This is the first blog entry from my new book Community-Based Discipleship. I will begin with an excerpt from the Introduction in which I briefly relate how I assessed using the word discipleship to describe how I had grown to understand my relationship with Jesus Christ and his with me. “As the ideas within this book germinated in my mind and began to take some sort of shape as themes and chapters, I found that I needed to think about the utility of the word discipleship to describe the way in which I had begun to conceive of learning from Jesus. As many Christians know, discipleship is a very loaded term. Much of my early experience of discipleship was at the feet of church leaders who weaponized it into the WMD of their own version of fundamentalist Christianity. It was an approach to discipleship that tended toward anti-intellectualism and a philosophy of leadership that created (or attracted) narcissistic demagogues who espoused a Pharisaical interpretation of holiness and p