World Missions & Evangelism, Inc.

In the last blog post, we started talking about Simple Church structure or Developed (Traditional) Church structure in Disciple Making Movements.  Here are 9 Statements for you to consider in determining what kind of local church development should be pursued in a DMM. 1.  In Disciple Making Movements, all churches begin as simple churches. 2.  Multiplication of groups/churches happens easiest with simple churches. 3.  Simple churches, with less formal structure, may not be as sustainable as developed churches. 4.  Church Planting/Multiplication is NOT the same as Church Development.  Church Development has to do with how the resulting churches will be structured and organized. 5.  In Disciple Making Movements, we see ourselves as Catalysts or Facilitators of the movement.  Thus we don't insist on any one form of church (simple or developed) or of government (episcopal,  presbyterian, congregational) or of meeting place (house, riverbank, church building, or cathedral).

The number 1 question I have from pastors and church leaders relating to the DMM (disciple making movement) strategy is "What are the churches like?" "What kind of church government?"  "Are they all House Churches?" In fact, many times it seems that this is the most important question that leaders have.  I must admit that this has really dismayed me at times.  It sometimes seems that leaders can be more focused on issues of structure, than on issues of evangelism.  Indeed I have had conversations that seemed to imply (and sometimes outright state) that if the resulting churches in a DMM are not of a certain kind of structure, that it would be better not to do DMM at all.  These sentiments are stated by God loving, experienced leaders sometimes....but they have not thought through the bottom line meaning of such concepts. Are we really to believe that it would be better for people to not hear the Gospel, not become believers, not follow Christ at all un

In this blog post, I want to introduce the reader to the 7 stages of a developing disciple making movement. Then in my next teaching post on this blog, I want to specifically focus on 1 of the stages that seems to be challenging to many practitioners of the dmm/cpm strategy.   These 7 stages are broad categories that encapsulate several of the Critical Elements of disciple making movements. If you check out several of my older posts from several years ago (especially from the first year of the blog 2008) you will find several blogposts that describe what we call Critical Elements.  (This series of blogposts from 2008 are entitled  "The Critical Elements","Critical Elements of a Church Planting Movement", "Passionate Extraordinary Prayer", "Authority of Scripture and Obedience", "Rain and the Holy Spirit", "Miracles", "The 1:8 Factor", "The Strategic Critical Elements", and finally "The Discipleship E