What Are Some Problems with the Disciple Making Movement (DMM)?

What are some of the problems with Disciple Making Movements (DMM)?

There are a number of problems with DMM. First, I think we need to address the problem that we are defining a church in an unbiblical fashion. We're saying if you have a group of unbelievers together, studying the Bible and obeying it, that's a church, but these people haven't professed faith in Christ. They haven't been baptized into Christ's church. They don't have the sacraments being served there, they don't have a man who can preach the word there. They don't have elders and deacons. They don't have church discipline. There are a group of unbelievers doing some kind of Bible reading and discussion together. And we're calling that a church. That's one of the first and primary problems we have with disciple making movements. And having three or four or five groups of unbelievers cannot possibly be a church planting movement or a number of churches because you just have unbelievers gathered together in various places. We can't call that a church planning movement or a disciple making movement. So that's one fundamental concern.

The second concern I have with it is this notion of obedience-based discipleship. We're really handing out a false gospel that if you obey Christ enough you'll eventually come to faith in him. That is so contrary to what we believe. We believe in justification by faith alone. It's when you hear the word of Christ the the gospel of your salvation. You hear about who Christ is and what he's done for you and the spirit really gives you life and you believe in Christ and you're united to him through faith. That's where you're justified, declared righteous, forgiven for your sins, where you're united to Christ, and so growing in godliness where we call what we call salvation. It's not obedience based discipleship it's faith-based discipleship. That's what we really ought to be teaching in the Christian church.

Third critique I have of DMM is the notion that Western missionaries are participating in some kind of colonialism or or imposition by teaching. We're actually raising up missionaries to go and teach because these are the spirit-indwelled Bible trained people who are going to teach others the word of God. But what exists in the DMM world is this notion that the Holy Spirit will correct a group of unbelievers so that they don't go into error. And that's nonsense. We don't even see that in the church led by Elders appointed by Paul. We see those churches going into error. Paul's warning the Ephesian Elders in Acts 20 about the fact that false teachers will rise from our own midst. So the idea that Satan is not going to be actively at work sowing discord and sowing bad doctrine and sowing lies into that group of unbelievers is is just nonsense and it runs throughout the DMM circles.

Fourthly is this notion of speed. We sort of want our missions today like we want a cheeseburger: quick and with little cost. We want to get it as fast as we can, we don't want have to pay any real costs, we don't want to have to do the hard work of language learning. We don't have to do the hard work of suffering. We don't want to have to do the hard work of knowing these people and their culture and understanding it. And we don't want have to do the long hard work of tilling the soil and sowing the seed of the word of God and waiting for it to grow so that it might be brought to a harvest.