Here are 100 books that The Master Plan of Evangelism fans have personally recommended if you like
The Master Plan of Evangelism.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’m just an everyday person. I don’t have a fancy title or lots of degrees, but I do have experience being close to God and a never-ending quest to know Him more. His love is so good that it absolutely must be shared. So if I, in all of my ordinariness, can learn extraordinary sacred things, then I can bring others along the journey, too. His presence in my heartaches, struggles, joy, and adventures has sustained my life, and I don’t know any credential that could testify any clearer that a journey with God is worth taking.
After reading The Divine Conspiracy twice, I’m ready to dive in again. So many treasures are packed into these pages, waiting to be absorbed.
Anchored in the Sermon on the Mount, the author discusses our discipleship and how we related to Christ. Sometimes, we miss the life that’s in biblical text, but this book offers perspective that makes us take a second look and inspires our hearts.
First published in 1998, The Divine Conspiracy captured the attention of Christians across the world, by offering a timely and challenging call back to the true meaning of Christian discipleship.
Gracefully weaving biblical teaching, popular culture, science and scholarship together, Dallas Willard refuted the view that Christianity is solely about gaining admittance to heaven when we die, and taught that, as disciples, we have access now to the life of the kingdom.
Equally relevant today as it was on publication, The Divine Conspiracy challenges us to step aside from the pieties of contemporary Christian practice and offers instead a practical…
Cory Hartman (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) collaboratively crafts practical tools, interactive processes, and breakthrough content for the Future Church Company, three interconnected organizations that exist to help the church embody the movement Jesus founded. I previously served as a pastor for thirteen years and founded Fulcrum Content, a gospel communication training organization.
Addison’s book lengthens and broadens Coleman’s Master Plan. While Coleman focuses on Jesus’ selection, training, and sending of his twelve closest disciples, Addison also examines what Jesus did before he named the Twelve, including rich historical background of his ministry context in first-century Palestine. In this way, Addison sheds light on how to engage unreached people who are still far from committing themselves to learn from Jesus.
Addison discerns a recurring six-step pattern in Jesus’ activity, in the early Palestinian church, in Paul’s Mediterranean travels, and in global disciple-making movements today. Importantly, he lays out these steps in a way that contemporary Western Christians unused to Jesus’ method can begin practicing them together.
Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year
Sometimes we get so caught up in the power of Jesus shouting from the cross, "It is finished!" that we forget that Jesus started something. What Jesus started was a movement that began small, with intimate conversations designed to build disciples into apostles who would go out in the world and seed it with God's kingdom vision. That movement grew rapidly and spread wide as people recognized the truth in it and gave their lives to the power of it. That movement is still happening today, and we are called to play our part…
Cory Hartman (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) collaboratively crafts practical tools, interactive processes, and breakthrough content for the Future Church Company, three interconnected organizations that exist to help the church embody the movement Jesus founded. I previously served as a pastor for thirteen years and founded Fulcrum Content, a gospel communication training organization.
Imagine you and a band of others begin living out what Steve Addison describes, and as a result, more people you’re talking to embrace Jesus and start following his way with you. Your group has changed; now what do you do?
Neil Cole is a leading practitioner of a model known variously as “organic,” “simple,” or “house church”—networked groups with scant formal organization meeting in homes and public spaces. In Church 3.0, Cole argues for and describes the practicalities of this church style. Although in our book Future Church Will Mancini and I contend that there is still a valid and valuable role for the institutional church today, Cole’s work stimulates important thinking about how to evolve it to make disciples where people actually live, work, and play.
An expert practitioner answers to questions about the burgeoning organic church movement Neil Cole's best-selling book Organic Church described the fastest growing segment of contemporary Christianity-the so-called organic church. Now in this next-step book, he answers questions about how to deal with theological and organizational issues that come up. He talks about issues such has what to do with finances, children, heresy, leader training, and rituals and ordinances. Without the top-down structure of a denomination, even people who are proponents of this small, house-church model worry that they are not doing it right. Offers an important resource for anyone involved…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Cory Hartman (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) collaboratively crafts practical tools, interactive processes, and breakthrough content for the Future Church Company, three interconnected organizations that exist to help the church embody the movement Jesus founded. I previously served as a pastor for thirteen years and founded Fulcrum Content, a gospel communication training organization.
