How One Church Built a Disciple-Making Movement | Joey McLaughlin

Joey McLaughlin describes growing up near Atlanta in a dysfunctional family. His parents divorced when he was young; his father was intensely driven by success and later became an airline pilot, while his mother married and divorced multiple times. Joey says he developed a distorted picture of love and desperately wanted male influence. A college-basketball player from his student ministry took an interest in him, showed up at his games, opened his home, and shared ordinary life with him. That mentor made John 10:10 tangible by showing Joey that following Jesus could combine abundant life and joy rather than boredom and morality.

Joey expected to attend an Ivy League school and play college basketball, but after a summer internship at a roughly 10,000-person church, he accepted a staff job offering $27,000 and a parsonage—an offer he jokingly called millionaire-level compensation. He later studied biblical studies and theology at Moody Bible Institute and served at several megachurches in Atlanta and Pennsylvania. Joey and his wife, his high-school sweetheart, have three children: Raleigh, Haddon, and Laney, ages 10, 6, and 5. They planted Elevate City Church on October 4, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joey admits that although the church would have said it wanted to make disciples, its first three years were effectively a lesson in what not to do when planting a church. The team relied on attractional methods: getting as many people as possible into Sunday services, improving the weekly experience, and hoping people would be drawn by preaching, worship, branding, or a distinctive church style. In Atlanta’s highly competitive megachurch environment, Joey says he was trying to build “the biggest and the best,” joking that he was following his father’s skyscraper ambition. Those methods produced a difficult season rather than the desired disciple-making culture.

Around 2023, an organization called Finish the Task prompted Joey to think about the approaching 2,000-year anniversary of the Great Commission in 2033. Whether or not the date was historically exact, he found it useful as a rallying point and began asking whether Elevate City was actually making disciples as Jesus did. Prayer, reading, and a review of the church’s practices led him to focus less on attendance metrics and more on lasting spiritual fruit. Joey imagined standing before Jesus and accounting for the disciples he had personally and corporately made. Elevate City then rebuilt its ministry around spiritual formation, multiplication, and investing in the few to impact the many.

Joey’s first test was personal: he had to name the people he was discipling, and they could not merely be paid staff. Every team member likewise had to identify people they were discipling beyond their normal volunteer leaders in children’s ministry, worship, or production. The church examined its schedules with their wives, team, and elders and accepted that Jesus-style discipleship could not happen at the same pace as their previous programming. They removed events and classes and “killed some darlings”—good, attractive ideas that were not central to the mission. Joey says the resulting model had to be simple enough to repeat, robust enough to transform lives, and adaptable across generations, neighborhoods, and life stages.

Elevate City organized its discipleship ecosystem around three words: Know, Follow, and Lead. Joey grounds “know” in John 17:3, describing eternal life as an experiential relationship with the one true God and Jesus Christ that begins now rather than only after death. The pathway begins with outreach, including prayer walks, service initiatives, and spiritual surveys, because believers are to see themselves as missionaries rather than wait for people to attend church. Sunday gatherings are primarily for equipping believers—like halftime for people serving in the world—through worship, communion, baptism stories, teaching, and renewed vision before they return to mission.

Base Camp is a four-week experience following Elevate City’s gatherings. It explains the church’s vision, theology, core convictions, and discipleship pathway while giving leaders relational proximity to newcomers that a handshake or follow-up email cannot provide. Joey says the purpose is to make clear that Elevate City expects more than Sunday attendance, a small group, or a dinner club: it wants people formed into Jesus’ image so they can help form others. Base Camp therefore functions as the bridge from initial awareness of the church and Jesus to a deliberate journey of following him and participating in multiplication.

Equip teaches people to pray, read the Bible, and have gospel conversations through a 10-week curriculum, but Joey calls it a 20-week journey because participants do not finish until they lead someone else through it. Multiplication is printed throughout the material. The process often reveals that participants do not understand the gospel, lack a personal story, or have inconsistent prayer and Bible practices; some encounter Jesus and are baptized by their Equip leaders. Joey says Equip has produced more than ten strands with more than ten generations, and that its story-sharing exercises create unusually deep relationships. The goal is not merely learning disciplines but learning to teach them to others.

After Equip and leading Equip, participants serve in the local church, using the 5Q framework associated with Alan Hirsch to identify their gifts as apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, or teachers. Joey says mature ministry requires the whole body—not just one leader—to use its distinct gifts. Elevate City also has house-based small groups that discuss Sunday teaching and multiply after a year, though Joey calls this his least favorite element because it often serves as a community holding place rather than the main engine of transformation. The central “Lead” step is EquipX: a year with one disciple maker and three proven multipliers who meet weekly to deepen their knowledge of Jesus and lead others.

Joey requires people to complete and multiply through Equip before entering EquipX, because a yearlong investment in three people is risky if they have never demonstrated that they can multiply. Equip provides basic gospel, Scripture, prayer, and story-sharing foundations; EquipX supplies a more robust lifelong model. Elevate City then invites people into covenant membership, including baptism, sacrificial giving, continued service, and a discipling relationship, while emphasizing that there is always another step through leadership development or missions. Joey says Elevate City is preparing an Equip Network for 2027 to help other churches make this transition. The church website named in the episode is elevatecc.church.