Curious about Jesus but not sure where to start?
You have felt it before. That quiet pull toward Jesus, sitting right next to a louder voice telling you faith is complicated, that church was not built for your life, that you would not even know where to begin. Maybe you work long hours. Maybe you have never opened a Bible. Maybe you tried once and got lost somewhere in the first few chapters. Follow Jesus was made for that exact moment. It is a new 50-day discipleship resource from Matt LeRoy and Blackbird Mission, built to make following Jesus simple, honest, and possible for anyone.
The call, the cost, and the commission
Follow Jesus walks you through the Gospel of Matthew, one eyewitness account of the life of Jesus, over fifty days. Matt LeRoy points to a pattern he sees running through the whole story. It starts with the call in Matthew 4, when Jesus meets ordinary working people and says come follow me. It moves to the cost in Matthew 16, take up your cross, the part none of us gets to skip. It lands on the commission in Matthew 28, go make disciples, spoken to the same people He called at the start. That arc is the spine of the journey. You are not just stepping through a gate. You are learning to walk a road, and then joining the mission at the end of it.
Ten to fifteen minutes a day
Here is what a day looks like. You start with prayer. You read a short passage of scripture. You sit with a reflection that hands you the background and context so you are not decoding it alone. You pray again. You close with a response question that pushes you toward a real next step. The whole thing runs about ten to fifteen minutes, roughly a commute or a cup of coffee. Each week carries its own theme, ends with an action step, and includes a short Thursday conversation between Daron and Matt you can even work through with a couple of friends. Read it as a book or listen day by day. The point stays the same. Not more information. Actual change. Follow Jesus releases in November.
Want in when it launches, or curious about following Jesus yourself? Email info@daronearlewine.com.
Episode Summary:
Most people who are curious about Jesus never start, because they do not know where to begin. Genesis? A random verse? A church they do not know in a town they are only in for six weeks?
Matt LeRoy spent ten years building the answer. Follow Jesus is a 50 day walk through the Gospel of Matthew that takes 10 to 15 minutes a day. A commute. A cup of coffee.
In this conversation, Daron Earlewine and Matt LeRoy break down the discipleship arc hiding in plain sight in Matthew, why Jesus found His first disciples at work instead of at worship, and what it looks like to plant orchards of discipleship among 10 million people in the dirt world who have never seen a church that fits their life.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ The whole Gospel of Matthew has a discipleship arc built into it. Matthew 4 is the call, come follow me. Matthew 16 is the cost, take up your cross. Matthew 28 is the commission, go make disciples. Jesus says the last one to the exact people He called in the first one.
⚡️ The margin is actually the center. Jesus consistently goes to people others overlook. Which means the fringe is not the edge of the story. It is where the story has always been happening.
⚡️ Information is not the goal. Transformation is. Every week of Follow Jesus includes an action step, not just a reading, because we already have more information than we can use.
Follow Jesus releases November 2026. Free copies at the Dirt World Summit in Phoenix, and available wherever books are sold.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
What is the one thing that has kept you from reading the Bible consistently? Drop it in the comments. Matt answers a version of that question in this episode, and we read every reply.
If this episode encouraged you, share it with one person who is curious about Jesus but does not know where to start.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Matt LeRoy: So we go 50 days through the Gospel of Matthew. He’s telling this story, eyewitness account of the life of Jesus. And we see this discipleship arc in that story. So if we talk about what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus, we should probably look at how Jesus did it. And that’s the whole thought.
Daron Earlewine: Welcome back to The Daron Earlewine Podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host. I want to take a minute and thank everyone who has subscribed to the YouTube channel. So many new people have joined us over the past three to six months. Welcome.
If you like this episode or a past one and you think, man, this would be encouraging to my brother, my sister, my friend, my enemy, share the episode and ask them to join this community and be a part of it. Maybe you’re on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to the podcast. I just want to say a huge thank you for your support and for being a part of it.
I also want to thank our amazing monthly donors of Blackbird Mission who contribute generously to help us make all these resources free for anyone around the world. Thank you to those who watch, those who subscribe, and thank you to those who give. We couldn’t do it without you.
Today we’re sitting back down with Matt LeRoy. Author, pastor, speaker, church planter, World Hope extraordinare, and good friend of mine since 1999.
Matt LeRoy: Yes, sir.
