Wondering how to start a Discovery Group? Listen to three fruitful practitioners in Mel, Steve (from North Queensland and PNG) and Mike (from Hong Kong). You’ll be practically equipped in learning how to start discipleship groups with lost people around you.

Here’s some keys these guys are learning as they see dozens of groups multiplying in various contexts around them:

Enjoy being trained by these catalysts who have seen movement take off from prayer meetings that have gone out of control!

We listen in to what God is up to through a fruitful church planter, Ben Taylor in England. You’ll be inspired by how God is multiplying disciples and churches through the powerful stories Ben shares. 

Ben encourages us to keep the gift of faith we have alive since this is what God wants to grow in us the most. 

As he sees demons cast out and brand new churches being started around him recently in Somerset, Ben reminds us that God’s vision is in fact a promise to us. 

Finally, Ben finishes by giving us some practical steps we can take to keep our faith fresh as we pray and fast during our 40 days of prayer and fasting as a Praxeis community. 

In this episode, one of our leaders, Gabi from Hungary shares about how she is multiplying leaders in Eastern Europe. Focusing on the Roma Gypsy people, Gabi and her team are being swept up in God moving powerfully amongst these people. And all in the midst of the Ukrainian war.

Since being invited to help see newly baptised gypsies discipled from Carpathia (in Ukraine), Gabi shares some of the keys and tools she’s been learning to see movement go viral and take off.

Some of the keys have been:

Gabi highlights how simplifying and contextualising the Praxeis My World* training has helped leaders shift their mindsets. The Discovery Bible Study method has also been taken and modified to fit the Roma Gypsy context.

As we listen to Gabi, we hear how a leader knows how to use and contextualise tools to help resource a movement.

Gabi ends the podcast by encourages us and praying for us. She reminds us how Jesus is the Lord of the harvest. Movement is his vision. Therefore we can be confident in him. He will show us the next steps to take. We must follow him on his terms and in his time.

* to find out more about the Praxeis My World training, contact Vicki at [email protected]

In this podcast we talk to Lynda Wilson who leads us in a discussion about multiplying harvest prayer. She briefly talks about her rich history in church and prayer. Then leading us through an overview of scripture Lynda shares her journey of understanding this from a scriptural point of view. Some key pickups are

Prayer is part of the going

You multiply the harvest, you will multiply the prayer

You can’t do it alone

Prayer helped the early church with opposition and trials

Prayer isn’t seperate from discipling people

And a bunch more practical insights!

So what do we actually do once we find a person of peace? In this, our last episode of David Watson’s training, we are walked through some of the coaching and mentoring questions we can use when starting a movement. David emphasises how important it is to focus in on coaching the right people who are starting to facilitate Discovery Bible Studies (DBS). 

David calls the facilitator of a group the first level of leadership in movement. He describes how all the steps of the DBS are vital to form healthy churches. It is the coaches job to develop the facilitator in the skills to form these groups through debriefing how the DBS went.

But debriefing is so much more than just coaching. Mentoring is also involved where character development takes place. David takes us through six key questions a mentor can ask. These are: 

Finally, David encourages us to give this a go. Coaching a person of peace to facilitate a DBS instead of leading a group ourselves is a big paradigm shift for many of us. We need to be willing to fail and learn from our mistakes when seeking to reach all sorts of lost people. But we need to take the first step and coach someone to start a DBS. 

Resources: 

David shares with us a number of counter intuitive or paradoxical statements his church planters have developed when it comes to seeing movement. These include: 

David tells us the importance of moving on when people are not responding, remembering its not our job to convince people. He shares how Christ is the end, not the start story, highlighting how we don’t usually fall in love with a stranger. 

He describes how discovery is key since people can only own what they discover. David also speaks about how all four parts of the Great Commission are necessary for replication: 

Finally, David finishes this episode by challenges us to stop sinning by missing the target. We need to be aiming for God to show up and show his glory even in the hardest of places. Its often here that we will yield the greatest results! 

Resource: 

Engage Africa – Paradigm Shifts

David shares with us about finding People of Peace (POP) after sharing the Engage Africa ‘Person of Peace’ video. He gives us some characteristics to keep in mind when identifying POP within communities. We also hear of a story of a Person of Peace before David explains the difference between group and personal or mass evangelism. 

Groups are vital when it comes to movement, however David tells us that we are likely to see 8-10 groups fail. Despite this, groups do work since they replicate more groups of disciples. 

Persons of Peace are the key to seeing group evangelism. David trains using a Person of Peace game, highlighting important learnings along the way. These include how finding a Person of Peace is our single, most important prayer need we have when starting movements since it is an act of God. He also mentions how we need to be conspicuously spiritual when identifying a POP whilst connecting with a community. 

Resource: 

Engage Africa – Person of Peace video

This episode, David talks about the core values behind the Discovery Group process. He makes special mention of how we need to be builders of communities in our modern urban contexts since there is often a lack of community. He also emphasises the need for participation and no experts in the group for movement to happen. 

Every culture, David says, has to develop its own response to love, care and worship in their own context. This allows church to form from the Discovery Group process. 

If you already know about the Discovery Group process, allow David’s insights into the DNA behind it perhaps refine how we are going about starting groups around us. Something he mentions might just help you get unstuck. 

Resources:

The Core Values of a Discovery Group

Engage Africa – Discovery Bible Study video

David Watson continues our summer series on starting a DMM. This episode, he starts by reflecting on the importance of prayer after showing us the ‘Prayer and Fasting’ clip from the Engage Africa video series (we recommend watching this before or after listening to this week’s episode). 

Listen to David walk through one strategy of setting up a prayer network that can model prayer to others. This involves making a list of 30 people and allocate each to a day in the month. Then each day each person is contacted and is offered prayer. This is repeated each month. After a period of time each person is encouraged to ring and pray for 30 people per month too. A prayer network is rapidly formed that can contain thousands of people. 

Establishing and maintaining prayer networks like this for each area that we are wanting to see movement in is our first job. However personally we also need to be praying, seeing it more and more as a lifestyle that we deeply value alongside scripture and disciple making. 

Resource: 

Engage Africa – Prayer and Fasting video

In this first of six episodes, we rewind the clock to April 2016 when we first had David Watson come visit Australia and train us in starting a Disciple Making Movement (DMM). 

In this episode, David introduces the importance of the role of a coach in DMM. He begins by sharing with us how we need to have our favourite Christian beliefs challenged to embrace movements since everyone who wants to be a Christian is already a Christian. Our job is not to make people like our Christianity, but to help them fall in love with Jesus. 

Reflecting on the average costs Western Christianity, David identifies how our role in DMM must shift so that we become coaches not players. We need to have a higher tolerance for error and releasing the need to control. People on the front edge of movements are different to those on the inside. DMM only happens if we stop trying to lead and instead begin coaching movement. 

Finally, David describes how every church is essential. He hows how we can start a second track within our established churches for people keen to practice DMM principles. Others from the original track might then be inspired to join in once there is fruit. 

David ends this episode by challenging us to think about what we will need to give up to see movement. 

Resource: 

‘Contagious Disciple Making’ – David and Paul Watson