The success of Disciple Making Movement churches (DMM) is not based upon large weekend gatherings.

Rather, DMMs multiply disciples by utilizing Discovery Bible Study Groups or Three-third Groups. These smaller, decentralized groups are the primary strategy of multiplication. They are nimble, based upon the ministry of everyday disciples and are not focused on large Sunday gatherings.

Effective as they are, we cannot find entrenched examples of DMMs in North America.

But there is hope for North American churches. There are churches in the USA with disciples of Jesus reproducing disciples.

“There is hope for North American churches. There are churches in the USA with disciples of Jesus reproducing disciples.”

Based upon the national research conducted by Grey Matters, the team at Discipleship.org (with the help of Exponential) discovered that there are just under 5% of churches in North America that are reproducing disciples.[3] Reproducing disciples is more time-consuming and it requires harder work than multiplying disciples (which I believe is based upon a special movement of the Holy Spirit), but reproducing disciples is still exciting, important ministry.

Those who reproduce disciples do it intentionally in the context of personal discipling relationships over time—often over a period of three years. Those who multiply disciples also do it intentionally, but there is a special culture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, where multiplication happens faster, with disciples being multiplied in three-to-six months as a part of rapid growth. Again, we are not witnessing the establishment of this kind of movement yet in North America. But we do witness churches that reproduce disciples.

Most of the churches reproducing disciples hold weekend gatherings and guide people into discipling relationships in small groups and smaller, transparent-space groups.[4]

Moving People into Discipling Groups

How do the churches that are reproducing disciples move people from weekend gatherings into small groups?

Jim Putman is one of the country’s leading experts and practitioners in creating disciple making churches that are reproducing disciples and disciple makers. He is the founder of Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, Idaho, a church which has planted many reproducing churches and, in the midst of all their church planting, they still witness a weekend attendance of around 8,000.

The Basic Strategy in Weekend Gatherings

Here is the basic strategy that Jim and his team utilize in the church’s weekend gatherings. He calls it the 3-C Strategy:

• Challenge
• Celebrate
• Connect

The kind of churches that we are talking about have heavily invested in staff who focus on raising up disciple makers. That means that, when people attend weekend gatherings, there are lots of everyday disciple makers who have been prepared to help those who attend the church to be discipled outside the large gathering in small groups or transparent groups.

At a weekend gathering, the attendees will be encouraged to get into a group in the following ways:

Challenge

People will be presented regularly with a vision of discipling groups during the teaching time and through other means during the weekend service. They will hear stories of discipling groups and how they help people to truly live as disciples of Jesus. They will also be challenged in every large gathering to take the next step. That next step is typically a step into an environment where they can make connections to help them meet people from a discipling group they can then check out (see below).

Celebrate

The large gathering will celebrate the key elements of church culture. The key slogan says it all: people imitate what church leaders celebrate. So, the leaders of the weekend services share stories and progress in disciple making. There is a celebration of baptisms in discipling groups, new discipling groups, new leaders of discipling groups, and new apprentices of discipling groups. Discipling group attendance is celebrated more than weekend service attendance, although both are important.

Connect

Since the goal is to get as many people as possible to join a group, there are specific practices and habits designed to help people take the next step toward a discipling group. Typically, people who are attending the weekend service will need bridge gatherings—from guest reception connections to men’s breakfasts to women’s gatherings—because people typically need to connect with people outside a group before they will join a discipling group. A smaller number can jump directly from the weekend service with a connection made to a group leader there or with staff help into a small group.

Visualizing the Process

In churches that are reproducing disciples (by everyday disciples making disciples), we witness at least an 80% participation rate in discipling groups (with some going up to 100%). To help you visualize the process of people moving from hearing about a church to attending a church to joining a discipling group, look at the following two funnels. The first is from Real Life Ministries (where Jim is lead minister/pastor) and the second is from my church, Harpeth Christian Church (where I serve as lead minister/pastor).

[1] See www.2414now.net for details.

[2] Discipleship.org provides the following definition of a Disciple Making Movement (DMM): “A rapid and exponential increase in disciple making churches (1,000 or more) within a local culture who plant multiple churches and these churches are churches who multiply disciples, groups, and churches of obedience-based disciples so that we can see at least four generations of churches produced in six streams of disciple-making activity and these streams multiply consistently into churches (100 churches or more within 2 to 5 years).”

[3] “National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches: High Aspirations Amidst Disappointing Results,” https://multiplication.org/product/national-study-on-disciple-making-in-usa-churches/

[4] See more details on the transparent space in Harrington and Absalom, Discipleship That Fits: The Five Kinds of Relationships God Uses to Help Us Grow.

