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March 5 - April 2, 2019
Dickerson concludes: If we want to rebuild and restore a culture of discipleship, we have no choice but to release the way American church was done in the 20th century. The late-20th-century church model, in so many applications, requires so much energy and attention that little to nothing is left for anything else, including discipleship. The 20th century church model which revolves around buildings, weekend gatherings, sermons and such is not primarily focused on discipleship. Discipleship gets crowded out because doing all of those things takes so much time. We do all those things hoping we
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Stan Parks, a DMM Trainer and Vice President of Global Strategies at Beyond, “DMM is obedience-based discipleship that sees disciples reproducing disciples, leaders reproducing leaders, churches reproducing churches, and movements reproducing movements.”
Roy Moran, author of Spent Matches, says, DMM is a strategy that has six key characteristics: God ordained, Spirit dependent, Bible centered, obedience focused, discovery based, and disciple driven. In brief, DMM turns average followers of Christ into event planners, rather than salesmen for Jesus, so that they can invite their friends, neighbors, and workmates into small groups designed to hear from God through reading the Bible, obeying what He says, and sharing it with their social networks.
Jerry Trousdale in Miraculous Movements, “In a nutshell, Disciple Making Movements spread the gospel by making disciples who learn to obey the Word of God and quickly make other disciples, who then repeat the process. This results in many new churches being planted, frequently in regions that were previously very hostile to Christianity.”8
How people measure success says a lot about why they do what they do.
To those executing a DMM strategy, success can be summed up in two words: generational discipleship.
They measure whether disciples are making disciples who make more disciples who make more disciples. As disciples are being made, churches are intentionally being planted with these new disciples. They don’t plant churches hoping to get disciples (which is what I did). They make disciples, and from those disciple-making efforts, churches are planted.
It’s best to think of generational growth like generations in families. Four generations would be like great-grandparent to grandparent to parent to child. I’m the fourth generation from my great-grandfather.
Notice, at its core, DMM is not a “come and see” strategy. It is absolutely a “go and tell” strategy. Instead of trying to get lost people to attend church services, which most lost people don’t want to do anyway, you’re taking the gospel directly to them.
Stan Parks says, “Around the world, the number one way DMMers find those interested in God is by serving them (healing prayer, kind deed, community service) while consistently, simultaneously, and culturally appropriately pointing to God.”
1.What does this teach us about God? 2.What does this teach us about people? 3.If this is from God, what should we do/obey in response? 4.Who should we share this with?
often meet in homes or other places where groups of people naturally gather, just as the church did in the New Testament. The average size of these churches worldwide is fourteen believers, according to Stan.10 Occasionally these churches will cluster in groups of fifty to one hundred for encouragement and training, if the context permits.
Beyond, a missions-sending organization, recently posted a series of videos corresponding to the CPM steps, which I’ve found helpful in giving an introduction to this strategy.12 To summarize, CPM steps are as follows: Step 1: Prayer Step 2: Prayer Walking Step 3: First Contact Step 4: Miracles and Healings Step 5: Discipleship Step 6: Reproduction13
emphasized that DMM invites every ordinary believer, not just pastors, to be a disciple maker and church planter. Although ordinary people being disciple makers isn’t particularly controversial, ordinary people acting as church planters may be a bit controversial in our country. This is not the case in countries where DMM is succeeding in making millions of disciples. I explained further how believers often refer to themselves as church planters in these movements when people ask what they do. They’ll say, “I’m a taxi driver to provide for my family, but I’m actually a church planter.”
Imagine you have been asked to feed a village that is running out of food. You are given an estimate that in three years the village will face starvation. Would it be better to give the people in the village two adult elephants or two infant rabbits to help them avoid starvation?
After sharing this illustration, my DMM trainer, Stan, said, “Elephant churches are strong and helpful, but they reproduce so slowly that we need more rabbit churches to truly reach the world.”
DMM author Jerry Trousdale said, “God bless elephant churches; they serve wonderful functions. But from every strategic perspective, megachurches and even average-sized churches will never fulfill the Great Commission without a goal and plan to launch thousands of rabbit churches.
I then announced that we had just finished training our first 54 church planters to leave our church and go plant these rabbit churches. We asked the 54 rabbit church planters to come to the stage; and our church gathered around them, prayed for them, and commissioned them to go out, make disciples, and start churches!
People started coming up with great ideas. We didn’t know whether the ideas would be fruitful, but we said we were willing to try anything. We knew we wouldn’t figure out how to best leverage each individual ministry area unless we took risks and tried new things.
“that’s the way we’ve always done it.” We wanted to leverage the weekends in whatever way the Lord would lead.
