A guy is working out using the equipment. I start talking to him. Somewhere in the middle of it I share the gospel.

Alex says yes to reading the Bible with us. Praise God.

That’s Friday.

Lost to Leader in a Weekend

Saturday he actually shows up, and John joins us this time. We go through a Story of Hope. Alex isn’t ready to follow yet. We don’t push it. We just keep going.

Then we get to the Great Commission and I lay it out plain sitting at the coffee shop we go to daily.

• Does Jesus have authority in your life? (Yes/No)

• Will you go where He leads you? (Yes/No)

• Will you learn to make disciples? (Yes/No)

• In all nations of the earth? (Yes/No)

• Will you get baptized and baptize? (Yes/No)

• Obey His commands? (Yes/No)

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

We baptize him right there that afternoon at my house and the same day we sit down and train him to reach his own network.

Without the pathway, John's still gathering. Alex is still waiting.

Two Half-True Things

Dave and I have both lived on either side of an argument that never really gets settled in movement circles. Make disciples, obey the Great Commission, and church happens on its own. Or, no, plant churches, that’s where the whole task actually lives, disciples get made along the way. You can find a verse for either one. You can find a movement that built its whole identity around either one.

Dave tells this on himself better than I can: Fifteen years ago, deep in that first wave of disciple-making books, he reads this article, sticks with him for years, the engine of the car is disciple-making, make disciples and you’ll always get to church. He believes it enough to build a whole season of ministry around it in Oklahoma City.

Church didn’t come.

Not because he’s bad at it. He’ll tell you that too, half joking, half not. One-on-one discipleship, even the real kind, can’t manufacture a leader out of nothing. A leader needs people to actually lead. Skip that and you get real change in somebody’s life and still no church at the end of it.

But if you go the other way and only focus on church there are different problems.

You end up with a room full of people who show up, confident guy up front, and underneath all that, thin. Fuzzy. Church exists. Nobody in the room could actually reproduce it somewhere else.

Somebody needs a small enough space to say what’s actually going on with them and get pushed on it. Not a room of fifty. Sometimes not even a room of five. And somebody needs a bigger space too, where they’re carrying something beyond just their own walk with God, because two guys getting coffee, no matter how good that conversation is, isn’t going to give them that on its own.

The Test You Can Run Tonight

You want to know honestly which side you lean toward? Forget what you’d say if I asked you outright.

If you lean disciple-making, you already know what’s coming back. Something about following Jesus. Something real, probably. And then either silence or a shrug when it comes to church, because you never actually said the word out loud to them.

If you lean church, flip it. Ask somebody sitting in your gathering what it means to make a disciple. Not define the term, just, what would you actually do. You’ll get something about showing up, maybe leading a discussion. Not much about the guy at their job who doesn’t know Jesus yet.

Two things have to already exist before your version of Alex shows up on the bars.

One is an actual sequence, not a vibe, for taking someone from that first conversation to the point where you’d trust them with somebody else. John had it memorized, basically, by the time Saturday rolled around. Didn’t have to think about it.

The other is a version of what does church even require, stripped down to almost nothing. Who, what, where, when, why. Not the healthy version. The starting version. A disciple who can answer those five things badly can still help get something started.

I don’t actually know what happens to Alex yet. Nobody does. John’s still texting him, still following up, still doing the unglamorous part where you find out if yes on a Saturday turns into anything six months out. That part doesn’t make it into the story you tell on a podcast. It’s the part that actually matters most.

That’s the whole problem, right there. Most disciple-making training dies on that sentence. The content’s usually fine. Somebody sits through it, nods along, fills a notebook, and then a few days later they walk into a real situation they have never once watched anyone handle. We gave them a module, but they needed a life.

The 5% Problem

Here’s what messed me up. For years I figured most people could watch a method and go do it. Eighty percent, I’d have guessed. Find the intuitive ones, pour in, let them run with it.

Then I tried it with real people.

Five percent. Maybe. A mentors heard me say five and told me I was being generous. Five percent or less can take content and turn it into competence on their own.

So why do we keep training everybody like they’re in that five?

Next Lab: “The Aquila and Priscilla Pattern” (Wednesday, July 15th at 3PM ET). What disciples do that see traction and new disciples made.

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Temporary Incompetence

People need room to be bad at this for a while. Dave calls it temporary incompetence. Fail first, fail fast, fail forward.

And the reason people freeze isn’t fear of failing. It’s that nobody told them when the failing ends. Give somebody an endpoint and they’ll endure almost anything. Take it away and they just stand in the parking lot running the conversation in their head, the one they’re never actually going to have.

But you can fool yourself here.

A good workshop lowers the barriers. It shows you it’s possible.

Reps Beat Information

Because if information were enough, we’d be drowning in disciple-makers. You can learn anything now. YouTube, Google, ask a chatbot and it’ll walk you through whatever you want, step by step. So where is everybody? They’re not out there. Information doesn’t get you across the line. Reps do. With other people. Inside something that looks like a church.

What the Two Church Model Actually Means

So this is the thing I want to hand you. The two church model. And I know the name throws people, especially if church to you means a finished, healthy organization you join once it’s all sorted out.

Try it this way. You belong to a church that gathers. We draw the same picture every single time, the church waffle, every practice pulled straight out of Acts 2. And while you’re sitting in that one, you’re getting sent to start another where you already live.

Not later. Not once you’ve got it. Now, while it’s still half figured out.

Antioch Was Always the Plan

This isn’t new: take the formation of Antioch in the Book of Acts starting in Acts 8:1.

Persecution hits, they stone Stephen, everybody scatters. And some ordinary believers end up in Antioch and start a church. No apostles. None. Just regular people who’d been part of something back in Jerusalem and rebuilt it wherever they landed, and it was messy, and then Barnabas goes and gets Paul and the two of them come help that church grow up. And here’s the part Luke won’t let you skip past. Antioch is where they first got called Christians. Not the apostles’ church in Jerusalem. This one. The messy one the ordinary people started.

God let it begin with half-ready people and grew it toward health from there.

But it was never the price of admission.

The Accountability Nobody Talks About

We tell ourselves the established church is the safer bet, the healthier one, and the simple church is where it all goes sideways. I don’t buy it anymore.

The accountability I get around a dinner table I never once got in a pew. Somebody there knows what I said I’d do this week and they ask me about it. That just doesn’t happen Sunday morning. Never happened to me, anyway. So a guy who’s sat faithfully for fifteen years can get smoked by somebody two years in who’s actually out doing it and answering for it every week.

Start by Doing It

The church is the primary training ground of the kingdom. Not the classroom. The church, because it drags you out into the mess with other people where you can’t fake it. You can’t even baptize yourself.

You need the room full of people who’ll pull you back out of the water and walk you through it right.

So stop waiting until you understand it well enough. You won’t get there that way. You get there by doing it.

We like Paul. Dave and I have learned a ton from him. The problem is we start with him. We crack open the New Testament and go straight for the theology, straight for the part where Paul tells some church how to clean up its mess, and we treat that as the ground we’re standing on.

It’s not the bottom of anything.

Why the Books Are in That Order

Ever wonder why your Bible goes Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, then Romans? The reason’s dumber than you’d think. Whoever ordered the letters mostly went by author and size. Stack Paul’s together, longest to shortest. Then start over with everybody else. Hebrews landed wherever, since nobody could agree who wrote it. Then Peter. Then John.