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Josh Howard recently joined our team at Discipleship.org.  He has spent the last 10 years of his work in Southeast Asia, focused on coaching and equipping disciple making movements.  Josh will be moving to Indianapolis and will be starting with us in August, so we wanted to take the next two newsletters and help you to get to know him better.  Here is an important post, telling you about their work.

Bobby Harrington

We had a math problem. It was a little over ten years ago, and my team was praying and dreaming about how to reach 1.3 billion South Asians.

To be clear, there were about 8 of us in this meeting. And, again, our goal was to reach 1.3 BILLION people. (Do you realize that a country like India could lose a billion people and still be in the top five largest nations in the world)?

How do 8 people reach 1.3 billion?

More math: We realized every day at least 25,000 people die in India, and over 150,000 around the world. That began to break our hearts. So, as a team we began to pray, “God, how do we reach the planet with the gospel and see the Great Commission completed in our lifetime? But we’ll start with South Asia, God. Show us how to reach these nations.”

In that meeting one team member said, “Hey Josh, what if we could reach 100,000 people a year with the gospel? Wouldn’t that be incredible”? I was like, “Absolutely!” Another guy said, “Yeah, it’d be great! They’d write books about us.”

I pulled out my calculator and excitedly plugged 100,000 into 1.3 billion. That’s when I realized that it would take us 13,000 years to reach India if we did it 100,000 people per year.

Reality smacked us in the face: Addition was never going to get the job done. Even addition on steroids would fall woefully short. If we added a zero to our “incredible” proposal and reached a million people a year, it would still take us 1,300 years just for India.

What do you do when you realize addition doesn’t work?

We got down on our knees and prayed. We started fasting. We asked God, “The way we’re currently doing things is never going to get the job done. We’re never going to see this nation reached. What do we do, Lord? Please show us how to finish your task.”

A few weeks later I stumbled across a little book by a guy named Ying Kai. Ying and his wife Grace moved to South China and rather than focusing on addition – adding people to their church so they could grow their little piece of the Kingdom – they focused on God’s big Kingdom and started multiplying disciples and mobilizing as many Christians as they could send out into the harvest fields. In just ten years they saw 200,000 churches started and a million people baptized.

Tears began to well up in my eyes. I shut the book and was only able to mutter out a stammering prayer, “God, if you can do that in China, I know you can do it here. I know you long to move this way in South Asia, Lord.”

Our team decided to give it a shot. To forget addition and focus on multiplication. We decided to multiply disciples and churches. That led to us changing, well, just about everything.

• We revolutionized our job descriptions. We went from “players” to “coaches.” Our job was not only to do ministry, but to train everyone else to do ministry as well.

• We flipped our structure. Instead of the leaders being at the top, the leaders would be at the bottom–lifting up as many as they could, supporting everyone else as they do ministry.

• We focused on training. In fact, we started training everyone who moved. If you were breathing, you were receiving training on how to share the gospel and make disciples who make disciples.

• We changed the focus of Sunday mornings. Instead of thinking of our gatherings as “the game,” we would use them as a strategic “locker room” time with our team, preparing them to go out and play in the real game.

• We realized control is the enemy of movement, so we gave up control and in return exponentially increased our influence.

• And I could list many, many more…

Ever since, multiplication has become our focus and our filter. For instance, pastors sometimes ask me at what point we have one of our house churches become two house churches. I always smile and say, “No, that’s addition. (Or possibly division). We’re in the multiplication game.” How does multiplication happen? We don’t tell people, “When your group gets to 30, it’s time to split it in half so you have two groups.” No, we cast vision and train every person to go reach their friends and family with the gospel, to make disciples, and to hopefully start their own house church when that happens. We want every person in every house church sharing their faith with non-believers and seeking to start Bible studies with them, which will become new churches.

The result of our math conversion from addition to multiplication? Last year our team started 9,439 churches. Started. That’s not how many churches we have in our ministry. That’s the number of new churches we launched in just twelve months.

Let’s break that down with some cool math:

• 9,439/12 = 786 churches started per month.
• 9,439/52 = 181 churches started per week.
• 9,439/365 = 25 churches started every day.

Wow. That’s not us. That is all God. And that is the power of multiplication.

Want some more math? You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before, but let’s say I was the only Jesus-follower in India, and I led only one person to the Lord and discipled him the first year. And then the next year we both led only one person to faith. The third year all four of us each led one more person to become a follower of Jesus and disciple maker. How long would it take to reach all of India? (Pulling out calculator–doing math). About… thirty-two years.

