Disciple Making Movements happen as God's people align themselves with His will and disciple people into a relationship with Him in ways that allow them to do the same with their friends, neighbors, and family. We align ourselves with God by reading His Word and through prayer. Every single modern Disciple Making Movement was preceded and accompanied by massive amounts of people praying for long periods of time. What makes us think Movement in the United States and Canada will require any less? #disciplemakingmovements #contagiousdisciplemaking #church #churchplanting #pray #prayer #gospelmovement
In the beginning, tracking progress as you work towards Disciple Making Movements is difficult. You probably haven't found Spiritual Sharers or Persons of Peace. You don't have any Discovery Groups. You certainly haven't seen anything multiply. All the hard work without any visual progress can be frustrating, to say the least. Mitigating frustration - especially in the early stages of Movement - is one of the reasons I like to ground Metrics on tactics which are ultimately informed by our strategies. I like to set Goals around things I do and Desired Outcomes based on how I hope God will use my activity to build His Kingdom. (I talk about Metrics here. I talk about Goals and Desired Outcomes here.) 'Prayer'...
In our last webinar, Metrics that Matter: Measuring the Right Things for Movement, I talked about the importance of vision, clear definition, and strategic elements are for determining what to measure if you want to be part of staring Disciple Making Movements. I did not, however, talk about goals setting or establishing desired outcomes. I thought I'd take care of that here. Most goals aren't as helpful as they could be. I run into a lot of disciple-makers who set (or have set for them) goals like this: "In the next year, we will find 10 Persons of Peace and start 10 Discovery Groups." On the surface, this goal seems pretty reasonable. It hits every element of a SMART...
When we first started discussing metrics within our team, there was a lot of push back because in religious circles metrics are hard to measure. There was even some discussion as to if they were even biblical. However for me it was more like coming home... With a masters degree in education and having spent multiple years as a lead teacher, I am very comfortable with all sorts of metrics. A quick Amazon search just brought up over 23,000 books for teachers on assessment. Whereas there is very little agreement on how students, teachers and even schools should be measured, everyone agrees regular assessment is essential. It seems nearly impossible for people to consistently move towards a goal that isn’t being...
Not that long ago we were in a staff meeting discussing this months focus; metrics. The conversation was a little confusing and went on for some time as we all tried to grasp the difference between qualitative and quantitative metrics. As a group we had the most trouble with the definition of qualitative metrics. Quantitative metrics are a little easier as they are the results that we count in numbers. Example: the number of discovery bible groups started in a year, the number of people discipled, the number of new churches planted. These things are easily measurable and reportable. Qualitative metrics are a little trickier and there was a sense of mental wrestling as we tried to come to a...
