The second element in “raising the sails” for movement is “Multiply Extraordinary Prayer.” If you study some of these movements overseas, one thing that will immediately become apparent is that they pray… A LOT!

The first element in “raising the sails” for movement is “Focus on God’s Word.” Most of us hear that & think, “I do that.” But what you may be thinking about is not exactly what people in these movements are thinking about.

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.

Remember the story I told you at the end of the last article about the couple that started 5,000 churches in their first 4 years after implementing the DMM Training? Well, I just got an update. They are 7 years in now and they’ve grown to between 15,000-25,000 churches planted with hundreds of thousands of new believers. Once you get to this size, you have to start giving ranges because no one knows exactly the size because it’s too large to count.

I mentioned in the Where’s Chris? article that I’ve been spending a lot of time meeting with mentors from all across the world. This has been going on for several years now. I’ve always been a big fan of coaching. I think everyone needs a coach. Coaches make you better at whatever you do.

Where’s Chris? That’s actually a popular question at our church these days – haha! You see, in the first 8 years or so, I preached almost every weekend at our church. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? I had started a church. I was the Senior Pastor. Senior Pastors preach pretty much every weekend. Right?!?!

The weekend after our 10 Year Anniversary, I shared with our church that we want to leverage every ministry at our church to help accomplish this new vision. We want to leverage weekends, groups, youth ministry, children’s ministry, and everything else to help us see 1,000,000 become disciples in the next 10 years.

We were so excited to let our church know about the vision for the next 10 years. We decided that our upcoming 10 Year Anniversary service on September 10, 2017 would be the time to do it. It would be our first time in almost 10 years that all 10 campuses would be together in 1 service.

DMM stands for Disciple-Making Movement. This acronym is also closely related to CPM which stands for Church Planting Movement.

I remember receiving the annual report a few years ago from one of our church’s mission partners. We had partnered with them for years in their work among the unreached. Their results were astounding. So astounding, in fact, that they couldn’t even measure their impact by themselves. They had to hire outside research teams to come in & try to calculate the number they had reached.

We had our number. We now knew the size of our people group & we knew what we needed to pray toward in the next 10 years. 1,000,000. Now for the 1st part of the question — “What’s it going to take…?”

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the WIGTake question that led our Leadership Team into a season of prayer & fasting about the direction of our church for the next 10 years. “What’s it going to take to reach everyone in our people group?” It’s a powerful question. It’s also a scary question. I had never asked it before. We had never asked it before.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Chris Galanos and I’m the Lead Pastor of Experience Life in Lubbock, TX. Experience Life, or eLife as we like to call it, is a church that my wife & I started in our living room in April of 2007. I had just graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX and we felt God leading us to come back to my hometown to start a new church.