The American Discipleship Question

White Paper | A Research Synthesis and a Proposed Model

Published by Ordinary MovementFirst Edition, May 2026

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How to Cite This Paper

Ordinary Movement, The American Discipleship Question: A Research Synthesis and a Proposed Model, First Edition (Ordinary Movement, May 2026).

Acknowledgments

This paper is the product of work that started in 2018 with one small group of ordinary men in a living room. Eight years later, the network has grown to more than 245 documented groups across 35-plus states, with second, third, and fourth-generation chains visible in the data. None of it would be possible without the leaders and participants who took the risk to try something they were told they were not qualified to do.

The research synthesis draws on the work of multiple institutional research bodies: Grey Matter Research and Consulting (for the 2020 National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches), the Barna Group, Lifeway Research, the Pinetops Foundation, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, the 24:14 Coalition, and the Lausanne Movement. The contemporary literature on disciple-making, surveyed in Part Seven, represents decades of practitioner and academic work that has made this paper possible.

This is the First Edition. The data we track updates monthly. The American disciple-making field is moving. Subsequent editions will reflect new data, refined analysis, and reader feedback. We welcome correction, engagement, and pushback from researchers, practitioners, pastors, donors, and readers of every kind. Contact info@ordinarymovement.com.

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TL;DR

American disciple-making is in structural crisis. The 2020 Grey Matter Research national study, conducted for Discipleship.org and Exponential, surveyed 1,000 Protestant pastors and found zero U.S. churches that statistically verified at Level 5 multiplication. Fewer than 5 percent qualified at Level 4. The study's own conclusion: "We did not find clear examples of disciple-making movements (DMM) in the US."

Globally, approximately 1,965 mature disciple-making movements are documented. Roughly ninety percent operate among current or former unreached people groups. The conditions that produce movement elsewhere (persecution, oral culture, collective social structures, intense prayer cultures) do not exist in American soil.

The biblical standard for disciple-making is four generations, drawn directly from 2 Timothy 2:2 where Paul names Paul, Timothy, reliable people, and others in a single sentence.

This research report examines the theological foundations of disciple-making, three centuries of American disciple-making history, the global movement landscape, the contemporary literature, and one network's multi-generational data tested against the field-recognized four-generation standard. Ordinary Movement was founded in 2018 to equip ordinary believers, men and women who often feel disqualified, undereducated, or unprofessional for ministry, to become disciples who make disciples. The deeper aim is a cultural shift in the American church, from passive consumer Christianity to purposeful, intentional Jesus-following.

Published by Ordinary Movement, May 2026.

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Abstract

In 2020, Discipleship.org and Exponential commissioned Grey Matter Research and Consulting to conduct the most rigorous national study on disciple-making ever attempted in the United States. The study surveyed one thousand Protestant senior and lead pastors, stratified by denomination, region, and church size. It assessed each church against a five-level framework, from Level 1 (subtracting from disciple-making) to Level 5 (multiplying disciple-makers across four generations).[^1]

The study's title was High Aspirations Amidst Disappointing Results. The findings explain why.

Fewer than five percent of U.S. churches qualified as Level 4. Zero churches were statistically verified at Level 5. Eighty percent of churches scored negatively. The research team's own published conclusion: "We did not find clear examples of disciple-making movements (DMM) in the US."[^2] Earlier Barna research conducted for the Navigators in 2015 had already documented the gap that the 2020 study confirmed at structural scale: eighty-seven percent of church leaders said discipleship was a top-three priority, but only twenty-seven percent reported having a clearly articulated plan or approach to it.[^2a]

This is the void.

This paper sits inside that void. It builds, in eleven parts, the theological and empirical case for a different approach to American disciple-making. It begins with the biblical foundations of what a disciple is and what disciple-making requires. It traces the history of American disciple-making across three centuries. It documents the current state of the American church through primary-source research. It examines the global picture, where approximately 1,965 mature disciple-making movements operate, with roughly ninety percent of them located among current or former unreached people groups. It engages the contemporary literature seriously, treating peer practitioners as friends. It examines the ninety-two-year arc of the Navigators, the most experienced American disciple-making organization in existence, which now publishes "this isn't a program" as the headline language of its flagship offering. It proposes a structured twenty-seven-session formation process built for ordinary believers, designed to run alongside existing churches, measured against the same four-generation standard the field's own research uses to define disciple-making movement.

It then presentsthe documented fruit of one network operating under that model since 2018, and engages openly with the counterarguments any serious disciple-making proposal must face.

The claim is narrow. The data is what it is. The next decade will determine whether the model holds at scale. The work itself is straightforward: equip ordinary believers who often feel disqualified to become disciples who make disciples. The cultural shift behind that work is the actual goal. From passive consumer Christianity to purposeful, intentional Jesus-following.

[^1]: Grey Matter Research and Consulting, National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches: High Aspirations Amidst Disappointing Results (conducted for Discipleship.org and Exponential, March 2020), 5–7. Hereafter cited as Grey Matter, National Study.

[^2]: Grey Matter, National Study, 3.

[^2a]: Barna Group, The State of Discipleship, commissioned by The Navigators (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2015), 11.

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Table of Contents

Parts

1. Theological and Biblical Foundations of Disciple-Making

2. A Brief History of American Disciple-Making

3. The State of American Discipleship

4. Global Disciple-Making Movements: What Has Been Verified

5. Why Multi-Generational Movement Resists American Soil

6. The Navigator Arc: A Ninety-Two-Year Preview

7. A Literature Review of Contemporary Disciple-Making Voices

8. The Ordinary Movement Model

9. What the Data Shows

10. Counterarguments and Limitations

11. What the Next Decade Will Tell Us

Appendices

• Appendix A: Frequently Asked Questions

• Appendix B: Glossary

• Appendix C: Bibliography

• Appendix D: Methodology Notes

Part One: Theological and Biblical Foundations of Disciple-Making

Any honest research on disciple-making has to begin with what disciple-making actually is. Methodology disconnected from theology produces technique. Technique without theology produces the very pattern the Grey Matter study documented: high aspirations amidst disappointing results.[^3] This part establishes the biblical and theological foundation that the rest of the paper rests on.

[^3]: Grey Matter, National Study, 8.

1.1 What Is a Disciple? The Biblical Definition

The Greek word mathētēs, translated "disciple" in English, occurs 269 times in the New Testament.[^4] It carries three load-bearing senses across that usage. First, a disciple is a learner: someone who attaches themselves to a teacher to receive instruction. Second, a disciple is a follower: someone who imitates the teacher's life, not merely memorizes the teacher's content. Third, a disciple is one who is sent: in the case of Jesus' disciples specifically, the formation has a destination beyond the disciple's own growth.

Jesus' own definition, given in John 8:31–32, is the most direct: "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."[^5] Three elements anchor the definition. Abiding (continuing, remaining) in Jesus' word. Knowing the truth. Being set free. Discipleship is not assent to a body of doctrine. It is sustained relational continuity with the person of Jesus, mediated by his word, producing measurable change.

[^4]: Walter Bauer, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 609. Hereafter cited as BDAG.

[^5]: All Scripture references are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

Luke 9:23 sharpens the cost: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." Discipleship costs the disciple's autonomy. The disciple no longer determines the shape of their own life. They take up something heavy, daily, and walk a road someone else is already on.

Three observations follow from these texts.

First, discipleship is relational, not curricular. A person can complete every workbook published on the Christian formation market and not be a disciple. A person who has read no book at all but who is daily abiding in Jesus' word, denying themselves, and following him is a disciple by the New Testament's own definition. The contemporary tendency to equate discipleship with content delivery is foreign to the biblical concept.

Second, discipleship is teleological. It has a destination. Jesus does not call disciples for their own sake. He calls them to send them. Mark 3:14 names both halves of the call explicitly: "And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach." With him and sent out. The order is fixed. Being with him precedes being sent. But being sent is not optional.

Third, discipleship produces disciples. This is the Pauline argument we will examine in section 1.3, but it appears in seed form across the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus does not merely teach his disciples. He teaches them how to teach. Matthew 10 sends the Twelve out on a training mission in Jesus' own lifetime. Luke 10 sends the Seventy-Two. The pattern is iterative from the beginning.

1.2 The Great Commission Mandate (Matthew 28:18–20)

The structuring text for Christian disciple-making is Matthew 28:18–20. It is worth quoting in full because nearly every theological argument in this paper traces back to it:

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

The grammatical structure of the commission has been the subject of substantial discussion. The main verb is mathēteusate, "make disciples." This is the imperative around which the entire sentence is built. The three participles that surround it (poreuthentes, "going"; baptizontes, "baptizing"; didaskontes, "teaching") modify and qualify the central command.[^6] D. A. Carson notes that the participle poreuthentes carries an attendant-circumstance force in this construction, meaning the going is assumed rather than optional.[^7] The disciples are going to be going. The question Jesus answers is what they should do while they go.

[^6]: D. A. Carson, "Matthew," in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, rev. ed., ed. Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland, vol. 9 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 666–68.

[^7]: Carson, "Matthew," 667.

The commission gives four content elements:

First, make disciples. The primary verb. Not "make converts." Not "make attenders." Not "make believers." Make disciples. The New Testament's own definition of disciple, examined above, applies.

Second, of all nations. The scope is universal. The Greek panta ta ethnē refers to people groups, not political nation-states.[^8] The commission has no geographical boundary.

[^8]: BDAG, 276–77.

Third, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian formula assumes Trinitarian theology. Disciple-making is not generic religious formation. It is formation into a specific identity rooted in a specific God who has revealed himself in three persons. The baptismal context also locates disciple-making inside the visible local church. Baptism is a church ordinance. The commission does not envision disciple-making that bypasses the local church. It envisions disciple-making that produces it.

Fourth, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Two words deserve weight. Teaching is didaskontes, the same root from which we get "didactic." But it is paired with terein ("observe" or "keep"), which means more than intellectual assent. The Greek implies practiced obedience, sustained behavior, lived response. Teaching that does not produce obedience has not yet completed itself.

The promise at the end, "I am with you always, to the end of the age," is structurally important. The Great Commission is not given as a burden. It is given with the assurance of Jesus' ongoing presence. This is not a contract with a delivery deadline. It is an invitation into Jesus' own ongoing work, sustained by the Holy Spirit who indwells every believer.

John Stott summarized the implications of Matthew 28 in language that is hard to improve on: "We have no liberty to stop short of the Lord's own purpose: not 'to bring people to a decision' but 'to make disciples'; not just to evangelize but to teach obedience."[^9] The American discipleship gap, which we will document at length in Part Three, is most fundamentally the gap between the evangelistic activity the church has prioritized and the disciple-making the commission actually demands.

[^9]: John Stott, The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 56.

1.3 The Pauline Pattern (2 Timothy 2:2)

If Matthew 28 is the structuring mandate, 2 Timothy 2:2 is the operating instruction. Paul writes to Timothy from prison, possibly in his last letter, and gives the multiplication pattern in a single sentence:

"And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others."[^10]

[^10]: 2 Timothy 2:2. Translation slightly modified to render the four generations with maximum clarity.

Four generations appear in one sentence. Paul. Timothy. Reliable people. Others.

This is the textual foundation for the four-generation standard the global disciple-making movement field uses to define movement. It is not a methodology invention. It is exegesis. A movement that consistently reaches the fourth generation is producing what Paul described. A movement that stalls at the first or second generation is not.

The Greek verb parathou ("entrust") is worth pausing on. It is a banking term, used elsewhere in 2 Timothy 1:12 and 1:14 for the gospel deposit itself.[^11] Paul is not asking Timothy to share information. He is asking Timothy to transfer something valuable into the care of trustworthy custodians, who will in turn transfer it to the next custodians. The metaphor implies that the gospel is not a stock of knowledge but a living trust that must be passed forward without being lost.

[^11]: BDAG, 772.

The phrase "reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others" carries two qualifications. Pistois anthrōpois (reliable people, faithful people) names character. Hikanoi esontai kai heterous didaxai (will be qualified to teach others) names capability. Paul names both because both are required. A person of character who cannot teach will not multiply. A person who can teach but lacks character will multiply something other than the gospel.

The four-generation standard is therefore not a methodology preference. It is the bar that 2 Timothy 2:2 sets and the bar that the field-level research adopts. Any disciple-making strategy that does not produce fourth-generation fruit has not yet completed what Paul described as Timothy's task.

1.4 The Apostolic Pattern (Acts 2:42–47, Acts 4:13)

Two passages from the early chapters of Acts establish the operational pattern that emerged when the Holy Spirit launched the church on Pentecost. The first describes what the early disciples did together. The second describes who they were.

Acts 2:42–47 establishes the four practices of the earliest disciple-making community: "And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." These four practices, didachē (teaching), koinōnia (fellowship), klasis tou artou (breaking of bread), and proseuchai (prayers), are not optional add-ons to discipleship. They are its operating substrate.[^12] Disciple-making that lacks any of these four is doing something other than what the first disciples did.

[^12]: F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, rev. ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 73.

The passage closes with a striking sentence: "And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved." Two words matter. Added, not subtracted. Day by day, not in occasional revivals. The early church grew through sustained ordinary discipleship that produced sustained ordinary fruit. This is the textual ground for the conviction that consistent disciple-making produces consistent church growth without requiring a separate evangelism program.

Acts 4:13 establishes the identity of those doing this work: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus."

Three words deserve weight. Agrammatoi, translated "uneducated," literally means "unlettered," without formal training in the rabbinic schools.[^13] Idiōtai, translated "common men," is the word from which English "idiot" derives, but in its New Testament context it means simply "ordinary" or "without official position."[^14] These are not pejoratives in Luke's writing. They are descriptions of fact. Peter and John lacked the credentials the religious establishment recognized.

[^13]: BDAG, 15.

[^14]: BDAG, 468.

But the third descriptor changes everything: syn tō Iēsou ēsan, "they had been with Jesus." The Sanhedrin recognized that what Peter and John lacked in credentials, they possessed in spiritual formation. The presence of Jesus in their lives had produced something the religious establishment could not produce in itself.

This is the textual foundation for the conviction that ordinary believers, formed by sustained relationship with Jesus, are sufficient for disciple-making. The work is not reserved for the seminary-trained. It is the standing assignment of every follower of Jesus who has spent time with him.

1.5 Discipleship in the Early Church

The patristic literature documents how the earliest post-apostolic church carried forward the Matthew 28 mandate. Two texts deserve attention because they shape what disciple-making looked like in the second through fifth centuries.

The Didachē (also called The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) is the earliest surviving extra-biblical church manual, dated by most scholars to the late first or early second century.[^15] Its first six chapters describe "The Two Ways," a structured catechetical curriculum that new converts were expected to learn before baptism. The structure is significant. New disciples were not converted, baptized, and then left to grow on their own. They were instructed first, formed in community, then publicly entered the church through baptism after demonstrating that the instruction had taken root.

[^15]: Aaron Milavec, The Didache: Faith, Hope, and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50–70 C.E. (New York: Newman Press, 2003), x–xv.

Tertullian, writing in the late second and early third century, describes a catechumenate that often lasted three years. Catechumens (those in formation) were separated from the baptized during the eucharistic portion of the service, instructed by elders, and only admitted to full communion after demonstrating both knowledge of the faith and changed life.[^16] The early church took disciple-making seriously enough to require evidence of formation before granting full church membership.

[^16]: Tertullian, On Baptism, 18, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885), 678.

Augustine's De Catechizandis Rudibus ("On Catechizing the Uninstructed"), written around 405 CE, is the most fully developed early treatise on disciple-making method. Augustine argues that catechetical instruction must be adapted to the learner, that love is the disciplinary frame within which instruction operates, and that the goal is not informational mastery but transformed loves.[^17] The treatise reads, fifteen centuries later, as remarkably relevant to contemporary disciple-making questions.

[^17]: Augustine, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ser. 1, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1887), 285–86.

What unites these early sources is the conviction that becoming a Christian and being a disciple are not separable acts. Conversion is the entry point. Disciple-making is the work. The two were structurally connected in the early church in ways the contemporary American church has separated.

1.6 The Reformation Recovery and Its Limits

The Protestant Reformation recovered the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, articulated most famously in Martin Luther's To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) and grounded in 1 Peter 2:9.[^18] This doctrine is the theological ground for ordinary believer disciple-making. If every believer is a priest, every believer is responsible for ministering to others in the body, including the ministry of disciple-making.

[^18]: Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in Luther's Works, vol. 44, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 127–28.

What the Reformers recovered theologically, they did not always institutionalize methodologically. The Reformation churches reinstituted clergy training, expository preaching, and confessional catechesis, all of which were genuine improvements over the late medieval pattern. The Reformers' insistence on the centrality of preaching the Word was right and necessary; the Word preached remains a non-negotiable mark of the gathered church.[^19] But the structural separation between professional clergy who taught and laypeople who learned remained largely intact across most Protestant traditions. The priesthood of all believers became a doctrine more often confessed than practiced.

[^19]: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.1.9. The pairing of Word and Spirit, central to the Reformation and to subsequent evangelical theology, will reappear throughout this paper.

This is the theological background against which the modern disciple-making renewal must be understood. The doctrine is in place. The methodology that fully embodies it is still being worked out, five centuries later.

1.7 The Holy Spirit and the Disciple-Making Work

A discipleship process that does not depend on the active work of the Holy Spirit is not biblical disciple-making. It may be religious education, character development, or behavioral modification, but it is not what the New Testament describes.

The Spirit's role in disciple-making is multifaceted. Jesus promised in John 14:26 that the Holy Spirit "will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you." Disciple-making, in this frame, is not the discipler teaching the disciple. It is the discipler creating conditions under which the Spirit teaches both. In John 16:13, Jesus describes the Spirit as guiding into "all the truth," again positioning the Spirit as the primary agent of formation. The discipler is a participant in a work the Spirit is already doing.

Galatians 5:22–23 names the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) as the visible evidence of Spirit-led formation. These are not character traits to be developed through technique. They are fruit produced by the indwelling Spirit when a disciple is abiding in Jesus, as Jesus described in John 15:5.

This is why any disciple-making strategy that emphasizes intimacy with Jesus as its first and primary value, and reproducibility as its operational mechanism, is more biblically coherent than a strategy that begins with mission and adds devotion later. Mission is the fruit. Intimacy is the root. Inverting the order produces activity without transformation.[^20]

[^20]: Dallas Willard makes this point at length throughout The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), particularly in chapters 7–8.

The balance of Word and Spirit deserves explicit attention. Disciple-making goes wrong when it becomes pure technique without the Spirit's enabling, and it goes wrong when it becomes pure emotional experience without the Word's content. Both errors produce something other than mature disciples. The biblical pattern integrates both: the Spirit teaches through the Word, the Word is illuminated by the Spirit, and disciples grow as they receive both together.[^21]

[^21]: Cf. Chuck Smith, Calvary Chapel Distinctives (Costa Mesa, CA: Word for Today, 2000), 24–29, for the classic articulation of Word-and-Spirit balance in evangelical ministry.

1.8 Grace as the Operating Atmosphere

A theological note on grace belongs in this part. The American disciple-making renewal has sometimes been criticized for tilting toward legalism, presenting discipleship as a series of behavioral requirements that must be met to demonstrate genuine faith.[^22] This criticism, when valid, names a real failure mode in disciple-making practice.

[^22]: For one substantive version of this critique, see Tullian Tchividjian, One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2013).

The biblical alternative is not less rigor. It is more grace. The same Paul who in 2 Timothy 2:2 commissions four generations of disciple-makers also writes, in Ephesians 2:8–9, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." Discipleship is the response to grace, not the means of earning it. Disciples obey because they have been forgiven, not to be forgiven.

The corollary is that disciple-making must operate under a culture of grace. Disciples will fail. Leaders will fail. Groups will struggle. The response cannot be to tighten requirements or to treat failure as evidence that someone is not really a Christian. The response is to bring grace into the room and let it do its formational work.

The high challenge of biblical discipleship and the high grace of the gospel are not in tension. They are the same posture viewed from different angles. The disciple who has truly grasped grace is moved to take up the cross daily. The disciple who is taking up the cross daily depends on grace to do so. Either without the other distorts what discipleship is.