Daron Earlewine: So Matt, we just finished the last episode talking about the three-year process of dreaming about creating this Follow Jesus discipleship resource. I thought let’s sit down in this episode and give a 30,000-foot overview of what Follow Jesus is all about. The way we’ve put it together and what we hope to see it become. How about that?
Matt LeRoy: Let’s go.
Daron Earlewine: Before we talk about what it is, share a little of the story of how it came to exist. Because you wrote it. It’s a part of a much bigger dream you have for resources that will help people follow Jesus. So take us there. Where did it come from? Where does it sit within what God’s given you to do?
Matt LeRoy: Those two words, follow Jesus, that’s the driving heart behind what I feel called to do, what I feel called to live. I know that’s for all of us, but I really do feel this calling to encourage and to teach people as they follow Jesus, to keep pointing people to Jesus and make sure that we are rooted in Him.
And of course, teaching through the Gospels, to keep rooting people in the Gospels as these extraordinary stories about this extraordinary life of Jesus. Of course, we know that they’re Holy Spirit-inspired and that Jesus is fully human, fully God, all of that. But even people who don’t believe in Jesus, even people who reject Christianity on intellectual grounds, so many of them are still drawn to the person of Jesus.
He’s such a compelling teacher and person and life that people are drawn to Him. So I just want to keep pointing more and more people to Him. And as they feel drawn to Him, they can discover more and more about the reality of who He is as He keeps revealing Himself to them.
This came about really from about a 10-year process, a 10-year dream of writing something like this. Of helping people walk through a Gospel to get to know who Jesus is.
It took root as well in the church that I helped plant. It’s called Love Chapel Hill in my hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Daron Earlewine: Go Tar Heels.
Matt LeRoy: Let’s go. I love that you got that in there. Thank you.
Before we ever started meeting for worship, we actually started meeting for a Bible study in a restaurant in downtown Chapel Hill on Franklin Street. And this beautiful, eclectic group of people coming from so many different backgrounds. We had college students and entrepreneurs. We had academics, young families, and even men and women experiencing homelessness who all were coming around this table together. And we were opening up the Gospels and reading about Jesus together, discussing the life of Jesus and being transformed by the life of Jesus together.
That is one of the places where I feel the most alive, when we’re doing that with a diverse group of people all united by Jesus at the core. All through that journey, I led that Bible study for 13 years, and all the way through that process I dreamed of sharing that more widely with other people because of how I saw people connect to it.
So that’s how this came about. The idea was to make something and create something together that could be shared with people who are interested in taking that step of following Jesus, learning who He is, beginning to walk with Him and to be transformed by Him.
Daron Earlewine: So we are in the process of creating volume one.
Matt LeRoy: Yes.
Daron Earlewine: Which is Follow Jesus. If we can raise enough money over the next six to 12 months to create the next volume, where does it go from here?
Matt LeRoy: From there, I would love for us to explore the book of Acts. Obviously coming off of the life of Jesus where we walk through His ministry and get that picture of what discipleship with Him looks like. We walk with Him to the cross, through His resurrection, and then the Great Commission where He sends His disciples out.
So I would love for us to pick up the story there and follow what happens after that. As Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father, the Holy Spirit is poured out and the church is born. And that commission just absolutely takes off through the book of Acts. So I’d love for us to explore that together next.
Daron Earlewine: So if God’s putting on your heart sizable or very non-sizable donations for us to be able to give life to this volume for the book of Acts, you can give at blackbirdmission.com/give. There’s a plug for that.
What’s after Acts?
Matt LeRoy: We’ll have to see.
Daron Earlewine: Something else in the Bible.
Matt LeRoy: Exactly. But I do have 10 different books laid out, most of them rooted in the Gospels, and also one that does an overview of the Old Testament, especially through the lens of Jesus. How the five main covenants of the Old Testament are pointing ahead to the reality of Jesus and find their fulfillment in Jesus. That will give people a grasp of that overarching story of the Old Testament, which so many people feel intimidated by, confused by.
But there really is a beautiful through line that is intentionally there for us to follow, to see the story fit together and find its culmination in Jesus.
Daron Earlewine: Let me bring two images together. You have started the Orchard Center where you create these resources, to create an orchard of discipleship.
God has opened the door for us with Rogue Collective Coaching, with great favor within the dirt world. Which is basically critical, heavy civil construction companies across the nation. Some asphalt companies, some concrete companies, anything that comes from the dirt.
