Making a Move

You describe yourself as a life-long student of ‘movements’. Why?

My core vision has always been about making disciples. I founded an organisation called MOVE which is a mission agency dedicated to multiplying disciples and churches. There we’ve been asking the questions: how do we create movements? How did Jesus begin a movement? What can we learn from him as a movement founder and how can we replicate that today? We now have workers all over the world engaged in front-line evangelism and discipleship leading to groups, communities and churches that can, and do, reproduce.

You’ve identified the characteristics of dynamic movements. Tell us about them. Movements are when significant multiplication happens. They are informal groupings of people and organisations pursuing a common cause. They don’t have members, but they do have participants. There are five characteristics that always go with a movement: white-hot faith, commitment to a cause, contagious relationships, rapid mobilisation and adaptive methods.

White-hot faith: the engine room of a dynamic movement and provides the motivation, energy and legitimacy to go and change the world. High levels of commitment to the cause are crucial - not usually to an institution but to a cause that they believe in. For good or for evil, history is made by people committed to a common purpose.

The idea of contagious relationships is that we are all just six handshakes away from everyone on the planet. Ideas, like viruses, spread from person to person and from group to group. Even in the digital age, contagious relationships are still the most important form of communication. The most responsive people to the gospel are those who have recently seen someone in their world come to faith. Whenever we see the Christian faith expanding exponentially, it’s traveling across networks of pre-existing relationships. We tend to focus on building quality relationships with a few. Jesus focused on connecting broadly and then through one responsive person, reaching households and villages. And that’s how we see the gospel spreading in Acts. 

Next is rapid mobilisation - ordinary people being released to go and change the world, raising disciples who will multiply disciples from the outset.

The last characteristic is adaptive methods: the best illustration of an adaptive method I can think of is the game of football. Football is the world’s game played by hundreds of millions and watched by billions. Why? I think it’s because you can drop a ball at the feet of a three year-old and she can start playing. It may take a lifetime of practice to master the game, but only an instant to begin enjoying it. Adaptive methods are simple, flexible and transferable. That’s one reason why Jesus taught by telling stories. A good story, like the Prodigal Son, can be told by anyone to anyone, even across the boundaries of culture and time. Wherever a movement is happening, we see churches sticking to their core belief and mission, but adapting the way in which they go about it. Sadly there are still loads of churches doing the opposite: changing their core belief and mission while sticking to the way they have always done things.

If I met someone with ‘white-hot faith’, what would strike me about them?

There’s a passion and an energy around them. People who change the world are passionate about what they believe in. We talk about crisis and process. Often there’s been a crisis moment in someone’s life - like Paul’s powerful encounter on the Damascus Road - where God really gets a hold of us, but people with white-hot faith also embrace process. They really build spiritual disciplines into their life in a day-by-day pattern.

And what does ‘rapid mobilisation’ look LIKE in everyday life? Often life can grow static and stagnant. How do we keep momentum?

We know what rapid mobilisation looks like - it looks like Jesus challenging a group of teenagers and young adults to come and follow him and to learn to do what he did. Jesus taught his lesson of faith to his disciples on a sinking fishing boat in the middle of a storm. If Jesus was a youth leader, he would have been fired by the church, but these disciples were going to learn by doing. Not in a classroom, the classroom is on the road. Jesus went after ordinary people and trained them on-the-job. There was theological content integrated with life and ministry. Jesus grew leaders and released them to go and change the world. You don’t get dramatic expansion of a movement if everyone is a paid professional. If anyone is paid, they are paid to pioneer new fields and mobilise others. Whether they are in New York or New Delhi, that’s what effective missionaries do.

What role can young people play in movements that change the world?

Everywhere we see disciple-making movements, we see young people leading. I know a young man of 19 who put his hand up to plant a church, but the church he was in said he was too young and inexperienced. So someone else encouraged him and when his church had about 500 people he handed it over and is now a CMS leader in New Zealand. That happens wherever you see movements. The key thing in preparing young people for this kind of work is to ask: what is ministry about? Read the Gospels. What did Jesus do and how do we do it today? Jesus connected with people, prayed for a need, and taught people how to follow him. Young people can begin to do that in their schools, universities and workplaces. They don’t need permission to do that - they already have authority from Jesus, they can just start doing it.

The end goal is to see people who can follow and obey Jesus, gathering them into disciple-making groups and then training other people to do the same. Encourage the teenagers you work with to start doing that in their world. If they don’t know where to start, then do some training with them to help them tell their story, and tell God’s story. Stories connect in this culture. They did in Jesus’ day, and they still do today. As they share their story, and do what we call ‘discovery Bible stories’ with their friends, things will begin to happen. We’re seeing growth wherever people are telling their story and leading simple Bible studies. In a youth group we need to build in simple contagious disciplines like this.

In our culture, THE WORD ‘OBEY ’ often jars, as people don’t like to feel controlled. What is the role of obedience in following Jesus?

In the Great Commission, Jesus says to go and baptise people and teach them to obey everything I’ve commanded. Disciples move from being ‘the crowd’ into disciples when they trust Jesus and follow and obey him. You learn to do that, you don’t begin being perfect in that, but keep learning to do what he says. Loving obedience is the heart of discipleship. It’s one step at a time. You read the Bible and ask: how can I obey what I’ve learnt? There’s always one thing, and then there’s always one more thing that Jesus will have for you. As young people begin to ask that question they will discover the freedom that obedience brings.

What do you see going on in the Church in the UK and what do you think are the main challenges we face?

The challenges are unique here - the greatest challenge I see is a lack of confidence in the gospel. We’re very preoccupied about how we fall short, how the Church falls short and how the Church is going to be ‘extinct in a generation’. We need to step back and realise that this is God’s thing. God’s mission is his responsibility and he calls us into what he is doing, to partner with him. When I read the book of Acts, I see the recurring phrase: ‘The word of God spread, multiplied and grew’. Wherever the gospel goes, lives are transformed, disciples are made and disciple-making communities - churches - are formed. We need to get out there sharing the gospel, telling people about Jesus. We don’t need to moan about churches. Churches will always struggle because they have people in them, but we do have something to talk about which is the gospel and how people can put their trust in Jesus and start following him as a disciple. Wherever we do that and follow it up with a disciple-making strategy, people are coming to faith all over the world. I think there’s a bright future for the Church if it can stop worrying about itself and start telling people about Jesus.