Escaping the Assembly Line

Introduction: Longing for Something More

1. Assembly Line or Adventure? Something More than “Making Disciples”

2. Fish Discover Water Last: Rethinking How We Think

3. High Bar or Clay Jar? Something More than “Trying to be like Jesus”

4. Relay Race or Rope Team? Something More than “Passing on the Faith”

5. What You See is What You Get: The Wisdom of Changing Your Lenses

6. Bank Vault or Banquet? Something More than “Outreach”

7. Pitched Battle or Pitched Tent? Something More than “Defending the Truth”

Conclusion: GPA or GPS? Where do we go from here?

Acknowledgements

Works Cited

Index of Metaphors

Index of Scripture References

More from Next Step Press

Finally, a book about discipleship that doesn’t make the Christian life sound like homework! Rossow’s approach to this often-burdensome subject is practical yet playful, abounding in creativity yet grounded in the Good News from start to finish.

With a rare ear for language—and the help of some inspired images—he invites us to interrogate our assumptions about what it means to follow Jesus in ways that are both unexpected and deeply refreshing. Watch out: if you’re not careful, this book may reignite your excitement about being a Christian.

David Zahl
author of Low Anthropology and Seculosity

The first time I heard the ideas in this book I had the rare and delightful feeling of simultaneously having the rug pulled out from under my feet and landing on home ground for the very first time. This book will shake you up so that you find things settling in better places than they were before.

Pretend you’ve been pedaling a racing bike around the town for a year and one day some guy shows you how to change gears. The bike is your Christian life, and that guy is Justin Rossow.

Dr. Conrad Gempf
author of Jesus Asked and Mealtime Habits of the Messiah

Rossow uncovers the confusions and misconceptions we have unknowingly adopted as defaults in the church, often accidentally missing the heart of Jesus at the same time. Gently inviting a wider approach, Rossow offers hope and grace for walking with God and others in our daily lives. His accessible creativity makes shifting your perspective a joy as you grow in faith and discipleship.

Dcs. Heidi Goehmann, LCSW, LMSW,
author of Finding Hope and Emotions & the Gospel

I love this book! I wish I’d read something like this when I was burning out in my parish, feeling like I was working for a factory, and having a hard time convincing people that we could follow Jesus in a more organic way.

Escaping the Assembly Line offers something I couldn’t find in those years: a way to rethink how we think; different ways to conceptualize habits that seem so obvious, but keep us stuck. My prayer is that people read this book and understand it for what it is: a friendly challenge, with insights that actually help.

Rev. Dr. Alexandre Vieira
Assistant Professor of Exegetical Theology,
Concordia Lutheran Seminary, Alberta, CA

For years, I felt something was amiss. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was and lacked the vocabulary or concepts to articulate the missing piece. I simply knew that our discussions about faith and faith formation were incomplete. There were too many underlying assumptions. Justin’s words and thought process helped me shed these assumptions. Don’t worry, he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; but he will help you develop the eyes to see the water you are swimming in.

Rev. Ben Gonzales
District Discipleship Development and
Mission Strategist, Texas District, LCMS

As a teacher and preacher of the Gospel, I could not put this book down! Justin gives us eyes to see how we envision discipleship and mission in problematic ways so that the Holy Spirit can reshape our vision in and through the Word of God. The metaphors and images are concrete, drawn from Scripture and real experience. Here is a book you will use.

Rev. Theodore J. Hopkins, Ph.D.
Senior Pastor, St. Paul, Ann Arbor and author of
Christ, Church, and World and (with Robert Kolb) The Christian Faith

If you share even a vague sense that something in the Church just is not working right, then this book is for you…

I was talking to a friend about “discipleship” recently. She had some honest questions about my use of the word. For her, “discipleship” has always been a church gimmick, a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter approach that ensures “success” by following a set formula. In her experience, people who push “discipleship programs” want you to use their four-step, magic bullet method, and then keep track of how many disciples you have “made.”

Tracking results (my friend called it “counting scalps”) helps validate their program. As a participant, you are supposed to feel good about the disciples you have “made.” And if you don’t have enough “notches on your belt” (her phrase), then there must be something wrong with you…

My friend works in the church and is married to a pastor. They have served together at several vibrant, forward-thinking, growing congregations. And the way these churches imagined outreach left their church workers feeling beat up by the process. To my friends, it seems like there must be something more to “discipleship” than a formulaic program we so often use as Law…

This book if for them.

According to ongoing research, the number of people who self-identify as having no religious affiliation keeps going up year to year, making “Nones” the fastest growing “religious group” in America.[1] The Christian Church has always struggled to pass the faith onto the next generation. But young people are leaving and never coming back in numbers we aren’t used to seeing.

And COVID didn’t help one bit! In many congregations, or even most, membership and attendance continue to decline. The people who remain are left feeling like there must be something more to “following Jesus” than just sitting in a pew for an hour on Sunday. If my faith is so important, why doesn’t it make more of a difference during the rest of my week…? This book is for them, too.

Ask any lay person, any pastor, anyone even remotely connected to the idea that Jesus is somehow important to life in the world today, and they likely have a story to share—an anecdote about how their home religious institution just doesn’t align with the way they think Church is supposed to be.