Henry Blackaby, author of Experiencing God, has said it, and my dad reminds me of it all the time1 : prayer and testimony are the fuel of revival.
If you study revival history, you’ll see that God has used prayer and testimony over and over again to set people ablaze. An example would be the Asbury Revival of 1970 at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky.2 There were many professing Christians at that school, but they weren’t on fire for God. They were lukewarm and living in sin. There was a general consensus among the students that they needed revival.
Thirty-six students joined together in an experiment. They covenanted together to spend thirty minutes with Jesus each morning for thirty days. They would read and obey the Bible. They would pray. They would share their faith. They would meet once a week to keep each other accountable and to pray corporately. They scheduled an all-night prayer meeting for the night before the experiment would be over.
Many described this atmosphere by saying that it was as though Jesus had walked through the door of the auditorium. There was nowhere else anyone wanted to be.
movements don’t happen unless people are reading, obeying, and sharing the Word of God.
told his disciples in Matthew 28:20: “Teach these new disciples to obey.” Don’t just teach them stuff. Teach them to obey the commands he’s given us. Teach them to literally follow Jesus! That involves obeying and sharing, not just learning.
The focus isn’t on information accumulation. The focus is on life transformation through obeying Jesus and sharing about him with others.
teach to obey, is the word train. Training implies obedience or application.
One of our friends, a leader in a movement that has reached millions, said the movement’s motto is, “Learn one thing. Do one thing.” Then they move on.
Prayer. Testimony. Training.
Since then, the Campus Pastors design their weekend services around prayer, testimony, and training.
I found quite the opposite. Acts 15:35 says, “Paul and Barnabas stayed in Antioch. They and many others taught and preached the word of the Lord there.”
people were more excited about the message than the messenger. The message had the power! The Word of God had power! People wanted to hear God’s Word, regardless of the messenger!
We need all of the people of God to be “preachers” of the Word of God!
Once I started having others help with the teaching, I had more time to pray, lead, read, and cast vision for the future. The decision to start using a teaching team for sustainability and health reasons came a few years before we even began thinking about DMM. I’m not sure if DMM would’ve even come into the picture if I, and others, hadn’t freed up the time to be able to think about it, read about it, and talk to others about it.
I can’t imagine what dreams and visions God would give Senior Pastors if they shared the teaching responsibilities and spent more time in prayer, seeking God for his vision for their churches.
asked Stan what he wanted us to do first as we moved toward DMM. He said he wanted to take us through a twelve-week DMM Catalyst Training. This training was based on principles God had used around the world, and Stan would just pass on biblical lessons he had learned from David Watson and many other movement catalysts.
Stan then made it clear that this training was not information to be transferred but biblical principles to be obeyed. The focus wouldn’t be on learning, like most Bible studies. Instead, the focus would be on obeying.
this wasn’t information Stan wanted to transfer; these were biblical principles he wanted to coach us to obey! That means you don’t even need to look at lesson 2 until you’ve obeyed the passage from lesson 1. Stan was going to make sure from the very beginning we weren’t distracted by “learning”—he wanted us laser-focused on obeying.
As our training continued, I began to notice something strange. Stan didn’t talk much. He told us that the Holy Spirit would speak to us as we took a fresh look at these Bible passages; he didn’t want to interfere with what the Holy Spirit wanted us to hear and obey.
A movement cannot happen without the wind of the Holy Spirit. He is absolutely the most important factor in seeing a movement of God break out. Without him, there is no movement.
If there is plenty of wind, but your sails aren’t up, you aren’t going sailing either.
If you want to go sailing, you not only need the wind, you need to raise your sails.
A movement of God doesn’t happen without the wind of the Holy Spirit, but a movement also doesn’t happen if the wind of the Holy Spirit comes and you don’t have your “DMM sails” up!
You can’t control the wind of the Holy Spirit, but you can control whether your DMM sails are raised when the wind of the Spirit comes!
That’s not to say that by getting our sails up the wind of the Spirit will blow into them immediately. We don’t control the wind. God does. But we want to get our DMM sails up so we’re ready whenever the wind of the Spirit decides to blow!
focusing on God’s Word involves a regular pattern of reading, obeying, and sharing the Word of God.
A solid foundation doesn’t just come from listening to Jesus. Many of us are really good at that. It actually comes from taking it a step further and obeying Jesus!
DMM practitioners measure spiritual growth by gauging how much people are obeying Jesus, not how much they know about Jesus!
The Pharisees knew a lot. Jesus didn’t give them credit for that. The disciples didn’t know as much, but they followed Jesus and obeyed what he taught (not perfectly). Jesus took a special interest in and gave the Great Commission to the disciples—the ones who acted on what they knew.