So a guy asks you how to read the Bible. You tell him what I’d tell him. Start on the left, work right. He gets to the end of Acts, flips the page, hits Romans, and figures Romans came first. Why wouldn’t he. It’s sitting right there at the front of the stack.

Romans is one of the last things Paul wrote. Galatians is one of the first. Read them in printed order and your timeline’s inside out before you finish a single book.

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Start With the Story, Let the Letters Talk

So flip it. Start with the story. Jesus born, Jesus living, Jesus dying, the resurrection, the church catching fire in Acts and spreading until Paul’s stuck under house arrest in Rome. That whole run is your frame. Then you take the letters and drop them into the spots where they actually got written.

Paul writes Galatians and the first thing out of his mouth is “who has bewitched you?” Read that by itself and you’ve got no clue when he wrote it, who he’s furious at, or what fire he’s trying to stamp out. Drop it in the story and it wakes up.

What Reading It Backwards Costs You

Read it backwards and here’s the cost. You start mining the letters for principles. You hit some great stretch in Romans or 1 Corinthians, yank the principle out, and draw up your own blueprint for building the kingdom.

Two examples. Romans 9 through 11, where Paul wrestles with the election of Israel and the Gentiles getting grafted in. Start your disciple-making there and you’ll decide the first thing a new believer needs is a tight position on election. So you sit down a guy who met Jesus three weeks ago and walk him through grafted-in olive branches while his eyes go dead. Election matters. It’s just not the front door.

Or 1 Corinthians 5. Paul tells the church to deal with a man sleeping with his stepmother, hand him over to Satan. Make that your model for conflict and you’ll sit on your hands until something detonates, then drag the whole church in to mop it up. Now back up to Jesus. James and John send their mom to go ask for the seats on his right and left. The other ten catch wind and lose it. Jesus stops everybody right there and lays out how it’s going to run in this crew. He caught it on the road, before it rotted. That’s how you handle it.

“Follow Me” Wasn’t the First Thing Jesus Said

This is where the order really costs you. We read “follow me and I’ll make you fishers of men” in Luke 5 like Jesus just met these guys. Strangers on a beach, drop the nets, off we go.

Nope. James, John, and Andrew were already running with John the Baptist. Jesus walks by, John goes “behold the Lamb of God,” and they peel off after him. By Luke 5 and the boats it’s been months. Cana already happened. The woman at the well. The healings in Capernaum. Jesus had already ditched them once to go down to Jerusalem and come back. The boat scene isn’t the start. It’s months deep into something already rolling.

That changes how you read your own week. Dave ran a retreat for leaders who’d spent a year working through the Gospels in order, and one line kept coming back. They saw Jesus as a man. Watching him move through the story in real time made him somebody you could actually copy on a Wednesday.

The evangelism thing hit them too. One woman said she used to figure that if she told a coworker about Jesus over lunch and he didn’t walk out and quit his job by the time the check landed, she’d failed. She was jamming months of Jesus’ ministry into one conversation. Slowing it down showed her it’s a process. The guy two desks over, the neighbor you nod to by the mailboxes, those are real people, and people take time.

Faulty Men, Growing in Grace

We don’t struggle to see the apostles as a mess when we know the story. Nobody reads about Peter sleeping in Gethsemane and thinks he was working through 2 Peter in his head. We know Peter. Talks too fast, takes a swing at a guy’s ear, denies Jesus three times before the rooster’s done. We cut him slack.

Paul, though. We read Paul like the scales dropped off in Damascus and he was preaching Romans by dinner. Like he had the whole letter the second Ananias finished praying over him. He didn’t. Paul grew. Galatians 2, he’s backing off scared when he should be stepping up. Early on he fights Barnabas over bringing John Mark along, splits with him over it, and years later he’s the one begging for John Mark to come sit with him at the end. He learned how to build people by getting it wrong first.

Let that take the weight off you.

You’re in Acts 29

Get close enough to what Jesus actually did that it starts changing how you run the 10:30 standup, how you finally answer your brother’s text you’ve left on read all week, how you talk to your kid the night after he lied to your face again.

Stick with that and something gives. You quit reading Acts like a museum case you wish you’d been around for. You catch yourself in it. There’s no Acts 29 on paper because you’re the one writing it, this week, in your apartment, in the group chat you keep muting, with the actual people whose names you already know.

Lord, keep me living Acts. I’m in it. Good place to be.

We run a Scripture deep dive like this all the time inside the Covo Multipliers tribe. It lives on WhatsApp, which is where the real talk happens. Link’s below if you want in.

Then yesterday everybody piled into the Expedition and we drove up to Plainville, Connecticut. Joe came down from New Hampshire to meet us there with Charlie, a student he’s been discipling at Keene State. Charlie’s home in Plainville for the summer, which meant we were standing in a harvest field Joe had never seen. We heard stories, told ours, opened the Word, grabbed lunch. Then I asked Charlie where he goes to harvest around here. He said the mall. So we went to the mall and shared the gospel in a town none of us had ever worked.

What Happened on I-84

I planned this trip with the car time in mind. Anybody can take people somewhere to watch ministry happen. I wanted these disciples stuck in a vehicle with disciple-makers for a couple hours each way, because that’s where the real transfer happens, and I was waiting for the right moment to say so out loud.

That’s exactly what happened. Somewhere on I-84, one of the disciples started sharing her testimony, and it wasn’t the version you give when someone asks. She shared parts of her story she’d never told anyone, things that months of meetings back in Oklahoma hadn’t surfaced. Shoulder to shoulder, everyone’s eyes on the road, nobody studying your face while you talk. A circle of chairs can’t quite get there.

That was my opening. I told them: this, right now, is the model. We’re not driving to ministry. The drive is the ministry. I started calling it boat time, partly because a Ford Expedition on the streets of New York genuinely handles like a boat.

Next Lab: “The Aquila and Priscilla Pattern” (Wednesday, July 15th at 3PM ET). What disciples do that see traction and new disciples made.

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Jesus and the Boat

Then I opened Mark 4 and 5 with them right there in the car.

Marcus had already been walking them through Mark 1 and 2 that week, Jesus immersing Himself in the lives of His disciples and their town. So I said, keep reading. Jesus takes the guys He’s been inviting into His habits and rhythms and He says, “Let us go over to the other side.” He gets them in a boat headed for the Gerasenes. A storm kicks up. He’s asleep in the stern. And on the far shore a demonized man is about to be set free in one of the most dramatic deliverances in the Gospels.

But first comes the boat.

We love the dramatic stuff, the healing and the deliverance, and I love it as much as anyone. Jesus cared about the trip, though. The boat is where the questions got asked, where the storm tested their faith, where the disciples picked up how Jesus thinks. And notice what happens on the other side: Jesus models engaging a brand-new place, then hands the freed man a vision. Go back to your own people and tell them what God has done. The disciples watched all of it. The boat ride was setting up everything they’d do later, from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.

Here’s the part I’ll admit. When we left, Marcus asked me what the plan was. I told him I wasn’t exactly sure. He said, what do you mean you’re not sure? I knew the ideal: testimony, the Word, a meal, time in Charlie’s harvest field. But Joe had never been to Charlie’s hometown and neither had I. We were going to figure it out when we arrived. I really doubt Jesus pulled up to that shore with a detailed itinerary for the demoniac. As we walked out the door at the end of the day, Marcus looked at me and said, well, it worked out.

