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5 Components of a
Gospel Movement
In certain cases in history, the gospel advances quickly in a city or region, leading to a rapid increase in new followers of Jesus, leading to an increase in new churches, which can even have an affect on the culture. After examining these movements of the gospel, we identified five common components in each case. Open Spaces exists to launch new missional experiments organized around these five components is a missional paradigm through which Open Spaces Project operates. What follows is a linear display and description of what each component is and is not.
Prayer walking, priestly prayer, blessing prayer, intercession
Identify, equip
Missional spaces, persons of peace, strangers to friends, incarnational living
Discovery to simple church
Discovery, model, invite, engage
Activating Prayer
Prayer walking, priestly prayer, blessing prayer, intercession
While prayer pervades every aspect of a movement, it is critical in laying the foundation and creating the conditions for a movement to launch and thrive. This is because prayer brings supernatural reality into the process. It is the gospel in power!
“Activating prayer” is a specific type of prayer. It is movemental in nature. It is aggressive. Intentional. Focused. Activating prayer knows how to move against the “gates of hell,” which, if we are true to the biblical description, are stationary; gates don’t attack. They are to be attacked!
Activating prayer operates comfortably in the supernatural, expecting signs and wonders. It is prayer that deals with the demonic, and knows how to partner with the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit.
It includes spiritual mapping and prayer walking. It may be intercessory and include healing and worship in ways that are strategic in nature and with a movemental purpose. Activating prayer can be prophetic, whereby people know how to hear from God and appropriately bring the Kingdom
into time and space. Activating prayer is most often declaratory and graciously harnesses the spiritual authority and power of blessing.
Throughout Novo, individual staff and teams pursue such prayer to:
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Help people listen and hear from God to inform goal setting and strategies;
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Demote and remove the demonic, and engage the angelic;
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Help individuals find freedom and experience inner and physical healing;
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Remove spiritual barriers and bring freedom to space, land, and people groups;
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Accelerate breakthroughs at local, city, and regional levels.
- Sam Metcalf, To the Ends of the Earth: What are Movements of the Good News?
Engaging Culture
Missional spaces, persons of peace, strangers to friends, incarnational living
Alongside and building upon the supernatural foundations laid by activating prayer, is engaging the culture. This is where the gospel in deed is lived out and is effective in contributing to a gospel movement.
Throughout human history from the time of Jesus to the present day, the good news of Jesus has moved along relational and highly contextual pathways. The gospel honors culture, and when healthy movements of the gospel occur, the good news of Jesus is expressed and moves in conjunction with and through culture. The gospel hits a vein of relationships, uniquely defined by culture, and moves quickly as it spreads along those lines. Therefore, to engage a culture requires missiological eyes to see where those veins exist and how to meaningfully connect within them.
When cross-cultural in nature, such engagement often requires language acquisition. Done well, learning a language can posture a cross-cultural worker in a position of humility that accelerates meaningful relationships and relational equity.
Engaging the culture also means seeing and moving to meet people’s felt needs. It may be a cup of cold water in
Jesus name. A package of essential supplies for a refugee family. A place to sleep for a homeless person.
Engaging culture may also call for prophetic engagement with systemic evil and injustice. Good news in deed may be expressed through tangible acts that bring hope to the poor, the widow, the marginalized, and other groups plagued by the fallenness of humankind. It may involve demonstrating the missional heart of the King through actions individually
and together. It may require going to battle against the principalities and powers behind entrenched sin.
We believe we can partner with God to see the Kingdom established on earth as it is in heaven, though never completely or never perfectly because while the Kingdom has been inaugurated with Jesus, it is not consummated. As we strategically pray over a context and engage culture, we can become students about what God is doing and where evil has a stronghold. This kind of healing and redemption helps draw people to Jesus as they witness the reality of heaven on earth. In the end, we want to see new disciples of Jesus and groups of disciples multiplying, and we also want to see cultural brokenness tangibly redeemed and transformed.
Engaging a culture means wisely undertaking an array of cultivating activities and actions, all which have intrinsic value in and of themselves and which serve as powerful “bridges of God” into the cultural context. Well-done cultural engagement can provide limitless opportunities for meaningful spiritual conversations. The good news lived out in deed is essential to demonstrate the reality of the Kingdom of God being present, but it cannot stand on its own. Engaging culture must also be fully integrated with the gospel in power through activating prayer, and it must lead to and connect with the gospel in word as people become fully committed and obedient disciples of Jesus.
