Disciple Making Movements

‘Can all the Christians of England sit still with folded arms while these multitudes in China are perishing for lack of knowledge?’¹

These words from James Hudson Taylor expressed his frustration at the smug satisfaction of worshippers in England, when so many people around the world had never heard the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. One of the great contributions of the Protestant missionary movement has been the sense of urgency that it has brought to the task of world evangelization.

Disciple Making Movements (DMMs) have gained significant attention in recent years as a missional approach aimed at rapid and widespread gospel growth. These movements, rooted in the tradition of Protestant missiology pioneered by figures like Roland Allen and Donald McGavran, emphasize the multiplication of disciples who make disciples, leading to the rapid planting of indigenous churches. Allen and McGavran were frustrated by approaches to mission that saw limited results. As McGavran engaged with Allen’s thinking, the church growth movement was born. McGavran pioneered new ways to measure church growth, so that sociological analysis might inform mission praxis. DMMs have emerged as the most recent iteration of church growth principles. However, a focus on speed and scope makes DMMs vulnerable to patterns of thinking that are influenced by Western secularism. This article will review these issues.

Understanding DMMs

At the heart of DMMs’ thinking lies a passionate desire to see many people come to faith in Jesus Christ. This urgency is reflected in the language of ‘rapid multiplication’ and ‘quick spread’ used to define these movements. For example, Zúme defines a DMM as ‘a rapid and exponential increase in disciples making disciples.’² Similarly, Daniel Sinclair introduces DMMs with a range of definitions, all of which include the theme of rapid growth.³ DMMs typically set specific metrics around scope and speed, such as a target of four generations of groups and 75 groups with 500 disciples within three years. It is important to stress that ‘in three years’ means in three years from the start of the movement, not within three years from the start of missional engagement in a particular context. Many years of preparatory work are likely to be required before a movement begins. The emphasis on speed and scale is driven by a deep concern for the millions who have never heard the gospel, as well as a sense of frustration with slower approaches to evangelism and church planting. DMMs proponents argue that the Great Commission calls us to make disciples of all nations, and they believe that DMMs approaches can help fulfill this mandate more effectively and quickly. 

Speed and Scope in Western Secularism

However, the themes of speed and scope also pose risks for late modern Western Christians living in a secular culture. Charles Taylor has shown that we live in a secular age that sees no need for God or for anything spiritual.⁴ By excluding God or anything spiritual from ordinary, everyday life we have also changed how we experience time. As German sociologist Harmut Rosa argues, we are experiencing social acceleration—we feel that time is speeding up.⁵ A minute is still a minute, an hour is still an hour. But technological innovation has allowed us to cram more and more communication events into each minute and hour. One way of illustrating this is to think about socially acceptable time frames for replying to messages. Airmail required a response within a few weeks. Email messages require a response in days to a week. WhatsApp messages require a response in minutes or hours. 

Technological acceleration leads to social acceleration, which speeds up the rate at which societal values and attitudes change. Time is increasingly controlled by big tech, Silicon Valley. The message of Silicon Valley is that business success comes from reaching many people very quickly—speed and scope. The key to achieving speed and scope, according to Silicon Valley, is by harnessing our creativity and by innovating. Silicon Valley will provide us with the technology to enable us to do this. ⁶

The risk for DMMs is that we buy into social acceleration without realizing it. Since, as Western Christians, secularism is the air that we breathe, it is impossible for us not to be shaped by the secular narrative. When it comes to DMMs, it is easy for late modern Westerners to think that being big and quick are ultimate goods. And it is easy to think that the way to reach huge numbers of people very quickly is through harnessing our innovation and creativity. So we innovate specific new strategies and tools that will engineer a movement. We believe that as we design new creative approaches to mission, we will find the tool, technique, or technology that will unlock massive growth. But as Os Guiness says: ‘Nowhere is the modern church more worldly than in its breathless idolizing of such modern notions as change, relevance, innovation, and being on the right side of history.’⁷

Andrew Wilson makes a similar point in his assessment of the themes that shape the ‘WEIRDER’⁸ secular West:

Diagonalization

To navigate these tensions, the concept of ‘diagonalization’ proposed by Christopher Watkin can be a helpful tool.¹⁰ Diagonalization involves identifying false cultural dichotomies and presenting a biblical perspective that transcends these false choices. For example, the dichotomy between ‘if we care about the lost, we must generate as much growth as possible’ and ‘growth is God’s responsibility, not ours’ can be diagonalized by affirming that ‘God gives growth as weak heralds proclaim a foolish message.’ Similarly, the dichotomy between ‘success means getting bigger quickly’ and ‘success is not our concern’ can be diagonalized by saying, ‘As we are faithful to God, he will keep his promises.’ This approach encourages us to avoid simplistic either/or thinking and instead seek a more nuanced, biblically grounded understanding of mission. Using the language of diagonalization helps us to be alert to straw men and encourages us to tread cautiously between false dichotomies. There is much in DMMs thinking that is wonderful. There is some DMMs thinking that is confusing. If we fall into black and white categories, we will not be able to navigate these tensions.

