AP

Disciple Making Movement DMM/CPM

Over the last decade or so there has been a lot of interest surrounding the evangelistic method going under various names such as ‘church planting movements’ (CPM), ‘Disciple making movement’ (DMM) ‘House2house’ or ‘Training for Trainers’ (T4T). These disciple making movements (collectively summarised as DMMs) often use a ‘Discovery Bible Study’ to evangelise people and recruit them to evangelise others and start other Bible studies or churches themselves soon after. These have predominately been used overseas on the mission field, but some people have suggested our church would benefit from this model here in Australia. At first glance, it sounds great! We should all desire many more people to come to Christ and many more churches being established. There are, however, some concerns with this movement.

DMMs advocate for small, simple and organic churches that can rapidly multiply in number. This idea is best described by The Rabbit and the Elephant: Why Small Is the New Big for Today’s Church by Tony Dale and George Barna. DMM house churches are like rabbits which are small and reproduce quickly. Established institutional churches are more like elephants. Their criticism of such churches is that they are large, unwieldy and not effective at making disciples. The governance and structures that define institutional churches such as buildings, offices, and pastors are eschewed in DMM in favour of organic, often independent and decentralised house churches. These are usually led by new converts. Examples used to justify this include shepherds at the nativity (Luke 2:16-17), the woman at the well (John 4:39), and the leper of Mark 1:45. While it is commendable that even new believers are encouraged to share the gospel, this approach to evangelism and church planting both fails to recognise stages in redemptive history and to follow Scriptural qualifications for church leadership.

These people who meet Jesus and immediately tell others about him are to be commended for their faith, but they lived prior to the birth of the church at Pentecost. At Pentecost, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, Jesus entrusted his disciples with the responsibility of growing his kingdom. He established an order and government for his church as revealed in Acts and the later New Testament. This still applies today.

Throughout the pastoral epistles there are qualifications for leading a church: this to be done by elders who should not be recent converts (1 Timothy 3:6) but who shouldbe upright, holy and disciplined (Titus 2:8). This raises a major problem with the DMM approach. In its commendable desire to see rapid growth and multiplication, there is little emphasis on training or developing the leaders in Christian maturity. Established churches invest much time and money in training ministers – which can be slow work – the intention should be that they will ‘rightly handle the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2:15).

God has given us qualifications for elders and those in pastor-teacher roles for the good of the church. Although DMMs may argue these new converts are not elders or pastors and they’re not leading churches in the conventional sense, they still do function as such. The marks of a church are often present with the word being preached or taught, and sacraments being administered. In the DMM model to be Christian is only about making disciples, and growing in maturity and cultivating a Christ-like character are not emphasised. In DMMs, obedience to the great commission is paramount. The new Christian is encouraged to simply to fulfil the Great Commission in obedience to Christ by evangelising and planting churches. Biblical Christian maturity by no means excludes evangelism but it extends well beyond it. To reduce the role of a Christian to sharing the gospel with others is to miss a wealth of other New Testament passages exhorting the believer to maturity (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:15-16, 2 Peter 3:18).

Another criticism of DMM is that is ahistorical. It assumes the institutional church is not sufficient to make disciples and an alternate model should be adopted instead. This ignores Scripture and the historical precedent. In recent centuries the church was at the centre of the First and Second Great Awakenings. We also see the multiplication of many Presbyterian churches throughout South Korea and Vanuatu in the 20^th Century as examples of many people coming to Christ through established churches. Why should we expect the 21^st Century to be any different? Our own confession teaches us that the church is the organisation to which Christ has ‘given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints’ (WCF 25.3).

In conclusion, DMMs may rapidly multiply the number of converts in an area but this model has some unbiblical, ahistorical and unPresbyterian features. What is most concerning about DMMs is perhaps that it appeals to the Western mindset of adopting whatever is novel, fast and easily reproducible rather than trusting God’s word and his methods. Any church looking to make disciples should consider how best to do this according to God’s word, his model of church government and how best to mature them once they’ve come to faith. These considerations are lacking in DMM which is why these movements may grow quickly but fail in the long term.

– David Hawken

For further reading:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/no-shortcut-success