Here’s a little about how Gospel for Life (G4L) began, how it stalled, and what we have planned for the future.
G4L Begins
In 2016, I was about three years into planting a new church. My wife, Char, wanted to shift her work from accounting to coaching and discipleship. We picked up a book called Sprint and booked a week to dream about how to start a new venture. We were excited. It felt meaningful, and I was excited to work alongside my wife.
One day, on the way home, we talked about what we should call this new project. “I have an idea,” I said. I told her that I’d purchased the gospelforlife.com domain before and wondered if that might work. “Interesting,” she said, and promised to think about it.
At the end of the week, we decided to create a small discipleship program: a habits-based approach to Christian growth. I would write the curriculum; we would try it out and get feedback. She would coach the women; I would coach the men.
We launched the program soon after. The name varied, depending on the iteration: G4L Discipleship and G4L Coaching. We used it in our church, and we also coached a good number of others outside of our church.
We got good feedback, and we loved it. I wrote a book based on our approach called How to Grow. Later, we published the curriculum I’d developed as 8 Habits for Growth, which can be used as a self-directed program or to disciple others.
We loved seeing an idea grow and bless others.
How G4L Stalled
Eventually, though, this ministry stalled, or at least began to change direction.
When 8 Habits for Growth was published, we no longer needed to coach others through the program. People could work through the material themselves.
To be honest, we always felt a little uncomfortable marketing Gospel for Life. We believe that discipleship should take place within the local church, and we struggled with some of the online approaches to marketing. We faced some pressure to make at least part of our income from G4L — it was Char’s primary income, and also my part-time job — but we didn’t want to make money in a way that felt icky to us.
Char kept coaching, but she began to focus on gospel-based nutrition and movement coaching through Live Wholehearted. I kept updating the website, but we didn’t have much direction. Eventually, I got tired of publishing two newsletters — one for my site, and one for G4L. I shuttered the website and incorporated its content into my own at DashHouse.com.
G4L still existed, I still spoke about the two books, and I still ran the Gospel for Life podcast, but we lost a lot of our direction.
The Future of G4L
A few things changed.
First: I changed roles. I became pastor of Grace Fellowship Church East Toronto. I no longer faced the pressure of working for G4L part-time, and, generally speaking, I’m less available for speaking at other churches.
Second, I solved some of our tech issues. My headaches were largely about generating content, but some of our headaches came from cobbling together different pieces of software and making them work together. I’ve simplified that now and found a way to make things work without constant friction.
Most importantly, the pressure’s off. We want to see G4L produce helpful resources without having to promote ourselves or make things work in a particular way. We’re going to aim to produce better content with a more flexible timeline, and I hope it will be helpful.
Next week, we launch a new season of the podcast. We also have plans for producing new posts and videos. We hope that some will find them helpful, but we don’t have to be the biggest thing on the Internet. That’s freeing.
We want to serve, to be generous, to share, and to have fun. I hope you enjoy it too. We’re looking forward to the next season of Gospel for Life.