Present Day Disciples

[This is Chapter 3 of Disciple Maker: Fulfill Your Destiny in the Disciple-Making Movement Launched by Jesus Christ, by Phil Bickel (© 2020). Free download at www.philbickel.com/store.]

Allow me to introduce to you the downtrodden, low-caste Bhojpuri people, who reside in northern India, east of Delhi and south of Nepal.  Dominated by neighboring religions, among the 100 million Bhojpuri in 1990, only 10,000 confessed faith in Christ.  That’s only 0.0001%!

Now meet David Watson, one of the missionaries who served among the Bhojpuri.  As a young man, David trained a handful of Bhojpuri men to be church planters.  They went out with high hopes, but before long several of them were killed.  News of their martyrdom left David dejected.  While home on furlough, he questioned: “Why return to India?”  Desperate for answers, he opened his Bible and asked God to show him how Jesus had made disciples.  As he read, God opened his eyes to things that had been “hidden” there all along.  

Encouraged and equipped, David Watson returned to India and taught Bhojpuri believers what he had learned from God’s Word.  Here is the gist of it.

1. Go into your community and serve your neighbors as opportunities arise.
2. Pray for God to lead you to a person of peace who is curious to explore God’s Word and will invite friends and relatives to join in the journey. 
3. When this group meets, have them focus on one Bible story or text.  Read it a couple times.  Then invite them to retell the Scripture in their own words.
4. Then have them discuss two questions: What does this Bible portion teach us about God?  What does it tell us about people?  

Then it really gets interesting —

5. Each individual asks: If this really is God’s Word, what is God telling me to do?  They each write one assignment that begins: “I will…”  Then, during the week they each obey what God showed them to do. 
6. Each one asks: With whom will I share this Bible passage during the week?  
7. At their next meeting they report what happened as they obeyed their “I will…” assignments, and as they told the Bible story to others.

Can you see how this approach imitates the way that Jesus made disciples?  Experiences and discovery hold priority over lectures and information.

So what happened?  In 1994, eighty Bhojpuri believers began to use this strategy.  They loved and served their Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim neighbors.  They prayed and found persons of peace, who invited relatives and friends to read and discuss the Bible together.  Although not every participant in these groups became a believer, many did.  Although not all of the Bhojpuri groups birthed new groups, many of them did.  After several years, the home groups had multiplied so much that Bhojpuri church leaders gave up trying to count the  burgeoning number of new disciples.  Today, Hindu researchers claim that Bhojpuri followers of Christ number at least 12 million.  If that figure is accurate, in about 25 years they grew from 10,000 to 12,000,000!

Widening Ripples

The miracle doesn’t end there.  The principles that the Lord taught the Bhojpuris in India have spread into the Middle East, Africa, and other regions.  David Watson reports that from 2005-2014, DMM was introduced in 33 African nations, resulting in 933,717 baptisms and 26,911 new churches.  During that same period, DMM began taking root in 12 Central and South American nations, plus 14 states in the USA.  Many true stories from these disciple-making movements are joyfully report in:

1. Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus by Jerry Trousdale (2012).  
2. The Father Glorified: True Stories of God’s Power through Ordinary People by Patrick Robertson and David Watson (2013).
3. Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery by David Watson and Paul Watson (2014).  

The largest disciple-making movement in the Western Hemisphere is in Cuba where a team of disciple makers planted more than 10,000 simple churches in just two years.  The atheistic Communist authorities are turning a blind eye — for the time being — because the crime rate in that region has fallen dramatically.  In fact, several of the primary disciple makers used to be underworld king pins and thugs!  

See for Yourself

What does carrying out the DMM strategy actually look like?  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at a powerful and informative 8-minute video entitled “Beyond: Church Planting Movements.”  It’s a production of Beyond, a mission agency dedicated to catalyzing church planting movements.  After viewing it, ask yourself:

• Could this be a more effective evangelism strategy than what I have used?  
• Would the methods I am using be enhanced and become more fruitful, if I linked them with DMM?  (One of the beauties of DMM is that it often works well with outreach strategies you are already using.)