You are probably reading this because you heard we’re moving to DFW (Dallas Fort Worth in Texas) & you’re curious to hear the story of how God led us to this point. Well, I’m glad you’re here. It’s been an exciting journey!

Mission Frontiers is a magazine dedicated to fostering and supporting a global movement to establish indigenous and self-reproducing Church Planting Movements among the 7,000+ unreached people groups of the world.

In March of 2020, I was invited to give a series of talks at the Multiply DMM Summit in Chicago. Unfortunately, due to coronavirus, the event was canceled. We were able to capture the first plenary on video and I wanted to share it with you here.

It’s probably not an overstatement to say that the coronavirus has rattled the American church. Pastors around the country are asking questions they probably never expected to be asking a few months ago.

The fifth and final way I want to discuss that the Holy Spirit might lead a church to be involved with DMM is through relaunching as a network of DMM churches. When I say final way, I only mean it’s the final way I’m going to discuss. I’m sure there are many other ways the Holy Spirit might lead a church to be involved, but these are the 5 that I’ve come to understand. I’ll trust the Holy Spirit to guide you and your church into exactly what he wants you to do.

The fourth way the Holy Spirit might lead a church to be involved with DMM is through a “transition” to a singular DMM focus. Instead of having two visions you’re running alongside one another, like with “hybrid,” you decide to make DMM the primary vision. While you may continue to do many of the things you’ve done before, like weekend services, you leverage everything in the church to help accomplish the primary vision of catalyzing a movement in your city/region.

The third way the Holy Spirit might lead a church to be involved with DMM is through a hybrid approach. One of my friends and mentors, Roy Moran, wrote a whole book on this topic called Spent Matches. I highly recommend you buy and read it. It’s fantastic!

My guess is that after reading the Bless post, you probably want to do more. You know you can bless & pray for movement work in your city but you’re wondering if there’s a more significant way your church can be involved. That leads us to a second way your church can be involved with DMM.

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.