Where Did Movements Come From Anyway?
A history of the development of disciple making and church planting movements
“I don’t know how it happened.
It's like how some talk about life emerging out of this chemical swamp somewhere by chance. It's almost a bit like that idea.
Something was fermenting among 6 to a dozen practitioners, and what popped out was the movements paradigm.”
That’s what Steve Addison said to me a few months ago. I was interviewing him for the missionary biography of Bill and Susan Smith that I’ll be releasing later this year, and we got to talking about the development of the disciple making and church planting movement paradigm.
Steve has researched movements more than almost anyone else in the world and he couldn’t pin down exactly where movements came from. The paradigm seemed to pop out of nowhere in the 1990s.
It hit me while I was talking with Steve that as I’ve been writing this book, I’ve gathered a wealth of knowledge from several practitioners who were there when movements emerged. I realized that I could answer the question: where did movements come from?
To answer that question, I’ll need to talk a lot about Bill and Susan Smith.
Nothing New Under The Sun
To be clear, I mean to answer the question, “where did the modern movements paradigm come from?” There have been many Church Planting Movements throughout the history of Christianity. The Forests in the Seed briefly mentions several, but here’s a short list of historical movements:
John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and the Methodists
Shubal Stearns, John Gano, and the Southern Baptists
Ko Tha Byu, Adonirum Judson, and the Karen
Peter Waldo and the Waldensians
The book of Acts
I’ll go into depth on these, and more historic movements, in about three books from now, but in the meantime, I’ll leave it up to you to research these movements. I wanted to mention them to point out that the Holy Spirit has always been about multiplying disciples and churches.
The modern notion of CPMs and DMMs is one of the most important influences on modern missions, but don’t think the Smiths or anyone invented the paradigm out of nowhere in the 1990s.
Voices From the Past
Bill Smith is a data junkie, and studied the movements above and many other mission thinkers to learn how to be a more effective missionary. Through this, the great cloud of witnesses from throughout history contributed to the development of movements.
Acts
Bill and Susan started studying Acts in the 1970s when they hit the mission field in Thailand. They, along with their Bangkok Urban Strategy (BUS) team, talked about what they learned, and asked each other, “how can we see this today?”
They were convinced that if they did what the New Testament church did, they would start to see what the New Testament church saw. Leaders like Peter, John, and Paul became models for them on how multiply churches.
Writers
Many writers penned concepts that would seep into the movement idea.
The early 20th century Anglican missionary, Roland Allen, foresaw the idea of church multiplication in his books The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? He never saw a movement himself, but wrote about the need to have fully indigenous churches where all believers took on the task of making disciples.
George Patterson struggled against religious tradition in Honduras in the mid-20th century. He saw these historic church practices as a hinderance to the ongoing mission of God and the multiplication of His church. Patterson advocated for simplicity in discipleship and church so that it could be easily reproduced. He also emphasized the need for obedience-based discipleship to help new believers grow and be transformed in Christ.
At the same time as Patterson, Donald McGavran, was articulating the need for people movements. In his view, missionaries should try to reach whole communities and not just individuals so the new believers could remain in their culture instead of being extracted from it. This way, they could continue to spread the gospel to their friends and family. McGavran also articulated the Homogeneous Unit Principle. This controversial principle stated that people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.
Brother Thom and Carol Davis noticed the concept of the Person of Peace in Luke 10 and saw that many times in the New Testament, whole households or “oikos” would come to Christ. They began spreading around these ideas in the 1980s and 90s.
All of the concepts from these believers are essential components of the movement paradigm today. Bill and Susan learned from these people, applied their concepts and spread it to others.
The Most Important Question
When Bill Smith coached other missions leaders, he would repeatedly ask the same questions to keep them focused on the vision that God had given them. Questions like, “How many of your people will hear the gospel today?” and “if you do this activity, how many of your people will get saved?”
One question topped all the rest as being the most pivotal: WIGTake. As in “What’s it gonna take?”
In the 1970s, when the Smiths were in Thailand, they and their team asked, “What’s it gonna take to reach all of Bangkok?” This was paradigm shattering for most missionaries at the time who instead focused on “what are some ministry activities I can do?”, or “how can I plant a church?”
The starting points of each perspective were at opposite ends of the spectrum. The WIGTake question started with the end goal in mind, and focused on reaching a large segment. The latter questions started with where a missionary was right at that moment, and focused on what was right in front of them.
The Smiths and their Bangkok Urban Strategy team, like Bill Beckman and Judson Lennon, took this WIGTake question seriously. They would only engage in activities that would help them reach the millions in their city, not just the few around them.
The WIGTake question forced them to do city-wide data gathering and research, extensive mobilization of believers, and they wouldn’t do any mass evangelism campaigns unless they had a plan to follow up and start churches with new believers.
Bill and Susan were asked to help with many ministries that could not be replicated by locals, but they refused. They only wanted to do something that could be reproduced by the Thai people.
They never saw a movement in Thailand, but they carried the WIGTake question with them as they trained others to reach UPGs numbering in the millions. In time, they would learn that the best way to answer the WIGTake question was through a movement of multiplying disciples and churches.
The Environment
A lot of the reason the Smiths did not see a movement in Thailand was because all of the churches were above ground, and there were no restrictions from the Thai government. This is counterintuitive, but it’s true. They needed to move to a country that was hostile to Christianity to develop movement principles.
