Raise the Sails

If you haven’t read through our 10 Introduction Articles, I’d recommend you start there. That will help this next series of posts make even more sense.

I want to spend the next 7 articles sharing about the 7 elements in “raising the sails” for a movement.

My DMM Coach, Stan, introduced these 7 elements in “raising the sails” in the DMM Training that I talked about in the recent DMM Training post.

He said that these 7 elements are consistently found in the lives of ordinary believers who are making many disciples in these movements all over the world.

That definitely got our attention.

We knew it would be critical to make sure these 7 elements were lived out by our staff & our church.

After he introduced them to us in Lesson 2 of the DMM Training, he repeated them at the beginning of every lesson from that point forward. Actually, he had us repeat them after the first few times. That’s how important they are. These were definitely ingrained in our minds by the time the training was over.

While these 7 elements in “raising the sails” for DMM are an important part of the training, they are still a very small part. I share these with you only to try to whet your appetite for going through the training yourself.

We did a 7-part message series at our church on each of these elements & I’ll share the link to each message at the end of the article.

Before we get to the first element, I wanted to spend some time sharing about this concept of “raising the sails.”

Stan shared it with us in Lesson 2. He called it the Sailboat Analogy. It goes like this.

A sailboat doesn’t get “movement” without the wind. If there’s no wind, you aren’t going sailing. The wind is the most important element in sailing. The same is true with a movement of God. We cannot make a movement happen. You don’t get movement without the wind of the Holy Spirit. If you don’t have the wind, you don’t have a movement. The wind of the Holy Spirit is absolutely the most important thing in seeing a movement of God break out.

Something else is also true.

If you have 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 get your sails up. The same is true with movements of God. You don’t get a movement of God without the wind of the Holy Spirit, but you also don’t get one if the wind of the Holy Spirit comes & you don’t have your “DMM sails” up!

To go sailing, you need one thing you can’t control & one thing you can. You need the wind & you need to have your sails up. Same for movements of God! We can’t control the wind of the Holy Spirit, but we can control whether we have our DMM sails up when the wind of the Spirit comes!

As we take a look at 7 elements in “raising the sails” for movement, we’re talking about the part we can control. We’re wanting to get our sails up! We’re not saying by getting our sails up that the wind of the Spirit will immediately blow on them. We don’t control the wind. God does. We’re just saying that we want to get our DMM sails up so we’re ready whenever the wind of the Spirit decides to blow! We don’t want our sails down when the wind comes!

The next 7 articles are all about helping you get your sails up!

One thing my DMM Coach said over & over again through the training is that we must raise the sails for movement & encourage others to do the same! Raise the sails & encourage others to raise the sails too! You don’t want just a few people raising the sails, you want as many as possible!

Got it!

The Sailboat Analogy made so much sense when I first heard it & it’s been something our team has returned to over & over again. We don’t bring movements. God does! We just need to have our sails up for when he comes! I’m sure I’ll talk a lot about “raising the sails” on this blog & wanted you to know what we were referring to.

In the next post, we’ll begin to talk about the critical elements in “raising the sails” for a movement of God!

Part 2 – Focus on God’s Word