You’ve found a potential Person of Peace and you’ve started a Discovery Group. Fantastic! Now what? You begin to meet with the Person of Peace (and possibly another leader in the group) at least once a week to coach them.

In Jim Collins’ book, How the Mighty Fall, he uses extensive research to document why many great companies fall from greatness. He says Stage 1 of these companies decline is “Hubris Born of Success.” Essentially, when you’re successful, you become prideful & overconfident, and that can lead to decline. You think you have it all figured out. You stop learning. You stop evaluating. You stop trying to get better. You’re successful, so who can teach you anything?

I feel like this passage is so often misunderstood. Typically if you were to ask a Christian, “Do you remember that passage about the wise man building his house on solid rock rather than sand?” they would nod their head. Then if you asked them to sum it up, they’d probably say, “Jesus was saying that if we listen to him, it’s like we’re building the foundation of our life on something solid but if we don’t, it’s like we’re building the foundation of our lives on sand & our lives will fall apart.” Perhaps you’re nodding along, but that’s not it at all. We miss the most important part.

The first word in that verse, translated “listen” in English, is the Hebrew word Shema. Pronounced “shuh-mah.” The idea isn’t just to hear or listen, though. The force of the word is to hear AND obey. According to Eugene Merrill, “’To hear’, in Hebrew lexicography, is tantamount to ’to obey,’ especially in covenant contexts such as this. That is, to hear God without putting into effect the command is not to hear him at all.” (New American Commentary – Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

I shared in the Multiply Extraordinary Prayer post about our prayer meeting on Sunday nights from 8pm-12am. We’ve been doing this almost every Sunday night for close to 2 years now & the impact of these meetings has been tremendous.

God loves to use “unlikely” people! Remember John & Peter? They were unlikely. Acts 4 records that as Peter & John were preaching to the people after healing a crippled man, they were confronted by the religious leaders because they were preaching about Jesus’ resurrection. This made the religious leaders very upset, so they arrested them & put them in jail. The next day the religious leaders brought them in and started questioning them. You’d think Peter & John would’ve been scared to death because these guys could have them killed. Instead it says Peter was filled with the Spirit & began to boldly challenge these leaders. I love what it says next.

As I’ve shared in multiple blog posts, we are continuing to pray about how to best leverage everything at our church for the sake of seeing a Disciple Making Movement (DMM). For the last year or so our weekends have centered around prayer, testimony, and training. We’ve had so many powerful & life-changing weekends since we first started using this format & it has given many people the opportunity to use their spiritual gifts and be involved in the gathering.

When you go out among the lost looking for persons of peace to see groups started, your dream is that the group would eventually come to Christ together, get baptized together, and form a church together. It seems like a far-off dream when you first get started because you realize you have to talk to so many people to get groups started & it takes quite a few groups being started to get a church planted. Even still, you begin to pray & dream about the day when you see your first church planted among previously lost people.

Roy, one of my DMM coaches, told me that I had to visit Hermie at Cityteam to see all that God was doing in California. We reached out to Hermie & he invited us to come & visit him in San Jose to see for ourselves what God was doing through their disciple-making efforts. It was an unbelievable experience!

I started the wigtakedmm.com blog in April 2018 to give the backstory behind our church’s journey toward movement. We had thousands of views in that first month and the overwhelming response gave us the idea to put much of this content into a book. After blogging for 4 months, I felt like we had enough content to justify beginning the book publishing process. We hired a great editor named Alee who has worked on several DMM projects for Thomas Nelson in the past and she helped guide us through the process.

I’m excited to announce today the release of my first book, From Megachurch to Multiplication, on Amazon in Paperback, Kindle, and Audible formats. That’s why I haven’t posted a blog entry in a few months. Now that the book project is complete, I will be regularly posting here again.

I love this question. Because I love the answer. I’ll get to that in a minute. I’ve asked this same question before. Usually it comes out of the mouth of someone who’s skeptical about the viability of movements in America. And that’s been me before.

I’m sure after reading all of these blog articles, you’re wondering, “Ok. This all sounds good, but where do I start?” I want to use this article to answer that question. I’m going to address two different groups of people. First, those that are on an American church staff. Second, those that aren’t.

When our church transitioned to DMM after our 10 Year Anniversary, we began to cast vision for ordinary people with normal jobs to begin to see themselves as disciple-makers & church planters. I knew what some people must’ve been thinking as I was casting that vision. Something like, “Easy for you to say. You’re paid by the church. Of course you can plant churches & make disciples. But not me. I have a job. I have to work. There’s no way I could do that.”

Prayer. Testimony. Training. Those are the 3 primary elements in our new weekends that are leveraged for DMM. I’d encourage you to read the Leverage article to understand why we revolve our services around those elements.

The S in PIPSY stands for Sick. Jesus told his disciples in Luke 10/Matthew 10 that when they entered a new area, they were to heal the sick & announce that the Kingdom of Heaven is near.

The second P in PIPSY stands for Prisoner. One of our goals at Experience Life early on was to start 10 campuses in 10 years. We were a multi-site church and wanted to try to add a new campus each year to reach out into a new area.

The I in PIPSY stands for International. About 15 years ago, while I was in college, my family took a class together called Perspectives. I think my Mom signed us up for it. It was me, my sister, my Mom & my Dad that took the class. The class was all about catching God’s heart for the nations. It was transformational for our entire family.

The first P in PIPSY stands for Poor. “Virtually every Church Planting Movement in the world today started among the poor.”

After casting vision to people for DMM & training them, what’s next? You send them out among the lost to places that Jesus has led them to go. What do you do when you get there?