Reflections

It is important to recognize the valuable contributions of DMMs. Their emphasis on passionate prayer, the priority of evangelism, and the empowerment of local leaders to make disciples who make disciples, are transformative and encouraging. The sense of urgency and priority DMMs bring to gospel mission is a vital contribution that should not be dismissed. The challenge, then, is to remain passionately convinced of the urgency and priority of gospel mission without getting swept up in secular narratives of speed and scope. This requires a careful engagement with DMMs approaches, one that is willing to affirm their strengths while also critically examining their potential weaknesses or blind spots. 

Growth is not automatically the trajectory that God gives to the church. As we follow the Bible’s narrative, we see God’s people experiencing blessing and judgement, growth and contraction. The church grows rapidly in the early chapters of Acts. In the letters to the churches at the beginning of Revelation, the Lord Jesus may remove the lampstand from some congregations. 

One of the temptations of Western secularism is to be convinced that innovation is the answer to all our problems, and that if things are new, they must be good. There are indeed many new and good ideas contained within DMMs thinking. However, we should recognize that significant themes within DMMs praxis are not new at all. They echo centuries of mission history. For example, DMMs focus on local disciples making new disciples from within their own culture and context, noting that this shape of gospel communication is particularly effective. This observation reflects themes in World Christianity, as it recognizes and honours the contributions of World Christians to global mission. African American missionaries like Rebecca Protten and Betsey Stockton, African missionaries like Samuel Crowther and Apolo Kivebulaya, made extraordinary contributions to world mission, but their stories are relatively unknown compared to people like William Carey and Adoniram Judson.¹¹ Historically, the explosive growth of the church has rarely come from foreign missionaries. Typically, foreign missionaries led a small number of local people to Christ. It has been through the evangelism of these first converts that more rapid gospel growth has occurred.¹²

We should also recognize that in mission history, God is kind to give remarkable growth at moments of His own sovereign choosing. Often rapid growth comes after times of slow and laborious ministry that seems unfulfilling. A risk of DMMs praxis is to imply that previous approaches to mission were deficient because they produced limited results. But perhaps a harvest is being reaped through DMMs precisely because generations of gospel workers have faithfully heaved rocks from the soil. They in turn allowed the next generations to plough and sow so that there might be a harvest today. 

As we navigate the complexities of DMMs and other missional approaches, may we hold fast to the truth that God gives growth as weak heralds proclaim a foolish message,¹³ trusting in God’s sovereign timing and purposes rather than our own.

Endnotes

1. James Hudson Taylor, China’s Spiritual Need and Claims, 1st ed. (London: James Nisbet, 1865).
2. ‘What is a disciple making movement?’ ZúmeVision, accessed 24 April 2024, https://zume.vision/articles/what-is-a-disciple-making-movement/. 
3. Daniel Sinclair, Mission Possible: Defining and Empowering your Ministry among the Unreached (Blackie, AB: MOF Publishing, 2021), 54.
4. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007).
5. Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
6. See Andrew Root, The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time Against the Speed of Modern Life, Ministry in a Secular Age, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021).
7. Os Guiness, Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2015).
8. ‘WEIRDER’ describes late modern Western culture as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, Romantic.
9. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Wheaton: Crossway, 2023), 288.
10. Christopher Watkin, Biblical critical theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022).
11. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Gregory H. Nobles, The Education of Betsey Stockton: an Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Emma Wild-Wood and George Mpanga, The Archive of a Ugandan Missionary: Writing by and about Apolo Kivebulaya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Andrew F. Walls, ‘The Legacy of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research 16, no. 1 (1992), https://doi.org/10.1177/239693939201600104, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/239693939201600104.
12. Editor’s Note: See Multiplying Disciples in the ‘Graveyard of Missions’ by Victor John & Dave Coles in Lausanne Global Analysis, March 2022.
13. 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:4.