, the need to challenge the consumer Christians in our congregations, and how we can unify the churches in our cities for gospel ministry.
This past June you published The Discipleship Opportunity. What are some of the cultural shifts that the church should be tuned in to as we’re going after today’s seeker?
The biggest thing about the book was this discovery that the church has for too long focused on stirring up interest in people’s lives. We felt like it was our responsibility to make God interesting or make spirituality compelling through different ways that we would do outreach and try to attract people in. There’s a lot of these tactics and techniques that we would we would try to do, and in the end, yes, we want people to come to know Jesus as their Lord and their Savior, but we spent a lot of energy making them feel like church isn’t boring or that it’s relevant to their lives. [The thing is] if someone was not interested, they wouldn’t have ever come in the first place. These days, more than ever, the uninterested are not coming anymore.
What’s interesting is that the Holy Spirit has always been better at creating interest in people’s hearts and lives. So, how does that affect strategy? What if we actually focused on the interested? If we focused on the interested non-Christian and the interested Christian, then how would that affect the way that we strategize, preach, disciple and evangelize?
How do you take people from an environment where they’re used to sitting down in the pew, singing a couple worship songs, listening to a sermon, maybe getting on a discipleship pathway or a program, and really make sure that they’re becoming disciples of Christ and not just consumers?
Yeah, at first in my flesh I was just like, Just throw them out. Who cares. Because the consumeristic Christians are the ones who write the angry emails. They’re the ones who leave the brutal Google reviews. They’re the ones that [cause] all the headaches in the church. [On the other hand] disciples who make disciples who make disciples—interested Christians—they will provide constructive criticism, and help, and you see their heart. [About the consumer Christians] I wanted to just say, Forget them. Let the Lord sanctify them at the end of Romans 12. Let Jesus be the one that keeps burning coals on there.
But I felt as I was praying and processing a sense of what does it look like to still disciple, evangelize and preach to the consumers? If God has called me to be the lead shepherd here in this congregation, and they’re a part of the flock, it’s pastoral malpractice to just ignore them. What is it that consumers are longing for?
I love what John Stott said: [It’s] a huge purpose for the shepherd to feed their sheep. But how do shepherds feed their sheep? They bring them to pastures where the sheep can feed themselves, where the sheep can graze. Consumers want to be hand-fed, they want to be cared for, they want the attention to be on them. [Stott said] the only sheep that shepherds hand-feed are sick ones and baby ones.
So, if that’s the case, then what do we do with the consumers? We have to challenge them. When it comes to disciples, we need to equip them. But when it comes to consumers, we need to challenge them. We can’t just keep on feeding into this mindset of if you don’t feed me I’m gonna go to another church that feeds me. We’ve got to challenge them. The Holy Spirit is going to awaken the sleepers to become seekers. The Holy Spirit is the one that can best turn our weak attempts at preaching the Word of God into a double-edged sword that cuts through the lies, the strongholds of the Evil One that are holding them back. This consumerist Christianity is holding us back from experiencing the fullness of all that Jesus has for us.
Another one of the prevailing models in the church is this invitational model. So, if I can get my neighbor to come to church, then my pastor will be the evangelist. How do you start to flip that equation so that people are more evangelistically minded, and are confident in their ability to share their faith?
Yeah, it’s a good question. Because for many years one of the strategies was, this is invite your friend to church Sunday. And there’s a sense that if you invite your friend to church on Sunday, then you know it’s gonna be seeker-sensitive to them. Or there’s the other model where every week there is gonna be a gospel presentation. Every week it would be safe to bring someone who doesn’t know Christ.
While I would say that those two efforts helped and created lots of opportunities for people to make a decision to follow Christ, unintentionally what it ended up doing was it presented to everyone who is Christian, here’s the extent of what it looks like to follow Jesus. The pinnacle is salvation. The pinnacle is inviting your friend to church. The pinnacle is them making a decision. On Sundays they hardly ever heard anything beyond [Christianity] 101. Many seeker-sensitive churches did produce disciples who made disciples, but it was often outside of that Sunday experience.
If the culture that you create only ever talks about and celebrates the moment of salvation, and not something deeper, where it’s not just about bringing your friend to church, but it’s about you making disciples—sometimes that might be you leading an Alpha course, or it’s you leading them to Christ and you baptizing them, not the pastor—if these sorts of things aren’t talked about, then people don’t have the imagination to know what they’re called to.
If you realize that you don’t actually need to make Christianity interesting or make Jesus relevant, you can go straight into worship because [interested] people are [already] interested. Create worshipful moments where people are having an encounter with King Jesus. People who aren’t Christians are longing for spiritual experiences. You see that in Gen Z. You see that in Gen Alpha. They know that there is a spiritual world, and they’re trying to figure out, What’s the answer? How do I access this spiritual world? So don’t give them Christianity Lite, bring them to the throne room of King Jesus. Let’s start not at zero, let’s start at 50. And when it comes to your preaching, the endpoint isn’t, Now bring your friend to church so we can evangelize. The endpoint is Ephesians 4: We’re gonna equip each other. The starting point is completely different, and you’re now releasing more, you’re equipping more.
Another sense that I get as I read Acts is this idea of a shared story across the Ephesian church. It’s almost like everybody’s watching the same show at the same time. Everyone’s sharing the letters that are being written by the apostles and their followers, and they’re sharing their resources in common.
What is the key to tapping into that shared love of Christ in a better way that makes churches partners in the gospel with each other?
A lot of pastors, they’re just work friends with other pastors in the city, which is fine—you can do work together—but do you actually like each other? Do you actually enjoy each other? Are you actually for each other? Do we want to be for each other, or is it just a should? That definitely needs to be addressed, and then it needs to be modeled. Personally, I’m texting. I’m becoming friends with the other pastors in the city one at a time. But, especially as guys, it’s tough. We’re a lot better at work friendships than friend friendships.
Then there’s the other side: How are you teaching? How are you educating and inspiring your church family toward the same end? One, it’s Jesus’ vision around unity in John. [Second, it’s] how do you teach the kingdom of God? More than anything, I love preaching on the kingdom of God, because it’s bigger than your church. [According to Lesslie Newbigin], the church is called to be a sign, instrument, and a foretaste of the kingdom of God. We’re all supposed to be signposts to the kingdom of God. And if any church is pointing to their kingdom over the kingdom of God, we can’t be that way. We need to teach the kingdom of God.
I also love what Dennae Pierre said, that there’s only one Holy Spirit. So what does that mean for a city? If the Spirit is speaking to the church in Ephesus, in Philippi or in Philadelphia, what is the Spirit of God speaking to Edmonton? How can we prophetically, as churches and as leaders, speak into our cities and be about the flourishing and the prospering of the city, be about being rooted here, and express incarnational ministry? Benedict of Nursia had a vow of stability—Daniel Grothe writes about it in his book, The Power of Place. What would it look like if as pastors we were to take vows of stability in our cities, be rooted, and lived in that way.
To hear more from leaders like Daniel Im, who are mobilizing their churches and ministries to reach their communities with the gospel, preregister your team now for next year’s Amplify Conference and take advantage of super early bird pricing.