This is the theological atmosphere within which the rest of this paper operates. The data we will examine in Part Three describes the failure of American discipleship at scale. The proper response to that failure is not condemnation of pastors or churches. It is honest naming of the problem and gracious commitment to the work that addresses it.

1.9 Why Discipleship Is the Church's Core Mission

The implication of the texts examined above is that disciple-making is not one ministry of the church among many. It is the core mission of the church. Every other activity (worship, teaching, sacraments, mercy ministry, evangelism) finds its purpose in producing disciples who make disciples.

Bobby Harrington and Josh Patrick, drawing on the broader contemporary disciple-making consensus, put it directly: "Disciple making is the master plan of Jesus. It was his strategy when he was on earth, and it remains his strategy for his church today."[^23] Robert Coleman, whose 1963 book The Master Plan of Evangelism substantially shaped the modern recovery, framed the same claim differently: "His concern was not with programs to reach the multitudes, but with men whom the multitudes would follow."[^24]

[^23]: Bobby Harrington and Josh Patrick, The Disciple Maker's Handbook: Seven Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 23.

[^24]: Robert E. Coleman, The Master Plan of Evangelism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1993), 21.

This conviction sets the bar for the rest of the paper. If disciple-making is the church's core mission, then the data we will examine in Part Three (which documents that less than five percent of American churches are reproducing disciple-making cultures) is not a niche concern. It is the structural failure of the contemporary American church at its central task.

A clarifying note. The argument that disciple-making is the church's core mission does not imply that disciple-making replaces the church. Disciple-making is what the church does. The local church is the appointed context within which disciple-making happens, the body within which disciples are formed, and the visible community to which disciples belong. Any disciple-making strategy that positions itself against the local church misunderstands its own mandate. The model proposed in Part Eight is designed to serve the local church, not to bypass it.

That is the theological ground on which the rest of the paper stands.

Part Two: A Brief History of American Disciple-Making

The American church did not always look the way it looks now. The structural separation between Sunday gathering and discipleship, the bottlenecking of ministry through professional clergy, the substitution of attendance for formation, and the dependence on programs to do what relationships used to do are recent developments. This part traces how American disciple-making evolved over three centuries, to understand the current crisis as a particular moment in a longer story.

2.1 The Awakenings as Discipleship Phenomena (1730s to 1840s)

The First Great Awakening, beginning in the 1730s under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Tennents, is usually remembered as an evangelism movement. It was also a disciple-making movement, although the contemporary distinction between the two would have been foreign to its leaders.[^25]

[^25]: Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 25–43.

Edwards's Religious Affections (1746) is one of the most rigorous theological treatments of disciple-making ever written in America. Edwards argued that genuine Christian formation produced visible "holy affections," meaning sustained heart-level desires for God and his ways, distinguishable from mere emotional response or doctrinal assent.[^26] Edwards's method was largely pastoral. He did not develop a curriculum. He preached, counseled, and produced theological works that shaped how subsequent generations approached formation.

[^26]: Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 95–124.

The Second Great Awakening, which extended from the 1790s through the 1840s, produced more institutional infrastructure for disciple-making than its predecessor. The camp meetings of the western frontier created sustained communal contexts for conversion and ongoing formation. The Methodist class meeting, imported from England and adapted to American conditions, was perhaps the most effective small group disciple-making mechanism in American history before the contemporary period.

The Methodist class meeting deserves separate attention. Methodist circuit riders organized new converts into "classes" of approximately twelve people. Each class met weekly under a lay class leader. The agenda was straightforward: each member answered the question, "How is it with your soul?" The class leader investigated each member's spiritual progress, addressed sin, and provided pastoral oversight. Class meetings were the standard structure of American Methodism throughout most of the nineteenth century. They produced a disciple-making engine that helped Methodism grow from a small movement at the turn of the nineteenth century to the largest Protestant denomination in America by 1850.[^27]

[^27]: Kevin M. Watson, The Class Meeting: Reclaiming a Forgotten (and Essential) Small Group Experience (Wilmore, KY: Seedbed, 2014), 22–38.

What the class meeting accomplished was structural disciple-making at the lay level, run on a question-and-relationship model rather than a content model, with leadership distributed across hundreds of thousands of class leaders rather than bottlenecked through clergy. The class meeting is, in retrospect, perhaps the closest American historical parallel to what global disciple-making movements look like today.

The decline of the Methodist class meeting after the Civil War is one of the most consequential developments in American church history. As Methodism professionalized, as seminary education replaced apprenticeship, and as the social context of American life changed, the class meeting was gradually replaced by Sunday School and pastor-led teaching. By the early twentieth century, the class meeting had effectively disappeared as the operational core of Methodism.[^28] The American Protestant church has not since produced a structure of equivalent scale and effectiveness for ordinary believer disciple-making.

[^28]: David Lowes Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting: Its Origins and Significance (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1985), 153–66.

2.2 The Sunday School Era (1820s to 1970s)

The Sunday School movement, originating in England in the 1780s under Robert Raikes and reaching American shores by the early nineteenth century, represented the institutionalization of a particular form of disciple-making.[^29] Sunday Schools initially served primarily to teach poor children to read using the Bible as the text. By the 1830s, the movement had expanded to include adults and had become the dominant lay-led discipleship structure in American Protestantism.

[^29]: Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 6–13.

The American Sunday School at its peak (roughly 1900 to 1960) was a remarkably effective discipleship infrastructure. Most American Protestant Christians from that era received their primary biblical instruction through Sunday School rather than through Sunday morning preaching. Sunday School teachers, who were almost entirely lay volunteers, often served the same age cohort for decades and developed substantial relational depth with their students. The Sunday School movement also created publishing houses, teacher training networks, and an internal economy of materials that supported the work.

The decline of the Sunday School from the 1970s onward, like the earlier decline of the class meeting, is connected to broader cultural shifts. As families became more mobile, as Sunday morning schedules contracted, as professional ministry expanded, and as the broader culture became less Christian in default assumptions, the Sunday School lost both its participants and its centrality.[^30] By 2020, fewer than half of American Protestant churches operated active adult Sunday Schools at scale.

[^30]: Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156–60.

2.3 The Postwar Parachurch Boom (1940s to 1970s)

The decades following World War II produced an unprecedented expansion of American parachurch ministries focused specifically on disciple-making among populations the local church was not effectively reaching. The Navigators (founded 1933), InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (founded 1941 in the U.S., though older internationally), Campus Crusade for Christ (founded 1951, now Cru), Young Life (founded 1941), and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (founded 1954) all emerged during this period.

What unites these organizations is their decision to develop disciple-making methodology outside the institutional church, often because they perceived the institutional church as either unable or unwilling to disciple particular populations effectively. The Navigators began with sailors in the U.S. Navy. InterVarsity and Campus Crusade focused on college students. Young Life reached high school students. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes focused on athletes.

Each of these organizations produced significant disciple-making content. The Navigators' Topical Memory System, Design for Discipleship series, and 2:7 Series have collectively reached millions of people. Campus Crusade's Four Spiritual Laws tract is one of the most widely distributed Christian publications in history. InterVarsity Press has produced one of the most respected academic Christian publishing houses in the world.

The parachurch era established the modern American assumption that disciple-making methodology can be developed, refined, and distributed by specialized organizations rather than by local churches. This is both a strength and a structural challenge. The strength is that specialized organizations can develop expertise the average local church cannot. The challenge is that this same specialization can encourage local churches to outsource their core mission rather than develop their own disciple-making cultures.

The Navigators' own ninety-two-year arc, which we will examine in detail in Part Six, illustrates the eventual recognition by the parachurch sector itself that disciple-making methodology, however excellent, cannot substitute for the disciple-making culture that local churches must develop.

The postwar period also witnessed the rise of what would become the contemporary evangelical movement, with figures like Billy Graham reaching unprecedented audiences through stadium crusades and televised broadcasts. The Graham crusades produced millions of recorded decisions for Christ. They also revealed, over time, the same structural pattern the broader American church would face: the gap between evangelistic decision and sustained discipleship. Graham himself acknowledged this gap in later years, repeatedly emphasizing the importance of local church follow-up and discipleship as the indispensable companion to mass evangelism.[^31]

[^31]: William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991), 273–95.

2.4 The Jesus Movement and the Rise of Calvary Chapel (1960s to 1980s)

A particular stream of American Christianity that emerged from this period deserves separate attention because it shaped much of the contemporary evangelical landscape and articulated, at its founding, several of the values this paper holds central.

The Jesus Movement, beginning in the late 1960s on the West Coast of the United States, emerged from the counterculture of the era. Young people who had been seeking spiritual reality through Eastern religions, psychedelic drug use, and the various social movements of the time encountered Jesus, often through informal Bible studies, beach baptisms, and the ministry of pastors willing to receive them as they were.

Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, became one of the most influential ministry centers of this period. Smith opened the church's doors to long-haired hippies that mainstream churches were refusing to accept. He taught the Bible verse-by-verse from Genesis through Revelation, modeling a form of expository teaching that became foundational to the Calvary Chapel movement and to a generation of evangelical pastors who learned from him. Smith's ministry emphasized grace, the active work of the Holy Spirit, the centrality of Scripture, and the priesthood of all believers. He famously avoided the strict five-point Calvinist soteriology dominant in some Reformed circles, while equally rejecting prosperity gospel teaching and hyper-charismatic excess.[^32]

[^32]: Chuck Smith, Calvary Chapel Distinctives; cf. Chuck Smith, Why Grace Changes Everything (Costa Mesa, CA: Word for Today, 2010).

The Calvary Chapel movement that grew from Smith's ministry would eventually plant more than 1,700 churches globally, with most planting happening organically through young men Smith had personally discipled. The movement's emphasis on simple expository teaching, openness to the Spirit, and grace-filled welcome of ordinary believers represents one of the more substantial American disciple-making contributions of the late twentieth century. Many of the cultural assumptions about ordinary believer ministry that this paper holds central trace, at least in part, to the influence of Smith and his peers in the Jesus Movement era.

The Jesus Movement also illustrates the conditions under which American disciple-making renewal has historically broken through. It happened among young people. It happened in spaces willing to receive new converts as they were. It happened through pastors willing to invest the time. And it happened at a cultural moment where established institutional Christianity was perceived as failing the very people most spiritually hungry. Those conditions are worth holding as the paper turns, in Part Three, to the current American disciple-making moment.

2.5 The Seeker-Sensitive Era (1970s to 1990s)

Beginning with Bill Hybels's launch of Willow Creek Community Church in 1975 and Rick Warren's launch of Saddleback Church in 1980, a new model emerged in American evangelicalism. The seeker-sensitive model, as it came to be called, aimed to remove cultural barriers to church attendance for non-Christians by adapting worship styles, communication formats, and ministry programming to feel accessible to those who had not grown up in church.[^33]

[^33]: George G. Hunter III, How to Reach Secular People (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), 36–48.

The seeker-sensitive model worked at the level of attendance. Willow Creek grew from a handful of people in a rented theater to attendance of more than twenty thousand at its peak. Saddleback followed a similar trajectory. The Willow Creek Association, founded in 1992, distributed seeker-sensitive methodology to thousands of churches globally. Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church (1995) and The Purpose Driven Life (2002) became foundational texts for an entire generation of American pastors.[^34]

[^34]: Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995); Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002).

The seeker-sensitive era produced one of the most consequential pieces of self-research in American church history. In 2007, Willow Creek published Reveal: Where Are You?, a self-conducted study of the spiritual maturity of their own congregation. The initial study surveyed 6,000 Willow Creek attenders and 5,000 attenders across six other like-minded churches. The findings were unexpected.

For decades, Willow Creek had operated under what the report itself called "the Church Activity Model for Spiritual Growth": the premise that as people far from God participated in church activities (small groups, services, volunteering), they would eventually become people who loved God and loved others. The Reveal data disproved that premise from inside Willow Creek's own congregation.

Three findings deserve weight.

First, increased church activity did not predict spiritual growth, particularly for those at higher stages of spiritual maturity. The architects of the study expected involvement and growth to track together. They did not. Greg Hawkins, Willow Creek's executive pastor who led the research, said the team had to tell senior pastor Bill Hybels that "the church isn't as effective as we'd thought."[^35]

[^35]: Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? (South Barrington, IL: Willow Creek Resources, 2007), 21; cf. "Willow Creek Finds Limits to Its Model," Christian Century, January 29, 2008.

Second, approximately twenty-five percent of respondents described themselves as "spiritually stalled" or "dissatisfied" with the church's role in their spiritual growth. Many were considering leaving. The Willow Creek leadership team described the finding as "almost unbearable" in the report's foreword.[^36]

[^36]: Hawkins and Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You?, viii.

Third, the most spiritually mature members were the most likely to feel underchallenged by the church's offerings and the most likely to consider leaving. The report, on page 51, stated this directly: the higher the level of commitment to Christ, the more likely it was that satisfaction with the church would be lukewarm.[^37]

[^37]: Hawkins and Parkinson, Reveal, 51.

What did predict spiritual growth, according to the data, was personal spiritual practices: daily engagement with Scripture, intentional habits of private prayer, and sustained reflection on the grace of God. Hawkins and Parkinson's own conclusion to the report has become one of the most-quoted sentences in American disciple-making research: "Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church."[^38]

[^38]: Hawkins and Parkinson, Reveal, 8.

The report's foreword carries the line that has become the most consequential public admission by a major American megachurch: "It is causing me to see clearly that the church and its myriad of programs have taken on too much of the responsibility for people's spiritual growth."[^39]

[^39]: Reveal, ix. The study was published in 2007 by Willow Creek Resources. The principal investigators, Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, led the research throughout. Willow Creek's senior leadership underwent significant changes after 2018. The Reveal study's empirical findings and methodology remain part of the American disciple-making research record, and citations in this section refer to the published report.

This is the Reveal contribution to the American disciple-making conversation, eleven years before Ordinary Movement was founded. The pattern, named honestly from inside one of the most-successful American churches ever built, was that activity-based discipleship does not produce mature disciples, and that personal disciplines and relationships do. The implications have been working their way through the American church for nearly two decades since. The disciple-making renewal documented in this paper is, in significant part, the field's response to what Willow Creek documented first.

The willingness of Willow Creek to publish unfavorable self-research is itself a sign of organizational integrity that deserves recognition. The Reveal findings document, from within one of the most influential American churches of the late twentieth century, the structural limitation of attendance-based disciple-making. Even when it works at scale, it produces something other than what the New Testament describes as disciples.

2.6 The Cell and House Church Movements (1990s to 2000s)

In partial reaction to the limitations of attendance-based ministry, the 1990s and 2000s saw growing American interest in small group structures imported from rapidly growing churches in the Global South. The cell church model, articulated by Ralph Neighbour Jr. in Where Do We Go from Here? A Guidebook for the Cell Group Church (1990) and observed at scale in churches like Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, proposed a radical restructuring of the local church around small cells as its basic operational unit.[^40]

[^40]: Ralph W. Neighbour Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? A Guidebook for the Cell Group Church (Houston: Touch Publications, 1990), 88–104.

Joel Comiskey's research on the largest cell churches globally, conducted in the late 1990s, documented that effective cell churches operated under a small number of distinctive principles: groups of approximately ten people, clear leadership pipelines, explicit multiplication goals, and integration with rather than separation from the larger Sunday gathering.[^41] Comiskey's work has become the standard reference for cell church practice.

[^41]: Joel Comiskey, Home Cell Group Explosion: How Your Small Group Can Grow and Multiply (Houston: Touch Publications, 1998), 25–47.

The cell church model produced significant fruit in some American contexts, but it did not scale across the American evangelical mainstream. Larry Stockstill's Bethany World Prayer Center in Baker, Louisiana, became one of the most-studied American cell churches, with documented small-group multiplication patterns through the 1990s and 2000s.[^42] But Bethany remained an outlier rather than a model that broadly transferred. Several factors contributed to the limited American adoption: cell churches require senior pastoral leadership that is willing to subordinate Sunday programming to small group health, they require structural disciplines most American churches were not prepared to adopt, and they were designed in cultural contexts (particularly Korean and Latin American) that operated with different default social structures than American suburbs.[^43]

[^42]: Larry Stockstill, The Cell Church: Preparing Your Church for the Coming Harvest (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1998).

[^43]: Comiskey, Home Cell Group Explosion, 156–65, addresses the cultural contextualization question directly.

The parallel house church movement, which proposed not merely adding cells but replacing the traditional church structure with networks of house churches, gained particular momentum in the 2000s. Neil Cole's Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (2005) offered a practical case for organic house church planting that has been influential in subsequent disciple-making conversations.[^44]

[^44]: Neil Cole, Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), 26–48.

The house church movement produced a small but persistent American footprint and significant overseas fruit. It did not become the operational pattern of the American evangelical mainstream. The reasons connect to a theological question this paper takes seriously: the local church, with its ordained leadership, sacraments, and visible communal worship, is not optional infrastructure. Disciple-making methods that bypass or replace the local church gain operational flexibility at a real theological cost. The model proposed in Part Eight chooses instead to run alongside the existing local church rather than to replace it.

2.7 The Contemporary Disciple-Making Renewal (2000s to Present)

Beginning in roughly the early 2000s and intensifying through the 2010s, a distinct disciple-making renewal emerged in American evangelicalism. Several streams contributed.

The first stream was the recovery of multi-generational disciple-making language through engagement with global movements. David Watson's work in Bhojpuri (which we will examine in Part Four), Jerry Trousdale's Miraculous Movements (2012), and David Garrison's A Wind in the House of Islam (2014) all brought global disciple-making movement methodology into the American conversation in serious ways.[^45] The vocabulary of "disciple-making movements" entered American evangelical discourse during this period.

[^45]: Jerry Trousdale, Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012); David Garrison, A Wind in the House of Islam: How God Is Drawing Muslims around the World to Faith in Jesus Christ (Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2014).

The second stream was the recovery of pre-modern catechetical practice. J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett's Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (2010) made the case for recovering structured catechesis in the contemporary American church.[^46] This stream produced what is sometimes called the "catechetical renewal," visible in reformed circles particularly.

[^46]: J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett, Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 22–48.

The third stream, and the one most relevant to this paper, was the formation of dedicated disciple-making networks distinct from existing denominational structures. The Bonhoeffer Project, Discipleship.org (founded in 2010 by Bobby Harrington), Renew.org (also led by Harrington), Replicate Ministries (Robby Gallaty), Real Life Ministries and the Relational Discipleship Network (Jim Putman), Multiply Movement (Francis Chan and David Platt), Zúme (Team Expansion), and dozens of smaller networks all emerged or significantly expanded in this period.

The 2020 Grey Matter / Discipleship.org / Exponential national study, which anchors the empirical sections of this paper, is itself a product of this renewal. The study was commissioned by Discipleship.org and Exponential, two organizations born of the contemporary disciple-making renewal, and conducted by the most rigorous independent research firm operating in the American Christian space. The study's title (High Aspirations Amidst Disappointing Results) summarizes both the achievement and the limit of the renewal.[^47] The conversation has matured. The fruit, at the level the field's own research can verify, has not yet.

[^47]: Grey Matter, National Study, 3.

Ordinary Movement, founded in 2018, emerged inside this contemporary renewal but with two structural differences from its peer networks. Both differences will be examined in detail in Part Eight. They are worth flagging here as the network's distinctive contribution to the conversation: the network operates without a founding church platform, denominational affiliation, or publishing-house pipeline, and it measures lineage rather than reach as its primary metric of fruit.

2.8 Where We Are Now

The three centuries of American disciple-making history surveyed above point to a recurring pattern. American Christianity has produced several effective disciple-making structures (the Methodist class meeting, the early Sunday School, the postwar parachurch organizations, the Jesus Movement and its inheritors, and the contemporary disciple-making renewal). Each succeeded in its time. Most have declined since their peak, often for reasons that had less to do with the structures themselves than with broader cultural changes. The contemporary American church has not yet produced a replacement structure that operates at the scale or effectiveness of the strongest historical models.

We are not the first generation to face a disciple-making crisis. We are the first generation to face the current one. The historical record gives reason for hope (structures that worked have worked before) and reason for sober honesty (no structure is automatically sustainable, and decline can take generations to reverse).

The next part examines, in detail, what the present American disciple-making landscape actually looks like, using the most rigorous research the field has produced.

