05/14/2026
When discipleship is not the focus of ministry
When discipleship is not the focus of ministry, the church DIES and apostacy is the thriving crop. The Ephesus church of Revelation is the church model of today. Why has the church left it's first love? It is becoming exponentially evident that church leaders have altered the recipe or thrown away the instruction book? Have they decided that apathy and the full counsel of God inappropriate for today’s church attenders? Are they substituting truth with alternate ingredients? Is just 80% Jesus enough for an adequate recipe to maintain a semblance suitable to a "biblical" church? After all, who will know since discipleship had not or does not adhere to the original recipe. Consider the following:
The Story of the Pot Roast
A young woman was hosting a dinner party for her friends and served a delicious pot roast. One of her friends enjoyed it so much that she asked for the recipe, and the young woman wrote it down for her.
Upon looking over the recipe, her friend inquired, “Why do you cut both ends off the roast before it is prepared and put in the pan?” The young woman replied, “I don’t know. I cut the ends off because I learned this recipe from my mom and that was the way she had always done it.”
Her friend’s question got the young woman thinking and so the next day she called her mom to ask her: “Mom, when we make the pot roast, why do we cut off and discard the ends before we set it in the pan and season it?” Her mom quickly replied, “That is how your grandma always did it and I learned the recipe from her.”
Now the young woman was really curious, so she called her elderly grandma and asked her the same question: “Grandma, I often make the pot roast recipe that I learned from mom and she learned from you. Why do you cut the ends off the roast before you prepare it?”
The grandmother thought for a while, since it had been years since she made the roast herself, and then replied, “I cut them off because the roast was always bigger than the pan I had back then. I had to cut the ends off to make it fit.”
I love this story because I think this is true for so many of the things we do in life. We have been doing them for so long that we rarely stop and question the rationality behind them anymore.
The church is much like the ladies cooking the Sunday roast. They take the original hunk of meat and cut off the ends so it fits in the pan. The meat is the word of God and the pan is the culture of the church. The whole piece of the meat will not fit inside the pan because the pan is too small so the whole chunk of meat, the Word of God, is cut to fit the pan, the mold of today’s church. Revelation 2:7 “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” ’