What Are Disciple Making Movements (DMM)?
What are Disciple Making Movements (DMM)?
There was a lot of popularity around a thing called "church planting movements" in the early 2000s. Church planting movements were were this desire to see churches planted very rapidly, very quickly among people groups all across the world. They would talk about doing that at at a series of levels, using 2 Timothy 2:2. Paul teaching Timothy, that's your second stage or second level. Paul in 1 Timothy 2, "who's going to in trust these things to Faithful Men?," that's third. "Who will be able to teach others also?," that's fourth. If I have four generations then I have a movement. That's what was happening in church planting movements.
What began to occur though is many in missiological circles started saying that, "Well, um, the Great Commission doesn't say 'plant churches,' it says 'make disciples.'" And so we started talking about disciple making movements not church planting movements. Disciple making movements then began to bring sort of extra baggage along with it.
When a missionary is sent out to do missions in accord with the model of disciple making movements, or DMM, they're really gathering a team and they're praying that the Lord would help them find a "Person of Peace," a person who responds well to the gospel. That person of peace they really see as the church planter. So they go to a field and sometimes the way they find that person of peace is they pray and God shows them an object, like a red wheel, and they see a man near a red wheel. Or they give some sort of "word of affirmation" where they say "God bless you" and someone says "Thank you." Now they've responded positively, so there's your person of peace. They gather with that person of peace and that person of peace, who's an unbeliever, now leads a Bible study among a group of people. You as the missionary do not teach. That's a kind of Western imposition, a sort of colonialism. So, you give them a guide so that they can study the Bible together. And what they do is they read the passage, they decide what it means among them, and then they find a "principle to obey," so they all obey that principle. Each time they meet they obey another principle. The obedience to that principle is called "obedience based discipleship." They obey more and more principles until they come to full submission and obedience to Christ. Once they've reached that they've converted. Now they're Christian in full submission to Christ. They gather other little groups and, as one person from this group gathers another group, that's a second church. As another person from that second group gathers, they form a second and a third and a fourth generation. Once you have those four generations, you now have a church planting movement.
This is being done in the Muslim world. Sometimes these church planning movements, or these disciple making movements, are really being done around this notion of dreams that Muslims are having. There's a claim that a Muslim had a dream about Jesus and they gathered together with their friends and talked about that and they they somehow form the core of a church.
There's a lot of hard questions that aren't being asked about any of that. It's just being assumed that this is good, that this is a work of the Spirit. It's actually referred to as "a fresh wind of the Holy Spirit," and we need to join in with that that work and see it happen. But we're not really asking hard questions about "Has this Muslim renounced Muhammad? Has he denied the Quran as being the word of God? Has he left the mosque? Has he professed the triune Lord? Has he professed that Christ is God and man? Does he believe in the atonement on the cross and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and justification by faith alone?" We don't ask those questions, we just hear that he believes in Jesus, which...all Muslims do believe in Jesus. He believes in Jesus and he wants to read the "injil," or the gospels, which...all Muslims do want to read that. He's with a group of friends doing the same thing, might be still attending the mosque, might be still saying "Muhammad's a prophet," and we're calling that a "church." If they have four of them then we're calling it a "disciple making movement." And those churches don't have to have believers. They have to be people meeting to read the Bible together, interpreting it without any teachers, as unbelievers, and obeying it together.
That's a disciple making movement.