-Sam Metcalf, To the Ends of the Earth, What are Movements of the Good News?
Making Disciples
Discovery, model, invite, engage
Every gospel movement utilizes effective tools and processes to help people far from God become committed followers of Jesus and then make disciples of others. Such multiplication is at the heart of any genuine gospel movement, and is also essential for ongoing discipleship and spiritual growth. It is the gospel in word.
While the history of the Church contains many evangelism and discipleship models, we favor a highly effective “discovery process” which does not initially rely on teaching, preaching, or experts and is organic in how it grows and multiplies. This type of disciple-making process is obedience-oriented and easy to replicate regardless of the setting.
Such a process is particularly apt for this time in history, particularly in the West, for several reasons. First, it calls for personal reflection and obedience as it speaks to fundamental weaknesses in prevailing worldviews that value immanence and immediacy. Secondly, it moves us away from the “hypocrisy of knowledge/experts” and toward the “authenticity of individual experience.” Thirdly, the discovery process is fundamentally dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit in an age when signs and wonders are more the global norm. And lastly, discovery processes honor and communicate value to the participants. We assume the participants bring insight and experience which are critical in understanding how adults really learn.
There are two foundational tools in such a “discovery process”:
1. Discovery Bible Study
A discovery Bible Study (or DBS for short or sometimes simply called a “Discovery Group”) is a superb, non-threatening way for people who are far from God to discover firsthand what the Bible says about God, people, and what it means to follow Jesus. It is a simple yet elegant process that is easy to reproduce. Everyone can do it! Everyone can play!
In a safe setting—a home, a coffee shop, a park bench, an office, under a tree—it can be done one-on-one, or with five, ten, or twenty people together. Short, carefully selected passages from the Bible are read aloud (or are told by the one facilitating), and several simple questions are used for discussion.
The DBS process works well orally where stories and passages from the Bible can simply be told rather than read. This means it can be effective with people who are non-literate. Actually, such verbal story telling and relational informality works well in many cultural settings regardless of literacy. We’ve watched this process be equally effective among both refugees and university students.
It is important to emphasize that the discovery bible study process is designed for those who are far from God. While it can be effective with those who already know Jesus, they are not the primary audience. In fact, including people who are already enculturated into churches in discovery groups with people who are far from God is usually detrimental for a variety of reasons: the churched already have pat answers; they can’t refrain from referring to Scripture other than the text being discussed; they inevitably use “Christianese” in their language, which is foreign to outsiders; and in many instances, their presence can be a distraction to those who are seekers.
2. Persons of Peace
These are individuals referred to in Mark 6, Luke 9, Luke 10, and Matthew 10. There are biblical examples of such individuals such as the woman at the well in John 4, Cornelius in Acts 10, or Lydia in the Acts 16. The demoniac in Mark 5:1-20 is another good example to the extent that N.T. Wright calls him “the first apostle to the gentiles.”
Persons of peace—sometimes referred to in these passages as the “worthy person”—are those who respond positively to the proclamation of the good news of the Kingdom and the supernatural signs of the Kingdom such as healing the sick, driving out demons, and raising the dead. They respond favorably to the message of the Kingdom and the messenger. Often, the message and the messenger come to the person of peace through cultural engagement where the gospel in deed is lived out in their presence with authenticity.
Persons of peace are spiritual seekers. They take the initiative and invite those proclaiming the Kingdom into their homes, their families, their relationships, and their communities. It may take many spiritual conversations and practical demonstrations of supernatural reality before persons of peace are clearly identified. But these individuals are key in introducing the good news and the bearers of the good news into their own cultural contexts. They
unlock pockets of people into which the good news can spread.
Often, persons of peace will be the ones with whom we do a discovery process, and they in-turn replicate the same process with their family, friends, and work colleagues. In other instances, persons of peace may introduce us into those relationships. Regardless, they are the cultural “insiders” whom God has uniquely prepared for such a time as this. They are the people just waiting for us as bearers and agents of the good news.
The importance of finding or developing persons of peace cannot be overemphasized. They are an essential key in finding the environments where God has prepared the ground for a gospel movement.