Part Three: The State of American Discipleship

This part documents the current state of American discipleship through primary-source research. Every figure cited in this part is traceable to a named study or research organization. The cumulative picture is sobering. It is also factual.

3.1 What the National Study Actually Found

The 2020 National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches, conducted by Grey Matter Research in partnership with Discipleship.org and Exponential, is the most rigorous quantitative study of American disciple-making ever conducted. Bobby Harrington led the project. Twenty-three disciple-making partner organizations contributed input, including the Navigators, Replicate Ministries, Renew Network, Final Command, New Generations, Relational Discipleship Network, and others.[^48] Grey Matter conducted one thousand telephone interviews with senior and lead pastors, stratified by denominational group, geographic region, and church size. The sampling error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.[^49] The 2022 Becoming Five study from Exponential expanded the dataset.

[^48]: Grey Matter, National Study, 2.

[^49]: Grey Matter, National Study, 4 (footnote 2).

The study used a five-level framework to classify churches by disciple-making maturity:[^50]

[^50]: Grey Matter, National Study, 5–7.

Level

Description

Percentage of U.S. Churches

Level 1 | Subtracting from disciple-making efforts | 29%

Level 2 | Plateaued, neither helping nor hindering | 44%

Level 3 | Adding disciples through church programs | 27%

Level 4 | Reproducing personal disciple-makers | Under 5%

Level 5 | Multiplying disciple-makers (4 generations deep) | Could not statistically verify

Read this table carefully. Seventy-three percent of American churches are either subtracting from disciple-making or making no contribution to it at all. Another twenty-seven percent are adding disciples through programs, which is good but is not multiplication. Fewer than five percent are reproducing disciple-makers. Zero churches in the sample met the criteria for multiplying disciple-makers across four generations.

The study's own published conclusion is exact: "We did not find clear examples of disciple-making movements (DMM) in the US."[^51]

[^51]: Grey Matter, National Study, 3.

The official definition of a disciple-making movement, as published in the study itself, sets a specific bar:

A disciple-making movement exists when churches plant multiple churches (within a few short years), through gospel activity, that has abundant fruit among the lost, that multiplies these disciples (people growing in obedience to all of Jesus' commands), who in turn replicate themselves in others, so that we can see at least four generations regularly produced in multiple streams of disciple-making activity and these streams multiply consistently into churches.[^52]

[^52]: Grey Matter, National Study, 13–14.

This is the field-recognized standard. The four-generation threshold is not a methodology preference. It is the operating definition the largest American disciple-making research collaboration uses to identify movement. We will return to it in Part Nine.

A more recent Lifeway Research study of 2,620 Protestant pastors, published in 2024, provides a current-year update on the structural disciple-making gap. Fifty-two percent of pastors now report having an intentional plan for discipling individuals in their congregation. Forty-four percent report they do not. Four percent are not sure.[^52a] Compared to the 2015 Barna baseline of twenty-seven percent reporting a clearly articulated plan, the trajectory has moved upward. The gap, however, remains structural. Nearly half of American Protestant churches still have no intentional disciple-making plan in 2024.

[^52a]: Lifeway Research, Pastors Views on Discipleship (Nashville: Lifeway Research, 2024), Q21; cf. Aaron Earls, "Discipleship Is a Priority Without a Plan for Many Churches," Lifeway Research, August 21, 2025.

3.2 The Halo Effect: Why Pastors Cannot See the Problem

One Lifeway 2024 finding should anchor every conversation about American discipleship before any methodology debate begins. The same survey of 2,620 Protestant pastors that documented the planning gap asked whether pastors agreed with the statement "Discipleship is not completed inside a program but in a relationship." Sixty-six percent strongly agreed. Twenty-nine percent somewhat agreed. The combined agreement was ninety-five percent.[^58a] American pastors, at near-unanimous scale, already know what disciple-making requires. The structural problem is not conviction. It is the gap between what pastors confess and what their churches are built to deliver. The model they confess and the model they operate are not the same model.

[^58a]: Lifeway Research, Pastors Views on Discipleship (Nashville: Lifeway Research, 2024), Q13.

What follows in this section is the structural reason most American churches do not deliver on what their pastors already believe.

The study surfaced something subtler than the headline numbers. American pastors systematically overestimate their own disciple-making effectiveness.

The data is striking. The average pastor in the study reported 12.5 new commitments to Christ in the past year for every 100 people in their congregation. Ten percent of pastors reported 25 or more new commitments per 100 attendees. If those numbers projected accurately to the national population, the United States would be adding 5.9 million new believers each year, or 59 million new Christians over the past decade.[^53]

[^53]: Grey Matter, National Study, 8–9.

The actual national data shows the opposite. National studies by Pew Research, Gallup, Barna, and others document no significant, consistent gains in Christian self-identification, basic Christian beliefs, church involvement, or born-again beliefs across that same decade.[^54] The Christian share of the population has declined.

[^54]: Pew Research Center, In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace (October 17, 2019), 2–5.

The numbers pastors report are not reality. They are aspiration mistaken for reality.

The Grey Matter team applied a useful parallel from their own prior research on charitable giving. In a 2018 study, they found that the average American donor gives about 1.95 percent of their income to charity outside of houses of worship. The average donor believes they give 8.41 percent. Fifty-five percent of Americans give to nonprofits. Only fifteen percent of donors are aware that more than half of Americans give. Six out of ten donors believe they give a higher proportion of their income than the typical American does.[^55]

[^55]: Grey Matter Research, The Donor Mindset Study (2018), as referenced in Grey Matter, National Study, 11.

The same dynamic operates in pastoral self-assessment. The researchers wrote it plainly:

If you convince yourself that you're getting all A's in school, what motivation is there to study harder? If you feel you're already spending lots of time on discipleship-related activities, and you feel your mindset is already pointed towards discipleship, what more can you do?[^56]

[^56]: Grey Matter, National Study, 11.

This is the structural reason the disciple-making gap persists. Pastors are not lying. They are not negligent. They are operating inside a perception bias that makes the gap invisible from the inside.

The study found two additional structural facts that contradict pastoral self-perception. Only fifteen percent of pastors report that their church has both a simple, reproducible model to equip members to make disciples and a framework to measure success at doing so. Only seven percent agree strongly that they have both.[^57] The average pastor spends nine percent of their working hours personally equipping people to be disciple-makers. They spend thirty-two percent on sermon preparation, twenty percent on pastoral care, and twenty percent on administration.[^58]

[^57]: Grey Matter, National Study, 9.

[^58]: Grey Matter, National Study, 9.

The activity that pastors say is the highest priority in their ministry is receiving the smallest share of their working time.

3.3 The Sermon Paradox

The structural pattern of American discipleship is built around the sermon. The numbers tell the story.

Eighty-nine percent of American pastors use the sermon as a primary discipleship approach. Thirty-three percent of pastors identify the sermon as the single most important discipleship vehicle in their ministry, ahead of small groups at eighteen percent and one-on-one discipling at seven percent.[^59] Thirty percent of pastors say corporate worship is the function their church does best. Eleven percent say discipleship is what their church does best.[^60]

[^59]: Lifeway Research, "Discipleship Is a Priority Without a Plan for Many Churches" (August 21, 2025).

[^60]: Julie Roys, "Survey: Pastors Say Church Does Worship Services Well; Discipleship Ranks Last," The Roys Report, citing Lifeway Research data.

The retention data is the other side of the paradox. Multiple Lifeway Research and parallel studies have consistently documented that ninety to ninety-four percent of churchgoers cannot remember specific sermon content seventy-two hours after hearing it. Approximately ninety-five percent of sermon content is forgotten within three days.[^61]

[^61]: Thom S. Rainer, I Am a Church Member: Discovering the Attitude That Makes the Difference (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2013), 19–24; cf. Lifeway Research, multiple sermon retention studies 2018–2024.

The tool American pastors are most confident in is the tool that produces the lowest retention of any educational format ever measured.

This is not a critique of preaching. Preaching does what preaching is designed to do. The Reformers were right to recover the proclamation of the Word as a non-negotiable mark of the gathered church, and verse-by-verse expository teaching of Scripture remains one of the great gifts God has given to his people.[^62] What we are documenting is the consequence of asking one ministry function to do work that the New Testament gives to multiple ministry functions operating together. Preaching is necessary. Preaching alone is not sufficient.

[^62]: Calvin, Institutes, 4.1.9. The verse-by-verse expository pattern in particular is well-articulated in the Calvary Chapel tradition; see Smith, Calvary Chapel Distinctives, 51–58.

The disciple-making renewal does not seek to replace preaching. It seeks to add to preaching the relational, sustained, accountable formation that produces disciples who can themselves teach others. The two work together. The sermon casts the vision and forms the theology. The disciple-making process embeds the formation.

3.4 The Discipleship Deficit at the Lay Level

The view from the pew is consistent with the view from the pulpit.

George Barna's 2025 research documents that approximately one in ten born-again American Christians actively disciples another person in a sustained one-on-one relationship. By a broader definition that includes any form of discipling activity, thirty-three percent of Christians qualify as active disciple-makers.[^63] Thirty-nine percent are not engaged in any form of discipleship at all.[^64] Even at the broadest definition, two-thirds of self-identified Christians are not making disciples.

[^63]: George Barna, 2025 Trends Outlook (Glendale, AZ: Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 2025), reported via Disciple Nations Alliance.

[^64]: Barna Group, Two in Five Christians Are Not Engaged in Discipleship (Ventura, CA: Barna, 2022).

Among Christians not currently making disciples, the primary barriers are not what pastors assume. Thirty-seven percent cite "not feeling qualified or equipped" as the obstacle. Twenty-four percent say no one has asked them. Only seven percent cite time.[^65]

[^65]: Barna Group, Two in Five Christians.

Eighty-five percent of pastors identify busyness as a major obstacle to disciple-making in their congregation. Twenty-two percent of practicing Christians say the same.[^66] The sixty-three-point gap is one of the largest disconnects in the entire body of American church research.

[^66]: Barna Group, The State of Discipleship, commissioned by NavPress and the Navigators (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2015), 22.

The qualification gap and the invitation gap are the actual obstacles. Solving them does not require asking American Christians to work harder. It requires asking them differently and equipping them clearly.

Only seventeen percent of American Christians can identify the Great Commission and explain what it means.[^67] This is the most basic disciple-making text in the New Testament. Eighty-three percent of self-identified Christians in America do not know what it says.

[^67]: Barna Group, The State of Discipleship, 12.

3.5 The Worldview Crisis

Underneath the disciple-making gap sits a deeper structural problem. The Cultural Research Center's 2025 American Worldview Inventory, conducted by George Barna at Arizona Christian University, documents the following:

Only four percent of American adults hold a biblical worldview.[^68]

Only two percent of parents of preteens hold a biblical worldview.[^69]

Only thirty-seven percent of Christian-church pastors hold a biblical worldview.[^70]

[^68]: George Barna, American Worldview Inventory 2025 (Glendale, AZ: Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 2025), 5.

[^69]: Barna, American Worldview Inventory 2025, 8.

[^70]: Barna, American Worldview Inventory 2025, 19.

Ninety-two percent of Americans hold what the researchers call a "syncretistic" worldview, blending elements from multiple philosophies for personal satisfaction rather than internal coherence.[^71]

[^71]: Barna, American Worldview Inventory 2025, 6.

These numbers matter because disciple-making is downstream of worldview. Asking a population that does not hold a biblical worldview to make disciples is asking them to reproduce something they have not personally absorbed. The work required is more foundational than methodology. It is identity formation.

The fact that only thirty-seven percent of Christian-church pastors hold a biblical worldview deserves separate weight. The people responsible for forming disciples are themselves operating, by majority, inside the same worldview confusion they are supposed to be addressing. This is not a moral failure on the part of pastors. It is the predictable outcome of seminary curricula that prioritized professional ministry skills over deep biblical and theological formation, of pastoral cultures that valued growth over depth, and of a broader American religious environment that has been syncretizing for decades.

The path forward, whatever specific methodological form it takes, has to involve the recovery of a biblical worldview at the leader level before disciple-making methodology can produce its intended fruit. This is one reason the model proposed in Part Eight begins with intimacy with Jesus as its first and primary value, not with mission or methodology. Worldview is formed in the secret place. It cannot be installed through training events alone.

3.6 The Church Closure Layer

The disciple-making gap exists inside abroader structural decline.

The United States is closing more churches than it is planting. In 2019, approximately 4,500 churches closed while only 3,000 were planted, a ratio of roughly three to two.[^72] Church closures are now outpacing church plants by about three to one across the most recent measurement windows. Approximately 15,000 American churches are projected to close in 2025 alone.[^73]

[^72]: Yonat Shimron, "Survey: More U.S. Churches Closing than Opening," Religion News Service, May 26, 2021.

[^73]: Thom S. Rainer, as cited in The Baptist Courier, "15,000 Churches Could Close This Year," 2025.

The Pinetops Foundation, working with church researchers, projects that 176,000 American churches will close by 2050.[^74] The National Council of Churches estimates that 100,000 churches could close by 2050. Different methodologies, similar order of magnitude.

[^74]: Pinetops Foundation, The Great Opportunity: The American Church in 2050, 2nd ed. (Pinetops Foundation, 2018), 28.

Three out of four American churches are in decline, according to LifeWay Research data.[^75] Ryan Burge, the political scientist who has done the most rigorous public work on American religious demographics, estimates that one-third of America's 350,000 Christian congregations are on the brink of extinction.[^76] Church membership in the United States dropped from seventy percent in 2000 to forty-seven percent in 2021, the steepest generational decline ever recorded by Gallup.[^77]

[^75]: Thom S. Rainer, Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2014), 7.

[^76]: Ryan Burge, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 89–93.

[^77]: Jeffrey M. Jones, "U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time," Gallup, March 29, 2021.

The growth rate of U.S. Evangelical churches is approximately 0.8 percent.[^78] The general population grows faster. This means the American Evangelical share of the population is shrinking even before considering disaffiliation.

[^78]: Joshua Project, Status of World Evangelization (2023).

The disciple-making question is happening inside a contracting institution. Any disciple-making strategy that depends on the existing church infrastructure must contend with the reality that the existing church infrastructure is in structural decline. This does not argue against the local church. It argues for the urgency of recovering the local church's core disciple-making mission. The local church is not in trouble because it is the local church. It is in trouble because it has, in many cases, drifted from its central work.

3.7 The Pastor Health Crisis

The people running the American church are not okay.

Barna's State of Pastors Volume 2, published in 2024, documents the steepest decline in pastoral health Barna has ever measured. The headline numbers:

Forty-two percent of American pastors seriously considered quitting full-time ministry in 2022. The highest figure Barna had ever recorded.[^79] Among pastors under forty-five, the figure was forty-six percent.[^80] By late 2023, that number had dropped to thirty-three percent. By January 2026, to twenty-four percent.[^80a] Barna's own framing of the drop is restrained: stabilization, not recovery. The acute crisis has eased. The structural problem has not.

[^79]: Barna Group, Pastors Share Top Reasons They've Considered Quitting Ministry in the Past Year (Ventura, CA: Barna, April 27, 2022).

[^80]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2 (Ventura, CA: Barna, 2024), 41.

[^80a]: Barna Group, "Pastors Quitting Ministry: New Barna Data Shows a Shift" (Ventura, CA: Barna, January 27, 2026), reporting a December 2025 survey of more than 410 U.S. Protestant senior pastors.

Forty percent of pastors show a high risk of burnout. The same figure in 2015 was eleven percent.[^81] Burnout risk has nearly quadrupled in a decade.

[^81]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 38.

Sixty percent of pastors have significantly doubted their calling.[^82]

[^82]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 52.

Eighteen percent of pastors reported suicidal ideation or self-harm in the past year.[^83]

[^83]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 73.

Sixty-five percent of pastors report feelings of loneliness and isolation, up from forty-two percent in 2015.[^84] Only twenty-two percent receive regular spiritual support from a mentor or peer network, down from thirty-seven percent in 2015.[^85]

[^84]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 67.

[^85]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 68.

Pastors reporting "excellent" physical wellbeing dropped from twenty-four percent in 2015 to eleven percent in 2023. Pastors reporting "excellent" mental and emotional wellbeing dropped from thirty-nine percent in 2015 to fourteen percent in 2023.[^86]

[^86]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 74.

The median age of pastors has risen from forty-four to fifty-four over the last twenty-five years. The average senior pastor is now fifty-seven. Half of all senior pastors are over fifty-five.[^87]

[^87]: Barna Group, State of Pastors Volume 2, 16.

A model whose primary engine is the Sunday-morning platform cannot run indefinitely if two out of five people running the platform are considering walking away. The pastor shortage is not a downstream problem of disaffiliation. It is the upstream signal that the model is taking on more strain than its operators can sustain.

The implication for disciple-making is direct. The work cannot be bottlenecked through professional clergy. The clergy itself is in structural crisis. Whatever produces disciple-making at scale in the United States must be distributable to ordinary believers, run alongside the pastoral office rather than through it, and capable of producing fruit without depending on a profession in active decline.

This is not an argument against pastoral ministry. The local pastor remains, as the New Testament establishes and the Reformers reaffirmed, the appointed shepherd of the local congregation.[^88] But the disciple-making work cannot be solely the pastor's. Ephesians 4:11–12 names the pastor's task explicitly as "equipping the saints for the work of ministry." The saints, not the pastor, do the ministry. Recovering this Ephesians 4 vision is, theologically, what the disciple-making renewal is attempting at the operational level.

[^88]: 1 Peter 5:1–4; Acts 20:28; cf. Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.4–6.

3.8 The Hidden Cost of the Addition Model

The addition model in American Christianity is most visible at the megachurch scale. Saddleback Church operates approximately 9,000 small groups at its post-2020 peak. Steve Gladen, Saddleback's small groups pastor, has publicly disclosed that ninety-five percent of new Saddleback groups are launched through campaigns rather than organic multiplication.[^89] Church of the Highlands operates approximately 3,400 small groups across twenty-six campuses.[^90] ARC, the church-planting network co-founded by Highlands' Chris Hodges, has planted hundreds of churches nationally. Highlands College has placed 1,300 graduates across thirty-eight states and twenty-one countries.

[^89]: Steve Gladen, in various public presentations at the Small Group Network and Saddleback Small Groups Conference, 2018–2023.

[^90]: "Church of the Highlands: Annual Report," accessed via churchofthehighlands.com, 2024.

These are real outcomes. Saddleback and Church of the Highlands have produced genuine kingdom fruit, and the leaders behind them are serious Christian leaders who have invested decades in faithful work. None of these institutions, however, has yet produced a four-generation disciple-making movement under the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org definition. The categorical difference matters.

A church-planting network is one form of multiplication. A volunteer corps is one form of engagement. A small group ecosystem is one form of community. None of these is the same as a network of disciples discipling disciples across multiple generations of named individuals, which is what the field's own definition requires.

The hidden cost of the addition model surfaces when its economics are computed at the aggregate level. The combined annual operational spend of American evangelical churches, divided by the documented rate at which those churches produce new disciples through baptism, yields a figure that has circulated in the American disciple-making research community since 2001. The estimate is approximately 1.5 million dollars per baptism in aggregate church operating spend.[^91]

[^91]: The figure traces to David B. Barrett and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends, AD 30–AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2001), 656, who calculated the average aggregate U.S. institutional cost per baptism at approximately $1,551,466 based on year-2000 economic data. The methodology divides total operating expenditures of U.S. churches (including facilities, salaries, and programs) by total annual baptisms. It is a macro-aggregate institutional efficiency metric rather than a per-plant capital requirement. The order of magnitude is what the figure documents; the precise dollar figure is illustrative. See also Ordinary Movement, 2025 Full Ministry Overview (October 2025), 14.

Methodology varies across sources. The order of magnitude does not. The American church operates the most expensive disciple-making infrastructure in Christian history and produces fewer disciples per dollar spent than virtually any movement documented globally.

In 2022, forty percent of Southern Baptist Convention churches reported zero baptisms for the year. Seventy-seven percent baptized between zero and five people.[^92] Only one percent of U.S. churches across all denominations say they are "very effective" at reaching the unchurched.[^93]

[^92]: Southern Baptist Convention, Annual Church Profile (2022).

