#tom mcelroy

  This past Friday and Saturday I attended and spoke at the annual Disciple-Makers Conference dreamed up and organized by one of my former students and staff members, Tom McElroy. Years ago Tom and I got connected through the church planting classes I taught for 14-15 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. Eventually, he became one of our staff members at New Song Church (now, Compass, Bolingbrook).

Tom is a real champion for disciple-making and the need for the Church to have a revolution in discipleship. A few years after Tom left our staff, he started a Disciple-Makers conference that has grown from just a couple of dozen in a retreat-like atmosphere to a much larger and more complex conference with half-a-dozen speakers in seminars and plenary sessions infused with great worship times of celebration but always focused on one task–making more and better disciples who can reproduce other disciples. 

This year’s conference was held at Calvary Bible Church in Bourbonnais, IL. It was a delight to both learn and speak there. And it was even more of a delight to renew friendships that started in the work God did at New Song Church many years ago. How gracious God has been to us all!

Christopher’s ministry is a great glory and has become not just national but global in impact. He is a trophy of grace and what God has done in his life as well as his mom and dad’s lives are nothing short of a miraculous. I hope you will pray for him regularly and rejoice whenever you think of him and the ministry that God has given him.  He is working on a third book right now. Pray that his days applying the seat of the pants to a seat of a chair and his fingers to a keyboard would produce a book of great courage and impact on the world.

  Let’s keep proclaiming the gospel.

Lives change when we do.