The first way the Holy Spirit might lead a church to be involved with DMM is to pray for it and BLESS it when it begins to make an impact in your city. This path doesn’t require any kind of church-wide commitment to embrace DMM. This is simply understanding and supporting DMM in your area and not resisting it.

Since the release of our book, From Megachurch to Multiplication, we’ve had the privilege of training hundreds of pastors from across the country, and even some from around the world. One thing I constantly see pastors wrestling with is how to implement DMM in their churches.

Just as Jesus sent out people two by two (Luke 10:1), we try to send teams of two out among the lost aiming to make disciples.

Recently, many of our DMM Churches have been focusing their going out among the lost efforts on the county jail. Some had been working primarily in low-income areas & others had been visiting the sick, but the results out at the jail have been so outstanding that they couldn’t help but take notice. Then we found out that the team in the jail really needed more workers, so we all wanted to go where it was clear to us that God was already working.

Ongoing Coaching is one of the 7 elements in “raising the sails” for movement and it is vitally important! Without my regular coaching meetings with Stan and other indirect coaching I’ve received through books, podcasts, articles, videos, and conversations with DMM practitioners, I don’t think we’d be where we are today. Since “movements” are a foreign concept to many of us in the American church, and since most of us have never been a part of one, we need a lot of coaching in our pursuit of movement or else we won’t know what direction to aim.

The way we encourage people to Focus on God’s Word is through a 7-Question DBS Process of reading, obeying, and sharing the Bible. The question sometimes comes up, “Why these 7 questions?” This is often asked by folks who may not want to use the questions or may want to change them up and ask their own questions. They often don’t understand why using these 7 questions is so important, so I want to discuss that here.

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.”