In the old days, Team Expansion missionaries tried hard to start one new church every year. If it seemed like everything went perfectly, we were amazed if 100 people were attending at the end of the next 12-month cycle. We’d try to train one of the new believers to be the preacher — and then rinse and repeat.
Now it’s 2019. Everything has changed. What are the differences? Profound. We aren’t really focusing on establishing a church in a rented building as much these days. And we certainly aren’t building any more church buildings — at all. Every once and awhile we might build a training center (we’re still hoping to finish the training center at Emerald Hills; please join us in praying for God to raise up someone or some group with $800,000 to pay the entire campus off so we can tackle the next important and critical phase that will make it a true retreat and training center with overnight guest rooms for 100 people). But now we’re focused on multiplying disciples and churches as nimbly as possible. We’re always trying to weigh everything we do on the balance of reproducibility and through the lens of the key question, “Can it multiply?”
Learning From Each Other
On Tuesday nights, I’ve started a peer mentoring group (another name: peer coaching). We’re all working together to help one another apply these principles worldwide, beginning with the people we all know best, our friends and families, and growing out to the people we know least of all, the unengaged and unreached. We do this peer coaching group via Zoom video conference. (So you could join in — once you have participated in an introductory “DMM Experience” — which can be done in as little as a 4-hour class on a Saturday morning! If you or your church might be interested, contact us).
Next month, we stage a global event to bring together our workers from all around the world. (Actually, we ask them to attend one of these events at least once every three years, but this year we have over 200 coming. It will be huge!) Would you please pray with me about that gathering? Pray for the Connect Gathering to go smoothly (there are lots of logistics). Pray that all the details will be ok. Ask God to inhabit the entire conference in such a way that our workers are encouraged, educated, inspired, retrained, and sent out with a new level of commitment to their respective roles.
We love this org — and we love our workers. Pray that God will be glorified.
Want to read more about our goal? Read the book, More Disciples: A Guide to Becoming and Multiplying Followers of Jesus, by Doug Lucas. (All proceeds go to help pay for training new workers to multiply. Doug doesn’t take the money personally.)
