Recommended reading #2

[Making Disciples, Ralph Moore – Not By Might, Lonnie Frisbee – A Supernatural Hippie Story, C. O’Maonaigh]

Making Disciples, by Ralph Moore

If you’re a pastor you should read this right away! I wish I had this book when I started pastoring. If you’re a pastor, you should read this before your pastor does and then right away give it to your pastor and everyone else you know. Ralph is an apostle, but he doesn’t look or talk like the way you’d think apostles would. I don’t like citing numbers to indicate what I think of people’s lives or ministries, but that there are 700 churches that are directly or indirectly attributable to his influence has to mean something. What it means to me is that he understands the priority of making disciples and knows how to do it. Please read this book!

Here’s a primer of some things he says:

• Making disciples seems so simple to me: spend time with people, include Jesus, and let things run their course. 

• Disciplemaking invades personal space. You share your own failings, victories and insights with another person. A good disciplemaker invites his disciple to help with ministry, then do ministry on his own while the disciplemaker applauds the effort. Disciplemaking calls a person to do things he or she never thought possible. It aids in the fulfillment of God’s vision and dreams in the one you disciple. 

• To the degree that my disciples make disciples, I am a success. If they don’t make disciples, I’ve failed at disciplemaking. It’s pretty simple, and very scary. 

• Disciplemaking begins when the Lord shows you who belongs in your life, Christian or non-Christian. 

• Everybody plays or we all lose! 

Not By Might Nor By Power – The Jesus Revolution, by Lonnie Frisbee

I read this because I know a number of people who knew Lonnie and because I am fascinated by the Jesus Movement, the tail end of which was when I became a Christian. Besides Chuck Smith, Lonnie probably had more to do with that revival than anyone else. He was a raw, yet rare hippie preacher in the ‘60s and ‘70s that God used around the world.

Though he’s been gone for many years now this “autobiography” just came out last year. It was written by a friend of his from the tapes of his story that Lonnie made before he died. The book is like Lonnie was – uncut and uncouth. He tells some phenomenal stories of healings, deliverances, and conversions. If you’re interested in revival and how the Holy Spirit can use simple and untrained people for his glory, you should read this.

A Supernatural Hippie Story, by C. O’Maonaigh

I read this because some of it took place in San Francisco and because I love hippies. I’ve not met Cate O’Maonaigh, but I do outreach in Golden Gate Park with people I call my “Dreadlocked Hippie Christian Friends” who know her. Her story is quite similar to Lonnie Frisbee’s. Cate was successful in the advertising business in the City when she felt called to give it all up and chase “real estate challenged” hippies in the Haight Ashbury. She tells some remarkable miracle and conversion stories that remind me of the Jesus Movement in the Haight. If you read this you’ll be injected with compassion for marginalized people and inspired to seek God for more supernatural interventions.