by Bobby Harrington:
Dear Discipleship-First Tribe,
We want you to become the disciple maker God intends you to be. For those of you who are church leaders, we also want you to develop and lead effective disciple-making churches. We are praying that the fires of disciple making movements will spring up everywhere, especially in our primary context, the United States.
There are various definitions of a disciple making movement. In a blog post earlier this year, Disciple Making Movement – a History and a Definition we discussed different definitions. Here is a short definition:
A disciple making movement is found when everyday disciples are almost all making disciples through at least four generations, with at least 100 groups, in a short period of time (3-4 years) and there are at least 4 different/separate streams of these groups (each moving to four generations resulting in at least 100 groups) and these streams consistently multiply into new churches.
I have yet to find clear samples of disciple making movements in the United States (or Canada for that matter), although there are some early sparks.
Do you want to know how many of these are all over the world, though? Continue reading to learn more about disciple making movements around the world and what you can do about it in North America.
Continuing from the email . . .
Missionfrontiers.org keeps track of these movements and they say that there are now over 950 disciple making movements around the world.
I urge you to be aware of disciple making movements. My research has included in-depth time with people like Roy Moran and Harry Brown from New Generations, James Forlines from Final Command, and movement leaders like Shodankeh Johnson, who lives in Africa (and is speaking at our Global forum in Nashville in November). You can visit Missionfrontiers.org to better understand and follow disciple making movements.
To help North American church leaders better understand the state of disciple making in North America and what may be involved in facilitating disciple making movements here, Discipleship.org has partnered with Exponential to complete a national study on the state of disciple-making churches in the United States.
Specifically, we are using a five stage metric to assess churches. Once completed this fall, we will have a picture of Protestant churches in America.
We will also be announcing opportunities for our Discipleship-First Tribe to gather together to learn more about disciple making movements in the next month.
Until that time, please join with us by prayer and your best efforts to focus on disciple making. Our culture is badly drifting. There is nothing more important than asking God for a national revival and revolution in Jesus-style disciple making that manifests itself in disciple making movements all over the land.
For King Jesus,
Bobby Harrington, Point Leader, Discipleship.org
Join us at our National Disciple Making Forum!
November 7th- 8th in Nashville, TN
New Blogs
“Do you want to learn about the seven essential marks of a disciple?”
by Bobby Harrington
“Two Rules for Conflict Resolution in Discipleship Small Groups”
by Jim Putman
“Managing Your Relationships”
by Impact Discipleship Ministries
New Podcast Episodes
S6 Episode 54: Danger of Progressive Christianity (David Young and David Hunzicker)
S6 Episode 53: How We Disciple People (Dave Clayton and Sydney Clayton)
S6 Episode 52: Discipleship Multiplication Movements (Brett Andrews and Bill Smith)
Photo by Michael Shannon on Unsplash
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Source: Searching for Disciple Making Churches and Movements in North America?