From Megachurch to Multiplication: A Church's Journey Toward Movement

by Chris Galanos

The WIGTake question is: “What’s it going to take to reach everyone in the people group?”

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.

In fact, an active “movement” is often defined as multiple streams of fourth-generation churches among previously lost people, adding up to at least one hundred new churches in two to four years.

Occasionally these churches will cluster in groups of fifty to one hundred for encouragement and training, if the context permits.

Only a rabbit church has the ability to reproduce rapidly, thrive in a dangerous environment, and naturally facilitate obedience-based discipleship within every member.”

it’s called obedience-based discipleship. The focus isn’t on information accumulation. The focus is on life transformation through obeying Jesus and sharing about him with others.

the Sailboat Analogy. It goes like this: A sailboat doesn’t get movement without the wind. The wind is the most important element in sailing, and if no wind is present, you aren’t going anywhere. The same is true with a movement of God. 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.

But something else is also true. If there is plenty of wind, but your sails aren’t up, you aren’t going sailing either. You may get a little movement, but not the kind you want. You won’t have any idea where you’re going. If you want to go sailing, you not only need the wind, you need to raise your sails.

Simply defined, focusing on God’s Word involves a regular pattern of reading, obeying, and sharing the Word of God.

7.Who should you share with this week? One of our friends from Africa told us that question 7 is the most important question if you want to see movement. Without sharing regularly, how will you find “persons of peace” and see new groups started? You won’t. Sharing is absolutely essential.

Here are some characteristics of prayer that we have seen among the hundreds of ministries that we coach and train, and within our own teams. •Many Christians pray . . . and fast every week at least two meals in one day. •Many new Christians gather regularly for all-night or six-hour prayer vigils. •Midday prayers for members of churches and ministry teams are common. •Personal disciplines of early-morning prayer are very common. One hour to two or three hours of prayer is not uncommon. •Family devotions centered on discovering the Bible together and praying together are common.1

As our Leadership Team was talking to Stan about how “extraordinary” prayer looks and how to implement it, he said, “Your prayer life now is ordinary for you. Add something to it to make it extraordinary for you. Then when that becomes ordinary, add something again to make it extraordinary. Keep repeating the process.”

Jerry Trousdale, author of The Kingdom Unleashed, wrote, Prayer is the lifeblood of movements. The church in the Global North [referring to North America and Europe] does not rely on prayer, and if behavior is any indication, it does not believe in it, either. If we are going to see movements in the Global North, we will need to see a new, ongoing commitment to serious, intense, persistent prayer for God to open heaven, to raise up disciple makers and church planters, to guide us to His people of peace, and to empower our work. Without that, there will be no movements and the church will continue its slow, inexorable decline into irrelevance in Global North culture.

Movements are all about lost people becoming disciples of Jesus and gathering in churches, then making more disciples of Jesus.

When Stan first talked to us about “going out among the lost,” we asked him, “Shouldn’t we start first with the people in our relational network who are lost?” He said that while we don’t want to neglect our relational network, if we wait to “go out among the lost” until we’ve shared with family and friends, we’ll inadvertently train ourselves not to “go out among the lost.” In other words, we won’t be in the habit of going out each week. Plus, he said, we’ll run out of family and friends to talk to quickly anyway.

vision to their believing friends about what God is doing through their disciple-making efforts. We’re hoping to inspire as many believers as possible to consider becoming disciple makers and church planters so one million people can be reached for Christ.

We’ve got to recover the “culture of empowerment” of ordinary believers that was evident in the first-century church. Did you know that leaders of the movement in India that has reached millions point to this same “culture of empowerment” as being essential to movement? We’ve got to empower ordinary people once again. Remember this verse: “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

The reason we gave our DMM churches a goal of casting vision to one person per week is because we’re assuming it will take casting vision to thirty people to find ten who are willing to go through the training.

My DMM coach says constantly that Church Planting Movements are basically Training Movements. Training is vital for rapid exponential growth because new leaders are constantly being raised up.

“For the diagram above, this leader talked about trying and failing in DMM and having to go back and rework and reexamine everything he was doing and start all over. God has used them to reach seventeen generations!”

“Would you be interested in getting your family and friends together to discover more from the Bible about God and his plan for your life?”

Jerry Trousdale warns us of the opposition that can come when we follow the Lord into a disciple-making vision: Experience shows that the opposition to Disciple Making Movements often comes not only from the outside but from Christians who do not understand it or who reject its premises. DMM practitioners have been ostracized from their denominations, have lost friends, have been vilified and slandered, all from within the Christian community. As Christians grow in their discipleship, opposition from both inside and outside the church is inevitable, and we need to be ready for it.

“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.”

Jesus is often working among the poor because one of my DMM coaches shared that virtually every known movement in the world has started among the poor.

hear it often described this way: many people first come to know Jesus as Healer and later come to know him as Savior.

Do you have any needs in your life right now, or do you know of any needs in this area? And (2) Is anyone in your family sick, or do you know anyone in this area who is sick?

“When people ask what DMM is, I basically tell them that we’re asking God that the book of Acts would happen again in our day!” People seem to understand that, since Acts is the powerful story of the early church and the rapid advancement of the gospel.

As our speakers prepare their outlines, the sections usually look like this: •Introduction •Read the passage •Retell the passage •Ask: •What does the passage teach us about God? •What does it teach us about people? •What should we obey in response? •Who should we share with? •Personal story of obeying and sharing the passage •Conclusion

We’ve found that the longer the trainings run, the more difficult it is for people to obey.

If a preacher really wants you to implement what he or she is teaching, then the preacher will briefly tell you one thing to focus on and spend the rest of the time helping you implement it. That’s how our strategy has shifted as we head toward the million goal, and that’s why the trainings are shorter. We strive for obedience, not knowledge acquisition.

Our teams started with prayer and fasting. We prayed together for two hours on Sunday night and then for another four hours on Monday before going out. We also fasted together as a staff all day Monday, prayed together for another hour each day from 1 to 2 p.m., and then had a testimony time on Friday from 1 to 2 p.m. to tell stories of what God did. In addition to prayer and fasting, on Tuesday through Friday we went out among the lost for at least two hours each day. Every team went to a different area of town where we had already been working in previous weeks and mapped out a plan to blitz the area over the four days.