In Thailand, they could use attractional events for evangelism and invite people back to a church building. They saw thousands of people come to Christ, helped start several churches that were led by Thai pastors, and saw some multiplication. To most missionaries, this would constitute a success, but not to the Smiths. The strategy did not reach the bulk of lostness in Bangkok or Thailand because it was too complex to reproduce rapidly.
When they shifted to China, almost everything they did in Thailand was illegal, and ineffective. The environment forced them to be innovative. These innovations had to be simpler and more relational because they couldn’t be event-based or attractional.
They didn’t have to start from scratch though because the Chinese church had learned how to exist exclusively in house churches.
The Chinese Christians had been isolated from the western world and were forced underground by the Communists for decades. They followed Christ in villages, towns, and cities where they were poor and could only meet in homes. By the time the Smiths arrived in the late-1980s, there might have been as many as 1,000,000 house churches in the country.
Bill and Susan had many Chinese friends to learn from as they sought to reach the Zhuang, a UPG that numbered in the millions. They asked the WIGTake question for their new ministry and saw a gap. Even though they learned from the past and from the local Christians, they would have to be innovative if they wanted to see the total evangelization of the Zhuang.
100 Options
David Barrett, a renowned researcher who wrote the first World Christian Encyclopedia, was the first person to point the Smiths to the Zhuang in 1987. He challenged them to find anything they could on this people group. A few months later, Bill came back to Barrett with boxes and boxes of documents about the Zhuang that he had photocopied. Bill took this a step further and came a binder containing 100 Options for evangelizing the Zhuang.
Bill thought of ways to get the gospel to the Zhuang through sports, medical care, businesses, radio, the Jesus Film, and much more. Barrett was astounded. This research helped convince the IMB to send the Smiths into China at a time when they (and every other mission agency) never sent anyone into restricted countries.
They lived in Hong Kong, but they needed to reach the Zhuang who were in southern China. Because of this, they began implementing the 100 Options and much more as non-resident missionaries (NRM).
As the IMB mobilized more NRMs to restricted countries, Bill supervised many of them. He trained them to come up with 100 Options too. As they all began to implement the ideas that ranged from the mundane to the crazy, they saw what worked and what didn’t.
Within a few years, there were one hundred NRM teams that had been taught the 100 Options. Most didn’t see much fruit. Maybe only a church a two. But a few started to see growth and multiplication.
The NRMs who were interested would get together and discuss what they were learning. This community of practice sharpened one another, and as the years wore on best practices emerged.
Bill is an extrovert off the charts, so whenever he saw something that was working, he’d spread it around to everyone he talked to. In this way, many missionaries in the IMB and other agencies began learning how to research, evangelize, church plant, and multiply among UPGs.
Prophetic Focus
Bill had to be the prophetic voice for the people who were starting to see multiplication. He had to keep them focused on what God had called them to.
When Bruce and Gloria Carlton made it to Cambodia, they had no idea how to reach the people. The nation was coming out of years of genocide and civil war, and had very few Christians. Bill and Susan would visit and talk with them to encourage them and to ask them pointed questions:
“How many of your people will hear the gospel today?”
“What’s it gonna take to reach all of the Cambodians?”
Bruce told me, “when someone keeps asking you these questions, you start to think what the answer might be”. Bruce and Gloria began implementing the 100 Options, and God brought them Cambodian leaders to invest in. The Cambodians came up with the Rural Leaders Training Program which equipped many local church planters. This work in Cambodia in the mid-1990s emerged as one of the first Church Planting Movements.
David Watson was called to reach the Bhojpuri in India. Bill supervised him too and like the Carltons, he had to ask him the same questions to keep him focused. Many other saw that David was a high level leader and asked him to lead various ministries in India: an orphanage over here, or a factory over there.
Bill would say to him, “David, that factory sounds good, but how many Bhojpuri are going to come to Christ through that?” David would reply, “None”. Bill would repeat back, “What’s it gonna take to reach the Bhojpuri?” With that, David would drop the factory idea and turn back to the vision God had given him.
The Bhojpuri work emerged as one of the largest disciple making movements starting from that point in the 1990s.
Once these movements emerged, Bill began spreading their stories across his and many other agencies. That’s how the movement paradigm started and spread to become one of the most influential shifts in modern Christianity.
Not Quite Emerging From Nowhere
God has started an untold number of movements in centuries past. Many lessons from across Christendom influenced those who would see movements emerge over the last few decades.
God convicted Bill, Susan and a few others to have a big vision to reach millions of people at once. The restrictions of working among UPGs forced these missionaries to think innovatively and simply. As they avoided good ministries to focus on the best ministry, God taught them how to multiply.
Now all of us who work in the world of disciple making and church planting movements can look back and thank those who came before us while also keeping our hand to the plow and looking ahead to what God will do. Know this fellow disciple maker, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Wes's point above stays with me. Bill Smith's WIGTake question is the spine of this whole story, but a lot of the answers were worked out in languages none of us wrote down. In South Asia I have watched households carry a movement four and five generations deep where no one ever published a method. They just obeyed the last passage and handed it on. Roland Allen saw it coming a century ago: the spontaneous expansion happens when ordinary believers, not experts, own the task. Thank you for honoring the giants here. I'd only add that some of the tallest ones never learned to read.
Good overview, but Majority World voices can be muted in this framing- they were more important for the development of the concept than is commonly acknowledged. An african proverb says, "Africans walk 100 miles but write one line. Americans walk one mile but write a book." We need to do a better job of documenting and foregrounding the perspectives of indigenous catalysts.