What Came Out That Night

One of those three disciples is about to leave the university to become a border patrol officer. Six to nine months of training in New Mexico, then Texas. After we got back from Connecticut, after dinner, after a full day, she started asking Marcus questions about how church works. Leadership, structure, how the pieces fit together. Her reason: when I get to New Mexico and disciples start making disciples among the people I’m training with, what do I need to know? I’m a sponge.

Marcus said something afterward that stuck with me: in one week of immersion, things stuck with these disciples faster than six months of work back in their own context. Getting out of your context does that. You walk past the same street every day and never notice the giant oak tree. Someone new comes to town and says, that’s a big oak tree.

Taking the Boat Home

What excites me isn’t Connecticut. It’s what these four carry home to Oklahoma City, where Marcus and Haylee are already living this out from their house, running a business with their hands and making disciples at the same time, the way Aquila and Priscilla did with Paul. Movements multiply through ordinary moments. A long drive. A meal that runs late. A walk through a neighborhood. Ordinary, but not accidental. Somebody has to plan the boat. Jesus didn’t drift to the other side. He said, “Let us go.”

On the podcast today

We recorded this one on a park bench in Queens, jackhammers and a Zumba class in the background, with Marcus beside me and Dave dialed in from Oklahoma City. We dig into boat time, why margin matters as much as structure in disciple-making, and how ordinary disciples can build their own boat experiences as they develop others.

And if this stirred something: next month’s lab is called The Aquila and Priscilla Lifestyle, on living out these habits and rhythms covocationally from your house. Details at covomultipliers.com.

Sometimes the most important ministry happens before you reach the other side.

That instinct is exactly what kills disciple making.

Dave and I came back to this on the podcast this week. We’ve talked about the rhythms of the multiplier a dozen times because we’re living it, not theorizing about it. And every time we land in the same place.

The Word That’s Missing is “We”

We see “Four Fields” or five parts of Kingdom growth in Mark 4:26-29. Entry, gospel, discipleship, gathering, leadership development.

That’s the kingdom pattern. The seed gets planted, it takes root, a harvest comes, you put the sickle to it, and then it takes leaders to repeat the whole thing.

But here’s the part people skip.

So when we list off the rhythms, going into new places, gospeling, discipling, gathering, raising up leaders, none of those are solo activities. They’re things you bring someone into. The framework is real and it’s biblical. But run it alone, on your own calendar, blocking out Tuesday at 7 to “do discipleship,” and it’s just a nicer to-do list nobody checks.

Next Lab: “Rhythms of a Covo Multiplier” (Wednesday, June 17th at 3PM ET). What disciples do that see traction and new disciples made.

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What I Missed Reading Levi’s Story for years

Mark 2. Jesus is in Levi’s house eating dinner with tax collectors and sinners, and the religious establishment is losing it. We read that story and go to the theology. Jesus came for sinners, not the righteous. True. Important.

But Dave pointed at the thing screaming off the page that we don’t notice. The disciples are right there. Watching Jesus laugh. Watching him pause. Watching how he talks to people the system says you’re supposed to avoid.

That’s the whole game. The subtle stuff. Not the lesson. The thirty seconds around it. The thing you only catch riding shotgun in the truck, standing at the sink doing dishes after, walking back to the car in the parking lot.

A Four-Hour Delivery Run

Dave had a young guy who’s been around him three years. Living room intensives. A monthly cohort, three hours a month for two full years. The guy still reaches out. Two days ago he hopped in the van and rode around for four hours doing business deliveries.

They didn’t sit down for a discipleship appointment. They drove. And in four hours they covered marriage, kids, what a soul even is, why we’re different from animals, and then the real one: “how do I disciple this guy I work with every week when I don’t see anything happening in his life?” Take me into the scriptures on that.

This is the part that breaks the American brain (mine included). We think discipleship is a scheduled block. Dave’s right that the second you split it, small group on Wednesday night over here and the actual job the other six days over there, you’re done. You’ve zapped the one thing you actually need, which is margin. The rhythm has to become how you already drive to work and eat lunch, or it becomes one more thing you don’t have room for.

“Can you do that?”

Best story from the episode: Dave’s been teaching prayer at the church that meets in his home. Somebody said they wanted to pray better, and instead of explaining prayer, Dave said come pray with me. So they’re at Topgolf (because he’s got unlimited Topgolf for the summer) and they start praying. The server walks up mid-prayer. Dave stops, handles the order, says okay back to it, and keeps praying.

His son, who’s half paying attention, watches the whole thing and asks the most basic question there is.

“Wait. How’d you just stop, talk to the server, and go back to praying? Can you do that? Is that allowed?”

That question is gold. And a theology class will never produce it. Not because the class is bad, but because nobody in the class is thinking about it, and even if they were, they’d never dare ask. The rhythm makes space for the question the lecture can’t reach.

It’s Not What You Do. It’s What You Are.

I had a guy in my living room last week. Sharp leader, doing real work on a college campus. I showed him a tool. He said great, I’ll go run it. And I had to stop him. Hold up. Do you want me to do it with you?

He paused. “Oh. Okay.”

He’s a psych major. Sits in a lecture hall taking notes, and four years from now hopes some job lets him use them. That’s the only model of learning he’s ever been handed. What I was offering him was different. A rhythm I do with you Thursday that you’ll do with somebody else next month.

That’s why you can’t download it. You can download a tool. You can’t download withness.

The Drips

Dave used Nathan Shank’s picture of chasing the river out of Ezekiel. Ezekiel sees the new Jerusalem and there’s a river starting from a drip. He walks and it’s at his ankles. Walks more, his knees. Keeps walking and it’s a torrent he can’t cross. The kingdom runs the same direction. It starts small and floods.

So no, what Dave and I are describing isn’t a rocket ship or a lightning bolt or a life hack. It’s nothing incredible. It’s built into the fabric of creation, the same be fruitful and multiply that shows up in Genesis. We’re not inventing a new way to make disciples. We’re trying to rediscover the old one.

If you’ve been reading the books and downloading the frameworks and still feel stuck, that’s probably your answer right there. You’ve been trying to do it alone.

Most Bible studies go small. Pick a verse, dig into a doctrine, help someone say what they already believe with a little more precision. Nothing wrong with that. But it has a ceiling.

What a Deep Dive Actually Is

You read a lot of Scripture. Together. Out loud. That’s the core of it.

Three chapters, five, ten, whatever the passage needs. You come with questions. You don’t push toward a destination. You let people sit in it long enough for things to start connecting on their own.

Last Saturday we spent three hours on Mark 1–6 and Acts 18–20. Mark 1–6 is Jesus in Galilee, calling people, going into fields, forming something around a person of peace, watching a movement start to take on its own momentum. Acts 18–20 is Paul in Corinth and Ephesus doing what looks, once you’ve seen it, like the same thing.

That’s the shift a deep dive is after. Not more information. A different frame.

Next Lab: “Rhythms of a Covo Multiplier” (Wednesday, June 17th at 3PM ET). What disciples do that see traction and new disciples made.

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How to Run One

Before People Show Up

Send the passage and around 3-5 discovery questions ahead of time. Ask people to read through the text a couple of times before the call.

If they haven’t read, the first hour is going to be rough. You’re trying to have a conversation with people who are reading the passage for the first time while they’re on the call. (That’s not a conversation. It’s a slow go of it.)

