Opportunities for Traditional Churches

Quick Links: Overview • DBS • DBS Story Sets • Prayer • solo Bible study • LTGs

What might conventional churches have to do with New Testament-style movements without buildings, seminary-educated clergy, extensive programming, or budgets?

Ayche B.R., a movement catalyst in the Horn of Africa, notes that traditional Christian communities produced the first movement pioneers such as Peter and Barnabas, and still do today. God has used both multiple simple churches and established legacy churches to advance the Great Commission.

Some traditional churches turn their small groups (cell, home, etc.) into discovery groups so their members learn how to start new generations of groups in their own circles. These new generations don't join the traditional church, whose culture they may not understand or like anyway.

Experience Life Church in Lubbock, Texas suggests a five-point church involvement continuum for traditional churches who wish to support DMMs. Each step is more demanding and sacrificial than the one before.

Bless: Pursue the vision and don't resist but bless movement work in your area. Pray.

Release: Also release some of your 'radicals'—the restless 'troublemakers' that congregations tend to have but don't know what to do with—to be trained by a DMM trainer and sent as missionaries from your church to your city. (This can involve a 'two-rail' strategy of multiplying groups operating more or less independently of the traditional congregation, described in chapter 39 of this book.)

Hybrid: Also add a DMM track in your church that you publicly promote and invite people to join. (Shoal Creek Community church in Missouri is a 'hybrid' traditional and disciple-making church. It has DBS story sets that introduce both discovery groups and traditional church small groups to seven journeys from conventional cultural Christianity to disciple-making.)

Transition: Also leverage everything in your church to support the DMM vision.

Relaunch: Also send out everyone to plant DMM churches, or else join other churches.

In the end, what's decisive is submitting to God's particular vision for a church ... not presuming a one-size-fits-all approach, settling for a comfortable status quo, or jumping in without counting the cost. "No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed" (Luke 5:37).