For more than 50 years, Disciple-Making Movements (DMMs) and Church Planting Movements (CPMs) have represented one of the great missiological recoveries of the modern missionary era.¹
They have helped restore biblical convictions that had been neglected in significant sectors of the church: that every believer can make disciples, that multiplication is God’s pattern for advancing His Kingdom, and that indigenous leaders should lead indigenous movements.
Along the way, they have reignited the church’s passion for prayer, renewed its sense of urgency for participation in the mission of God, and demonstrated the extraordinary fruit that results when disciples make disciples and churches multiply.
As David Williams observes:
“At the heart of DMM thinking lies a passionate desire to see many people come to faith in Jesus Christ. This urgency is reflected in the language of ‘rapid multiplication’ and ‘quick spread’ used to define these movements.”²
The fruit speaks for itself. Millions have come to Christ. Hundreds of thousands of churches have been planted across the globe.
The question is not whether DMMs and CPMs remain effective. They clearly do. Rather, the global realities of the 21st century make it imperative that we build upon their remarkable success by recovering an equally biblical and indispensable ecclesiological truth that has too often been assumed rather than intentionally pursued.
Beyond Multiplication
DMMs and CPMs answered one of the defining missiological questions of the late 20th century: How do we make disciples and plant churches that multiply?
The defining ecclesiological question of the 21st century is equally urgent: What kind of churches are we multiplying?
Think about it:
- Disciple-making multiplies disciples.
- Church planting multiplies churches.
- Intentional reconciliation forms healthy multiethnic, intercultural, and economically diverse churches.
Each is essential. Together, they represent complementary expressions of the church’s mission, not competing priorities. Without all three, our understanding and practice of the church’s mission remains incomplete.
To be clear, the New Testament’s vision for the local church extends beyond multiplied disciples. It anticipates reconciling churches in which people from diverse ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds are united as one body through the cross. Indeed, Paul does not merely celebrate that Jews and Gentiles have individually found salvation. He declares that Christ has destroyed the dividing wall of hostility, creating one new humanity that is joined together as “a holy temple in the Lord… being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:14–15, 21–22).
The miracle is not only that people from different backgrounds are reconciled to God through Christ. The fullness of the miracle is revealed as they are reconciled to one another. Together, they become a visible and compelling witness to the reconciling power of the gospel, providing the world with a foretaste of the Kingdom in which people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation worship Christ as one (Revelation 5:9; 7:9).
For too long, the prevailing assumption has been that as people come to Christ and mature in discipleship, reconciliation across human differences will naturally emerge in the churches they plant. Experience suggests otherwise. Nearly twenty years ago, Dr. Gary McIntosh, President of the Church Growth Network, explained:
“Rather than expecting nonbelievers to change their biases prior to accepting Christ, leaders in the Church Growth Movement felt that after people became believers in Christ and were filled with the Holy Spirit, they would grow in their understanding that churches should become multiethnic wherever possible. This lofty hope, however, has gone largely unfulfilled.”3
Like disciple-making and church planting themselves, reconciling churches that are multiethnic, intercultural, and economically diverse do not emerge by accident. They flourish where they are intentionally cultivated.
To be sure, many churches already reflect demographic diversity. Yet diversity alone is not the biblical objective. Too often, diverse people are expected to assimilate into the culture, leadership, values, and practices of a dominant group. Far less common are churches intentionally structured to accommodate, empower, and share leadership responsibilities across cultures as one body in Christ.
Intentional Reconciliation
By intentional reconciliation I mean the deliberate formation of churches in which men and women of varying backgrounds walk, work, and worship Christ together as one. The goal is not demographic diversity as an end in itself, but churches that intentionally pursue and embody the reconciling purposes of God, whether from their inception or from the moment this vision is embraced.
In partnership with the Holy Spirit, the local church should intentionally pursue what Christ accomplished on the cross: the reconciliation of those whom the world has long kept apart. This vision does not reject contextualization. It completes it by giving it a larger ecclesiological horizon, recognizing that the goal is not merely contextualized disciples, but healthy multiethnic and intercultural churches that visibly display the power of the gospel to transcend the distinctions of this world that otherwise divide us.
This vision must be sown from the moment of conversion, cultivated through basic discipleship, reinforced in leadership development, and reflected in churches that are planted and multiplied. Healthy churches rarely become what was never planted in their DNA. This is not a departure from disciple-making. It is its ecclesiological fulfillment.
