Disciple Making Movements – Part 1

Toward a Definition of Disciple Making Movements

“A movement is happening,” declares the subject line in a recent email. It doesn’t take but a few active brain cells to see the prolific use of this term, movement. Somewhere along the line the word movement has become the essential label for anything in the Christian world that represents itself as significant. This backdrop is critical because this article will attempt to define Disciple Making Movements (DMM). A definition is not an enviable task. Unlike a political story that operatives can “get out in front of” to control the narrative, this narrative is controlled by any and everyone who decides to use the term.

If I had the chops of a Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Levitt, I would have a logical and historical explanation of the liberal use of the word movement among Christian leaders, but I won’t even feign an attempt to join their ranks. I will suggest that there has always been a revivalist spirit among Great Commission-minded people. A longing for a Biblical experience that is “Acts” like – thousands added daily. Mix that with the writings of David Garrison about Church Planting Movements (CPM) in the late ’90s and you get fertile soil that sprouts the liberal and indiscriminate use of the term movement. 

This journey to a definition of Disciple Making Movements must necessarily take us through Garrison’s work with his fellow International Mission Board (IMB, Southern Baptists) cross- cultural workers. They were describing what they were experiencing because of their attempt to push Jesus’ message into difficult and dangerous places. 

Garrison, who has a Ph. D from the University of Chicago, penned the results of these discussions. They defined a Church Planting Movement as rapidly multiplying indigenous churches, planting churches that sweep across a people group or population segment.

It is important to remember that they weren’t promoting a new strategy, merely describing what they were seeing. The good news of Jesus was rushing across a people group in such a way that indigenous churches were planting indigenous churches in their ethnic environment.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the apparent fact that what they are describing is the tip of the iceberg. To get churches planting churches in population segments that were either closed or highly resistant to the good news of Jesus, you first had to have people pledging their allegiance to Jesus and living out his commands.

As Garrison pointed out in Church Planting Movements (2004), this wasn’t happening in one place; it was happening in many places with stunning numerical results and with a quality of spiritual maturity that caused new followers of Jesus to repeat the process. On the foundation laid by missionary leadership of people like Donald McGavran, George Patterson, and Keith Parks to name a few, they began to see the good news of Jesus set free from current constraints allowing this powerful truth to move rapidly through ethnic groups.

The results that Garrison and his tribe were claiming raised suspicion with many. They were undoubtedly “Acts” like results that many Great Commission-minded people longed for but had not yet seen. As results grew in credibility due to numerous sources surveying the different movements, so to did the adoption of methodologies that contributed to the viral spread of the good news of Jesus. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 

“For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”