We’ve got 10 million people currently laboring in the dirt world. Many of them living a life that I would call insulated from the church or the gospel. They’re working 60, 80, 100 hours a week. Many of them are working hundreds of miles from home. Some of them live in campers and stuff on job sites for months on end.
The idea of, I’ve worked 80, 90 hours and I’m going to get up in some city that I’m not from, find a church that I don’t know, to try to figure out this thing, in a city where I’m not going to be maybe for another six weeks. Or, I’m in my town, I’ve never really gone to church, I’m really curious about Jesus, but I don’t know that my life is going to be able to look like a traditional North American churchgoer.
Ten million.
God’s opened the door for us to step into that with Blackbird and with Rogue Collective. And what I see is a vision of us seeing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people make a decision to follow Jesus.
Matt LeRoy: Yeah, come on, man.
Daron Earlewine: And we start planting these orchards in the dirt. These people who are in the everyday spaces and places. And they maybe believe the lie that because their life can’t look like your average suburban churchgoer, they can’t be a part of the kingdom. But what I believe, and I know you do too, is that Jesus loves to work at the fringes.
Matt LeRoy: Absolutely.
Daron Earlewine: And He loves to find the people who feel discarded or overlooked. These people that I’m getting a chance to meet right now, Matt, I love them. They’re just genuine, hardworking, salt of the earth people.
What I hope is that with the beginning of this Follow Jesus resource and then the nine that will follow, they just become the seeds of the kingdom.
And what I love about it, dude, is you’ve done church planting, I’ve done church planting. I know how to plant a church. You know how to plant a church. I know the principles of planting a church without walls. But I’ve never done it. And in fact, in North America, we don’t do very well with it. Like our brothers and sisters in India and Africa and China, South America. They get it.
So I know that Jesus gets it. So I’m asking Him to give us some downloads and help us maybe unlearn a lot of things that we’ve learned. But man, let’s go.
Matt LeRoy: You know who else didn’t look a whole lot like the average North American churchgoer?
Daron Earlewine: Who’s that?
Matt LeRoy: The disciples. I mean, where are the first disciples when Jesus finds them? What are they doing? They’re at work, man. They’re fishermen. And He goes to them and calls them to come and be His first disciples.
So Jesus goes to the fringes. That doesn’t mean that He rejects people who are often picked or anything like that, but He goes to people that it may seem surprising to others. So oftentimes we’ll talk about the margins or the fringes. But that’s where Jesus is over and over again. So guess what? That means that’s actually not the margin. That’s the center. Because Jesus is always at the center of the story, right?
So if that’s where He is, then that’s where we have to go as well. So I love that about your heart too, Daron. You’re seeing this, you have a big vision for it, but you have a heart that’s driving it. And reaching people who aren’t being reached in another way. So let’s go.
Daron Earlewine: Right, we are doing it. It’s actually happening right now. We just finished filming for the Follow Jesus book resource. We lay it out in November. Lord willing, we’ll have 500 copies that we’ll give away for free at the Dirt World Summit out in Phoenix, Arizona. Just kind of a waypoint for us every year with our work with the dirt world. It’ll also be available, Lord willing, on Amazon, everywhere else people can get it. We’ve got three months to figure that out.
[Mid-roll break, speaker unattributed]: Hey, sorry for the interruption here in the podcast, but I wanted to take this moment to invite you into something. If you’ve ever been in a place in your life where you just felt stuck, you felt like maybe you’re just spinning your wheels. You’ve been thinking that there’s got to be more for me. I listen to the podcast all the time and I hear Daron talk about on purpose and for purpose. I have to discover my purpose.
Well, that feeling is right. You do need to. And I want to help you. I want to be a guide for you to step into who God created you to be. That’s the purpose in the design of what we do with Rogue Collective Coaching.
So if you’re curious, or if you’re saying, listen, I’m not curious, I know it’s time for me to take action, here’s your call to action. I want you to go to RogueCollectiveCoaching.com. I want you to click the button that says book a discovery call. I want you to jump on a 30-minute conversation with me. We’ll talk about where you are, and whether Rogue Collective Coaching is your next step to help you become who you were born to be. RogueCollectiveCoaching.com. Book a discovery call. Can’t wait to chat with you. Let’s get back to the episode.
