Founding editor
Aaron started Church Last after two decades of watching invitation cards do the work that friendship was meant to do. He writes on the sequence of conversion and edits every collection. (Placeholder bio — replace with the real one.)
The closing essay of the collection: what the gathered church looks like when it stops being a sales floor and returns to its actual work — receiving, forming, feeding, and keeping the people its members bring home.
In the funnel model, discipleship is what happens to people after they join. In the older pattern, formation begins in the friendship itself — reading, praying, and practicing before there's a membership record anywhere.
We've made peace with embarrassment as though it were humility. It isn't. On the difference between tact and shame, and how the fear of awkwardness became the American Christian's rule of life.
The Great Commission is routinely read as a corporate mandate for the institutional church. The grammar, the audience, and the earliest practice all say otherwise.
The opening statement of the whole project: the gathered church is the destination of conversion, not its engine — and the commission to witness was addressed to you.