We can sense it. We feel the disconnect. We know it, even if we hate to admit it. So this book if for all of us.

Something about our default ways of being a Christian or even being the Church just isn’t working right, leaving longtime believers with a vague sense that there must be more to faith and following Jesus than this.

But what? What is that something more?

In one sense, the religious institution we experience in the local church has always diverged from the Body of Christ as we imagine it should be. The church around the corner has always fallen short of being what the Church is supposed to be, because every congregation has always been filled with people who fall short of who they are supposed to be. And as long as sin endures (which won’t be always), local churches will also be sinful, even as the Church is already loved and forgiven and beautiful because of Jesus.

Fine and good. But even taking our fallen, sinful reality into account, something about the default ways we live out our lives together as sinful-but-forgiven people of God just isn’t functioning the way Jesus intends. The community doesn’t act like a community; the Body doesn’t function as a body; the one place that should give hope and life and courage feels just as divisive and empty as every other social group or political organization.

Of course, no single church is perfect.

Of course, God still uses the Church to bring faith and hope and restoration.

Of course, we walk by faith and not by sight; and we shouldn’t be surprised if the power (or even the effectiveness) of the whole Christian Church on earth is often hidden from our view.

But, doggone it! Something’s just not right here! The institution that seemed so vibrant just a generation or two ago no longer feels so alive.

It’s as if the Church sensed a looming cultural threat, so we stopped dead in our tracks and circled the wagons. It’s as if we traded in our sense of exploration in order to buy some semblance of safety—a stagnant status quo that isn’t really “safe” at all. It’s as if we tried to protect what’s most important to us the best way we knew how; but in so doing, lost sight of what’s actually most important.

The culture has certainly shifted around the Church over the last half-century or so. But the problem is something more than cultural. The default ways we imagine faith and following have gotten us where we are today; and now we sense that the same ways of thinking just can’t get us any farther.

So it’s OK if you find yourself longing for something more. You are not crazy for feeling disoriented or discontented. If you share even a vague sense that something in our Church default settings just isn’t working right, then this book is for you. Your struggle is real; don’t give up yet. There is something more.

But how do we find that something more?

I don’t think we can solve our sin problem until Jesus himself does away with sin, death, and the devil. (Come quickly, Lord!) But I do think we can explore different ways to live out what it means to be Christian individuals or a Christian community, ways that the Spirit can use to breathe new life into our understanding and imagining, our thinking and our living.

The place to begin this renewed reformation is with our basic Christian default settings. How we think matters. Our defaults determine more than we know. What we naturally assume following Jesus is supposed to look like—and how we typically imagine a community of believers—affects what we think we are doing, the kinds of decision we assume we need to make, and how we go about making those decisions.

We aren’t going to “fix” the Church. But we can notice places where the way we normally talk, feel, imagine, act, and think about being Church leads to a distorted experience of following Jesus. And we can look for other ways, other more biblical and more beautiful ways, of thinking about our life of following and our mission in the world—ways that can lead us toward more faithful talking, feeling, imagining, and acting out our status as sinful-but-forgiven members of God’s eternal family.

Sometimes, the way we have naturally come to envision our life of faith is kind of right, almost right, right in a narrow sense, but with unhelpful and unhealthy unintended consequences. And sometimes, unintentionally and unconsciously, the way we imagine the Church actually undermines or contradicts the Bible’s vision of the Church in the world. That’s when our natural assumptions do the most damage to our faith.

Ultimately, this book is an attempt to talk about what we rarely ever talk about, because it seems so obvious and natural. We don’t bother discussing “what goes without saying.” We rarely notice our own default settings. And we almost never bother to think critically about our own uncritical thinking.

Even detecting our assumptions poses a significant challenge. But once we get the knack for noticing our natural tendencies, we can begin to imagine something more than our standardized imagination currently allows.

What if that feeling of discontent, that longing for something more, is already the work of the Spirit preparing our hearts and minds to rethink how we typically think about faith and following?

Longing for something more is a good beginning.

Noticing your automatic assumptions is an important next step.

A new awareness of your natural tendencies can put your foot on the right path, and help you discover more faithful and more fruitful and more joyful ways of following Jesus.

That exploration of discovery begins here in time, as a kind of warm up for the life of the world to come. But the adventure of following Jesus continues into eternity, further up and further in, as we explore the vast landscape of knowing fully, even as we are fully known.

[1] According to Pew Research, “Nones” may be stabilizing around 28% of the US population as of Jan, 2024, or at least growing more gradually:  https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/24/has-the-rise-of-religious-nones-come-to-an-end-in-the-us/.

Escaping the Assembly Line:
The tools to notice (and power to Change)
the Discipleship Defaults that are killing your faith.

By Justin Rossow

© 2025 Justin Rossow and Next Step Press
Imprint: Next Step Press

Internal artwork: Lucie Orozco
Cover design: Brett Jordan, bit.ly/brett_blog
Proofreading: “Rev” Francis Rossow and Deanna Rossow

Inquiries or comments may be directed to Innovation@findmynextstep.org.

Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-9922105-0-7
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9922105-1-4
Kindle Edition ISBN: 979-8-9922105-2-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024926519