[^93]: Barna Group, The State of the Church (Ventura, CA: Barna, 2020).

These figures sit inside a structural reality that the addition model cannot solve from within its own logic. The math does not close.

3.9 The Pinetops Forecast

The Great Opportunity report, commissioned by the Pinetops Foundation and published initially in 2018 with subsequent updates, models the trajectory of American Christianity through 2050.[^94]

[^94]: Pinetops Foundation, The Great Opportunity, 7–14.

The base scenario projects that 35 million youth raised in Christian homes will disaffiliate from Christianity by 2050, approximately one million per year. The Christian share of the American adult population is projected to decline from 73 percent to 59 percent. The religiously unaffiliated population is projected to grow by 50 million, from 17 percent to 30 percent of the adult population.[^95]

[^95]: Pinetops Foundation, The Great Opportunity, 22.

Under current rates of retention and evangelism, the Pinetops worse-case projection is 42 million young people walking away by 2050. The base case is 35 million. If American churches were able to revert to retention and evangelism rates from the Gen X generation (which were themselves below historic peaks), the better-case projection is 26 million walking away, with 16 million more youth retained or won compared to the base case.[^96]

[^96]: Pinetops Foundation, The Great Opportunity, 24.

The 16-million-person difference between the base case and the better case is what Pinetops calls "the Great Opportunity." Their framing of it is direct: that is more young people who would know Jesus than every major American revival combined.

The math is honest. The path to closing it is not.

The addition model cannot, by its internal logic, address a disaffiliation curve of this scale. Attractional ministry depends on a cultural tailwind that pulls people toward Christian identity. Once that tailwind reverses, attractional ministry loses people faster than it can add them. We are inside that reversal now.

3.10 The Pattern: Attend, Consume, Repeat

Stripped to its operating logic, the dominant pattern in American Christianity over the past 40 years looks like this:

Attend. Consume. Repeat.

People come to church. They hear sermons. They attend small groups. They consume content.

They rarely become disciple-makers themselves.

The result is a church full of consumers and a leadership team exhausted from trying to keep them fed. The pastoral health crisis documented above is the predictable downstream consequence. So is the disciple-making gap. So is the disaffiliation curve. They are not separate problems. They are the same problem viewed from different angles.

Willow Creek's Reveal study, examined in Part Two, documented this pattern from inside one of the most-successful American megachurches eleven years before Ordinary Movement was founded. Their data showed that increased church activity did not produce spiritual growth, particularly at higher stages of maturity. The honest framing is theirs, not ours. The American disciple-making conversation has known about this structural problem for nearly two decades. The data is in. The structural response is what remains contested.

The honest framing belongs to a maxim that circulates in disciple-making circles, often attributed to Mike Breen:

If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.[^97]

[^97]: Mike Breen and Steve Cockram, Building a Discipling Culture: How to Release a Missional Movement by Discipling People Like Jesus Did (Pawleys Island, SC: 3DM Publishing, 2011), 11–12.

The first half is what global movements have documented across multiple continents over the past forty years. The second half is what the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study has documented in the United States across the past five.

What follows in the rest of this paper is an attempt to answer one question: what would it take to do the first half in American soil?

Part Four: Global Disciple-Making Movements, What Has Been Verified

Before turning to the obstacles American conditions present, it is worth establishing what is documented globally. American disciple-making does not happen in isolation. It happens inside a global field where movement at scale has been verified across hundreds of contexts. The American conversation benefits from honesty about that broader picture.

4.1 The Global Scale

The Lausanne Movement and the 24:14 Coalition are the two bodies with the most rigorous public tracking of global disciple-making movements. Their combined reporting establishes the following baseline:

Approximately 1,965 mature disciple-making movements are documented globally.[^98] An additional 1,750 pre-movements and 1,750 initial movements are tracked in various stages of development. The estimated population of professing disciples gathered through these networks exceeds 100 million. Approximately 9 million house churches are associated with church-planting movements globally. There are now more individual house churches from disciple-making movements than traditional denominational churches combined.

[^98]: Stan Parks et al., "Reporting Challenges for Movements in a World of Misinformation and Persecution," Evangelical Missions Quarterly 59, no. 4 (July–September 2023), reporting 24:14 Coalition tracking data; cf. 24:14 Coalition, Movement Tracker (2024); Justin D. Long, "Global Movements: Where They Are and Where They Are Headed," Mission Frontiers, January–February 2024.

The geographic distribution is the single most important data point in the global picture.

Region

Mature Movements

North America | 35

Western Europe | 42

Australia and New Zealand | 17

Everywhere else | 1,872

Approximately ninety percent of all documented disciple-making movements operate among current or former unreached people groups.

This is the structural background against which any American disciple-making claim must be evaluated. The pattern that produces rapid, multi-generational fruit in Iran, Bhojpuri North India, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of China is not the same pattern that produces sustainable Christianity in suburban Texas or coastal California. The methodologies are documented. The fruit is documented. The contextual differences are also documented. Honest analysis holds all three together.

The pattern these movements show has academic grounding outside the missiology literature. Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity, traced first-century Christianity's growth through dense network ties. Family. Friendships. Business relationships. Shared social space. His broader claim is that mass religious movements at every scale move through people who already know each other, not through cold contact or institutional broadcast. The contemporary reports from Iran, India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa fit the same pattern Stark documented historically.[^98a]

[^98a]: Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 1–27.

A theological note on terminology is worth flagging at the front of this part. The phrase "disciple-making movement" carries specific operational content drawn from David Watson, David Garrison, Steve Smith, and others working primarily in Global South and frontier mission contexts.[^99] Some practitioners within those streams have framed their work as ecclesiologically distinct from the traditional church. This paper does not take that position. The local church, with its ordained leadership, sacraments, and visible worship, remains the appointed context for Christian formation. What we are examining in this part is the operational pattern that has produced multi-generational disciple-making fruit at global scale. The question of how that pattern relates to the local church is one we will return to in Part Eight, when we describe the model this paper proposes.

[^99]: David Garrison, Church Planting Movements: How God Is Redeeming a Lost World (Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2004), 21–38; David L. Watson and Paul D. Watson, Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2014), 13–24.

4.2 The Iranian Case

Iran is the most-cited contemporary disciple-making movement in Western media and the most rigorously independently verified.

The pre-1979 baseline included a few hundred known Muslim-background Christians across the country. Ethnic Armenian and Assyrian Christians numbered approximately 100,000 but were legally prohibited from evangelizing Persian-speaking Muslims.

Current state estimates vary by source. GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based secular research organization, surveyed fifty thousand Iranians in 2020. One and a half percent self-identified as Christian.[^100] Extrapolated across the Iranian population of over 80 million, this implies approximately 1.2 million Christian converts. FAI (Frontier Alliance International) and To Every People estimate approximately 2 million practicing, baptized Iranian Christians as of 2025.[^101] International Christian Concern and Persecution.org report Iran as the fastest-growing evangelical Christian population in the world, with growth rates cited around 19.6 percent annually.[^102]

[^100]: Ammar Maleki and Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Iranians' Attitudes Toward Religion: A 2020 Survey Report (Netherlands: GAMAAN, affiliated with Tilburg University, 2020), 15.

[^101]: To Every People, Iran: An Update, 2025; cf. Frontier Alliance International, public reporting.

[^102]: International Christian Concern, Iran: Country Report, 2024.

The cultural backdrop matters as much as the conversion data. GAMAAN's attitudinal research documents that 84 percent of Iranians now hold negative views of Islam and 92 percent hold positive views of Jesus and Christianity.[^103] Fifty-four percent of Iranians self-identify as "non-religious." Fifty thousand of Iran's seventy-five thousand mosques have closed over the past decade.

[^103]: GAMAAN, Iranians' Attitudes Toward Religion, 24.

The operational features of the movement, documented in Sheep Among Wolves and parallel Frontier Alliance International reporting, are worth naming. Approximately fifty-five percent of Iranian disciple-makers are women.[^104] The movement operates without buildings, central leadership, or property. Entry happens through prayer and the identification of receptive individuals in existing social networks. Discipleship is obedience-based: action precedes full understanding. Persecution functions as a purifying accelerant. Seventeen-year prison sentences for attending a house church are not unusual.

[^104]: Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, dir. Dalton Thomas (Frontier Alliance International, 2019), documentary film.

A note of honest qualification belongs alongside these numbers. Luke Harper, writing for Radical.net in 2026, lives in the region and walks alongside the Iranian church. His published assessment is that the church has expanded in width but has not grown in depth.[^105] Many senior leaders are imprisoned or have been forced out of the country. Online media growth has outpaced discipleship capacity. The movement is real and massive. It is also carrying a discipleship crisis inside its own growth.

[^105]: Luke Harper, "What the Iranian Church Needs Now," Radical.net, January 2026.

Iran is not a clean success story. It is the fastest-growing church in the world carrying a serious crisis of formation depth. That is the honest version, and it tempers any tendency to romanticize global disciple-making movements as fully matured patterns to be transplanted.

4.3 The Bhojpuri Case

The Bhojpuri movement in North India is the most rigorously documented, multi-generationally verified disciple-making movement in the modern era. It is also the case study that anchors most contemporary disciple-making methodology.

The 1990 baseline: approximately five thousand Bhojpuri Christians among a population of one hundred million. The region was known in missions literature as "the graveyard of missions."[^106]

[^106]: Victor John with Dave Coles, Bhojpuri Breakthrough: A Movement That Keeps Multiplying (Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2019), 11.

The arc of the movement:

1990 to 1994: David Watson surveying the region and building relationships.[^107]

1994 to 1998: Obedience-based discipleship introduced to a small initial group of believers.

1998: The Bhojpuri New Testament released. Inflection point.

2000: International Mission Board audit documents exponential growth underway.

2008 to present: Movement spreading into Awadhi, Bengali, Punjabi, Angika, and other neighboring language groups.

[^107]: Watson and Watson, Contagious Disciple Making, 38–47.

Current state, as documented by movement insiders and corroborated through Lausanne-affiliated reporting: more than 80,000 churches with over 2 million baptized believers, per Premier Christianity in 2024 citing Lausanne data.[^108] Higher claims exist (Beyond.org has cited 10 million baptized disciples), but 2 million is the most conservative independently citable figure. Victor John, who has worked inside the movement for thirty-plus years, reports over 100 generations of believers and churches.[^109] These figures are practitioner-reported. Independent academic verification by Indian sociologists of religion or census authorities is not available, and missiologists have noted standard tracking limitations in fluid house-church networks operating in hostile regions. The conservative range is what is citable; the upper bound is what insiders report.

[^108]: Tim Wyatt, "Multiplying Disciples in the 'Graveyard of Missions,'" Premier Christianity, March 2024.

[^109]: John and Coles, Bhojpuri Breakthrough, 78–82.

The operational DNA that produced this outcome can be enumerated:

1. Indigenous leadership from the beginning. Watson set up the infrastructure and physically left.

2. Scripture in the heart language. The dramatized Bhojpuri New Testament was the inflection point.

3. Relationship-first engagement. Trust before proclamation. Proclamation before conversion.

4. Immediate testimony culture. Every new believer shares within their network from day one.

5. Obedience-based discipleship. Act on what you read before you finish understanding it.

6. Holistic social impact. Caste warfare, which had killed over one thousand people in Bihar in the 1990s, quelled in areas where the movement took root.

Bhojpuri remains the single clearest data point proving that multi-generational disciple-making is possible at scale when the conditions align. It does not prove that those conditions exist in North America.

4.4 The Chinese House Church Movement

The Chinese house church movement is the largest disciple-making movement in human history, with estimates ranging from 60 to 100 million believers in non-registered house churches as of the early 2020s.[^110] The movement has grown across more than seventy years of Communist Party rule, through the Cultural Revolution, through varying periods of relative openness and renewed persecution, and continues to expand.

[^110]: David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 285. More recent estimates are summarized in Operation World, ed. Jason Mandryk (Colorado Springs: Biblica Publishing, 2010), 215–17.

Documenting Chinese house church movement structure is methodologically difficult because the church operates under conditions where transparency is dangerous. What is known has been carefully assembled by missiologists and former practitioners working under pseudonyms. The pattern they describe is consistent with other documented global disciple-making movements: small house churches multiplying through ordinary believer leadership, scripture-centered formation, intensive prayer, and immediate apprenticeship of new converts as disciple-makers.

The Chinese movement also documents what disciple-making at scale looks like over multiple generations. House church networks like the Back to Jerusalem movement claim to have planted churches across hundreds of unreached people groups in Central Asia and the Middle East over the past several decades, sending missionaries from China outward through traditional missions networks and through commercial pathways that take advantage of China's economic relationships with the rest of Asia.[^111]

[^111]: Paul Hattaway, with Brother Yun, Peter Xu Yongze, and Enoch Wang, Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders Share Their Vision to Complete the Great Commission (Carlisle, UK: Piquant, 2003).

The relevant point for this paper is not to romanticize the Chinese house church but to acknowledge it as the largest demonstrated proof-of-concept that disciple-making can produce church planting at scale across multiple generations and across cultural boundaries, when the conditions of the soil match the operational pattern.

4.5 African Disciple-Making Movements

Sub-Saharan Africa has been one of the most fertile soils for disciple-making movement growth over the past three decades. The most-documented network is New Generations (the Cityteam spinoff led by Jerry Trousdale and Stan Parks), which reports involvement in more than 100,000 churches and 2 million new disciples across the African continent since 2005.[^112]

[^112]: New Generations, public reporting at newgenerations.org, 2024.

Shodankeh Johnson, working in Sierra Leone and surrounding nations, has been one of the most-influential African disciple-making practitioners, with his networks training thousands of leaders who have themselves discipled hundreds of thousands.[^113] The pattern in West Africa shares the same operational DNA as Bhojpuri: indigenous leadership, scripture in the heart language, immediate testimony culture, and explicit multi-generational reproduction targets.

[^113]: Bobby Harrington, in various Discipleship.org and Renew.org communications, has documented the Shodankeh Johnson network as one of the most rigorous extant disciple-making movements globally.

What the African data adds to the global picture is the demonstration that disciple-making movement is not limited to one region, one cultural type, or one set of geopolitical conditions. The conditions that have produced movement in India, Iran, China, and sub-Saharan Africa are diverse. What is constant across them is the operational pattern itself.

4.6 The Common Operating Stack

Across every sustained multi-generational disciple-making movement globally, stripped of cultural particulars, the operating pattern is substantially the same. Watson, Trousdale, Garrison, Smith, Sergeant, Howard, and the Lausanne reporting all converge on the following description:[^114]

[^114]: Garrison, Church Planting Movements, 172–94; Steve Smith and Ying Kai, T4T: A Discipleship Re-Revolution (Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2011); Watson and Watson, Contagious Disciple Making, 55–98; Jerry Trousdale, Miraculous Movements, 47–62.

1. Intense prayer and fasting culture. Josh Howard's research on Indian multipliers documents two to three hours of daily prayer as a baseline. Fasting two to three times per week is standard.

2. Obedience-based discipleship. Action precedes full understanding.

3. Person of peace entry. Find the one person God has prepared within an existing social network.

4. Discovery-style Bible engagement. Simple, question-driven, reproducible without a trained teacher.

5. Immediate testimony. New believers share on day one.

6. Indigenous leadership. Foreign catalysts leave early.

7. Explicit multi-generational goal. Fourth-generation replication is the success metric, not first-generation conversion count.

8. Simple, reproducible church form. A group of obedient Scripture-followers can become a church.

This stack is not controversial within the global disciple-making field. What is controversial is whether it can be transplanted into Western soil without losing its core properties, and how it relates to the local church as the New Testament describes it.

The model proposed in Part Eight takes a particular position on this question. It preserves several elements of the global operating stack (obedience-based formation, multi-generational reproduction, apprenticeship-style leadership development, simple reproducible content), adapts others to American conditions (structured curriculum rather than pure discovery, integration with the local church rather than house church replacement), and acknowledges that some elements (particularly the prayer and fasting intensity) cannot be imported wholesale and must be cultivated over much longer timelines.

4.7 Can This Pattern Run in American Soil?

The honest answer is: not at the same speed, not in the same form, and possibly not at all under the conditions American Christians work to maintain.

Every accelerant in Bhojpuri and Iran is an obstacle in suburban America. Persecution functions as a refining pressure that increases commitment. Comfort produces the opposite effect. Oral culture and collectivist family networks reproduce Discovery-style engagement naturally. Literate, individualistic American culture does not. Rural poverty creates spiritual receptivity. Suburban abundance produces indifference. Religious crises (Hindu in Bhojpuri, Shia in Iran) open unusual cultural doors. American Christians face no comparable cultural rupture, only slow drift.

The same methodology, the same leader commitment, the same faithful execution will produce different outcomes in different soils. That is not a failure of the method. It is a feature of how soil works. Jesus' own parable of the sower in Matthew 13 makes this exact point. The seed is the same. The soil produces different yields.

The implication for American practice is twofold. First, importing the global pattern unchanged is unlikely to work. The conditions that make the pattern reproduce do not exist here. Second, ignoring the global pattern entirely is also unlikely to work. The deep features of the operating stack (obedience, multiplication, indigenous leadership, simple reproducible form) are not cultural artifacts. They are biblical and structural. They have to be adapted, not abandoned.

What the rest of this paper proposes is one such adaptation.

Part Five: Why Multi-Generational Movement Resists American Soil

The structural obstacles to multi-generational movement in North America have been documented across four decades of research. They are not theoretical. They are reported by the same pastors, researchers, and practitioners who are trying to overcome them. This section names eleven obstacles that any American disciple-making strategy has to contend with honestly.

The philosophical context matters before we get to the operational obstacles. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age describes modern Western life as living inside what he calls the "immanent frame."[^114a] Transcendence becomes one option among many. Belief becomes a chosen identity, not an inherited one. The American soil is not just culturally different from the soil that produces movement elsewhere. It is philosophically distinct. The conditions under which costly, cross-shaped, multi-generational discipleship feels natural and necessary are largely absent in the late-modern West. This is not an excuse. It is the terrain.

[^114a]: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–22, 539–93.

5.1 The Willing Leader Pool Is Small

George Barna's 2025 research documents that approximately one in ten born-again American Christians actively disciples another person.[^115] This is not a moral failing of the ninety percent. It is a structural feature of the soil. Thirty-seven percent of Christians not currently making disciples cite "not feeling qualified or equipped" as the primary barrier. Fifty-nine percent of church leaders, in the Navigators' commissioned Barna research, cite "lack of qualified and willing discipleship leaders" as a major obstacle to disciple-making in their churches.[^116]

[^115]: Barna, 2025 Trends Outlook.

[^116]: Barna Group, The State of Discipleship (2015), 28.

The implication: in any given American Christian population, the willing leader pool starts at roughly ten percent. Of those, fewer will complete a structured process. Of those, fewer will launch a group. Of those who launch groups, a portion will produce a second-generation leader. The funnel narrows at every stage.

This is not an argument against the work. It is an argument for honest expectations about its pace.

5.2 Cultural Resistance to Multiplication

Allen White is the most experienced small group consultant in the American evangelical ecosystem. Over twenty years he has consulted more than fifteen hundred churches. His published frameworks (including the Exodus 18 coaching structure, the three-semester launch calendar, and alignment-series-based small group launches) are widely cited.[^117]

[^117]: Allen White, Exponential Groups: Unleashing Your Church's Potential (Indianapolis: Wesleyan Publishing, 2017).

His most important finding is the obstacle most American small group strategies do not handle well. From two decades of field data, in his own words:

Members didn't want to leave groups. Group leaders couldn't identify an apprentice. We weren't multiplying groups. We were losing groups because no one wanted to multiply. Or, more accurately, we were losing the opportunity to multiply.[^118]

[^118]: Allen White, "Why Small Groups Don't Multiply (And How to Change That)," Church Leaders, March 2018.

The psychological mechanism behind this resistance is straightforward. In North America, small groups become pseudo-family. The weakness of extended family structures, the divorce rate, the atomization of suburban life, and the general thinning of primary attachment relationships in American adult life all contribute to the small group functioning as primary community.[^119] Asking members to "split" the group triggers the same loss reflexes as family separation. The members are right to resist. Splitting feels like loss because, functionally, it is loss.