Around the world, many churches remain divided by tribe, ethnicity, language, caste, economics, or history. Some of these realities are understandable. Language matters. Geography matters. Context matters. Homogeneous church planting may be an appropriate starting point where language, geography, persecution, or culture require it. It should not become the assumed destination if the collective church is to advance a credible and compelling witness to the gospel.
Some may argue that if reconciliation is truly God’s will, it will naturally emerge wherever disciples are made. The same could be said of disciple-making and church planting. Yet no movement leader would conclude that God’s sovereignty eliminates the need for intentional disciple-making or church planting. Rather, throughout Scripture God accomplishes His purposes through the faithful obedience of His people. If Christ intentionally created one new humanity through the cross, then we should be equally intentional about forming churches that visibly reflect that reality.
To be clear, this reconciliation is not limited to ethnicity or culture.
Wherever the fall has erected dividing walls, the gospel calls the local church to become a living demonstration that those walls no longer define our identity. In some places those walls are ethnic or linguistic. In others they are tribal, caste-based, economic, political, educational, or generational. Even within an otherwise homogeneous tribe or village there are often those with influence and those without, those who own land and those who work it, those living with disability and those pushed to the margins. The particular walls vary from culture to culture, but the mission remains the same.
Christ broke down the dividing walls. The church is called to make that reconciliation visible.
Ultimately, it’s a question of gospel credibility.
A Compelling Witness
Consider how our ecclesiology might appear to those who do not know Christ. In the ancient world, every nation was understood to have its own gods. The Egyptians had theirs. The Hittites had theirs. The Babylonians had theirs.
When Christians remain unnecessarily separated along ethnic, tribal, or linguistic lines, an outsider might reasonably perceive something similar:
- Every tribe has its church.
- Every ethnicity has its church.
- Every language has its church.
To the watching world, then, perhaps each has its own god. Yet we proclaim one God who loves all people and one Savior who died to make us one. When the visible expression of the church fails to reflect that proclamation, the credibility of our gospel witness is diminished.
The New Testament presents a radically different vision.
The Church is not merely a collection of homogeneous local congregations existing peacefully alongside one another. It is the visible demonstration that Christ has already accomplished what the world still believes impossible.
An increasingly diverse and interconnected world struggles to find credible a message of God’s love for all people proclaimed from unnecessarily separated pulpits and pews. Our collective witness is strengthened whenever the church visibly embodies the reconciling power of the gospel it proclaims.
Today, more than at any other time in history, the opportunities for greater reconciliation have expanded dramatically. Migration, urbanization, refugee movements, and globalization have brought people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation into unprecedented proximity. Increasingly, our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and cities reflect the diversity of the nations themselves. Local churches therefore have an unprecedented opportunity not merely to proclaim reconciliation, but to embody it. If our ecclesiology does not keep pace with this reality, we risk offering a fragmented witness to a world searching for hope, belonging, and peace.
The book of Acts reveals a clear trajectory. The church begins in Jerusalem, finds a fuller expression of its reconciling identity in Antioch, and points ultimately toward the gathered Church of Revelation, where people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation worship Christ as one. Wherever contextual realities genuinely prevent that expression, such circumstances should be regarded as exceptions to be navigated rather than the ideal to be embraced. In doing so, our churches visibly proclaim God’s redemptive purpose to create one new humanity in Christ.
To be clear, this is not a Western strategy to be exported. It is a biblical vision to be faithfully embodied within every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.
The Next Great Recovery
The 20th century witnessed a remarkable recovery of intentional disciple-making and church multiplication. The 21st century must build upon that recovery by giving equal intentionality to reconciliation. Indeed, the next great advance of global missions may result from planting and multiplying churches that increasingly become living demonstrations of Christ’s prayer in John 17: “that they may all be truly one… so that the world may believe.”
When a world at war sees a people at peace, it will run to the local church, not from it.
NOTES
1 “Disciple Making Movements (DMMs) have gained significant attention in recent years as a missional approach aimed at rapid and widespread gospel growth. These movements, rooted in the tradition of Protestant missiology pioneered by figures like Roland Allen and Donald McGavran, emphasize the multiplication of disciples who make disciples, leading to the rapid planting of indigenous churches.” David Williams: Disciple Making Movements: Applying a Faithful Balance. See https://lausanne.org/global-analysis/disciple-making-movements-applying-a-faithful-balance (September 2024).
2 Ibid.
3 Mark DeYmaz. Building a Healthy Multi-ethnic Church: Mandate and Commitments of a Diverse Congregation. (San Francisco: Wiley, 2007, p. 62).
