Note from Ed Stetzer: We are in a series called, “Voices from the Global Church,” leading up to the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. I serve as the regional director for North America, and serve with a team of other regional directors. I’ve asked them to share what God is doing in their regions as we plan toward the next congress. You can also find more at the Lausanne site, including the State of Great Commission report here. Part 1 of the series, The Church and Mission in Europe Today: Changing the Narrative, is here. Part 2 is The African Church and Its Global Significance. Part 3 is A New Era in Global Missions Emerging From Asia.
Now we go to Australia with Julian Dunham:
Growing up in a conservative Christian Brethren church in Tasmania, Australia, I never saw a single person “get saved” from outside the core of seven or eight families. As the saying goes, the sign out the front said, “Whosoever will!”—but no one ever did.
In my teens, I risked attending a revival meeting at another church. And it turned my life upside down. I repented of my sin, got baptized, and started wholeheartedly following Jesus. It was the 1980s, and student ministry was prolific on high school and university campuses. We were discipled and did evangelism. I joined a discipleship group led by an older believer. I began evangelizing my friends, and several committed their lives to Christ.
At University, I continued evangelizing and discipling students. Afterward, I became a youth pastor in a large Baptist church, and I began to “train for the ministry.”
The Church Growth Movement
While my theological studies helped me, learning from church growth movement excited me much more. My bookshelves contained works from Lyle Schaller, Peter Wagner, James Engel, Carl George, Gary McIntosh, Bob Logan, George Barna, Aubrey Malphurs, Bill Hybels, Wayne Cordeiro, and Rick Warren. Here I saw an antidote to the stagnant church of my childhood. The church growth paradigm beckoned me to lead a well-organized, strategic, capable, and respectable church.
Without realizing it, I was moving from discipleship to a new and supposedly better paradigm: cell groups. The fruit seemed irrefutable. By the late 1990s, many “church growth” churches were growing, proving that attraction, vision, and meeting felt needs did work. We reached and baptized a lot of people—with one major caveat: most of the growth was from people transferring from other churches.
Despite the good intentions and hopeful possibilities, the new and supposedly better paradigm wasn’t producing the results it promised. I now see that all too often people weren’t being fully discipled or trained to make disciples. Training a small group leader was not always the same as making disciple-making disciples. At the time, I wasn’t wise enough to spot the difference.
Church Planting Movements
In the early 2000s, church planting resurged and new expressions of church emerged, focusing on different demographics that were seeking community and spirituality. Innovative models of ministry engaged the secular and spiritually curious. An influx of international collaborations and resources helped guide and enrich local initiatives. Some churches adapted to the rapid rise in immigration by embracing mono-ethnic congregations on the one hand or multicultural congregations on the other.
Despite a decline in adherence to organized religion, this era marked a significant expansion in ecclesiastical diversity and outreach strategies. At the same time, like the focus on church growth, the renewed and innovative focus on church planting didn’t fully embrace the vision of making disciples. While these church growth and church planting movements had good intentions and some wonderful fruit, they fell short of the main goal of making disciples. I believe that if they had focused on making disciples, church growth and church planting would have naturally followed. Thankfully, we’re seeing that course correction happen more and more today.
Disciple-Making Movements
A new vision for discipleship through disciple-making movements has emerged in our time. These movements intend to fulfill the church’s mission to make disciples, and they are finding church growth and church planting happen as a result. In contrast to the church growth and church planting movements, disciple-making creates fewer celebrities. Because many of the most fruitful initiatives of this movement happily fly under the radar, let me introduce you to four exciting developments.
First, City to City’s Ripple Effect is a course produced by Julie-anne Laird and written by Helen Bell. Ripple Effect disciples everyday Christians in relational evangelism, encouraging long term prayer for friends and family while being more open in friendship. The course trains gifted evangelists to serve their local churches, as well as helping ministry teams think through pathways to faith and creating a consistent culture of evangelism. Ripple Effect is bearing fruit, and more churches are joining into the training every week.
Second, Crossway’s Building Discipling Communities (BDC) strategy focuses on cultivating meaningful connections within small groups. Emphasizing relational depth and spiritual growth through regular gatherings, it encourages participants to share life experiences, study Scripture together, and apply teachings practically in their daily lives.