The questions matter too, and not just as prompts. They shape how people read. For our last study, the questions were around fields. What fields did Jesus and Paul enter, what opened the door, who was already connected to the work when it started. People came in looking for that. They were already seeing the text through movement eyes before we started.

Some came in already fired up. Others needed the study itself to land. But the ones who’d done the reading walked in with something to say, and that changes the temperature of the whole room from the start.

During

Start by reading out loud, together. Big sections. Saturday, we read Mark 1–3, talked for a while, read Acts 18–19, talked some more. Not verse by verse, whole chunks, one after another.

This sounds like it should be obvious. It’s almost never how church studies work. Most people haven’t heard long stretches of Scripture read aloud in years, if ever. There’s something about sitting in it as a group, taking turns, hearing different voices, that just works differently than reading alone. Things connect across the room, not just inside one person’s head.

Then ask questions. Don’t tell people what to see.

The first hour tends to be slow. People come in scattered, default mode is passive, and you’re working against years of sit-and-listen training. You’ll feel like you’re dragging. That’s fine. Don’t fill the quiet. Don’t save people from the awkward pause.

By hour three, something has usually shifted. Dave notices it every time: first hour you’re pulling teeth, third hour you can’t get people to stop. Their brains have finally locked in. The last 30 minutes can produce more than the first two combined, but you only get there by going through the first two.

It’s a form of germination. People need to ruminate. It looks like nothing is happening and then something breaks through. You can’t manufacture it and you can’t skip it.

Things That Actually Help

What’s Actually Getting Built

We didn’t see this clearly at first. The deep dive looks like a Bible study method. It’s not mainly that.

What you’re building is the capacity to go to the Word together and work something out. That sounds simple. It’s actually rare. Dave talks about this when he thinks about apostolic-type leaders, people trying to go where the gospel hasn’t been. Those people will hit situations no training covered. When that happens, the question is whether the team knows how to gather around the Scripture and wrestle toward an answer together. A lot of teams don’t. They haven’t practiced it.

That’s a practiced capacity, not a natural one. The deep dive is where you practice it, on the patterns and rhythms, the less-loaded material, so that when something big arrives, you already know how to be in a room together with the text as your foundation.

There’s something else happening in parallel. Every time you facilitate one of these, you’re modeling how to study Scripture. Not telling people they should study, but showing them how you do it. They’re watching how you ask questions, how you notice something in the first chapter and tie it to something three chapters later, how you follow a thread without forcing it. Over time they internalize that. They start doing it with other people.

That’s the longer game.

What Success Looks Like

Not a clean session. Not everyone landing on the same three points.

One of the guys in our last study sent a message that night. He’d been on these calls a few times, thought he understood what we were doing. He said he was starting to get why we spend so much time on them. He’d always seen the three-hour Saturday morning commitment, people still asking basic questions, conversations going sideways, as inefficient. Now he was seeing it differently. The slow soak was the thing. The aha moments don’t happen without the time it takes to get there.

That message was worth more than a polished session would have been.

Chuck said something near the end of the conversation that’s been sitting with us. When you walk into the room, you’re looking at the next generation of disciple makers. Not participants. Not an audience. People who don’t yet see themselves that way, and part of your job in every one of these studies is helping them see it.

Not just what they know. Who they are.

Take Mark 1–3. Read it out loud with someone. Bring one question that doesn’t have a tidy answer. See where it goes.

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Read your Bible. Pray. Go to church. Share the gospel.

It’s Not What You Do. It’s Who You’re Becoming.

Every Thursday Dave and I get on a call. He’s outside an OnCue gas station in OKC. I’m in Queens. We’ve been doing it long enough that it doesn’t feel like a meeting anymore. It’s just Thursday.

The same thing keeps coming up. Different week, different angle: how does someone go from doing disciple-making things to actually being a disciple maker?

The illustration that’s stuck with me is a backwards bike. The Smarter Every Day guy, Destin Sandlin, had his kids weld a gear in the middle so turning right made the wheel go left. He tried for weeks. Couldn’t do it. Then his brain flipped and suddenly he could. Except now a regular bike threw him off completely. He’d fall over every time. His brain had been rewired and there was no going back to the old default.

That’s the target. Not better habits to manage on top of your regular life. A different person. One where, when a coworker loses her dad and you’re sitting across from her, what comes out isn’t something you planned. It’s just who you are now.

Acts 2 Is the Blueprint

Everything comes back to one passage. Acts 2:36-47.

We call it the Church Waffle: three rows of four habits, twelve total. I know how that sounds. But we didn’t invent anything. Luke wrote it. We just put a grid on it so you could see the shape.

Row 1: Identity (vv. 36-41)

Peter stands up in the temple courts. The crowd is already rattled. Disciples just spoke in a dozen languages at once and half the crowd thinks it’s some kind of drunken stunt. Peter says: “This Jesus you crucified. God raised him. He’s Lord and Christ.”

People are cut to the heart. What do we do?

Repent. Be baptized. Receive the Holy Spirit.

That’s row one:

1. The Gospel. Mouth to ear. Peter opened his mouth to people standing right in front of him. That’s it. That’s the template.

2. Repentance. Not the Sunday you walked an aisle. The guy who stops managing his anger only when the kids are watching and actually lets God into the room where it happens. Ongoing. That’s the habit.

3. Baptism. Public. Telling coworkers, neighbors who’ve known you for a decade, family who thinks you’ve gone weird. Not quietly spiritual on the inside.

4. The Holy Spirit. I don’t have a clever way to say it. Spirit. That’s the habit.

Row 2: Devotion (v. 42)

One verse.

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

The whole weight of this row is on devoted. Not sampling. Not attending. Devoted. It’s what keeps row one alive. Without it, the identity in row one just quietly fades.

5. Apostles’ Teaching. Not read at 6am and forgotten by 8. Two guys at lunch and one of them says, “I read something this morning that I can’t shake. What do you think it means?” That’s the habit.

6. Fellowship. The person who texts you at 10pm when their marriage is in trouble and you pick up. Not a group you attend. Someone who actually knows where you are.

7. Breaking of Bread. A kitchen somewhere, Thursday nights, the Lord’s Supper, real food. Dinner tables, not conference rooms.

8. Prayers. Plural. Out loud. Other people in the room. Not the half-conscious kind right before you fall asleep.

Stop one and the others start slowing down. They hold each other up.

Row 3: Overflow (vv. 43-47)

Do rows one and two long enough and something starts coming out that no one manufactured.

9. Signs and Wonders. The guy who’s been a Christian eight months prays for his sick coworker and something actually happens. He didn’t strategize it. He just didn’t not do it. God showed up.

10. Generosity. Someone hears another family’s car got repossessed. It gets covered. No program, no offering envelope. Their relationship with money had changed and the money went where the need was.

11. Worship. You’re driving home from a dinner where God showed up and you’re singing in the car alone and you realize you’ve been doing it for ten minutes.

12. Multiply. Healthy churches like healthy plants and animals reproduce. As we live out the practices and share the gospel with the lost, new disciples devote themselves to the habits and rhythms.

Next Lab: “Rhythms of a Covo Multiplier” (Wednesday, June 17th at 3PM ET). What disciples do that see traction and new disciples made.

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The Part Nobody Talks About

Most people read “they devoted themselves” and start thinking about what to add to their personal routine. That’s very American.