We’re in the middle of that. The first year we started a few churches. The second year a couple dozen. About five years in we were seeing several hundred churches launched a year. Last year, 9,000.

If we started a church that reached 100,000 people a year, it would take us 13,000 years to reach India. But with a multiplying movement of disciple makers, only thirty-two years! That is the power of multiplication! And when it comes to our mission, multiplication is the only math that works. 

If you’d like help shifting from addition to multiplication, stay tuned… I will be sharing more of what we have learned through Discipleship.org in the months and years ahead. 

For King Jesus,

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Excerpt from Discipleship Handbook: The Six Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle
by Bobby Harrington and Josh Patrick

“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” 2 Timothy 2:2

Authentic discipleship repeats itself, where the disciple becomes a disciple-maker: reproducing the discipleship process.

In preparation for the launch of discipleship.org, we solicited the input of some of the most effective disciple-makers in North America. We were stunned by their uniform emphasis on one point (and it was especially punctuated by Robert Coleman and Bill Hull): discipleship is not biblical without an emphasis on multiplication. If our vision of discipleship stops with the disciple, it falls short of the example Jesus left for us. Authentic discipleship repeats itself, where the disciple becomes a disciple-maker, reproducing the discipleship process.

As Bobby and Jim Putman pointed out in the book, DiscipleShift: Five Shifts to Help Your Church Make Disciples Who Make Disciples, no one can be mature without experiencing the love of God in Christ and loving others in turn. It is hard to believe that someone is truly Christ-like if he or she does not personally seek and save the lost, since that was Jesus’ purpose for coming to the earth (Luke 19:1-11). Jesus was sent by the Father into the world for the redemption of people and he, in turn, sent his disciples into the world for the redemption of others (John 20:21). Can we truly be like Christ, who made discipleship a high priority, and not personally make disciples ourselves? His last words were very clear. He commissioned us with the commandment to “make disciples” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Discipleship for People Who Are Lost

Let’s talk first about discipling lost people. We also call this Evangelism. Lost people are those who do not know or claim to know Jesus. We have both lived in areas where there are few Christians. In those areas of the world, the saved and the lost are clearly distinct. And the approach is clear, we follow Jesus by entering their world to love and serve them as Jesus loved and served people (which is to be missional). And out of safe relationships that are established through this kind of love, we tell them about and invite them to join the kingdom of God. We call this strategy show and tell.

Let’s be honest. The closest friends of most Christians are Christians. They may have a few ongoing and meaningful relationships with lost people, but probably not too many. Christians naturally connect with other Christians, so most, if not all of their best relational energy is invested in people they know or meet at church. The discipleship lifestyle means that we must follow Jesus and actually go out and find lost people (Luke 15). We must constantly encourage people to be like Jesus by intentionally connecting with non-disciples and helping them to become disciples. This is repeating the discipleship process at the most basic level. Someone taught us about Jesus. Now we want to repeat that with others. Eternal destinies lie in the balance.

In light of the Bible’s overt teaching on God’s eternal judgment, nothing is more important or urgent than giving a person the opportunity to trust and follow Jesus. As stated earlier, many will refer to this as evangelism, but it is more biblical to call it discipleship. Jesus didn’t command us to evangelize the lost. He said “go and make disciples.” The language of the Bible implies something much deeper and more substantial than a singular focus on conversion or a one-time presentation of information.

It’s hard to imagine a higher priority for a local church than reaching those who are eternally lost. It’s interesting to us that the Bible does not list numerous directives that constantly tell us reach out to lost people. We believe that this is because it is unfathomable that we would require such commands from God to do this. If we really believe that God rescued us from eternal punishment when he sent his Son to die as our sacrifice and other people do not have what we have, why should we have to be told to share that gift with others? If we sincerely love people, how could we not want to share this Good News with them? Honesty compels us to ask two hard questions:

1. Do we really believe what the Bible clearly says about the consequences of failing to trust and follow Jesus?

2. If we believe what it says, what are we doing about it?

We can easily grow cold in our fundamental conviction that God’s Word is absolutely true. The pressure from culture to be tolerant and non-judgmental often leads churches to have fuzzy beliefs and soft convictions.

But we must align our individual lives and square the mission of the church with the words of Jesus. We believe that Jesus really is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). No one comes to the Father except through Him. We believe that there is no other name by which people can be saved (Acts 4:12). We believe that Jesus was telling the truth when he said that hell is a real place and that most people are going there (Matthew 7:13-14, 25:46, Luke 8:11-14).