What are the stages of a disciple’s optimal development? The theoretical path starts with a person not following Jesus and ends with that person helping their own disciples make disciples of Jesus. Having a reliable model that traces the course of a disciple’s development benefits a disciple maker practically, because people have different capacities, needs, and challenges at different stages as they grow.
The most persuasive and useful model yet proposed might be found in this brief book by Harrington and Wiens, who adapt to individuals the Exponential organization’s five-level typology of churches.
Becoming a Level 5 Disciple Maker is an introduction to the five levels of disciple making with a focus on how to become a Level 5 disciple maker like Jesus. The authors discuss why we should pursue Level 5 disciple making, how we can pursue it, and what we can do to assess our progress along the way.
Bobby and Greg introduce and explore the pathway to becoming a disciple maker by using this five-level framework. Focusing on helping individuals identify where they are on the disciple-making scale (levels 1 to 5) and what is needed to become a Level…
I’ve had the joy of “making disciples” for a long time. From the time I became a Christian while in college, to raising my own sons as disciples, to 15 years of work with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on secular campuses, to the last third of my life as a Professor of Bible and Theology at a Christian University, I have responded to Jesus’ Great Commission to “make disciples” with both the joys and sorrows that calling includes. I have experienced the richness of intergenerational congregations that my pastor-husband has led, and seen our sons grow and mature as Christians through “parenting in the pew” before it was a book!
This multi-author book is a terrific resource for older teens and college students to navigate “growing up” well and maturing in their own faith commitment and practices. Chapters offer good advice and the reasons behind the advice for faith challenges, dealing with failure, forgiving parents as a part of loving them, finding a new congregation for worship, work, and witness, as well as dealing with sexuality, morals, justice issues, vision for missions, and creation care and much more! This book is a practical as well as a biblically faithful guide for the transformation of a lifetime as children empty the nest into adulthood. I give this book as a graduation gift to every high-schooler I know!
Do you want to live for Jesus but struggle with what that means day by day? The deep desire of our hearts to be close to God is so easily sidetracked by daily realities. This book is designed to cover the areas of faith and life that you most want to bring together under God's leadership:
decision-making
dating and relationships
racial reconciliation
suffering
experiencing God
loving your parents
emotional healing
time management
everyday evangelism
hope for times of failure Following Jesus is a wild and wonderful journey. It is perhaps the riskiest choice you will ever make. And the most…
Ever since I was 12 years old, I told my mom I would figure out this thing called, “life.” It wasn't until 7 years later that I started my journey to dive deep to find the deep profound truths of this world, our life, and how it all works. I've read over 1,000 books on many topics that span from mindset, psychology, neuroscience, near-death experiences, spirituality, universal laws, and much more. I wanted to find out how this all works so I can help myself which in return, can help the ones I love and help the world. Since then, I've written 3 books that have been the accumulation of this journey so far.
This book was what I needed at the time of my life at 19. It shared the teachings of Jesus in such a simple way that is well beyond what I was ever taught for 18 years being a Catholic and had me see Jesus more in the human form than how he is normally perceived.
In this remarkable book, Paramahansa Yogananda reveals the hidden yoga of the Gospels and confirms that Jesus, like the ancient sages and masters of the East, not only knew yoga but taught this universal science of God-realization to his closest disciples. Compiled from the author's highly praised two-volume work, The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, this insightful and compact book transcends the centuries of dogma and misunderstanding that have obscured the original teachings of Jesus, showing that he taught a unifying path by which seekers of all faiths can enter the kingdom of God.…
I am, by training, a philosopher, scientist, and clergyman who has spent 47 years speaking on issues pertaining to God, philosophy, science, and culture at many universities. Since childhood I’ve been fascinated both by nature, as well as by why people do the things they do. As for life experience, I’ve worked in several countries, have been married for more than 44 years, and raised 6 children … all of which have been an enormously valuable arena of learning. All of this has given me a deep conviction that I need to spend my life helping people to think about the things that are most important in life.
This book was suggested to me by a professor of New Testament studies at Cambridge University as his most highly recommended book for the historicity and preservation of the New Testament Gospels. I would heartily agree.
It is rigorously pedantic and thorough—which is exactly what I require on a topic like this. It is work to read this book, but very satisfying. It may be one of the most heavily underlined books I own, and I see it as a valuable resource that sits in a bookshelf beside my desk, where it can be immediately consulted.