But look at the passage. 3,120 people devoted themselves together. Not a personal discipline program. A community.

Two things you can’t get by yourself:

You can’t get either of those alone. That’s not a criticism. It’s just how it works.

The Church Waffle

Simple drawing. Three rows, four columns:

This isn’t a tool. It’s what everything else is sitting on top of. Every conversation about running Dave’s dry-cleaning business as a mission field, planting a church in a neighborhood you moved into on purpose, building covocational leaders who can do this across a city, all of it assumes this is already under there.

Pull it out and the whole thing drifts. You can only multiply what you actually are.

What to Do

Open Acts 2:36-47. Read it slow.

Then keep reading Acts all the way through. Watch for these habits showing up in Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus. Luke stops explaining it at some point because he figures you know what to look for. Same pattern, new city, new people, every time.

Then ask yourself which of these twelve you’re actually doing. And which ones you’re doing alone, private Bible reading, solo prayer, when they were always supposed to happen with other people in the room.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into this live episode with !

You want to see the guy you grab lunch with on Thursdays, the woman two doors down who waves but never stops to talk, the coworker who keeps asking you oddly deep questions. You want them to actually follow Jesus. Not just show up to a service once. Actually follow. And then turn around and bring their friends with them.

You want the full thing. Lost to leader.

That’s what this episode is about. And once you see where you’re stuck, you won’t be able to unsee it.

The Confession Most Leaders Won’t Make

Dave Miller (church planter, dry cleaning business owner, discipler of people) said it bluntly on this week’s episode:

“I had a doctorate in disciple-making and had no idea how to do it.”

He’d read the books. Talked about it constantly. Had all the right language. But Proverbs 14:23 kept haunting him: There is profit in all hard work, but endless talk leads only to poverty.

He was in endless talk mode.

This is more common than anyone admits. You can diagram the Great Commission on a napkin. You’ve had the conversation at the men’s breakfast three times. You’ve recommended the book. But the guy you eat lunch with every Thursday still has no idea you follow Jesus, because you’ve never actually said anything to him.

The vision is clear. The intention is real. The action is... absent.

What’s the gap? Two things. Always the same two things.

Barrier #1: You Don’t Know Where to Start

A lot of us can name categories faster than we can name people. Not “people at work.” Actual names.

The guy in the seat next to you who puts his headphones in the second the meeting ends. The neighbor whose trash cans you’ve been rolling back to the curb for two years. The regular at the Tuesday morning pickup basketball game who mentioned, once, that his marriage is struggling.

Those people. Can you name three of them right now?

If you hesitated, that’s the starting point.

Next Lab: “From Lost to Leader.” (Wednesday, May 20th at 3PM ET). Learn a simple path to help people move from far from God to growing disciple.

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Barrier #2: You Don’t Know What to Do Once You See It

Say you’ve solved the first one. You know it’s Coffee Cloud on Wednesday mornings. You know it’s the school pickup line at 3pm. You know it’s your crew at the job site.

Now what?

This is where even more people stall. You show up. You’re friendly. You wait for something to happen. Weeks pass. You feel like you’re doing something. You’re there, you’re present. But nothing is actually moving.

Dave nailed it on the episode: “If I don’t understand that what I’m doing is taking me somewhere, I get burnt out because it seems pointless.”

Busy ≠ moving. Showing up ≠ building.

The Objection You’re Already Forming

Here’s what happens when you start talking about a “Lost to Leader Pathway,” a clear, step-by-step framework for taking someone from their first spiritual conversation all the way to training others to do the same.

Someone always says: Isn’t that too mechanical? Aren’t you just turning people into a product on an assembly line? Doesn’t that feel Pharisaic?

It’s a legitimate question. And here’s the answer:

The pathway isn’t a machine. It’s a map.

The guy from the job site texts you out of nowhere after three months of silence and says he’s ready to talk. The woman from pickup line starts coming to your Thursday Bible study, then disappears for six weeks, then shows back up with her sister. Someone grows fast for a month, then hits a wall you didn’t see coming. None of that goes according to script.

Dave used an image from the Kentucky Derby that stuck with me.

Before the race, these wiry, explosive thoroughbreds are bouncing off the walls. Energy in every direction, no focus. And what do they do? They tie each thoroughbred’s bridle up next to a massive, calm, steady Clydesdale. The big horse doesn’t react. Doesn’t panic. Just walks. Slow. Consistent. Leading toward the gate.

That’s what the pathway does. Not a cage. A calm lead horse.

The Path Has to Be Clear, and Cleared

Here’s something the episode surfaced that most discipleship conversations skip.

A pathway isn’t just a list of steps. It also exposes the extra obstacles you’ve added.

Can they share the gospel with their friends? Can they baptize someone? Can they gather their people around Scripture before they’ve been through your membership class? Can they start obeying Jesus before they understand everything?

If you’re unclear on that, you’ll slow them down without meaning to. You’ll call it wisdom. But sometimes it’s just control with Bible words on it.

The pathway has to be clear step by step, and it also has to be cleared of the bottlenecks he never put there.

What the Pathway Actually Looks Like

Mark walked through his in real-time on the episode, not hypothetically, but from what he’s doing right now at Coffee Cloud up the street from his house.

He walks in, opens his laptop, and starts talking to whoever’s nearby. Not a strategy session, just normal conversation. He’s looking for the moment it goes from small talk to something real. When it does, he doesn’t pivot awkwardly into a gospel presentation. He just keeps going, brings in something from his own story, sees how they respond.

Some people shut down. He keeps showing up, keeps being normal. Others lean in: “yeah, I’d want to keep talking about that.”

Those people he takes into Stories of Hope — simple Bible stories that circle around what it actually means to turn and follow Jesus. Nothing complicated. Just sitting with the text together.

When someone comes to faith, he doesn’t leave them floating with a Bible and a handshake. He sits down and gets specific: here’s who you are now, here’s why you make disciples too, here’s the first person in your life you should probably talk to, here’s how you start. And when are you doing it?

Then they start gathering. Nothing formal at first. Just showing up in each other’s lives, reading together, praying, eating. The stuff of Acts 2.

And from that, he watches for who’s starting to take initiative. Who’s already having spiritual conversations with their coworkers without being asked? Who brought a friend? That person is the next leader.

The Real Test of Your Disciple-Making Plan

Here’s a filter worth applying to whatever you’re currently doing:

That’s where most approaches break down. They work fine when you’re present. But the moment you try to hand it off, the gaps show up. They freeze when the conversation goes somewhere unexpected because they learned to follow your lead, not to hold the map themselves.

When a disciple can train someone else, two things happen: they finally understand why you made the choices you made (not just that you did them), and you develop common language. So instead of you explaining everything from scratch every time, they can say “remember what we talked about with the Stories of Hope” and you both know exactly where you are.

That’s the goal. Not someone who needs you on every call. Someone who can run without you watching.

One Thing to Do Before You Close This Tab

Somewhere along that line, there’s going to be a fuzzy spot. Maybe it’s right after they believe — you’re not sure what to do next. Maybe it’s when it’s time to hand it off and you realize you don’t actually know how to explain it to them. That fuzzy spot is the gap in your pathway.

That’s not a failure. That’s data. That’s where you need clarity.

