Conversations as you Go

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

Why the incarnation is the reason that we stand in wonderment and worship!

We jump into our second podcast with Rodrick. Here we discuss how to multiply workers for the harvest field.  To focus on Intentional training. This podcast is full of gold! 'A disciple is not a disciple until they become a disciple maker' & 'to reach a great harvest feed you must create a great harvest force.'

I encourage you to take notes and go back over some of these comments from a proven movement leader.

Dave is speaking from India to Rodrick, a movement leader who visited many of us in Australia back in 2012. 

Rodrick firstly gives us an insight into what is happening today sharing about the spiritual darkness across much of the nation. He then dives into some of the reasons why movement is sparking. He highlights three areas: 

The habit of long term prayer and fasting by exisiting believers. This models prayer to the next generation of disciples. 

The Holy Spirit raising up “sons of soil” (or first generation new believers) who pray and take ownership of their own people. 

The spontaneous flow of the gifts of the Holy Spirit amongst the grass-root harvest force. 

Rodrick also discusses the themes of the Word of God that are being shared across the movement. These include: 

Repentance from sin.

Promises of God regarding defeating the powers of darkness.

He gives insight into the western mindset of intellectual knowledge compared to experiencing God intimately. Intimacy with God, Roderick says, is what empowers. 

Roderick speaks about how everyone can witness from the ‘little' they know and have experienced. Telling others the extra details is often not helpful. Simply sharing our deliverance with others is enough. Christian witnesses are naturally super contagious.

Finally, Roderick encourages us to make the shift from being caught up in a program or relating to God in our brains to encountering God in our hearts. This he says will result in God’s anointing being increased in our lives, make us sharper and more effective.

We hear from Paul King in Middlesborough UK via a podcast done by Ben from Mission Somerset in England. As we join this podcast half way through, Paul is sharing how he is doing mission. There is so much here we can learn and be challenged to do as we listen to a sold out disciple maker share some great stories. Through the stories Paul shares, he emphasises the importance of being a 'family' and meeting each other’s needs on top of any other desire. Paul describes how their community is becoming really attractive to others. They offer an upfront spirituality which shows people how “God must be alright, since these people are alright”. 

“Some people God has brought to us”, Paul says. They meet others through simply being obedient to God’s lead. One of the key learns along the way has been for Paul to open himself up to not being afraid of other people’s lifestyle choices. He has also been willing to give 12 months to a radically different ministry approach compared to what he was previously doing as a pastor. 

Paul openly shares his need for financial and prayer support and some insights into kingdom giving. To partner with Paul and get in touch, check out www.libertymission.org.uk. 

The podcast finishes with Paul challenging and praying for us. He urges us to stop. To offer God what we have, not worrying about what we don’t have. And ask God to multiply it.

Roger joins us again to share how he has stepped back into New Zealand (NZ) amidst the many challenges facing the nation. He speaks about the key lesson of starting with a team and how thankful he is to be on mission with others. 

Some of the other building blocks Roger highlights to us include the importance of perseverance and patience when it comes to seeing movement in a western and often urban context like NZ. He emphasises how God is simply requiring us to obey him. He also describes the value God has on using ordinary people (priesthood of all believers) where everyone gets to play. 

Rog then gives us a special insight into what a prayer strategy has looked like as he and the team have followed God’s lead into a local town called Huntly. God has been saying to them, "the treasure is not buried very deep” in this place. They are discovering how getting God’s word as a group has been so vital. We listen to some of the stories Roger shares of the incredible welcome the team have received in this town since responding to God’s lead. 

Finally, Roger encourages especially any of us who are feeling weary. To persevere as God has often spoken to him many times over the years and press into God with others and 'not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up’ (Galations 6:9).

This episode we have the privilege of hearing the journey of Jesus calling Roger, our Praxeis New Zealand leader, to follow him. As a young man at age 17, God launched Rog into global missions. This saw him travel the nations of Asia with YWAM. We hear how God captured Roger’s heart as he started to reveal to him what he calls God’s ‘puzzle pieces’ along the way. 

Roger reflects on how one of the key missing pieces on his journey was in asking the wrong question. Instead of asking ‘how do we do church?’, Roger can now see the right question is ‘how do we make disciples?’. 

You’ll be enriched by the many stories along the way that Roger shares. From nations like Japan to Scotland and back home to New Zealand. Roger shares with us the highs and lows of what it has looked like for him to respond to Jesus’ call to ‘go’. 

He encourages us to keep obeying the call God has placed on our own lives. Even though there are stops and starts, God will continue to reveal the pieces of the puzzle of what he is doing. We are to simply remain dependent as we seek him and allow him to lead us and fill in the blanks along the way.