Disciple Making and Church Planting Movements

The missions world is starting to use the term Disciple Making Movement (DMM) more than Church Planting Movement (CPM), primarily because Christ commanded us to make disciples while He built His church. There are some nuances of difference between the CPM and DMM approaches to movement, but there is a lot of overlap in the basic Biblical principles.

The goal of both CPM and DMM is to plant the gospel, make disciples, and teach them to obey everything that Jesus commanded. As believers live out God’s Word, they will make other disciples, meet together as the body of Christ (church), and develop leaders who are released to make more disciples and plant more churches.

As part of our missionary training, Global Frontier Missions exposes students to church planting movement (CPM) and disciple making movement (DMM) principles and strategies. Several of our missionaries prefer 4 Fields methodology. Others use a simple, obedience-based discipleship process developed by veteran missionary David Watson called Discovery Bible Study (DBS). DBS is a reproducible, inductive Bible study where participants note what the text says by writing it down or repeating it orally several times. Then, they interpret the passage by answering questions such as, "What do we learn about God's character from this passage?" or "What are some sins, promises, examples (good or bad), and commands in this passage?". Application follows, using one or two “I will . . . ” statements to obey, so that the group holds everyone accountable. DBS closes with each person stating with whom they will share what they have learned, as a way to keep evangelism/disciple-making built into the DNA of the movement.