A groundbreaking work in New Testament studies expanded and updated
Winner of the 2007 Christianity Today Book Award in Biblical Studies, this momentous volume argues that the four Gospels are closely based on the eyewitness testimony of those who personally knew Jesus. Noted New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham challenges the prevailing assumption that the Jesus accounts circulated as "anonymous community traditions," asserting instead that they were transmitted in the names of the original eyewitnesses.
In this expanded second edition Bauckham is adding a new preface, three substantial new chapters that respond to critics and clarify key points of his argument,…
I have just retired after teaching 35 years in the New Testament department at Denver Seminary. I have authored, co-authored, or co-edited thirty books related to New Testament studies and more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles or chapters in multi-author books. I have learned that most of the reasons people don’t believe in part or all of the Bible is because they don’t understand it properly, so my passion is to try to rectify that. The New Testament changed my life for the better, as it has hundreds of millions of other people. I just want to help that number continue to grow.
Written at a much more basic level than the first three books on my list, Roberts boils the issues down into easy-to-read, bite-size chunks that any thoughtful layperson can digest. After my own book on the historical reliability of the Gospels, it’s the next one I would hand to anyone ‘off the street’ and the first one I would give to someone ‘on the street’! Mark is an apologist with the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, who has remained a person of impeccable integrity during their recent rough waters. While many writers tackle Matthew, Mark and Luke together, because they are more similar than different, Roberts includes John, who is more different than similar. A great read.
Attacks on the historical reliability of the Gospels-especially their portrayal of Jesus Christ-are nothing new. But are these attacks legitimate? Is there reason to doubt the accuracy of the Gospels? By examining and refuting some of the most common criticisms of the Gospels, author Mark D. Roberts explains why we can indeed trust the Gospels, nearly two millennia after they were written. Lay readers and scholars alike will benefit from this accessible book, and will walk away confident in the reliability of the Gospels.
I have just retired after teaching 35 years in the New Testament department at Denver Seminary. I have authored, co-authored, or co-edited thirty books related to New Testament studies and more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles or chapters in multi-author books. I have learned that most of the reasons people don’t believe in part or all of the Bible is because they don’t understand it properly, so my passion is to try to rectify that. The New Testament changed my life for the better, as it has hundreds of millions of other people. I just want to help that number continue to grow.
Keener is one of the few living scholars who has actually read cover-to-cover all of the most relevant Jewish and Greco-Roman background literature to the New Testament and can speak with authority about the way the Gospels are similar to and different from other ancient biographies and histories. He addresses virtually every skeptical question, is abreast of all the scholarly trends, including those that get little press because they actually support the reliability of the Gospels. But he is no fundamentalist, insisting that we evaluate the ancient books of Scriptures by the standards of writing of their day and not ours. A soft-spoken man, who has overcome personal tragedy more than once, Keener is a good friend and amazing Christian gentleman.
Demonstrates the reliability of the canonical gospels by exploring the genre of ancient biography
The canonical gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources.
Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography he explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the gospel writers’ method and degree of accuracy in recounting the ministry of Jesus. Keener’s…
The Bible is the greatest mystery novel ever written. It begins in the Old Testament with seemingly random accounts of ancient people in far away places with strange customs. There’s the prophecy of a coming Hero who will conquer the villain and restore peace to the land. The mystery reaches…
For decades, I both worked as a psychiatrist and volunteered as Santa. A fun idea came to me back then on an exhausted Christmas morning. During my training. I had heard stories, some real, some apocryphal, of involuntary hospitalizations of patients with delusions of being either Jesus or Santa. But what might happen if a patient with similarities to Jesus were hospitalized concurrently with a patient with similarities to Santa? Would they be friends? enemies? frenemies? And to what extent might these two really be Jesus and Santa? The final story—December on 5C4—re-enacts Jewish myths, Christian tales, and Santa legends as these two characters plot a shared escape!
I love how this novel humanizes Jesus by exploring his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood through the recollections of his childhood best friend, Biff. The conceit is clever! Biff is resurrected and transported to contemporary St. Louis, where he is commanded to stay locked in a hotel room under the supervision of an angel until he completes a new gospel.
The story is humorous and entertaining but also moving and thought-provoking. Jesus is presented as a well-developed character and we share in his dilemma: “I ask for guidance, but I get no answer. I can feel that I am supposed to do things, but I don’t know what. And I don’t know how.” Wordly themes of lust, greed, and doubt are juxtaposed against divine themes of love, charity, and faith.
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years - except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in this divinely hilarious, yet heartfelt work 'reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams' (Philadelphia Inquirer). Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes, Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the…