Daron Earlewine: People get their hands on Follow Jesus in November. What’s the journey? What is it?
Matt LeRoy: Here’s the big picture. Follow Jesus, the call, cost and commission of discipleship. This is a 50-day journey through the Gospel of Matthew. We’re not jumping around to a bunch of different books and pulling pieces here and there.
Daron Earlewine: Did you choose the book of Matthew because your name is Matthew?
Matt LeRoy: That is not why. I was going to go with Luke, but something didn’t sound right. I do have a son named Luke.
So we go 50 days through the Gospel of Matthew. He’s telling this story, eyewitness account of the life of Jesus. And we see this discipleship arc in that story. So if we talk about what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus, we should probably look at how Jesus did it. And that’s the whole thought.
I’ve seen this pattern, and many others have seen this too, obviously. There’s this pattern and this story arc there. It begins with the call, and that can just be described as, come follow me. Matthew chapter four, when He meets His first disciples and calls them to come and follow Him.
Then there is the cost. In Matthew chapter 16, He says, take up your cross. So that’s how I would define the cost. And every person in their discipleship journey is going to be confronted with that. None of us can sidestep that part of the story.
But if we’ll continue on in the journey, then it goes into Matthew chapter 28, which is the last chapter of the book. At the very end of the book, after the crucifixion and the resurrection, we have the commission, and the commission is defined as go make disciples. Which is absolutely beautiful, because who’s He saying that to? His disciples that He called all the way back in Matthew four.
So Matthew four, the call, come follow me. Matthew 16, the cost, take up your cross. Matthew 28, the commission, go make disciples. And so we see this arc that Jesus is leading us through as we follow Him. Yes, we’re going to be confronted with that cost. But each of us also is going to realize we have a part in this mission.
This isn’t just about stepping through a gate of salvation, even though that is true. We also follow Jesus along the road of discipleship, and then we get to join Him in His mission of sharing this story with other people.
Daron Earlewine: I love it. So it’s designed to be a 50-day journey. How does that break out? Are you reading five or six chapters a day? What does it look like?
Matt LeRoy: Great. The way we do that is, that’s a seven-week period. So each of those weeks is going to have its own theme that has to do with one of these really core and key pieces of discipleship to Jesus.
So each day, we begin this way. We begin with prayer. We want to make sure that we’re setting that framework first. As we’re entering into this, we’re about to hear from the word of the Lord. So we want to be open and we want to be ready to be changed by what we’re experiencing. So we start with prayer.
Then we move into Scripture. So every day there is a Scripture passage, and this is the most important part of everything else that we’re doing. Everything else is growing out of that.
Part of the desire here is to help people learn how to read Scripture. Because it can be intimidating if you’ve never done it before. Where do I start?
Daron Earlewine: Exactly.
Matt LeRoy: How much do I read? What am I supposed to do here? So we take these sections and help root people in Scripture, help teach that rhythm of how to walk.
[Brief off-script laughter break, unrecoverable audio]
So each day with that Scripture, we root people in Scripture, teach them that rhythm of moving through the Scriptures in that way. Then there’s a reflection where I will take that Scripture passage from that day. So each day we’ll have a reflection where I write on that passage of Scripture. It’s not just my ideas, whatever I’m thinking of that day. It’s helping to walk through and understand that passage of Scripture.
We’ll give some background context. We’ll say, here’s what it meant in that day and time, here’s what Jesus is asking of us today. Then we’ll pray again. Framing it both in prayer. And then every day also ends with a response. So we’ll have a response question, or a series of response questions, for us to think through what we’ve just experienced and to challenge us to take some next steps.
Daron Earlewine: So to go through that, what’s it take a day? Five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour and a half?
Matt LeRoy: Oh, no. I would say 10 to 15 minutes per day is what it’ll end up taking.
Daron Earlewine: So it’s just a commute. If you’re doing a podcast version, that’s your commute. Or if you’re reading, that’s a cup of coffee.
And I love that as we filmed it this week, I got to hear you read through the whole book. What I loved about it is it’s deep enough for you to really get a strong grasp on it, but it’s not overwhelming if this is brand new to you.
Those are the big questions people have when they get curious about, maybe I do want to think about following Jesus. But do I start in Genesis? What counts for reading? Plus, I start reading and I don’t have anybody to help me understand some contextual things.