[^119]: Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 79–115, documents the broader thinning of associational life in the United States. Cf. Robert Wuthnow, I Come Away Stronger: How Small Groups Are Shaping American Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

White's own response to this dynamic was to stop asking groups to split and to launch new groups out of all-new people instead. That is one valid solution. But it trades classical multiplication for addition. The deeper structural challenge (how to launch a second generation of leaders from inside an existing group without forcing the group to dissolve) remains unsolved in most American small group strategies.

This is the obstacle the model in Part Eight attempts to solve structurally.

5.3 Comfort and Consumer Christianity

Discipleship.org's own analysis in its 2021 piece Disciple Making Movements: Why Not Here? names the problem directly:

Our churches are often full of "spiritually obese" members, always getting fed but seldom working out their faith. For our western Christian culture to experience disciple making movements, we must change how we approach scripture and Bible study.[^120]

[^120]: Discipleship.org, Disciple Making Movements: Why Not Here? (Franklin, TN: Discipleship.org, 2021).

Nearly every rapid disciple-making movement globally has emerged under conditions that Western Christians work to avoid. Persecution (Iran, China, parts of Africa). Poverty (Bhojpuri, much of the Global South). Regime collapse (post-revolution contexts). The conditions that produce movement are the conditions the suburban American church is built to insulate its members from.

This is not a moral indictment. American Christians did not choose abundance any more than Iranian Christians chose persecution. But it is a structural reality. The accelerants that have produced documented movement elsewhere are not available here. Any American disciple-making strategy has to work with the soil that exists, not the soil it wishes it had.

5.4 Sermon-Centric Formation Is the Default Pattern

The numbers in Part Three bear repeating in this context. Eighty-nine percent of American pastors use the sermon as their primary discipleship approach. Approximately ninety-five percent of sermon content is forgotten within three days. This pattern matters for disciple-making strategy because every new American disciple-making leader arrives carrying the assumption that information transfer through a stage-based teaching event is how spiritual formation works.

Asking a new leader to invert that instinct (to do discipleship relationally over six to twelve months, with the expectation of generational multiplication downstream) requires a cognitive and habit rewire. Some leaders will make the full rewire. Many will not. They will run a discipleship process as "another small group Bible study." Those groups will be less likely to produce second-generation leaders because the leader never fully internalized that disciple-making, not content delivery, is the point.

This is one mechanism behind the variability in second-generation emergence rates that any American disciple-making network has to plan for. The sermon-centric default is in the water American Christians have been drinking their whole lives. It does not disappear in a single training event.

One related Lifeway 2024 data point reinforces the in-person requirement that any American disciple-making model has to honor. Among 2,620 Protestant pastors surveyed on whether "Discipleship can be as effective virtually as in-person," only twenty-two percent agreed at any level. Seventy-five percent disagreed.[^120a] The pastoral instinct, at near-three-to-one scale, is that disciple-making requires physical presence. Any disciple-making model designed for American soil has to take this seriously. Commitment to in-person session structure is not a stylistic preference. It is a structural alignment with what American pastors broadly know to be true.

[^120a]: Lifeway Research, Pastors Views on Discipleship (Nashville: Lifeway Research, 2024), Q14.

5.5 The Prayer and Fasting Intensity Gap

This obstacle is the least quantifiable and probably the most significant.

Josh Howard's survey of the most effective Indian multipliers documents two to three hours of daily prayer as a baseline. Weekly fasting two to three times.[^121] The rapidly reproducing discipleship movement in Iran, per Frontier Alliance International reporting, operates under the published principle that "everything is foundational on prayer. We find people of peace through prayer. We even find locations through prayer."[^122]

[^121]: Josh Howard, Disciple Making Movements: An Indian Practitioner's Perspective (Ignite India, 2019), as cited in Discipleship.org partner reporting.

[^122]: Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, dir. Dalton Thomas (Frontier Alliance International, 2019).

The Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study defines Level 5 disciple-making churches in the United States as those where "praying and fasting is significantly entrenched, happening a couple of times a week and intensified in special seasons."[^123] Zero American churches qualified for Level 5 in their study. The prayer intensity gap is part of why.

[^123]: Grey Matter, National Study, 14.

Typical Western Christian prayer time, by contrast, is documented across multiple studies at ten to fifteen minutes per day among self-identified Christians, with somewhat higher figures among those in active discipling relationships.[^124]

[^124]: Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study (2014; updated 2020).

The spiritual engine that is load-bearing to every rapid disciple-making movement globally operates at an intensity an order of magnitude beyond what most American disciple-makers sustain. This is not a methodology gap. It is a posture gap. Methodology cannot close it. Only prayer life itself can.

The implication for American practice is sobering. The question is not whether to instruct leaders in rigorous prayer. The question is what realistic adoption rate the American disciple-making field can expect, and whether without that intensity the multiplication rate can ever match what is documented globally. The honest answer the research supports is: not at the same rate.

This obstacle is not optional to address. But the timeline to address it at scale is longer than the next funding cycle. The encouraging note is that prayer is a gift of grace, not a discipline of will. The Spirit who prompts prayer is the same Spirit who indwells every believer. The growth of prayer culture in American disciple-making is more a matter of yielding than of striving.

5.6 Busyness, Real and Imagined

The sixty-three-point perception gap between pastors and laypeople on busyness (eighty-five percent of pastors say it is a major obstacle, twenty-two percent of practicing Christians say the same) was already noted in Part Three. The implication for disciple-making practice is precise. The qualification gap and the invitation gap are the actual obstacles, not time scarcity. Solving them does not require asking American Christians to work harder. It requires asking them differently and equipping them clearly.

5.7 Time Horizon Compression

Western Christians experience time as speeding up. The resulting temptation inside disciple-making networks is to chase speed, mistaking "rapid" for "faithful."

The honest Western disciple-making practitioners have said so directly. Steve Addison, who has trained Western disciple-making practitioners for more than twenty years, published this self-assessment:

I'd taught hundreds of leaders around the world on the characteristics of movements, I'd trained church planters, pastors and denominational teams on implementation. Churches were planted but where was the fruit? We weren't seeing multiplying disciples and churches.[^125]

[^125]: Steve Addison, The Rise and Fall of Movements: A Roadmap for Leaders (Cody, WY: 100Movements, 2018), 1.

Cory Ozbun, co-leader of KC Underground, published this in 2023:

We have become so accustomed to the rapid speed of everything in our culture that it is easy to programize and systematize our strategies to the point that we end up tragically missing the heart of it all. Slow and steady wins.[^126]

[^126]: Cory Ozbun, "Why Slow and Steady Wins: Reflections from KC Underground," 2023.

David Watson, whose Bhojpuri work is the most-cited multi-generational case in modern disciple-making, has written:

Nothing is quick. It only appears to be because more and more leaders are produced in obedience. We go slowly but appear to go fast. We invest extensively in one person to reach and train many.[^127]

[^127]: Watson and Watson, Contagious Disciple Making, 72.

The pace of multi-generational disciple-making is determined by how long real discipleship takes. Eighteen to twenty-four months per cohort is a minimum, not a baseline. A four-generation chain takes six to ten years to develop from the origin group, even when every gate succeeds. This is not a methodology problem. It is a physics problem. American disciple-making strategies that promise faster than that are promising what the soil does not produce.

5.8 The Leader-to-Mentor Role Shift

In most American small group models, the leader finishes the curriculum and moves on. The group dissolves. The participants are left hoping a pastor or staff member will catch them in the gap.

Any serious disciple-making strategy has to invert this default. The original leader stays invested as mentor for the next generation. The Pauline pattern in 2 Timothy 2:2 names four generations in a single sentence. That sentence requires the first-generation leader to remain in relationship long enough for the third and fourth generations to emerge.

This is harder than it sounds. It runs against American individualism. It runs against the preference for clear endings over open commitments. It runs against the absence of an honored mentorship tradition in most American subcultures. Some leaders will run a discipleship process well, transition to ongoing community, and then emotionally exit. If they do, the second-generation leaders who emerged from their group lose their coaching pipeline at exactly the pivot point Allen White calls "mission critical." The group launches but the chain breaks at the second-to-third-generation handoff.

The structural answer to this obstacle is built into the model and addressed in Part Eight.

5.9 Founder-Succession Timeline Asymmetry

Every documented disciple-making movement in history has eventually faced the same test. Can the movement continue when the founders step back? Watson stepped back from direct Bhojpuri leadership around years fifteen to twenty of that movement. The movement carried on. The transition was not optional. It was the proof of the movement's sustainability.

Any American disciple-making network will face the same test. The question is when. The honest answer is that the timeline in American soil is longer than in Bhojpuri.

The reasons follow directly from the obstacles already named. American conditions lack the persecution that purifies commitment. American conditions are individualistic rather than collectivist. American conditions are literate and consumer-oriented rather than oral and collective. American conditions produce comfort rather than the spiritual hunger that drives movement elsewhere. Each of these features extends the timeline.

The implication is not pessimism. It is a calibrated horizon. A network founded in 2018 should not expect founder succession to be possible by 2028. The honest planning horizon for American founder succession is closer to twenty to twenty-five years from founding. That is not a failure. It is the time the soil requires.

5.10 The Moralistic Therapeutic Deism Problem

Underneath the methodological obstacles sits a worldview obstacle that the sociologist Christian Smith documented in the most influential study of American adolescent religion ever conducted. Smith and his National Study of Youth and Religion team, working with the data from interviews with thousands of American teenagers between 2001 and 2008, found that the dominant religious worldview among American young people was not orthodox Christianity, agnosticism, atheism, or any other classifiable religious position. It was what Smith named "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."[^128]

[^128]: Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 162–63.

Smith identified five operating beliefs of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.[^129]

[^129]: Smith, Soul Searching, 162–63.

Smith's research documented that this worldview operated as the default among American teenagers and young adults across denominational lines, including those who self-identified as evangelical Protestants. The follow-up study, Souls in Transition (2009), confirmed that the worldview persisted into emerging adulthood and shaped religious practice and engagement throughout the twenties.[^130] Smith's most recent work in this stream, Handing Down the Faith (2021, with Amy Adamczyk), traces what actually determines whether children adopt a serious religious identity. The variable is the consistent religious practice and conviction of their parents, modeled at home in everyday life.[^130a] The finding cuts against the dominant American assumption that church programs are the primary mechanism of formation. Parents are. Disciple-making, in the sociological data, is intergenerational and household-anchored long before it is institutional.

[^130a]: Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 12, 187–212.

[^130]: Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 154–62.

The implication for disciple-making is substantial. The population the American church is attempting to disciple does not, by majority, hold a worldview in which discipleship makes sense. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism does not require disciple-making. The God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism does not call disciples. He sponsors moral therapy.

This means that disciple-making in American soil is not primarily a methodology problem. It is a catechesis problem. The first work of American disciple-making is the formation of a biblical worldview that makes the call to discipleship intelligible at all. The Cultural Research Center data noted in Part Three (only four percent of American adults hold a biblical worldview) is the contemporary update of Smith's earlier research. The pattern has only intensified.

This is one reason the model proposed in Part Eight begins with intimacy with Jesus as its primary value rather than with mission, methodology, or recruitment. Intimacy with Jesus is the operating context within which a biblical worldview is formed. Without that intimacy, the rest of the work has no foundation to build on.

5.11 The Asymmetry Between Conditions

The cumulative effect of the obstacles above is simple. Every accelerant in Bhojpuri is an obstacle in America. Every American cultural feature slows the timeline in ways global disciple-making leaders did not have to navigate. The same methodology, the same leader commitment, the same faithful execution produces a longer timeline when applied in this ground.

This is the asymmetry that has to be named at the front end of any American disciple-making strategy. The work is real. The fruit is possible. The pace is slower than the public discourse suggests. The American disciple-making conversation will not mature until that asymmetry is held honestly by the people doing the work.

Part Six: The Navigator Arc, A Ninety-Two-Year Preview

No other American organization has worked at disciple-making longer or harder than the Navigators. No other organization has invested more in curriculum, training, infrastructure, and global deployment. No other organization has commissioned independent research on itself and then published unflattering findings. And no other organization has publicly pivoted its strategic framework as many times across as many decades. The arc of those pivots is the single most instructive case study available to the American disciple-making field.

Understanding it correctly reframes what is realistic for any newer network and what time horizons honest planning requires.

6.1 Founding and Early Identity (1933 to 1970s)

Dawson Trotman began what became the Navigators in 1933, initially through evangelism and discipleship among U.S. Navy sailors in Long Beach, California.[^131] The early Navigator DNA was life-to-life, one-on-one discipleship built around Scripture memory, personal Bible study, and accountability. That DNA still shapes the organization ninety-two years later and has been exported to 115 countries.

[^131]: Betty Lee Skinner, Daws: The Story of Dawson Trotman, Founder of the Navigators (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 89–112.

Notably, the early-era Navigators did not operate from a church platform. They discipled individuals in military, campus, and workplace contexts. The structural parallel to platform-independent disciple-making is worth holding.

Trotman's own theological convictions shaped the organization from the beginning. He emphasized personal prayer, scripture memory, accountability, and the responsibility of every believer to make disciples. The Navigator Wheel, Trotman's visual summary of the disciple's life (with Christ at the center, and Word, prayer, fellowship, and witnessing as the four spokes), continues to be used by Navigators worldwide more than seventy years after he developed it.[^132]

[^132]: Skinner, Daws, 167–82. The Navigator Wheel diagram is described in detail in Navigator training materials available through NavPress.

6.2 The Curriculum Era (1970s to Present)

NavPress launched the Design for Discipleship (DFD) series in the 1970s, seven study books intended for one-on-one and small group use. DFD has sold more than five million copies over twenty-five-plus years.[^133] This was the Navigators' first major curriculum export into local churches and established the pattern of "reach individuals with curriculum, trust the individuals to disciple others."

[^133]: NavPress, Design for Discipleship Sales Report (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2020).

The DFD pattern set the template for an entire generation of American disciple-making curriculum. Multiple subsequent publishers and ministries adopted similar structures: a multi-book series, designed for use by lay leaders, supporting one-on-one or small group discipling relationships, with substantial scripture memory and homework components.

6.3 The Church-Focused Curriculum Era (1975 to Present)

In 1975, a group of Navigator staff gathered to address how the disciple-making learned through campus and military ministry could be transferred into local churches specifically. The result was the 2:7 Series, initially a five-book curriculum, later condensed to three eleven-week workbooks (roughly thirty-three weeks of structured content, comparable in scope to the twenty-seven-session process described in Part Eight).[^134]

[^134]: The Navigators, 2:7 Series, multiple editions, NavPress.

Over fifty years, more than two million people have been discipled through 2:7.[^135] This is the single largest individual-discipleship reach in American church history. A commonly cited illustrative outcome from the Navigators' own public reporting: one Indian professor who ran his first 2:7 group in a dorm room has, over forty years, traced more than two hundred local churches across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, East Africa, and the Middle East back to that single group.[^136]

[^135]: The Navigators, "About the 2:7 Series," navigators.org.

[^136]: The Navigators, Small Beginnings, Big Impact, internal newsletter, 2019.

Stories like this are not rare in the Navigator ecosystem. They are also overwhelmingly weighted toward non-American contexts. That weighting is one of the most important features of the data. The Navigator framework appears to produce significant multi-generational fruit in international contexts but to produce less of that fruit in American contexts at scale. The pattern is consistent with the soil asymmetry documented in Part Five.

6.4 The Strategic Planning Pivot (2000s)

At some point during the 2000s, a new group of Navigator staff gathered to address a problem that had become clear inside the organization: churches using 2:7 were producing discipled individuals but were not, as churches, becoming disciple-making cultures. The Intentional Disciplemaking Church (IDC) strategic planning process was the response. IDC helped churches develop vision, values, and mission for disciple-making at an institutional level.

This was the Navigators' first organizational acknowledgment that curriculum alone does not produce a disciple-making church. The pivot is theologically significant because it represents the recognition, from inside one of the most curriculum-rich organizations in American Christianity, that the work of disciple-making cannot be reduced to material distribution. It requires culture formation at the congregational level.

6.5 The Culture Transformation Pivot (2018 to Present)

Growing intentional Disciplemaking Cultures (GiDC) is the current Navigator Church Ministries flagship. It is explicitly framed as not a program. It is a three-year engagement. The three phases progress from CORE (building a foundational team of trained disciple-makers) to MATURITY (aligning shared language, values, vision, and practices across the church culture) to MULTIPLY (outward focus into community).[^137] GiDC has been implemented in hundreds of churches per the Navigators' own reporting.

[^137]: Navigator Church Ministries, GiDC Overview (Colorado Springs: NCM, 2024), navigatorschurchministries.org.

The published tagline of the offering is revealing: "This isn't a program."

The Navigators have reached a point, eighty-five years into their work, where their primary offering to churches is explicitly not a product to be consumed but a multi-year coaching engagement to build culture. The institutional learning from ninety-plus years of disciple-making work has converged on culture transformation as the higher-leverage work, with curriculum and individual discipling integrated into the broader cultural shift rather than serving as the primary mechanism.

6.6 The Research They Commissioned on Themselves

Navigator Church Ministries commissioned Barna Group to conduct a rigorous study of discipleship in American churches, published as The State of Discipleship. They then published the findings prominently on their own public-facing materials. The findings include:

Only one in five American Christians is involved in any discipleship activity at all.[^138]

A significant difference in approach to discipleship exists between Navigator alumni and Christians generally, though the magnitude is described qualitatively rather than numerically in public reporting.

The gap between pastors' self-assessment of their disciple-making effectiveness and the reality on the ground is substantial.

Church leaders identify busyness as a major obstacle at eighty-five percent while practicing Christians identify it at only twenty-two percent.

[^138]: Barna Group, The State of Discipleship, 9.

The single most telling sentence the Navigators have pulled from their commissioned research and now display across their external-facing materials is this:

America's best churches don't have a discipleship program or "ministry," but a disciplemaking culture and identity.[^139]

[^139]: Barna Group, The State of Discipleship, 17.

That an organization whose primary commercial and ministry product has been discipleship programs for fifty years would put this sentence on its own materials is an act of extraordinary organizational integrity. It is also the clearest signal available to the wider field about where the work actually lives.

6.7 The Strategic Arc, Summarized

The Navigators progression over ninety-two years moves through five distinct phases:

1. Life-to-Life (1933 to 1970s). One-on-one discipleship, predominantly in non-church contexts.

2. Curriculum distribution (1970s onward). DFD into churches, over five million copies.

3. Church-focused curriculum (1975 onward). 2:7 Series, over two million discipled.

4. Church strategic planning (2000s onward). IDC process.

5. Church culture transformation (2018 onward). GiDC three-year engagement.

Each pivot happened because the prior framework was producing real fruit at its level but was not producing what the organization actually wanted at the next level.

Life-to-life worked at the individual level but did not transfer cleanly into churches.

Design for Discipleship curriculum reached millions of individuals but did not produce disciple-making churches.

The 2:7 Series deepened individual discipleship inside churches but did not produce disciple-making cultures.

IDC helped churches plan for discipleship but did not, alone, produce sustained culture change.

GiDC is the current attempt. Its results will be evaluated over the next decade.

6.8 What the Arc Tells the Field

After ninety-two years of serious work, more than two million discipled individuals through a single curriculum, another five million through DFD, global deployment across 115 countries, and arguably the most mature disciple-making infrastructure in American Christianity, the Navigators themselves do not claim to have solved American disciple-making.

The five lessons available to the wider field from this ninety-two-year arc:

First, curriculum is necessary but not sufficient. The best discipleship curriculum in American history, distributed over fifty years with global infrastructure and substantial marketing support, did not by itself produce verified multi-generational movement in the United States. Scale of inputs does not guarantee scale of movement outputs.

Second, the pivot from resource to strategy to culture is likely inevitable. The fifty-year arc from DFD to 2:7 to IDC to GiDC ultimately landed on culture change as the higher-leverage work. Any newer American network should anticipate a similar pivot in its own future, name it internally as likely, and build learning mechanisms that surface when the pivot is needed.