If you want to get that clarity, we’re hosting a live lab, The Lost to Leader Pathway, this Wednesday on Zoom. We’ll walk through the full framework, show you the practical tools, and give you space to ask questions.

Link is in the episode description. Sign up, get the Zoom link, show up.

Bring the fuzzy spot. That’s where we’ll start.

• Start here → https://obey.tools/

• Join a 45 Min Skills Lab Zoom Call → https://covomultipliers.com/

• Walk with others → https://forms.gle/YwqLhonNSipybAD8A

In this episode of the H3X Podcast, Mark and Dave unpack the concept of precision harvesting: how Jesus filtered and invested in the few to see lasting multiplication. They explore why disciple making is inherently “inefficient” and why that’s actually the key to compounding growth over time.

You’ll walk away with a framework for discerning where you are in the process and how habits and rhythms like the three-thirds process can build movements from micro to macro.

You knew there was more to say. You just didn’t know what.

So you moved on. You told yourself it wasn’t the right moment. You filed it under “complicated” and started the machines.

The Question You Haven’t Asked

Most of us treat disciple-making like a design problem. We see a gap: the guy at the next workstation who never talks about anything real, the neighbor who shows up at the block party every year but you’ve never gotten past the weather. We start trying to build something to fill it. A reason to follow up. An approach that fits the relationship.

That seems responsible. It’s actually backwards.

That changes everything about how you show up.

If disciple-making is something you invent, then your experience is the raw material. You try things. You let what works shape what you do next.

But if it’s something you discover, if Jesus actually lived it out, if the early church actually modeled it, if it’s sitting right there in the text, then your experience isn’t the source. It’s the field where you apply what you already found.

Next Lab: “From Lost to Leader.” (Wednesday, May 20th at 3PM ET). Learn a simple path to help people move from far from God to growing disciple.

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The Order of Operations

There’s a framework called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Don’t let the name scare you off.

But most of us reverse the order.

The conversation with the customer hits you. It feels urgent and unresolved. So you reach back into whatever you remember from Sunday and try to find something that confirms the call you made, or didn’t make.

You think you’re being biblically grounded. You’re using the Bible to ratify whatever you walked in with.

Dave Miller, who plants churches while running a dry cleaning business, put it bluntly: most believers will say the Word of God is central to their life. But the vast majority of us are making our decisions in the experience category. We don’t have enough of the Word in our hearts that we’re actually letting it interpret our experience. We’re letting our experience interpret it.

That’s not cynicism. That’s just honest.

Why Experience Always Wins

Experience has an unfair advantage. The customer whose marriage is falling apart is real in a way that abstract theology rarely is. That 30-second window at the register, where you could have said something and didn’t, that’s real. You can replay it.

Theological debate doesn’t have that problem. You can argue the order of salvation on a Tuesday night and wake up Wednesday morning with zero practical consequences. The stakes feel invisible.

The result is a faith that bends to fit your week instead of a week that gets bent by your faith.

For a covocational leader trying to make disciples at a job, in a neighborhood, in the twenty minutes after hockey practice when everyone’s lingering by the cars, that’s a slow catastrophe. You’re not just trying to live differently. You’re trying to model something reproducible. If experience is driving, what people around you are watching is just someone trying their best. That’s not a movement. That’s a decent example at most.

Priscilla and Aquila Aren’t an Inspiration Story

They’re a case study.

Rome. Corinth. Ephesus. Back to Rome. Back to Ephesus. Across the snapshots we get of their lives, the same pattern keeps showing up: they’re working with their hands, and there’s a church meeting in their home. And they’re not just hosting. They’re leading citywide. In the mix with Paul, with Apollos, with the broader movement.

So when the customer says his marriage is falling apart, you’re not scrambling for a religious line. You’re drawing on something you already studied. You’re asking what Scripture already taught you to do when peace opens a door.

Jesus Never Let the Pressure of the Moment Become the Authority

Crowds pressed him. Critics tested him. Gethsemane crushed him. But experience never told him who he was. The Father did. The Word did.

That’s the pattern we’re being formed into. Not a moral checklist you run before making a call. Christ formed in you, pushed outward through you into the ordinary Tuesday: the register conversation, the breakroom lunch, the parking lot after practice where everyone’s standing around and no one’s in a hurry yet.

Start With the Word

The next time someone opens a door, don’t start with your anxiety. Don’t start with what felt awkward last time. Don’t start with whether you think you’re ready.

• Start here → https://obey.tools/

• Join a 45 Min Skills Lab Zoom Call → https://covomultipliers.com/

• Walk with others → https://forms.gle/YwqLhonNSipybAD8A

In this episode, we explore the biblical model in Acts 18–20 and how Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila’s habits and rhythms became the foundation for a multiplying hub.

You’ll hear why immersion—seeing it, experiencing it, and living it alongside others—can accelerate adoption far beyond classroom learning.

It is getting exactly what you built.

That is what I (Mark) mean by innovating your way out of success.

The Production Mindset

When I got to New York, I thought I understood the process. Years of doing this work had given me confidence in the system: find the right person, run them through the training, develop these kinds of leaders, and you’ll get output on the other side. Lost to leader. A pipeline.

Dave runs a shirt press in his business. That machine doesn’t have a will. It doesn’t show up on a Tuesday and decide it doesn’t feel like it today. You put a shirt in, you get a pressed shirt. Every time.

The guy I’m meeting with on Thursday morning over coffee? He does have a will. He’s got a history, a family situation, a job that’s grinding him down, and a version of God he learned about as a kid that he’s not sure he believes anymore. He’s not going to move from where he is to multiplying disciples because I ran him through the right modules in the right order.

Next Lab: “From Lost to Leader.” (Wednesday, May 20th at 3PM ET). Learn a simple path to help people move from far from God to growing disciple.

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What Jesus Was Actually After

Read the Gospels from page one with a production mindset and you’ll be confused by the numbers. Twelve disciples. Seventy-two sent out. A hundred and twenty in the upper room.

That’s not what success looks like if you’re running a launch campaign.

Not people who knew how to love their enemies, gritting their teeth and forcing it, but people who had practiced it long enough that they stopped filing people under “enemy” in the first place. Not people who could walk someone through a disciple-making process on a whiteboard, but people for whom making disciples was just how they lived, at the job site, in their apartment building, at the school pickup line.

That’s a fundamentally different definition of success. And it has a completely different time horizon attached to it.

The Time Horizon Problem

One of the most important shifts I’ve had to make is moving from “when will I see results” to “what does it actually take for a lifestyle to reproduce into another person.”

Not just knowing the vocabulary. Not just being able to explain the Four Fields on a napkin at lunch. Actually living it, week in week out, until it becomes instinct.

When you know that, you stop abandoning things that are working just because they don’t feel productive yet. You stop looking at the guy you’ve been meeting with for eight months and deciding he’s not the right kind of person. You start asking better questions. You invest differently.

You stop innovating your way out of what was actually fruit beginning to form.

What Gets Multiplied When You Get This Wrong

Here’s the hardest part: you can work hard for years and actually achieve the wrong thing.

If your definition of success is production-oriented and you labor until you get it, you might just get it. You’ll get leaders who can reproduce a production mindset. You’ll build a pipeline of people who know how to run the pipeline. And you’ll look around at what you built and realize the rooms are full but the multiplication isn’t happening. Nobody’s household, friendships, and everyday relationships are actually being touched. People know the language but they’re not living it with their neighbors.