You may want to read that last sentence again and look up those passages.

This is the most urgent issue in the universe. Our hearts should break for those who are disconnected from Jesus. We should do everything we can to help as many as we can to see the goodness and light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4, 6).

Charles Spurgeon exhorted his church in England with these words:

“If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our dead bodies. And if they perish, let them perish with our arms wrapped around their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let no one go unwarned and un-prayed for.”

Discipleship for Cultural Christians

We now live and work together in a context where cultural Christianity (described earlier) is the norm and biblical discipleship is the exception. In a sense, this is an underlying reality in much of the America, where every year over 75-80% of people report in surveys that they are Christians and even active church attenders look just like the non-church attenders around them in terms of behavior. It is a scandal.

It is a particular scandal in the Bible belt. When almost everyone is a so-called Christian, it can be toxic. A kind of social-club Christianity sets in and people are a part of church for all the wrong reasons. Church leaders and Biblical disciples must be tough minded and commit themselves to faithfulness.

We believe clarity on what it means to be saved is critical in how we go about making disciples and the stands we take. We have concluded that most people who would meet the cultural Christian description (described earlier), those who are religiously oriented, but not actively living under the Lordship of Jesus, are either lost or in danger of being lost. We are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9) and genuine faith shows itself in faithful living (Ephesians 2:10). Cultural Christians do not demonstrate faithful faith. We have found both David Platt and Robert Picerelli, who come at it from two distinct theological frameworks, to be helpful guides on this issue.

Discipleship for the Saved

Now let’s talk about discipling saved people. Far too many people have been saved and then abandoned. Somehow it is just assumed that they will be discipled by getting involved in a church or that it will just automatically happen somehow. It doesn’t work that way. Jesus and the apostles showed us that disciples are made by other disciples. So it is vitally important to raise up disciplemakers who equip and disciple the saved, so that they become mature in Christ (Colossians 1:28). We must replicate disciples.

Too many people think that it’s the minister or a pastor or the elders who make disciples. They’re concerned that they don’t know what to do or that they will make mistakes. This is where biblical teaching on the ministry of all believers and the coaching role of leaders is so important (Ephesians 4:11-13; Romans 8:3-8). Every disciple has the capability and responsibility to make disciples. We are all ambassadors, lights in the world, and ministers of reconciliation. Understood this way, it’s the role of every disciple of Jesus to be ministers and to make disciples, and the role of every minister, pastor, and elder to train, equip, and coach every disciple to become disciplemakers.

The acid test of a disciple-maker is not that he or she is making disciples, but are making disciples who have gone on to be disciple-makers. We learned the following formula from our friends David and Jon Ferguson. They describe the ideal mindset of a disciplemaker and what it means to be committed to repeating the discipleship process. We disciple people with a focus that we are training them to move on and disciple people themselves.

• I do. You watch. We talk.
• I do. You help. We talk.
• You do. I help. We talk.
• You do. I watch. We talk.
• You do. Someone else watches. I do. Someone else watches.

A mature disciple-maker can point to several people that he has discipled and that are now discipling others. At the beginning, we were their disciples, but now they are our co-laborers. We may release people from being actively discipled by us, yes, but we never release them from relationship.

Multiplying the Disciple Making Cycle

When I (Josh) met Scott in the Spring of 2003, it was obvious that he didn’t trust or follow Jesus. His wife coerced him to an Easter worship gathering. He was a new face in the crowd, so I approached him and asked some general questions about his background. He described himself as “non-religious” and “skeptical” about the claims Jesus made about himself. I told him that I appreciated his candor and would like to hear more of his story. He didn’t reject the idea of another conversation, so I invited him to lunch. We had lunch nearly every week for 6 months. We mainly talked about sports, marriage, and our careers…. and sometimes we talked about Jesus.

His curiosity peaked when The Passion of The Christ was released in theaters. After we saw the movie together, we unpacked the experience over a cup of coffee. After his third sip, he whipped out a 5-page list of questions that were provoked by the movie. I answered the ones I knew. I said, “I don’t know,” to the ones I did not. A few days later, I was led to intensify my prayers for him and his eternal destiny. In those prayers, I discerned God prompting me to invite Scott to join a small group of guys who met for encouragement and Bible study each week. Much to my surprise, he was quite open to such an invitation. This weekly immersion in authentic Christian fellowship ended up drawing Scott like a moth to a flame to the beauty and supremacy of Jesus. We didn’t try to answer all of his questions. We had unanswered questions of our own! We just loved him, confessed our struggles, and walked with each other with no agenda. Over the course of about 6 months, Scott began to share our conviction that Jesus died for our sins and was raised to free us from death.