Third, individual discipleship success does not automatically scale to movement. Two million discipled individuals did not, across fifty years of American deployment, produce a verified multi-generational movement. This is not a failure of Navigator effort or methodology. It is a structural feature of American soil interacting with an individual-plus-curriculum strategy.

Fourth, the American context resists multi-generational fruit even with world-class methodology and a century of practice. The Navigators have the best methodology, the longest track record, the deepest infrastructure, the largest publishing footprint, and the most credibility in the field. They cannot point publicly to a sustained American multi-generational movement. That fact says something important about the soil, not about Navigator competence.

Fifth, the long view is the only view that works. Nothing in the Navigator arc happened quickly. Every major pivot took a decade or more to mature. Every honest practitioner inside the organization currently uses phrases like "long-haul process," "faithful presence over years," and "God meets us in the practice, not just in the results." The American disciple-making field would benefit from absorbing this posture as a baseline assumption rather than as an aspiration.

The Navigator lesson in a single sentence:

Ninety-two years and still iterating, the most experienced disciple-making network in America has publicly concluded that curriculum alone does not produce movement. Culture change in churches does. Any newer network should watch for the same lesson and plan its work accordingly.

Part Seven: A Literature Review of Contemporary Disciple-Making Voices

The contemporary American disciple-making conversation has produced a substantial body of literature over the past sixty years. This part surveys the most influential voices, treating each as a serious contribution to a shared field. The goal is not to rank them. The goal is to understand what each has contributed, what each has not, and where the conversation stands.

The voices surveyed below operate from a range of theological commitments. Some are Reformed. Some are Wesleyan. Some are Baptist. Some are non-denominational evangelical. Some are Anglican. Their disagreements on second-order theological questions are real and worth taking seriously in their own contexts. What unites them, and what justifies treating them together in a literature review, is their shared commitment to recovering disciple-making as the church's core mission.

7.1 Robert Coleman: The Pattern Recovery

Robert E. Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism, originally published in 1963, is the foundational text of the contemporary American disciple-making renewal.[^140] It has sold more than 3.5 million copies and has been translated into more than one hundred languages. Coleman's central argument is straightforward. Jesus' method was not the proclamation of the gospel to crowds, although he did that. Jesus' method was the deep formation of a few who would themselves form many.

[^140]: Robert E. Coleman, The Master Plan of Evangelism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1993).

Coleman organizes Jesus' method around eight principles: selection, association, consecration, impartation, demonstration, delegation, supervision, and reproduction.[^141] The eighth principle, reproduction, is the structural argument the whole book builds toward. Jesus did not merely make disciples. He made disciple-makers. The work was incomplete until the disciples themselves were producing further disciples.

[^141]: Coleman, Master Plan, 27–113.

Coleman's contribution to the field is establishing the biblical and methodological grounds for prioritizing depth over breadth. Sixty years after publication, the book is still cited as the starting point for most American disciple-making frameworks. What Coleman did not provide was a contemporary operational system. The book describes Jesus' pattern. It does not describe how a twenty-first-century American pastor or layperson should organize their week to embody that pattern.

This is not a critique of Coleman. The book was published in 1963, decades before the contemporary disciple-making renewal had assembled the methodological infrastructure that newer networks now build on. Coleman's contribution was the foundational one. The rest of the field has been working out the operational implications ever since.

7.2 Bill Hull: The Pastoral Vocation Reframe

Bill Hull's The Disciple-Making Pastor (1988) and The Complete Book of Discipleship (2006) represent five decades of pastoral and theological work on disciple-making.[^142] Hull's central contribution is the recovery of disciple-making as the pastor's primary vocation, not as one ministry among several.

[^142]: Bill Hull, The Disciple-Making Pastor (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1988); Bill Hull, The Complete Book of Discipleship: On Being and Making Followers of Christ (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006).

Hull argues that the modern American pastorate has been deformed by its assumption that the pastor's primary work is preaching and church administration. The biblical pastor's primary work, Hull argues, is making disciples who make disciples.[^143] The other tasks support that work or they are not the pastor's work in the first place. This argument has been particularly influential among Reformed and Wesleyan pastors who have used Hull's framework to reorient their own ministry priorities.

[^143]: Hull, Disciple-Making Pastor, 22–34.

The Bonhoeffer Project, which Hull co-founded with Brandon Cook and others, attempts to embody this reframe through pastor-to-pastor disciple-making cohorts. Hull's literary contribution to the field is substantial. The Bonhoeffer Project's measurable institutional impact has been more modest. The pattern of voices making real theological contributions without producing matched scaled institutional change is one we will see repeatedly in this part.

7.3 Greg Ogden: Triads and Transferable Material

Greg Ogden's Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time (2003) makes a specific operational argument. Ogden contends that the most effective unit for disciple-making is the triad: three people, including the discipler, meeting weekly over an extended period.[^144] Ogden's Discipleship Essentials (1998), the twenty-four-week curriculum he developed for triad use, has been widely adopted in seminaries and mid-size churches.[^145]

[^144]: Greg Ogden, Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 142–58.

[^145]: Greg Ogden, Discipleship Essentials: A Guide to Building Your Life in Christ, rev. ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2018).

Ogden's contribution is twofold. First, he made a specific case for triads over one-on-one and over larger groups, arguing that triads provide both accountability and reproducibility in ways the other configurations do not. Second, he produced transferable curriculum that pastors and leaders could use without developing their own.

The limitation of Ogden's framework is that it remains primarily a curriculum-and-method approach. Like Coleman's Master Plan, it provides the pattern. It does not provide the structural mechanism that produces multi-generational reproduction at scale across thousands of contexts. Ogden himself would likely acknowledge that the triad is an operational unit, not a complete movement strategy. The work of building a movement around the triad is the work the broader disciple-making renewal has been attempting since.

7.4 Dallas Willard: The Theological Reframe

Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (1998) and The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006) are arguably the most theologically substantive contributions to the contemporary American disciple-making conversation.[^146] Willard, a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California and a serious lay theologian, argued that the American church has functionally separated salvation from discipleship, treating the first as essential and the second as optional.

[^146]: Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998); Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).

The title of The Great Omission makes the argument: the American church has functionally omitted the discipleship clause from the Great Commission, focusing instead on the conversion and baptism elements.[^147] Willard's theological case is that the gospel itself is misunderstood when discipleship is treated as optional. The grace that saves is the same grace that forms.

[^147]: Willard, Great Omission, ix–xiv.

Willard's contribution to the field is theological gravity. The disciple-making renewal has often been more methodological than theological. Willard's writing forces the conversation to engage seriously with the question of what discipleship is for and why it is non-negotiable. His insistence that grace and effort are not opposites (his often-quoted phrase: "grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning") has shaped the theological self-understanding of the disciple-making renewal in important ways.[^148]

[^148]: Willard, Great Omission, 34.

The limitation of Willard's contribution is that he was a philosopher rather than a pastor or movement leader. His books shape thinking. They do not produce movements directly. The work of translating Willard's theological gravity into operational practice has fallen to others.

7.5 Mike Breen and 3DM: Building a Discipling Culture

Mike Breen and 3DM's Building a Discipling Culture (2011) represents a serious attempt to develop a transferable disciple-making framework usable at the local church level.[^149] Breen, an Anglican vicar in Sheffield, England, built a system of "LifeShapes" (visual icons representing core disciplines like the learning circle, the up/in/out triangle, the semi-circle of rest and work) intended to be both memorable and reproducible.

[^149]: Mike Breen and Steve Cockram, Building a Discipling Culture (Pawleys Island, SC: 3DM Publishing, 2011).

3DM has trained pastors and churches in the LifeShapes framework across hundreds of contexts globally. The model has produced documented fruit in particular church planting movements, especially in the U.K. and through certain American Anglican networks. Breen's contribution to the field is the recovery of culture-formation language. His own often-cited summary: "If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples."[^150]

[^150]: Breen and Cockram, Building a Discipling Culture, 11–12.

The limitation of Breen's contribution is that the LifeShapes framework requires extensive training to deploy faithfully and depends on a particular relational culture that has been difficult to reproduce across many American contexts. The framework has been most effective where it has been embedded in churches whose leadership has been personally formed in the 3DM environment over multiple years.

7.6 Jim Putman: Relational Discipleship

Jim Putman's Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches That Make Disciples (2010) articulates the Share / Connect / Minister / Disciple framework that anchors Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, Idaho, and the Relational Discipleship Network.[^151] Putman's argument is that disciple-making is fundamentally relational rather than informational, and that churches that build around relationship produce disciples while churches that build around content do not.

[^151]: Jim Putman, Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches That Make Disciples (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2010).

Real Life Ministries is one of the most-studied American churches built around an explicit disciple-making framework. Weekly attendance has grown to approximately eight thousand across twenty-five years of Putman's leadership. The accompanying Real-Life Discipleship Training Manual has sold more than 100,000 copies.[^152]

[^152]: Jim Putman, Avery Willis, Brandon Guindon, and Bill Krause, Real-Life Discipleship Training Manual: Equipping Disciples Who Make Disciples (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2010).

The contribution of Putman's work is the proof-of-concept that a single American church can build sustainable disciple-making infrastructure around an explicit framework. The limitation, which Putman himself acknowledges in his training materials, is the difficulty of transferring that culture from one congregation to other congregations operating in different contexts. The Relational Discipleship Network functions primarily as a pastors' learning community rather than as a multi-generational movement.

Putman's intellectual honesty about the limitations of his own work is worth flagging. He has published an exchange in which he asks a pastor what percentage of the congregation is spiritually mature. The pastor's answer, "Maybe ten to twenty percent," is documented in Putman's own training materials.[^153] That a leader operating one of the most disciple-making-intentional churches in America would publish an honest assessment of his own congregation's spiritual maturity ceiling is the kind of organizational candor that the broader field needs more of.

[^153]: Putman et al., Real-Life Discipleship Training Manual, 23.

7.7 David Watson and the DMM Stream: The Global Bridge

David Watson and Paul D. Watson's Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery (2014) brought the methodology of the Bhojpuri movement, which we examined in Part Four, into the American disciple-making conversation.[^154] The Watson framework (Discovery Bible Study, person of peace entry, obedience-based discipleship, four-generation lineage tracking) became the operational standard for American disciple-making movement (DMM) attempts.

[^154]: David L. Watson and Paul D. Watson, Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2014).

Jerry Trousdale's Miraculous Movements (2012) and The Kingdom Unleashed (2018) extended the Watson framework with documentation of African disciple-making movements emerging through New Generations (the Cityteam spinoff Trousdale leads).[^155] Steve Smith and Ying Kai's T4T: A Discipleship Re-Revolution (2011) brought the parallel T4T methodology from East Asian house church movements into American practice.[^156]

[^155]: Jerry Trousdale, Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012); Jerry Trousdale and Glenn Sunshine, The Kingdom Unleashed: How Jesus' 1st-Century Kingdom Values Are Transforming Thousands of Cultures and Awakening His Church (Murfreesboro, TN: DMM Library, 2018).

[^156]: Steve Smith and Ying Kai, T4T: A Discipleship Re-Revolution (Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2011).

The contribution of this stream is the introduction of global movement methodology into American practice. The limitation, which several of these authors have themselves acknowledged, is that the methodologies have not yet produced movement at the same scale in American contexts. The conditions Part Five documented (comfort, individualism, sermon-centric formation, prayer intensity gap, founder-succession timeline asymmetry) all attenuate the global pattern in American soil.

A theological note on the DMM stream is worth flagging. Some practitioners within this stream have framed their work as ecclesiologically distinct from the traditional local church, treating Discovery Bible Study groups and rapid multiplication as a replacement for the visible congregational structure of the church. This paper does not take that position. The visible local church, with its ordained leadership, sacraments, and ongoing communal worship, remains the appointed context for Christian formation. The model proposed in Part Eight engages the operational insights of the DMM stream (obedience-based formation, multi-generational reproduction tracking, ordinary-believer empowerment) while running alongside the local church rather than replacing it.

7.8 Francis Chan: The Megachurch Refusal

Francis Chan's Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples (2012), co-authored with Mark Beuving, occupies a singular place in the contemporary literature.[^157] Chan, having left his four-thousand-attendance Cornerstone Church in 2010 to pursue simpler and more apostolic disciple-making, published Multiply as a free 24-session curriculum aimed at giving ordinary believers permission and tools to make disciples without seminary training.

[^157]: Francis Chan and Mark Beuving, Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2012).

The contribution of Multiply is its disposition. Chan's willingness to walk away from a megachurch platform to pursue disciple-making more faithfully is a public act of theological seriousness that the broader American evangelical conversation has not fully reckoned with. The book itself is biblically substantive and accessible to non-seminary readers.

The limitation of the Multiply movement is that it did not sustain at American scale. Chan has since moved to the We Are Church network of house churches and to extended periods of ministry in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. The Multiply Gatherings that ran from 2012 to 2016 have largely ceased. This is not a moral or methodological failure. It is a structural data point. Two of the most visible American pastors, with megachurch platforms, launched a disciple-making movement in 2012, and one of them concluded by the end of that decade that the work was more reproducible in other contexts.

Tim Challies's critical review of Multiply noted that the curriculum focuses heavily on biblical and theological content over character formation, suggesting that a disciple trained through Multiply may know more Bible without necessarily becoming a more mature disciple-maker.[^158] The critique is worth taking seriously as one of the few sustained public engagements with the methodological assumptions of a major American disciple-making framework.

[^158]: Tim Challies, "Multiply by Francis Chan: A Review," challies.com, December 2012.

7.9 Robby Gallaty: D-Groups at Scale

Robby Gallaty's Growing Up: How to Be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples (2013) and the broader Replicate Ministries ecosystem represent the most widely distributed American disciple-making framework in the contemporary period.[^159] Replicate's D-Group model (three to five people, gender-specific, twelve to eighteen month commitment, weekly Bible reading plus Scripture memory plus accountability plus prayer) has been implemented across "thousands of churches worldwide" per the organization's own claim.[^160]

[^159]: Robby Gallaty, Growing Up: How to Be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2013).

[^160]: Replicate Ministries, "About," replicate.org.

Gallaty has published twenty-three books on disciple-making across his career. Long Hollow Baptist Church, where Gallaty has served as senior pastor since 2015, grew from approximately three thousand to eight thousand-plus attendance under his tenure. Growing Up has sold more than 100,000 copies.

The contribution of Gallaty's work is the demonstration that a Southern Baptist pastor with a significant church platform can build disciple-making infrastructure inside a denominational and institutional context. The framework is reproducible at the personal-discipleship level. Replicate's coaching services have been adopted by many churches seeking to implement D-Groups.

The limitation, which Gallaty himself has framed as the central question of the field, is whether the D-Group model produces multi-generational fruit. Gallaty's own published rhetorical question, from Rediscovering Discipleship:

How many generations of groups have you seen replicated in your church?[^161]

[^161]: Robby Gallaty, Rediscovering Discipleship: Making Jesus' Final Words Our First Work (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 87.

The question is open in his own work. Replicate has not yet published multi-generational lineage data from the thousands of churches it has influenced. The question Gallaty asks is the right question. The field is still waiting for the answer.

7.10 Doug Burrier: Sustainable Discipleship

Doug Burrier's How to Make Disciples and Well Made Well Done, both self-published from Three Taverns Church in Cave Spring, Georgia, represent one of the few contemporary American disciple-making frameworks making a specific multi-generational claim with supporting methodology.[^162] Burrier's published claim is five generations deep in his own disciple-making culture, with a ninety percent completion rate among those entering his Sustainable Discipleship process.

[^162]: Doug Burrier, How to Make Disciples (self-published, n.d.); Doug Burrier, Well Made Well Done (self-published, n.d.).

Burrier operates outside the major publishing houses and conference circuits that have shaped most of the rest of this list. His endorsements come from the Georgia Baptist Mission Board's discipleship catalyst and from regional Southern Baptist networks.

The contribution of Burrier's work is its rigor. The methodology is substantive (the fourteen-step predictable pathway, the four foundational elements, the seven core practices). The multi-generational claim is specific enough to be testable, even if not yet externally verified.

The limitation is scope. Burrier operates one Georgia church. His framework has not yet been tested across distributed contexts. Whether the methodology transfers beyond the home congregation is the open question. Burrier's own published framing of disciple-making temporary "shrinkage before genuine growth" is, however, one of the more honest acknowledgments in the contemporary literature of what happens when a church actually pursues multiplication seriously.[^163]

[^163]: Burrier, How to Make Disciples, framing summarized in various Three Taverns Church public materials.

7.11 Discipleship.org and Renew.org: The Field Infrastructure

Bobby Harrington has built, across the past two decades, the most substantial intellectual and research infrastructure in the American disciple-making field. Discipleship.org, which Harrington co-founded with Josh Patrick and others, operates as a coalition of disciple-making partner organizations.[^164] Renew.org, also led by Harrington, operates as a theological and pastoral network primarily within the Restoration Movement.

[^164]: Harrington and Patrick, Disciple Maker's Handbook.

Harrington's contribution to the field is the work of building the conversation itself. The 2020 National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches, which anchors much of this paper, was driven by Discipleship.org. Multiple conferences, books, and partner organizations operate within the Discipleship.org orbit. The Renew Network produces theological resources for Restoration Movement and adjacent churches.

The limitation of Harrington's contribution is that Discipleship.org and Renew.org are intentionally infrastructure rather than operational disciple-making networks themselves. They make the field possible. They are not, in themselves, producing the multi-generational fruit the field is trying to identify. That work is for the operational networks that operate within the broader field Harrington has helped build.

7.12 What the Voices Agree On

Across the literature surveyed above, several points of substantial agreement emerge:

First, disciple-making is the church's core mission. Coleman, Hull, Willard, Putman, Watson, Breen, Chan, Gallaty, Burrier, and Harrington all argue this directly. None treats disciple-making as one ministry among many. All treat it as the central work.

Second, relationship is the operational medium, not curriculum. Every author surveyed argues that disciple-making happens primarily through sustained relational investment, with content serving the relationship rather than substituting for it.

Third, multi-generational reproduction is the destination, not first-generation conversion. Coleman, Watson, Trousdale, Gallaty, Burrier, and the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study all use four-generation language drawn from 2 Timothy 2:2.

Fourth, the American context is structurally harder than most disciple-making contexts globally. Hull, Willard, Watson, Chan, and Addison all acknowledge this directly. None claims American disciple-making moves at the speed of Bhojpuri or Iran.

Fifth, the local church is the appointed context, even when disciple-making must sometimes happen outside it. The parachurch authors (Navigators, Bonhoeffer Project, Replicate, Multiply) all argue that their work is meant to serve the local church rather than replace it. Even the more ecclesiologically experimental voices (Watson, Trousdale, Cole) generally argue that disciple-making produces local church structure as its natural fruit, even when that structure looks different from the established denominational pattern.

7.13 What Remains Contested

Several points of substantive disagreement remain in the literature:

First, whether disciple-making movement is possible in the American context at the scale documented in Bhojpuri and Iran. Watson, Trousdale, and the DMM stream tend toward "yes, but slower." The Navigators, Coleman, Hull, and the established American disciple-making mainstream tend toward "the question is structurally open."

Second, whether the local congregation must transform itself into a disciple-making culture in order for movement to emerge (the GiDC and Navigator position) or whether disciple-making movement can happen as a parallel track inside churches that do not transform institutionally (the position the model described in Part Eight takes).

Third, whether structured curriculum (Coleman, Ogden, Burrier, Gallaty) or discovery-based approaches (Watson, Trousdale, Smith) produce better long-term fruit. The evidence is mixed and probably depends substantially on cultural context.

Fourth, the role of the sermon in disciple-making. Most authors surveyed acknowledge that the sermon alone does not make disciples, but they differ substantially on how much weight the sermon should carry in a disciple-making church. The Reformed authors tend to give the sermon more weight than the DMM-influenced authors do.

Fifth, the question of whether the contemporary American disciple-making renewal has yet produced any verifiable multi-generational fruit, or whether the renewal is still in its early phase and the fruit is still ahead. This is the question Gallaty's published rhetorical question puts to the field. The answer, in 2026, remains largely open.

The paper now turns, in Part Eight, to the model proposed by one network operating inside this contested conversation, and in Part Nine to the data that bears on these contested questions.