I’ve been there. I’ve sat in rooms where people could explain the whole process, draw the diagram, name the phases, train it back to you, but almost nobody was actually opening Scripture with a lost person that week.

Not a dramatic moment. Just the slow, ongoing work of letting his definition be more authoritative than whatever felt like momentum at the time.

Go Slow to Go Fast

Acts 2 gets vision-cast constantly. The four marks. The devotion. The breaking of bread in someone’s living room on a Wednesday night. The movement.

But Acts 2 does not come out of nowhere. It’s the fruit of three years of Jesus doing what Jesus did, proximity, shared meals, conversations on the road, correction in real time, repeated practice until it became instinct. The early church didn’t erupt because Jesus had the best framework. It erupted because enough people had been genuinely transformed in their actual daily lives.

You fail. You adjust. You keep going. And years later, you look up and realize something is reproducing that you didn’t manufacture.

You can’t steer a parked car.

But you also can’t steer a car by swapping out the engine every time the drive feels slow.

The Compounding Effect

Kingdom transformation compounds. The twelve become the seventy-two. The seventy-two become the hundred and twenty in the upper room. The hundred and twenty ignite Acts 2. Not because of a better system, because enough people’s actual lives had changed and were now reproducing into other people’s actual lives.

The invitation is to let Jesus’ definition win. Hold it firmly enough not to abandon it when it’s slow. Hold it loosely enough to keep learning what it actually requires.

Whatever it takes. However long it takes.

That’s the job.

• Start here → https://obey.tools/

• Join a 45 Min Skills Lab Zoom Call → https://covomultipliers.com/

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If you’re trying to live this out as a covocational disciple-maker, Dave and I host Covo Multiplier Labs and Scripture Deep Dives. Not silver bullets. Just practical handles, Scripture, and a community of people trying to get the car moving together. Find us at covomultipliers.com.

In this episode, Jason Cronkhite shares his transformative journey from corporate life to kingdom entrepreneurship, all through the lens of a single Hebrew word: Avodah - work, worship, and service as one.

He unpacks how this redefinition of vocation reshapes company culture, client relationships, and everyday conversations at work.

Whether you're a CEO, team leader, or solopreneur, this conversation will reframe your calling and equip you to build a business that multiplies discipleship.

They prayer-walked Saturday mornings. Ran backyard Bible clubs on weekday afternoons. The moms came onto the porch. The kids ran over as soon as the folding table went up.

They couldn’t reach a single family.

The dads were gone before the kids woke up and home after the kids were in bed. Second shifts at distribution plants. Restaurants open until close. The strategy was built for people who weren’t there.

Most of us are still building strategy for people who are somewhere else.

The village doesn’t exist in Queens

Villages work one way. In John 4, Jesus meets a woman at a well, and by sundown the village is walking out to find him. That works because the whole village draws water from the same well, eats dinner on the same four streets, and marries each other’s cousins. Get the woman, get everyone.

Try that in Queens, NYC. The guy who runs the halal cart on 73rd is not at the Bangladeshi church on Sunday afternoon and he’s not at the ethnic community center on a Wednesday. He’s at the cart from 9am to 8pm.

Next Lab: “From Lost to Leader.” (Wednesday, May 20th at 3PM ET). Learn a simple path to help people move from far from God to growing disciple.

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The City is Rebar

Think of a city as rebar. Ethnic threads run one direction: Iranian, Bangladeshi, Persian, Korean. Inside each thread the cardiologist and the line cook show up to the same wedding. The workplace cuts across the other axis. Slice across OU Medical and you’ll find a South Asian attending scrubbing in next to a Pakistani fellow and a nurse who grew up in Norman. Slice across the Hobby Lobby distribution center and you’ll find Guatemalans on morning shift, Salvadorans packing, Afghans and Iranians on the forklift. Nine languages in thirty-five employees at one point.

The ethnic axis gets you the moms at the bus stop. The workplace axis is the only thing that gets you the dad who clocks out at 9pm.

Most mission strategy only sees one axis. Which is why the dads are never reached.

Your work is not the funding mechanism. It is the entry point.

Your dry cleaning shop is not the thing you do to afford the ministry you actually care about. The counter where you hand back a dress on Friday afternoon is the ministry. The truck cab with your crew at 6:45am is the ministry. The four-hour drive to the job site is the ministry.

You have to actually be around people. And around them long enough for your life to say something on a day when nothing dramatic is happening. You unlock the shop at 7. They walk in at 7:15. Nobody had to schedule anything. Nobody had to be convinced to come. The rhythm runs itself every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

The guy who led a dad to Christ at the Hobby Lobby warehouse didn’t catch him at a Sunday service. He caught him on break, sitting on an overturned bucket near the loading dock. That was the only place that dad was reachable. Once the dad moved, his family followed.

This is where we usually settle. We call a business “kingdom” if the owner pays on time and doesn’t pad the invoice. Fine. That’s the floor.

The bigger move is what happens when the regular at your counter mentions her dad is on hospice and you don’t just nod and bag her shirts.

Redeem the hours you didn’t choose

Paul says redeem the time. In a village that means showing up on the porch. In a city it means a harder question: where do your forty-five hours a week actually go, and who’s sitting next to you while they go?

Some of your hours you chose. Dinner with friends you like. Saturday hike. The group chat. Most of your hours you did not choose. The 7:42 train. The 9:15 standup. The customer who walks in at 4:30. The driver you’re riding with for four hours to a site. Those hours are fixed. Those people are fixed. The only variable is whether you bring the kingdom into them or treat them as the thing you’re doing in between real life.

The dads you can’t reach by knocking on doors at 11am are reachable on the loading dock at 2pm. The people groups your church can’t access through a Sunday invite are standing next to you on the line.

They were never going to come to you. You were always going to have to go to work.

Listen to the full H3X episode wherever you get podcasts. To go deeper, check out covomultipliers.com. Our next lab is May 20th: how do you move someone from lost to leader?

With a heart for unreached people groups and a stethoscope in hand, Erin shares how prayer, perseverance, and practical love opened doors among her Somali neighbors.

What began with failed cookie deliveries turned into years of deep relationships, neighborhood healing, and gospel storytelling.

Her story is a testament to how the ordinary rhythms of work and life can be saturated with Kingdom purpose when rooted in identity, prayer, and obedience to Jesus.

This is not a character flaw. It is what most of us were handed. Sacred on one side. Everything else on the other. Ministry for the called. Survival for everyone else.

One calling, not two

Co-vocational is not a strategy for people who cannot afford to go into full-time ministry. It is not a consolation prize or a funding model. It means your kingdom calling and your daily work are not running on separate tracks.

They are the same track. One life, not two lives managed in shifts.

Most people, when they hear this, think they need to add something. Pray more at the office. Work in some gospel conversations. Find ways to squeeze ministry into the margins of the real day.

That is still the old framing wearing new clothes.

The parking lot

There is a man three desks down who is not following Jesus and making disciples. Not this year. Probably not next year either. He has his reasons, and in his own head they make sense.

But last month, after a meeting where a project he had worked on for six months got killed in fifteen minutes, he walked to the parking lot. You were already out there. You did not have a plan. You asked how he was doing and you actually waited. He talked for twenty minutes. You asked about his wife by name the following week.

Nobody sent you. No organization deployed you. You were just present, and present turned out to be enough to open something.