Eight years and two churches later, Scott called me out of the blue just to catch up. He informed me that he had formed a discipleship group for men. He called it a “Jesus group.” He said that he was “paying it forward.” I immediately went silent and I felt a tear fall down my cheek, and this puzzled him. All I could say was, “Thank you, Jesus.”

Click here to download Discipleship Handbook: The Six Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle for free!

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Taken from Revisiting the Master Plan of Evangelism by Robert Coleman and Bobby Harrington

Reproduction is evidence your discipling program is beginning to multiply, because until you see what is emerging from this person in whom you’ve invested, you really don’t know if you’ve gotten through. Until you see the fruit of your discipling in reproduction, you’re not sure you’ve finished your work. That was always in the mind of Jesus from the beginning. He’s not just looking to the next generation; he’s looking to the generation beyond that generation and the generation beyond that. He’s looking always to the fulfillment of his plan to reach the world. In his mind, there’s no such thing as global missions as distinct from local missions. God loves every person in the world.

How does this principle work?

When you start with a just a handful, you recognize the necessity of multiplication. It begins with the person in whom you have invested some time beginning to replicate that in the life of someone else. Let’s not get the idea we’re the only one involved in this. Thankfully, there are others who are impacting that life more significantly than our involvement—moms, dads, husbands, wives, and children. We may be a significant part of the process, but disciple-making is a process. We’re getting a lot of help from others who can compensate for some of our deficiencies. Seeing something happen in the lives of others made Jesus rejoice when He could anticipate the time His investment in a few would begin to pay dividends for eternity. We want to do the same thing.

Is the principle of reproduction for all Christians?

I see the word disciple in an inclusive sense of all followers of Jesus, designating the church of the redeemed. The great commission was given to the whole church. Apart from this being the commission to the whole church, how would we ever fulfill his purpose in creation? How would God’s love in making us ever find fulfillment in a people created in His image to know Him and to love Him? So I have to see the Great Commission as a way of life for every believer, every follower. We’re all ministering priests; we are in this together and that’s when we’ll rejoice together. It’s when we see this as a lifestyle, not a gift, but as a command that it really begins to resonate in our life as a plan by which we can measure our steps.

Whatever we’re doing, wherever He plants us, we can follow these principles. We have to work out the details in the specific culture where we are and the time spent. That’s going to continually change. A lot of programs and techniques will change. For example, Jesus didn’t have the technology that we have today. He didn’t have a car. He probably would have gotten around on a donkey if he didn’t have to walk. Those are just methods and programs that facilitate how we can fulfill our mission. Discipling comes down to a way of life. If we can get that into the way we live every day, we’ll walk on tiptoes. Nothing is irrelevant or peripheral. It’s all part of the plan. What are you going through today? You don’t see it working out, but God’s working through it to accomplish a purpose that’s still good. Trust Him. He’ll not leave you alone.

How does love result in multiplication?

Love for lost people is not anything we work up in the flesh, but it is an overflow of the love of God in the heart of a disciple. Only that kind of love will penetrate the darkness of a dark, sin-infested world, because it’s love that cannot be denied. It doesn’t mean they’re going to receive us with delight, but they have to recognize there’s something unnatural about the compassion and concern flowing out of you into the world.

You don’t engineer it. You don’t announce a big meeting; you don’t get on TV and say whatever big thing you’re doing. It will overflow and make itself known when it’s genuine, which in a sense is getting back to what we were talking about in being filled with the Holy Spirit. Like Paul said, “Be continually filled with the spirit,” (Ephesians 5:18) where “be” is used as a continuing sense of the verb. Unfortunately, I think for most of us, it’s more of a fluctuating thing. There are high points and low points, and that’s why we need reaffirming of what we know is God’s privilege and God’s word. That comes out in just yielding to the fullness of the Holy Spirit. We sometimes call it revival—a revival experience I think is what Paul is talking about when he describes being filled with the Spirit, and it’s what is evident at Pentecost.

When people are coming to Christ, their lives are transformed and they have evidence of it in their lifestyle. I can thank God and say, “He’s doing something here with us that’s not of this world.” We dare not try to limit the dimensions of what God accomplished when Jesus died on the cross. The blood of Christ goes deeper than the stain of sin has gone. I believe God loves us so much that when Jesus died, He died to solve the sin problem and who am I to question the efficacy of what Christ did at Calvary. I fall short, but I know what He did was perfect and it just makes me hunger and thirst for more righteousness, and more of Him and the Word.

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