Part Eight: The Ordinary Movement Model

What follows is a description of one network's attempt to work inside the conditions the previous parts have documented. The model has been operating since 2018. The data is in Part Nine. This section describes the operating logic.

8.1 Mission and Identity

Ordinary Movement exists for one purpose: to make disciples who make disciples.

The model is built on three biblical anchors. From Acts 4:13, the observation that Peter and John were "uneducated, common men" who had "been with Jesus." This is the identity claim. Ordinary people who have been with Jesus are sufficient. The work is not reserved for the seminary-trained.

From Matthew 28:18–20, the explicit commission to make disciples of all nations. This is not a clergy assignment. It is the standing instruction to every follower of Jesus.

From 2 Timothy 2:2, Paul's charge to Timothy to entrust what he has received to reliable people who will be qualified to teach others. Four generations are named in a single sentence: Paul, Timothy, reliable people, others. This is the measurement standard.

The mission, said plainly:help ordinary believers grow in intimacy with Jesus, identify the calling that flows from that intimacy, and live a lifestyle of disciple-making that reproduces across generations.

The order of operations matters. Intimacy comes first. Calling emerges from intimacy. Multiplication is the fruit of calling, not the engine. This order is grounded in the theological foundations established in Part One, particularly the recognition that fruit comes from abiding, not from striving.[^165]

[^165]: John 15:5, "Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." Cf. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 311–35, on the relationship between grace, abiding, and fruitfulness.

8.2 The Three Core Values

Three values structure every group in the network.

Intimacy with Jesus is the primary value. Everything else flows from here. The aim is a deep, personal relationship with Christ developed in the secret place of private prayer, Scripture, and obedience. A group that produces multipliers without producing intimacy is producing recruiters. A group that produces intimacy will produce multipliers as a natural consequence.

This value is grounded in John 15:5 and in the broader Pauline emphasis on "being in Christ," which appears more than 160 times across Paul's letters.[^166] The primary locus of Christian formation is union with Christ. Disciple-making methodology serves that union. It does not substitute for it.

[^166]: For the theological depth of "in Christ" language in Paul, see Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 67–87.

Willow Creek's Reveal study, examined in Part Two, reached the same operational conclusion from inside the seeker-sensitive model in 2007: personal spiritual practices drove growth; church activity did not. The Reveal data validates this order of operations from outside the disciple-making movement field, eleven years before this paper was written.

Intentional relationships is the second value. This is doing life together with purpose, not surface-level fellowship. Real community that costs something. Relationships forged through shared pursuit of Jesus. This is the structural answer to American individualism inside the disciple-making process itself.

The biblical pattern is Acts 2:42, where the earliest disciples "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." Fellowship (koinōnia) is not optional infrastructure. It is one of the four practices that the Spirit-launched church inhabited from its first day.

Multiplication is the third value. It is the fruit, not the formula. Multiplication flows from calling, and calling flows from intimacy. The model gives people the tools to live a lifestyle of disciple-making as a natural result of their relationship with Christ, not as an obligation to fulfill.

This ordering matters theologically. A network that puts multiplication first and adds intimacy later produces activity disconnected from formation. The fruit Galatians 5:22–23 names (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) is produced by the Spirit's indwelling work, not by methodology applied to willing volunteers. The model is designed to honor this order.

8.3 The Twenty-Seven-Session Process

Every group in the network runs the samestructured process. The session count is fixed. The content is fixed. The order is fixed. This is the property that makes lineage tracking possible at all. A second-generation group is running the same twenty-seven sessions the first-generation group ran. A third-generation group is running the same content the founders ran.

The process is organized into four modules:

Module One, Foundation (Sessions Intro through 5): Introduction, Your Story, Excuses Are No Excuse, Milk vs. Meat, What a Failure, Review.

Module Two, Core Values (Sessions 6 through 12): Intimacy with Jesus, Intentional Relationships, Multiplication, The Blood of Christ, The Cross, Spirit/Soul/Body, Review.

Module Three, The Holy Spirit (Sessions 13 through 16): Holy Spirit Parts 1 to 3, Review.

Module Four, Discipleship Principles and The Send (Sessions 17 through 26): Discipleship Intro, Accept Him, Know Him, Obey Him, Make Sacrifices, Share Him, Love Others, Make Disciples, Urgency: A Call to Action, The Send.

The process runs over six to twelve months depending on meeting frequency. Weekly meetings produce a six-to-seven-month cycle. Bi-weekly meetings produce a twelve-month cycle. Group size ranges from one to ten participants, with the typical range being five to seven.

By Session 17, participants begin leading individual sessions themselves. This is intentional. It provides low-stakes leadership practice within a safe environment. By Session 26, every participant has been challenged to consider one question: who has God placed in my life that I could disciple?

The principle running through the design: process, not program. The structure exists to be replicated across generations, not consumed as a discrete study. Same process, every generation. That property is load-bearing for everything that follows.

The pneumatological commitment is also worth naming. Module Three (Sessions 13 through 16) is dedicated to the Holy Spirit. This is not optional content tacked onto a primarily curriculum-driven process. It reflects the theological conviction that disciple-making is the Spirit's work, that ordinary believers are indwelled and empowered by the Spirit, and that the gifts of the Spirit operate in the contemporary church.[^167] The model is structured to assume the Spirit's active presence in every group, every generation, every session.

[^167]: This continuationist position is consistent with the broader theological frame of the model and traces in part to the influence of Chuck Smith and the Calvary Chapel tradition on contemporary evangelical disciple-making. See Smith, Calvary Chapel Distinctives, 24–42, on the balance of Word and Spirit.

8.4 The Complete Lifecycle

The full lifecycle, at a glance:

Phase

What Happens

Key Actions

1. Launch

First-generation group begins

A leader gathers one to ten people and commits to twenty-seven sessions over six to twelve months.

2. Cultivate

Discipleship deepens

The group works through four modules in order. Intimacy with Jesus first. Calling and multiplication follow.

3. Finish

Group completes Session 26

Session 26 is not an ending. It is a sending.

4. Transition

Group becomes OC Group

Lightweight, peer-led ongoing community. Weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Centers on intimacy with Jesus and missional living.

5. Multiply

Second-generation groups launch

Participants step out to lead. Some launch immediately. Others wait for the next church-calendar season.

6. Mentor

Leader shifts role

First-generation leader supports second-generation leaders through OC Group and personal connection.

7. Multiply

Third, fourth-generation groups launch

Second-generation leaders mentor their participants. Multiplication continues generationally.

8.5 OC Groups: The Structural Answer to Split Resistance

OC Groups (Ordinary Community Groups) are simple, peer-led gatherings designed to sustain community and mission after the original group finishes. They are not a replacement for discipleship. They are an incubator for ongoing disciple-making.

The structural problem they solve is the one Allen White documented across twenty years of American small group consulting. Members do not want to leave groups. Groups have become pseudo-family. Asking them to split feels like loss because functionally it is loss. Most American disciple-making strategies either ignore this problem or work around it by launching new groups out of new people, which is addition, not multiplication.

OC Groups address the problem at the structural level. The original community is preserved as the launching pad rather than asked to dissolve. New leaders launch out while the original community continues meeting, now functioning as a team huddle, mentorship space, and accountability environment for the new leaders.

Every OC Group meeting centers on two simple but powerful questions.

"How is your heart?" This goes beyond surface-level. It invites real, vulnerable sharing about what is happening spiritually.

"What is God saying to you, and what are you going to do about it?" This keeps the group mission-focused and action-oriented.

Two questions. No curriculum. Sustained community without competing with multiplication.

The danger with any ongoing group is that it becomes the main thing. People get comfortable. They stay together. Nothing multiplies. OC Groups are designed to prevent this outcome through three properties:

First, frequency is intentionally light. The OC Group does not consume the margin a participant needs to lead a new group. If the OC Group meets monthly, the participant has time to launch and lead a new weekly group while staying connected to the original community.

Second, the OC Group serves as a team huddle for new leaders. When someone launches a second-generation group, the OC Group is where they bring their wins, their struggles, and their lessons learned. The original leader, now functioning as mentor, can support multiple new leaders through this shared space.

Third, launching is celebrated as the goal. When someone launches a new group, the OC Group does not treat it as someone leaving the community. It treats it as the community fulfilling its purpose. The cultural signal is clear: this is what we are for.

The OC Group is closer in structural function to the Methodist class meeting documented in Part Two than to the contemporary American small group. The class meeting's centering question ("How is it with your soul?") and the OC Group's centering questions ("How is your heart? What is God saying?") share an underlying pattern: lightweight relational accountability that sustains formation without consuming the bandwidth needed for ongoing disciple-making work.

8.6 Multiplication in Motion

As participants from the first-generation group step out to lead their own groups, the movement takes shape.

The generational pattern:

First Generation. You launch your first group. You lead participants through twenty-seven sessions over six to twelve months. The group finishes and transitions to an OC Group.

Second Generation. Participants from your group launch their own groups. They lead new people through the same process. You shift into a mentor role, supporting these new leaders.

Third Generation. Participants from those second-generation groups step out and lead their own groups. The leaders you mentored are now mentoring others.

Fourth Generation and beyond. The multiplication continues. Groups you never started, led by people you never met, are now making disciples. This is movement.

This is the Pauline pattern in 2 Timothy 2:2 made operational. Paul, Timothy, reliable people, others. The four-generation arc described in a single sentence becomes the documented operating pattern of the network.

8.7 The Mentorship Model

This is where the model goes against the dominant American small group pattern.

Leaders do not merely lead a group and move on. They shift into mentors.

In most small group cultures, the leader finishes and fades out. Participants are left hoping a pastor or staff member will catch them in the gap. That is not ideal. It usually produces abandonment at the moment of greatest spiritual transition.

The model invites something different. Become a mentor. Keep investing. Check in on your people. Pray for them. Encourage them. Let them know they are not alone when leading gets hard.

David Watson, in Contagious Disciple Making, defines mentorship this way: "Mentoring is the intentional relationship with others that causes all parties involved to grow in discipleship."[^168] Mentorship benefits both parties. As you pour into new leaders, you grow too.

[^168]: Watson and Watson, Contagious Disciple Making, 89.

The mentorship model is also where the model serves rather than competes with the local pastor. A pastor cannot personally mentor every new disciple-maker emerging from a church's disciple-making process. The network of first-generation leaders functioning as mentors to second-generation leaders becomes the distributed mentorship layer that takes the pastor's role of "equipping the saints for the work of ministry" (Ephesians 4:12) and embodies it across the congregation.

8.8 The Capacity Shift

There is a level of growth in this model where the leader has so many people in their life that they have discipled, who are now out discipling others, that they no longer have the capacity to lead another group themselves. Instead, they are discipling leaders who are discipling others.

This is the Paul-and-Timothy pattern from 2 Timothy 2:2 made operational. At some point, your contribution to the movement stops being "lead another group" and becomes "mentor the leaders who lead groups." That is how multiplication becomes structurally possible without indefinite founder presence.

The capacity shift is not merely operational efficiency. It is the Pauline pattern of apostolic succession adapted to the priesthood of all believers. Paul did not lead every Ephesian church. He raised up elders who led them and mentored those elders from a distance. The model's structure is the contemporary embodiment of that pattern.

8.9 Three Methodological Distinctives

Three operational principles run through the entire model:

Process, not program. The twenty-seven sessions are designed for replication across generations, not consumption as a discrete study. The same content, run the same way, by every leader in every generation. This is what makes lineage tracking honest.

High challenge, high grace. Commitment is treated as a feature, not an obstacle. Participants are asked for six to twelve months of weekly engagement, often with multi-hour sessions. The model explicitly frames this challenge as necessary for the transformation the process is designed to produce. The challenge is paired with a culture of grace around failure, doubt, and slow growth. Both are present. Neither is optional. This balance reflects the Pauline conviction that grace is not opposed to effort but only to earning.[^169]

[^169]: Cf. Willard, Great Omission, 34, on grace and effort. See also Ephesians 2:8–10, where grace is the foundation and good works are the purpose.

Apprenticeship over curriculum. Participants are trained to lead by leading, not by taking a separate leadership course afterward. The expectation of future leadership is present from the first session. This is the mechanism by which a participant becomes a leader.

8.10 Two Structural Distinctives Relative to the American Field

Two further features distinguish the Ordinary Movement model from the broader American disciple-making landscape:

The first is the measurement standard. The model tracks lineage, meaning named chains of individuals who have completed the full twenty-seven-session process and then led others through the same process across multiple generations. The four-generation standard is the same standard the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study uses to define disciple-making movement.[^170] The choice to measure against that standard is not Ordinary Movement's invention. It is the field-recognized definition applied honestly.

[^170]: Grey Matter, National Study, 13–14.

The second is platform independence. The network operates without a founding church platform, denomination, seminary pipeline, or publishing-house pipeline. Growth happens through volitional adoption by ordinary leaders, one leader at a time. This is structurally harder in the short term because there is no captive audience, no pastoral invitation from a stage, no denominational distribution mechanism. It is structurally more movement-like in the long term because the leader pool is self-selected for willingness to disciple without external scaffolding.

The model is designed to run alongside existing church structures rather than to replace them. A church running small groups for connection, Alpha for new believers, and other ministries for healing or theology can adopt this model as a parallel track for the participants ready to commit to a structured formation process aimed at multiplication. Theframing offered to pastors is explicit: keep your small groups. This model serves the willing. Both are needed in a healthy church.

That posture is the strategic difference. The model is additive to the existing church ecosystem. It is not a competitive replacement for it. This is the theological and practical answer to the ecclesiology question some forms of the global DMM stream have left open. The local church, with its ordained leadership and sacramental life, remains the appointed context for Christian formation. The Ordinary Movement model serves that context. It does not bypass it.

Part Nine: What the Data Shows

9.1 The Definition That Sets the Bar

The Grey Matter / Discipleship.org / Exponential 2020 study published the official operating definition of a disciple-making movement:

A disciple-making movement exists when churches plant multiple churches (within a few short years), through gospel activity, that has abundant fruit among the lost, that multiplies these disciples (people growing in obedience to all of Jesus' commands), who in turn replicate themselves in others, so that we can see at least four generations regularly produced in multiple streams of disciple-making activity and these streams multiply consistently into churches.[^171]

[^171]: Grey Matter, National Study, 13–14.

The four-generation threshold is the field-recognized standard. It is not a methodology preference. The Grey Matter team applied this definition to a representative sample of 1,000 American churches and could not statistically verify a single church meeting it.

The data presented below is one network's documented progress toward the same four-generation standard the field's own research uses to define movement.

9.2 The Measurement Hierarchy

The American disciple-making field uses a hierarchy of measurements. From least rigorous to most rigorous:

1. Attendance. Sunday attendance, event sign-ups, campaign participation.

2. Program completion. Workbook finishes, course certifications, curriculum participation.

3. Books sold or churches influenced. Reach metrics.

4. Individual groups started. Volume metrics.

5. Lineage. Named chains of people who completed a structured process, then led others through the same process, then those others led still others, across verified generations.

The first four measurements tell a reader something about the gravity of the ministry. They do not necessarily indicate that disciple-making is happening. A church can grow its attendance without producing disciples. A workbook can be completed without transformation. A book can sell millions of copies without anyone becoming a disciple-maker. A network can launch thousands of groups without any group producing another.

Lineage is the only measurement in the hierarchy that cannot happen without real transformation across real people across real time.

Ordinary Movement measures lineage. Each generation is counted only when the named leader has completed the full twenty-seven-session structured process and then launched a group in which the next generation also completed the same process. The same standard applies at every gate. The methodology supporting this measurement is documented in Appendix D.

9.3 Why Four Generations Is the Standard

The four-generation standard is not methodologically arbitrary, and it is not Ordinary Movement's invention. It is drawn directly from 2 Timothy 2:2, where Paul charges Timothy to entrust what he has received to "reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others." That single sentence names four generations: Paul, Timothy, reliable people, others.

The Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study, the most rigorous American disciple-making research available, uses the same four-generation standard to define movement.[^172] The convergence is not coincidence. A movement that consistently reaches the fourth generation is producing what Paul described and what the field's own research recognizes as movement. A network that stalls at the first or second generation is not.

[^172]: Grey Matter, National Study, 13–14.

Each layer of the measurement hierarchy can be present without the one above it. Attendance can grow without discipleship happening. Program completion can happen without transformation. Books can sell without anyone being discipled. Groups can launch without any group producing another. Lineage cannot happen without real transformation across multiple generations of real people who have completed a rigorous structured process.

The 27-session structure is the filter. The chain is the destination. The structure weeds out the merely curious and the casually committed. The chain evidences that real discipleship produced real disciple-makers who produced real disciples.

9.4 What Has Been Documented

The network's internal tracker, current through April 2026:

Total groups launched lifetime: approximately 279. Public-facing reporting uses the more conservative figure of 245-plus as of October 2025, which is the most recent quarterly snapshot prepared for external use.[^173]

[^173]: Ordinary Movement, 2025 Full Ministry Overview (October 2025), 8.

Total participants and leaders combined, lifetime: 1,629-plus per themost recent public Ministry Overview.[^174] Of those, approximately 1,384 are participants discipled, with 255 distinct leaders.

[^174]: Ordinary Movement, 2025 Full Ministry Overview, 9.

Active mentors (leaders functioning in the capacity-shift role described in Part Eight): 20.

States with active leaders and participants: 35-plus.

Countries showing up in the data: 9.

YouTube subscribers: 6,100-plus. Lifetime views: 757,000-plus. Hours watched: 115,000-plus.

Year-over-year movement growth, 2024 to 2025: approximately 4.5x combined. Leaders and groups 2.1x. Participants 5.3x. App sign-ups 2.8x. Community engagement 3x.

The 2025–2026 launch surge produced approximately 201 groups in the most recent 14 months. This is the largest cohort in the network's history. Its downstream multiplication will determine the next decade.

9.5 Generational Chain Counts

Generation Reached

Number of Chains

Second generation | 74

Third generation | 37

Fourth generation | 6 complete, 1 emerging (7)

Fifth generation | 0

The standard that produces these counts is stricter than the public counting used by most documented disciple-making movements. Each named person in each generation has completed a six-to-twelve-month structured process before being counted. Six complete four-generation chains represents twenty-four leaders in the tracker, each of whom completed the full structured process and launched their own group before being counted as a generation. The verification standard is operational, not aspirational: a person is counted as a generation only after they have done the work that defines the next generation downstream.

Under the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org definition cited above, the network is producing four-generation chains across multiple independent streams. The Grey Matter study, working at the level of individual churches, could not statistically verify Level 5 multiplication in any single U.S. church in its national sample. The OM data is not directly comparable, because the unit of analysis is different: chains across a network rather than reproduction within a single congregation. What the network data documents is that the four-generation threshold itself is reproducible in American soil, even if the Level 5 standard, as Grey Matter defined it at the church level, remains unmet.

These figures count only chains that have reached the named generational threshold. The denominator behind these counts, including chains that started but have not yet reached four generations, is documented in Appendix D Section [X], which reports dissolution rates and chain-completion rates transparently.

The pattern is small. It is documented. It is growing. It does not yet constitute the kind of widespread, demographically representative pattern that would let the field claim American disciple-making movement at scale. That is the work of the next decade.

9.6 Conversion Rates Between Generational Gates

The rates of conversion between generational gates depend on how much time has elapsed since the founding group launched. Multiplication takes time. A new group cannot produce a second-generation leader the week it ends. The American church calendar adds further structural lag, since most American Christians launch groups aligned to the three-semester pattern (fall, spring, summer). A participant who finishes a process in May cannot realistically launch a new group until August.

With those structural lags accounted for, the conversion rates from the tracker:

First-generation to second-generation, all groups with fifteen-plus months of runway: 40.0 percent (34 of 85 launches before January 2025).

First-generation to second-generation, all groups with eighteen-plus months of runway: 44.7 percent.

First-generation to second-generation, all groups with twenty-four-plus months of runway: 47.8 percent.

First-generation to second-generation, mature 2018–2022 cohort only (the closest available proxy for a settled rate): 51.9 percent.

Second-generation to third-generation: 50.0 percent (37 of 74 chains aggregate across all cohorts).