That is not a ministry program. That is a posture. And you already have access to it because you show up to the same building every day.

Your work is not the funding mechanism. It is the entry point.

There is a version of co-vocational that still treats the job as infrastructure. You work, you earn, you fund the real mission somewhere else. The job is a means to an end.

The job site, the pickup line on Tuesday afternoons, the gym at 6am, those are not support structures for ministry happening somewhere else. They are where the ministry happens.

That is Field One. That is entry. And you are already in it.

Next Lab: “From Lost to Leader.” (Wednesday, May 20th at 3PM ET). Learn a simple path to help people move from far from God to growing disciple.

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Two things that stop people

The first is not seeing it. Most people move through their days without ever mapping what they actually have access to.

• Your coworker who just went through a divorce.

• The dad you see at swim practice every Thursday.

• The client who calls more than necessary because she trusts your judgment on things far outside the work.

Stop and look at what is already there. The access is probably larger than you think.

The second is seeing it and freezing. You know the conversation you have been sitting on for three months. You know the neighbor you have been meaning to have over. That is not a calling problem. That is a skill problem, and skill problems are solvable. What most people need is not more conviction.

Why staying matters

There is another reason to stay visibly in the co-vocational space, even when you could move into full-time ministry. It is what it shows the people watching.

When a business owner is baptizing people he met through his shop, when a teacher is hosting a simple gathering in her apartment on Friday nights, when a contractor is the person on the job site that guys actually want to talk to about things that matter, something shifts for everyone who sees it. Not just: look what God did. But: I could do that. You do not need a title, a salary, or a sending organization. You need a posture and the willingness to be present in the spaces you already occupy.

You have a job, a neighborhood, and a daily routine. That is not your life before the assignment starts. That is the assignment.

• Start here → https://obey.tools/

• Join a 45 Min Skills Lab Zoom Call → https://covomultipliers.com/

• Walk with others → https://forms.gle/YwqLhonNSipybAD8A

The Romans thought that too. Caesar Augustus consolidated power, the republic gave way to empire, and everyone was scrambling to figure out what came next.

Into that exact moment, Jesus showed up. Not with an institutional response. Not with a scalable program. With a gospel and twelve guys.

The Wrong Response to Crisis

The guy in your Tuesday morning staff meeting who used to be steady is now doom-scrolling between agenda items. Your neighbor who never talked about politics is anxious about whether to pull money out of his 401k. Everyone is grabbing for something solid.

In a low-trust environment, that’s exactly the wrong move.

The gospel spreads when a woman at work comes to Christ and starts having her three coworkers over for dinner on Thursday nights. That small group of four becomes a church. That church multiplies to engage another workplace or park. That is how it grows.

Three Years, Not a Crowd

It’s what Jesus was building when he called Simon by name on a dock in Galilee and walked with him for three years instead of managing a crowd.

The crowds showed up anyway. The movement outlasted the empire.

The Tent Booth Was The Entry Point

I heard a church planter recently describing how his funding was drying up and he might have to go get a job or start a business. He was talking about it like his dog had died. Like taking a sales job meant he was abandoning the work.

But Priscilla and Aquila made tents. They worked the booth at the market. Their shop floor is where Paul met them, where the church in Corinth started taking shape. Tent-making wasn’t their backup plan. It was their entry point.

When we treat the pathway as fixed, we’re managing toward our preferred version of the vision.

The grain of wheat that falls to the ground doesn’t get to decide what kind of fruit grows. It just dies. And something bigger comes from it.

This Has Always Been The Mechanism

People read Matthew 24 while watching the news at 11pm and think, this must be the one Jesus was talking about.

He was. And so was every generation before ours. His instruction to all of them was the same: don’t be alarmed, don’t be led astray, and don’t stop.

That’s always been the mechanism. Crisis doesn’t change it. Crisis just makes it harder to believe.

What to Do Right Now

Go find one person. Share the gospel over coffee, in your car, on a walk. Help them bring the gospel into the handful of people already around them.

And if you’re sitting here with a big vision and growing anxiety about whether it’s actually moving, check what you’re feeling. Urgency and control feel the same from the inside.

Start small. Trust God with what grows from there.

• Start here → https://obey.tools/

• Join a 45 Min Skills Lab Zoom Call → https://covomultipliers.com/

• Walk with others → https://forms.gle/YwqLhonNSipybAD8A

It continues when people walk closely with God and give themselves to what He is actually doing in their place, among their people, in their moment.

That is why Emmanuel’s image of a compass and road signs stuck with me. A map assumes every terrain is the same. A compass helps you stay aligned when it is not. Most of us want a map because we want control. But Jesus’s movement has never been built on control.

It moves through dependence, discernment, and obedience.

The problem is often not ignorance but overload

A lot of us already know too much.

We have heard the stories, read the books, and learned the language. But knowledge does not make us focused.

What Emmanuel surfaced is that the issue is often not ignorance. It is overload.

Many leaders are not stalled because they do not care. They are stalled because they are trying to carry too much at once. Too many goals. Too many needs. Too many good things without enough clarity about what matters most now. So they stay active, but scattered. Busy, but unfocused.

That kind of ministry drift can look faithful from the outside. But underneath, there is very little clarity.

Busyness quietly works against what we say we want

This was the sharpest part for me.

Emmanuel talked about busyness as more than a full calendar. It is a kind of frantic activity that makes us rush our work, skim our responsibilities, and lose the ability to be present with people. We get driven by the urgent. We avoid harder conversations. We miss what is in front of us because part of us is always somewhere else.

That gets in the way of Jesus’s movement continuing locally.

You can spend all day doing ministry and still be unavailable to God. You can fill every margin and still miss the person He put in front of you.

It looks responsible. But it can quietly hollow out the focus and presence that obedience requires.

Beneath busyness is a deeper disorder

What I appreciated is that Emmanuel traced this deeper. He said busyness flows out of a cluttered mind, and beneath that is a disordered heart.

That gets to the real issue. A cluttered mind wants too many things at once. A disordered heart is not fully ordered around seeking God first. So the problem is not just poor time management. It is inner disorder.

That explains why sincere leaders can still feel fragmented.

We are not always blocked by laziness. Sometimes we are blocked by divided attention, mixed desires, and a pace shaped more by pressure than by prayer.

An ordered heart stays near God. It gains clarity. It becomes more able to recognize what needs to be done in this moment and this season.

What starts and stops Jesus’s movement

If I had to boil down what I learned from Emmanuel Prinz, it would be this:

It slows down when leaders become scattered, cluttered, and ruled by urgency instead of discernment.

So the first question is probably not, “What new method do I need?”

A better question is, “What is fragmenting my attention right now? What is thinning out my presence? What is keeping me from hearing clearly and obeying simply?”

• Start here → https://obey.tools/

• Join a 45 Min Skills Lab Zoom Call → https://covomultipliers.com/

• Walk with others → https://forms.gle/YwqLhonNSipybAD8A

He shares the messy, Spirit-led process of multiplication, where broken people find Jesus and unexpected leaders emerge.

Through setbacks, burnout, and failures, Roger uncovers how simple obedience, friendship, and the power of “milk not meat” transformed his approach.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, frustrated, or unsure what’s actually working in multiplying movements in North America, this episode is a helpful deep dive into faithfulness in action.

Tune in to learn how this balance can transform your leadership and sustain kingdom movements for generations.