Blog

Written by Lisa Mason
on 31st January 2022

Last week’s training saw us learning the seven principles of a church planting movement... and the hand gestures to help us remember them! How many can you still recall?!

I think it’s safe to say that there’s a fair amount of soul searching going on within our team right now. This training is challenging and a lot of our traditional notions of what church planting looks like are being ignored and usurped by new priorities.

Recently, after attempting to explain the principles of DMM to a christian friend, their response was that this all sounded ‘worryingly radical’! We all recognise these principles and methods from the stories in our bibles but the challenge to live our lives by them is more disconcerting than anything I have ever experienced before.

Last week, Chris and I were given some words of advice and encouragement from a movement catalyst who has seen over a million people baptised since letting go of his traditional principles and choosing to live in obedience to the great commission.

He gave us three steps that we could take in order to see movement happen in the people groups that we are seeking to reach.

Firstly, go and read Matthew 9:16-17

Stop reading this blog post and don’t worry if you don’t make it back here again because you have too much to think about! Go on. Off you go.

Have you read it?

Okay, it was good of you to come back.

The main difference between new and old wineskins? The new ones are empty. They have yet to be filled. In order to become new wineskins we have to be emptied. We have to let Jesus strip away all of our traditional notions of who we are and what we do. This process is painful and challenging and lonely. But it is necessary in order to fully embrace the principles that we are choosing to live by.

The second step is humility. In order to be disciples who make disciples we need to let go of self-importance, for Chris and I this challenge has led us to repent of where we have been seeking to find our identity in what we do for the church. We have to invest ourselves fully in the lives of others, in order to see them become disciples of Jesus. This means letting go of a lot of things that previously gave us comfort and assurance.

Thirdly we are learning that whatever we read in the bible, whatever God tells us to do, we must obey. This is the scariest one of them all. And if I’m honest, I’m still not sure that I have even begun to be obedient when I look at the commands of Jesus and the way he lived his life or the lives of his disciples and the early church. But the challenge we have received is that the lost can only become disciples when the disciple maker is obeying what he/she is teaching.

There is a level of brokenness that we are all led to enter. It is the level of brokenness where we find the sweetness of Christ’s mercy and the riches of his grace. As we are broken, so we surrender all that we have held dear and as we surrender we learn to abide in God, to live for him and him alone.

Team, I know this is hard. This is costly. We are being stripped, refined, undone. Can I encourage you not to fight this process but to bring your pain, your questions and doubts to God? Stay in the discomfort and the unknowing and wait for him to speak. We are praying for you each by name. We are so thankful for you and trust that God will be with you as you step again into the unknown this week.