And one thing you have such a gift to do, and you did a great job with this in this book, Matt, is you bring necessary historical and theological context. But not overwhelming, where it feels academic, like I’m trying to get my master’s degree here off the start.
That’s what I love. You explained what you wanted to do. It’s like, let’s make following Jesus as accessible as it is. And I love the way we’ve done it. You wrote the book, and if you’re a reader and you love to sit down and read, you love a good book, you can hold the Follow Jesus book in your hand. You can go through it, you can take notes.
But I’m anticipating we’re going to have contact with people where it’s like, man, reading’s not really a thing for me. And so to be able to say, okay, listen on your way to work every day, just play that episode for day one through day 50 and grow in that process.
And then I think what people want is, once they’ve listened to it through the first time, they go, man, now I actually really am even more curious. I’m not as intimidated. This time I’m actually going to read.
Matt LeRoy: Yes.
Daron Earlewine: We’ve also had, Matt, a Thursday at the end of each week. We did about a 15-minute episode of you and I having a conversation kind of like this, just pulling out some of our lived experience. Maybe some questions or insights that we’ve gotten from that passage or from that concept. And the heart behind that is to allow people to decompress and think through what they just learned that week.
But also the potential that maybe they gather with two or three people and go through that together. It could be almost like a small group gathering.
Matt LeRoy: Exactly.
Daron Earlewine: Which we call a small group in the American church, but a lot of church people just call that church.
Matt LeRoy: This is true. That’s a great point.
Daron Earlewine: In a lot of places of the world, that’s exactly right. Get together with other believers and meet with Jesus. What’s that called? That would be called church.
Matt LeRoy: That’s awesome. Exactly. A couple things there. One, I love those conversations that we get to have each week, and I think that helps illuminate the importance of community. That yes, this is a very personal thing. Following Jesus is personal. No one else can follow Jesus for you. But it’s not individualistic.
Following Jesus has always been a shared experience, even from the very first disciples that Jesus called. So I love how that gets to come out in our times together, the conversations we get to have.
I’ll also say, and this is something I find helpful and that’s in there because I have experienced it to be helpful, once a week we’ll have an action step. So there’s some kind of tool that we’re giving you as well. It’s not just about, okay, here’s some information that I’ve learned. Every single week there’s some kind of active challenge for how we can live this out.
Because we don’t want to just create people who have more information. There’s enough of that. We have all the information we could ever even hope to have. What we need is transformation. And that’s what Christianity is about. That’s what discipleship to Jesus is about. So each week has one of those active steps that can help lead people into that.
Daron Earlewine: I was telling you today, I’m reading that book about whole-brained faith. I think it’s called The Other Half of Church or something. But it’s about this idea that to get transformation, we have to have right-brained and left-brained discipleship.
And I think so much of our current structures of discipleship are a lot of left brain. You read, you study, you do these things, you analyze. It’s a very analytical deal. I’ve got to get information. And what’s missed is the relational, emotional side of following Jesus. In a relationship with other people and with Jesus, there’s going to be relational, emotional realities. So I love that you’ve added that part in, and hopefully in that process we’ll start seeing right and left brain disciples grown, and that’s where transformation takes place.
Well, Matt, I’m stoked, dude. This has been phenomenal. Ten years for an idea for you, three years for you and I dreaming it up and putting the pieces together. Coop and his team of amazing editors are going to get working on editing the 16 hours of video that you shot the past two weeks and then the couple of hours that we shot. We’ll get that done and get the final editing done and get this thing actually put together in an actual bound book and available by November.
If you have questions about it, or if you’d like information on how to get copies or something like that, you can always email me, daron@daronearlewine.com. If you’d like to be a part of helping the next project, like I said, you can always be a part of that at blackbirdmission.com/give. We’d love to invest your generosity right into the next project of Follow Jesus.
This has been an awesome week, man.
Matt LeRoy: Thank you, Daron. A lot of fun being with you, man, for sure.
Daron Earlewine: Very cool. Hey, I hope this episode was inspiring to you. Be praying for this project. We have high hopes for it and we want to see God do great things, not just in the dirt world, but in the world in general. And we believe this resource can do it. So be praying for us.
I appreciate you. Until we talk again, remember God is near you, not far away. He’s for you, not against you. And He has created you on purpose and for purpose. We’ll talk to you next time on The Daron Earlewine Podcast.