One of the couples on our team met and started discipling a woman (believer) in Disciple Making Movements (DMM) who was selling pupusa’s (a traditional Salvadoran dish) to make enough money so she could support herself in her own city and so she could travel to other countries to share the gospel and encourage other believers. This woman has many connections! This woman is so excited about DMM that she is now leading trainings in her own city, a nearby city, and even other countries. She now has several Discovery Groups going on in all of those cities and she is finding and training several leaders to do what she is doing. This is one of the things I love about DMM. It spreads because of God working through ordinary people. Because this woman is such a high level worker, we as a team invest a lot of our time and resources to support what she is doing.
I see it all the time, people hear about Church Planting Movements, get excited about it, and go off and train as many people as they can thinking that it is going to produce churches. More often than not it fails and people ultimately just quit and say it doesn’t work. Here is what I was taught and have learned first hand. Find and pour into the RIGHT people rather than training a lot of people. This is going to seem like a much slower process and it certainly feels like it in the beginning. Sometimes it has taken months and months just to find the right person to actually start seeing churches planted. But if you find the right people you are going to see churches started rather than training many people and over time not getting anywhere. Often it is the right person who finds more of the right people! It is important too, as I have stated before in previous posts that finding people who can actually relate to or even from a particular people group or community is vital to seeing churches planted. It is going to take a time of transition to think this way. Our ministry had to stop everything we were doing and start making strategies to find the right people. Often times we had to build new relationships with other people groups of believers and it takes time to build that relationship and trust.
How do you find the right people? First off, ask God to lead you to the right people. Sometimes it is difficult to know who the right people are. You have to use His guidance and discernment. It often feels like we are constantly sifting through people, but in our experience, when you find the right person, you will know. It is the few and not the many. You simply cannot invest all of your time and resources in everyone. You can give some of your time to many, but your main time should be focused on the ones who are going to produce. To find the right people, you have to have a strategy to find people and out of those people you have to have a strategy to find the right person. The right people are the ones who get really excited about DMM and go out and implement DMM. They usually have many connections. They start groups right away. They have the ability to find new leaders and train them. Simply put, they bear fruit. Not everyone is going to be this high level person, and EVERY SINGLE person in a Discovery Group is vital in the multiplication process, but it usually takes this high level person to get the process started.
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