Why use the discovery process?
There are a variety of reasons we have chosen to primarily use this discovery process as a foundational tool in the creation and multiplication of gospel movements:
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Such a process is consistent with our values, particularly in how we view the power and efficacy of the written Word of God.
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Discovery is highly organic, flexible, and easy to contextualize.
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It is missiologically best suited for the multiplication and impact that God desires, especially in the urban West.
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The discovery format has elements that can be used throughout the other movement components. In other words, it is a powerful integrating tool.
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This process is proven. We’ve seen and experienced the results. We know it works, often far beyond our expectations and in vastly diverse cultural and relational contexts.
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This process is an effective way to “seed” all the components of a church from the very beginning.
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There are two basic things we trust in a DBS process:
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The power of the Bible.
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The real and manifest presence of the Holy Spirit.
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Above all else, we believe Jesus operated this way. He modeled how his Kingdom could most effectively spread through relational networks.
Our role as missionaries and bearers of the good news is most often to simply set the spiritual table and then humbly stay out of the way as the meal is divinely served. Word and Spirit working in tandem is a powerful combination.
- Sam Metcalf, To the Ends of the Earth, What are Movements of the Good News?
Developing Leaders
Identify, equip
Unless leaders are developed intentionally, from within a gospel movement itself, it will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own success. Such movement leaders will exhibit a wide array of gifting, and all are necessary to guide and build ministry momentum that will go far beyond themselves. Ultimately, such gifted individuals emerge from within the movement as it picks up momentum. It’s a very organic process. We believe that leaders, like all of the resources to sustain and multiply gospel movements, are best developed from the harvest and not by being imposed externally.
These gifts and gifted individuals will reflect the variety of gifts described in I Corinthians 12, 14, and Romans 12. Of special interest should be the APEST template (Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Shepherds, Teachers) described in Ephesians 4. The more purposefully leaders can be identified, encouraged, and developed in line with that paradigm, the more effective they will be and their contribution to the movement. As movements grow and mature, those leaders will find their place either within the local church expressions that emerge or within the missionary structures that God uses to catalyze such movements. The type of training needed for these leaders will vary depending on their giftedness and the church structure to which they are called.
We also must emphasize that effective leadership is as much or more about character as it is gifting. Jesus was clear about servant leadership, and it really is a non-negotiable. It is just as vital in the inception and early stages of a movement as it is in a movement’s maturity.
There are times when movements of the gospel may produce individual leaders with the right mixture of vision and visibility to influence their entire network and even their nation toward radical societal change. We believe gospel movements have the unique capability to identify and leverage such gifted individuals for the sake of society as a whole. We want to be aware of this possibility and do all we can to empower such leaders.
Therefore, there must be clear intentionality in growing leaders for any gospel movement. It requires the ability to identify, recruit, and then grow such individuals. Those responsible must know how to appropriately coach, mentor, and launch others into productive ministry leadership.
- Sam Metcalf, To the Ends of the Earth, What are Movements of the Good News?
Forming Churches
Missional spaces, persons of peace, strangers to friends, incarnational living
Multiplying gospel movements is not the same thing as planting churches.
If we pursue movements of the gospel, we should inevitably get new churches, and such new church expressions are an evidence of the health of a gospel movement. But if we simply pursue church planting, we may or may not get movements. They are not the same thing.
In the discovery process used by Novo, the functions of a healthy church are coded, from the very beginning, into the values and structure of a new group of people following Jesus or moving toward him. Every discovery group should have embedded into its DNA the basic elements of what a full-blown, healthy local church should be.
When is it “church?”
Inevitably, the question comes, “So when do one or more of these discovery groups really become a fully-formed local “church’?” There is no real definitive answer to that question; rather there are some milestones and indicators that point in that direction. For example, some would say church has “arrived” when a group discovers from Scripture what sacraments are (baptism, the Lord’s supper, etc.) and then begins to put these into practice. Some suggest it is when the group has “self-identified” as church. Others believe that threshold is crossed when leadership has emerged and is identified/recognized by the group. Another indicator is when several of the groups begin to meet together for a larger sense of mutual worship and encouragement. This “gathering”—which is often public—may be slow to happen, especially in repressive or persecuted environments.
-Sam Metcalf, To the Ends of the Earth, What are Movements of the Good News?