Third-generation to fourth-generation: 16.2 percent (6 of 37 chains).

Second-generation to fourth-generation cumulative: 8.1 percent.

For external comparison, Joel Comiskey's research on more than seven hundred small group leaders across the top eight cell churches in the world found that sixty percent of leaders multiplied their group at least once, taking approximately nine months per multiplication. Forty percent of leaders never multiplied at all.[^175] Those are elite global multiplying churches operating under conditions American churches do not face. The convergence point matters. Multiplication rates between fifteen and fifty percent at the first gate are consistent with what global research on disciple-making at scale documents.

[^175]: Comiskey, Home Cell Group Explosion, 41.

9.7 Participant-Level Multiplication

The network's tracker documents seventy-one unique individuals at the second-generation leader position who were once participants in a first-generation group and then launched their own group. Across eighty-five mature first-generation groups containing roughly 425 to 510 participants depending on group size assumptions, the per-participant rate of becoming a leader sits in the band of 12 to 17 percent, with the most data-grounded single figure at approximately 15 percent.

The American baseline for any kind of disciple-making activity, per Barna's 2025 research, is approximately ten percent of born-again American Christians actively discipling another person.[^176] The 15 percent figure documented above is 1.5 times that baseline. The comparison is not strictly apples-to-apples, since Barna's count includes any informal discipling relationship while the network's count requires the higher bar of launching a structured twenty-seven-session group with new participants and leading them through it. Under a comparable definition, the baseline rate would be substantially lower than ten percent, which makes the 15 percent figure more distinctive rather than less.

[^176]: Barna, 2025 Trends Outlook.

The point of presenting this measurement is pastoral honesty. The honest answer to a pastor asking "will my people actually become disciple-makers if I send them through this?" is not "everyone will." It is "more of them will than American baseline rates predict, and the ones who do tend to produce downstream fruit."

9.8 Transformation Survey Data

Lineage measures reproduction. Lineage does not directly measure whether the people moving through the process are actually being transformed. For that, separate survey data sits above the lineage tracker in the measurement hierarchy.

From the public 2025 Ministry Overview through October 15, 2025: 91 percent of participants reported measurable growth in intimacy with Jesus through the process.[^177]

[^177]: Ordinary Movement, 2025 Full Ministry Overview, 12.

From the most recent participant survey at year-end 2025: 99 percent of participants reported growth in intimacy with Jesus through the process.[^178]

[^178]: Ordinary Movement, internal participant survey, year-end 2025.

These numbers matter because lineage and survey data answer different questions. Lineage asks: did this process produce leaders who produce leaders? Survey data asks: are the people moving through the process actually being transformed?

When participants are reporting measurable growth in their relationship with Jesus across multiple survey windows, the process is not only reproducing. It is doing the formational work the process claims to do.

The honest qualification: self-reported growth is a subjective measure. It is not equivalent to objective character transformation measured by independent observers. The strongest claim the data supports is when the survey results and the lineage results are held together. The combination represents a coherent picture: a process that transforms participants (91 to 99 percent survey result) and produces measurable multi-generational fruit (74, then 37, then 6 to 7 chains at each gate).

9.9 The Measurement Stack, Top to Bottom

The full measurement stack the network operates under:

1. Intimacy with Jesus (survey data). Are participants actually growing closer to Christ? 91 to 99 percent affirmative.

2. Lineage (tracker data). Does this process produce leaders who produce leaders? Yes, at 74, 37, and 6 to 7 across three documented gates.

3. Program completion (internal tracking). Does the process hold together as a sustainable practice? Yes, at high per-cohort completion rates.

4. Group count (public reporting). How many groups have launched? 245-plus as of October 2025, approximately 279 per the internal tracker as of April 2026.

The top of this stack is the real point. The bottom is the visible scaffolding. Most American disciple-making networks report only the bottom two layers. The ability to report the top two layers, with data rather than narrative, is the strongest signal in the data presented above.

9.10 Fruit Outside the Trackable Pipeline

A note of appropriate humility belongs alongside the data. The tracker captures what can be measured within the network's methodology. It does not capture the genuine Kingdom fruit of people who have moved into discipling others in contexts outside the model. That fruit is real. It is simply not countable within this system, and claims about the network's impact should not pretend otherwise.

The documented fruit is a subset of the actual fruit. The documented subset is what can be honestly reported in public. The rest belongs to God and to the people doing the work outside the frame. The network's data is offered for what it is and only for what it is: one network's documented progress toward a standard the field itself has defined.

Part Ten: Counterarguments and Limitations

A serious paper has to engage seriously with its own critics. This part addresses the most substantive counterarguments that could be raised against the model proposed in Part Eight and the claims made in Part Nine. Each section names the counterargument as honestly as possible, then responds.

10.1 The DMM Ecclesiology Critique

The first and most theologically substantive critique comes from within the disciple-making movement stream itself, though it cuts in the opposite direction. Some DMM practitioners argue that any model integrating with existing local churches is, by definition, not a disciple-making movement in the technical sense. True DMM, on this view, requires simple reproducible church-form structures (typically Discovery Bible Study groups functioning as house churches) that are not bound to or dependent on the traditional congregational pattern.[^179]

[^179]: This position is articulated in various forms by Watson and Watson, Contagious Disciple Making; Garrison, Church Planting Movements; Trousdale, Miraculous Movements; and others working in the global DMM tradition.

The response: this paper does not claim that the Ordinary Movement model is a disciple-making movement in the technical Watson sense. The paper claims that the model produces multi-generational fruit consistent with the standard the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study uses to define DMM in the American context. Those are not the same claim. The first is methodological. The second is empirical.

The paper also takes a particular theological position on the ecclesiology question. The visible local church, with its ordained leadership, sacraments, and ongoing communal worship, is not optional infrastructure for Christian formation. It is the appointed context within which disciple-making happens.[^180] The model proposed serves that context rather than replacing it. This is a theological commitment, not a methodological accident.

[^180]: See the theological foundation laid in Part One, sections 1.4 and 1.9. Cf. Edmund Clowney, The Church, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1995), for a substantial Reformed treatment of why ecclesiology matters for disciple-making.

The critique loses force when reframed. The question is not whether the model is technically DMM. The question is whether the model produces the kind of multi-generational fruit Paul described in 2 Timothy 2:2 and the Grey Matter study uses to define movement. The data in Part Nine indicates that it does, at small scale, across thirty-five states, without bypassing the local church.

10.2 The Sacramental Question

A related critique deserves separate treatment. If the disciple-making process operates outside the local church's direct oversight, what about baptism and the Lord's Supper? These are not optional in the New Testament. They are commanded ordinances of the church.[^181]

[^181]: 1 Corinthians 11:23–26; Matthew 28:19; cf. The Westminster Larger Catechism, questions 162–177, for the classic Reformed treatment.

The response: the model proposed in this paper does not perform baptisms, administer the Lord's Supper, or otherwise replace any sacramental function of the local church. Participants in Ordinary Movement groups continue to attend their own local churches, where the ordinances are administered by ordained leadership. The model is a formation process. It is not a substitute church. The 27-session content does not include teaching that would supplant a pastor's authority on theology or church practice. It includes formation teaching consistent with broad evangelical orthodoxy, designed to deepen the participant's engagement with their existing local church.

This is one of the structural advantages of integration over replacement. A model that runs alongside the local church inherits the church's sacramental life rather than having to construct its own.

10.3 The Curriculum-versus-Movement Debate

A methodological critique runs in the opposite direction. Some disciple-making practitioners argue that the structured 27-session curriculum is too prescriptive to produce genuine movement, that real movement requires discovery-based approaches that emerge organically from the Spirit's work in indigenous contexts.[^182] Curriculum, on this view, is the operating logic of programs rather than movements.

[^182]: This position is most strongly articulated in Watson and Watson, Contagious Disciple Making; and Smith and Kai, T4T.

The response: the choice between structured curriculum and discovery-based approaches is not binary. The model proposed combines structured content (the same 27 sessions every generation runs) with discovery-style discussion within each session and apprenticeship-style leadership development across the process. The curriculum is the trellis. The Spirit's work in the participants is the plant. Both are present.

The structured content also serves a specific function in American context. The Cultural Research Center data noted in Part Three (four percent of Americans hold a biblical worldview) means that pure discovery approaches, in the absence of formed worldview, can produce idiosyncratic readings of Scripture rather than disciple-making fruit. Structured content gives participants a coherent biblical and theological framework within which the Spirit's discovery work has room to operate productively. This is not a critique of discovery approaches in contexts where the biblical worldview already exists. It is a recognition of the soil American disciple-making operates in.

10.4 The Therapeutic Moralistic Deism Problem

The most penetrating critique of any American disciple-making proposal, including the one in this paper, is that the population the model is trying to disciple does not, by majority, hold a worldview within which discipleship makes sense. Christian Smith's research on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, examined in Part Five, documents that even self-identified evangelical young people in America largely operate from a worldview in which God exists to make them happy and morally adequate, not from a worldview in which they are sinners called to follow Jesus at the cost of their autonomy.[^183]

[^183]: Smith, Soul Searching, 162–63; cf. Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 154–62.

If this worldview diagnosis is correct, then any disciple-making methodology, including this one, is downstream of a deeper catechetical problem. You cannot make disciples of people whose operating worldview does not have room for discipleship.

The response: this is a real and serious limitation. The model is not a catechesis. It is a disciple-making process for people who have already grasped, at some basic level, what it means to follow Jesus. For people whose worldview is fundamentally Moralistic Therapeutic Deist, the model presupposes a starting point they have not yet reached.

This is one reason the model begins with intimacy with Jesus as its primary value rather than with mission or methodology. The work of forming a biblical worldview begins in personal encounter with the living Christ. The 27 sessions, particularly the early sessions on identity, intimacy, and the role of the Holy Spirit, are designed to invite participants into the worldview shift that disciple-making presupposes.

For participants whose entry point is closer to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism than to historic Christianity, the model can serve as a starting place. But the deeper catechetical work it sometimes triggers may take longer than the 27 sessions allow. This limitation is honestly named and is not solvable inside the methodology itself.

10.5 The Survivorship Bias Question

A methodological critique of the data in Part Nine deserves direct engagement. The 91-to-99-percent transformation survey results are striking but may suffer from survivorship bias. The participants who complete the 27-session process and respond to the survey are, by definition, those who stayed in the process. Those who left have not been surveyed and are not represented in the transformation data.

The response: this critique is correct. The transformation survey data should be read as describing the experience of participants who completed the process, not as describing the experience of all participants who began it. Honest reading of the data has to hold both numbers together: the high transformation reporting among completers and the per-group completion rates that determine how many participants reach the survey at all.

The lineage data is less vulnerable to survivorship bias because it tracks completed multi-generational chains rather than self-reported experience. A second-generation leader who launched a group is documented whether or not they would have reported transformation on a survey. The chain itself is the evidence.

The strongest claim the data supports is when the two types of measurement are held together. High transformation among completers, combined with multi-generational chains forming at rates consistent with global research, suggests something real is happening. Neither measurement alone is sufficient. Both together, with the survivorship bias of the transformation data acknowledged, makes a coherent case.

10.6 The Single-Network Limitation

A broader methodological limitation: the data presented in Part Nine documents one network's outcomes. One network cannot prove that the model would produce similar fruit in other contexts. The structural features that have produced Ordinary Movement's documented fruit (founder leadership, platform independence, specific cultural conditions in the particular states where the network has grown) may not transfer cleanly to other networks attempting similar work.

The response: this is also a real limitation. The data in Part Nine does not prove that the model is the solution to American disciple-making. It documents that the model has produced multi-generational fruit in one network's experience. The broader claim, that this kind of model can produce this kind of fruit at scale in American soil, would require multiple networks operating under similar logic and producing similar fruit across distributed contexts.

The forecast in Part Eleven addresses this limitation by identifying the conditions under which the network's continued growth would or would not provide evidence relevant to the broader claim. The next decade's data will tell the story. The current data is one network's contribution to a conversation that needs more contributors.

10.7 What This Paper Does Not Prove

In the interest of honest scholarship, it is worth naming the claims this paper does not make and the conclusions it does not support.

This paper does not claim:

• That Ordinary Movement has solved American disciple-making.

• That the model proposed in Part Eight is the only or best methodology for American disciple-making.

• That other American disciple-making networks have failed in their work.

• That the Navigators, Replicate, Multiply, the Bonhoeffer Project, the Relational Discipleship Network, the DMM stream, or any of the other voices surveyed in Part Seven are wrong about discipleship.

• That a network operating since 2018 can claim what ninety-two years of Navigator work has not yet been able to claim.

• That the documented multi-generational chains in the network's tracker constitute a verified American disciple-making movement at the scale the Grey Matter study would recognize.

What this paper does claim:

• That American disciple-making is, at scale, in structural crisis, as documented by the field's own research.

• That the global picture proves multi-generational disciple-making movement is possible under the right soil conditions.

• That the structural obstacles to such movement in American soil are documented and serious.

• That the Ordinary Movement model represents one credible attempt to work inside those obstacles.

• That the network's documented data so far is consistent with the model producing the kind of fruit the field's own research uses to define movement.

• That the next decade will determine whether the pattern holds at scale or breaks down as cohort size increases.

These are narrower claims than the paper might be read to make. They are the claims the data actually supports.

Part Eleven: What the Next Decade Will Tell Us

The data in Part Nine describes the first eight years of one network's work. It does not describe a verified American disciple-making movement at scale. The American field has not yet produced one of those, and a single network with eight years of operating history cannot claim what ninety-two years of Navigator work has not yet produced.

What the data does describe is unusual in this soil. Documented fourth-generation chains. Transformation reported by ninety-plus percent of participants. Growth rates that have moved from single-digit groups per year through 2022 to triple-digit groups per year in the most recent fourteen months. Distribution across thirty-five states without a founding church, denomination, or publishing partner.

Whether this pattern holds at scale will be determined over the next ten to fifteen years. The honest posture is patience. The honest test is not what the network claims about itself. The honest test is what the data shows when the 2025–2026 surge cohort begins to mature and produce its own downstream multiplication.

11.1 The Three Indicators That Would Show the Model Is Not Scaling

Three measurable indicators would signal that the model is not producing what its current data suggests.

First, if the 2025–2026 cohort produces significantly fewer than sixty second-generation groups by the end of 2028. The current mature cohort produced second-generation groups at rates between 40 and 52 percent depending on runway. A surge-cohort emergence rate materially below 30 percent at 24-to-36 months of runway would indicate the model's first-gate conversion is weaker than the existing data shows.

Second, if the second-to-third and third-to-fourth generation conversion rates from the surge cohort fall materially below 40 percent and 10 percent respectively. The current tracker shows 50 percent and 16 percent across all cohorts. A material drop from those rates at scale would indicate either a quality-thinning effect as volume rises or a cohort-quality effect, either of which would change the long-term trajectory.

Third, if the downstream catalyst layer fails to expand. The network currently shows five to seven leaders beyond the founders producing their own multi-generational chains. If by 2030 the network still shows only the same five to seven catalysts, with no new ones emerging from the surge cohort, the model would have failed to produce a self-sustaining catalytic layer.

These are the load-bearing measurements for the multi-generational claim. The network has committed to quarterly review of all three. The data will be what the data is.

11.2 The Honest Posture: Learner, Not Leader

Nothing in this paper claims that the network is the answer to American disciple-making. The Navigators after ninety-two years do not claim that. No other American network credibly claims that. The honest posture is learner, not leader.

What the paper does claim is more limited. The American field has documented its inability to produce verified multi-generational disciple-making fruit at scale. One network has produced internally documented multi-generational fruit under a rigorous completion standard. The pattern is unusual enough in this soil that it warrants further study, further testing, and further time.

Whether the pattern holds will be determined by what happens between 2028 and 2038, when the 2025–2026 cohort completes its full multi-generational arc. That is the relevant window. Anything anyone claims before then, including the network itself, is premature.

11.3 What the Work Is Actually For

The work of Ordinary Movement is not measured by a number. It is measured by a shift.

The people Ordinary Movement was built for are the ordinary men and women who have spent years in church feeling disqualified. The ones who never went to seminary. The ones who never felt called to professional ministry. The ones who have looked at the work of disciple-making and assumed it belonged to someone more credentialed than them. Acts 4:13 names this identity directly: ordinary believers whose only credential was that they had been with Jesus.

Helping these believers become disciples who make disciples is the core of the work. Every documented chain in the data behind this paper began with an ordinary person who said yes.

The cultural shift the work aims for is larger than any single network. It is the shift from passive consumer Christianity to purposeful, intentional Jesus-following. From attending and consuming to following and reproducing. From treating disciple-making as something professionals do to recognizing it as the standing assignment of every believer.

That is what the work is for. Whether Ordinary Movement specifically becomes the network that catalyzes that shift at scale, or whether other networks doing similar work get there first, is a secondary question. The shift itself is the goal.

11.4 An Invitation

This paper exists not to settle the American disciple-making question but to clarify it.

The data the field has produced is the data the field has produced. The Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study could not statistically verify a single Level 5 disciple-making church in the United States. The Navigators after ninety-two years now publish "this isn't a program" as the headline language of their flagship offering. Forty-two percent of American pastors seriously considered quitting full-time ministry at the 2022 peak, down to twenty-four percent by 2026 but still substantially elevated. Forty million Americans have disaffiliated from Christianity since 1990. Fifteen thousand American churches are projected to close in 2025 alone. The pattern is clear.

What is also clear is that the global field has documented approximately 1,965 mature disciple-making movements, ninety percent of them operating among current or former unreached people groups, under conditions American Christians work to avoid. The operating stack that produces them is documented. The asymmetry between those conditions and American conditions is documented. The work it takes to adapt the pattern to American soil is documented.

To pastors and church leaders reading this: the question is not which discipleship program to adopt. The question is what your church is structured to produce. If the answer is consumer Christianity at scale, the addition model will serve you. If the answer is disciples who make disciples across multiple generations, something more rigorous and slower-moving is required.

To researchers and journalists: the data presented here is open to scrutiny. The methodology is described in Appendix D. The tracker is internally rigorous and externally testable. The claims are narrow on purpose.

To other practitioners in the field: the cohort of American networks attempting multi-generational disciple-making is small. The work is harder than the public discourse suggests. Charity toward each other is more useful than positioning against each other. No one in this cohort has solved American disciple-making yet. Some of us are trying. The data will tell the story over time.

To anyone reading this who is wondering whether ordinary believers can actually make disciples who make disciples: the data suggests yes. Not at the rate of global movements operating under different conditions. Not at the speed American consumer culture would prefer. But at a real rate, in real American soil, across real generations of real people. That is what the documented fruit shows so far.

There is a maxim that circulates inside disciple-making circles, often attributed to Mike Breen, and which Ordinary Movement keeps on its public materials. It belongs at the close of this paper.

If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.[^184]

[^184]: Breen and Cockram, Building a Discipling Culture, 11–12.

The American church has spent forty years making churches. The data is in. It is not enough.

The work continues.

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Appendix A: Frequently Asked Questions

This appendix provides direct answers to common questions about the research, the model, and the conversation this paper is part of. Each answer is designed to be readable as a standalone response.

What is a disciple-making movement?

A disciple-making movement (DMM) is the documented, ongoing reproduction of disciples and church communities across multiple generations of believers. The official definition published in the 2020 Grey Matter Research study, the most rigorous American national study on disciple-making, is this: "A disciple-making movement exists when churches plant multiple churches (within a few short years), through gospel activity, that has abundant fruit among the lost, that multiplies these disciples (people growing in obedience to all of Jesus' commands), who in turn replicate themselves in others, so that we can see at least four generations regularly produced in multiple streams of disciple-making activity and these streams multiply consistently into churches." The four-generation threshold comes from 2 Timothy 2:2, where Paul names Paul, Timothy, reliable people, and others in a single sentence. Approximately 1,965 mature disciple-making movements are documented globally; roughly ninety percent operate among current or former unreached people groups.

What is discipleship in simple terms?

Discipleship is the lifelong process of following Jesus, being shaped by him in close relationship, and helping others do the same.

The New Testament's word for disciple is mathētēs, which means a learner who follows a teacher closely enough to imitate the teacher's life. Jesus' own definition in John 8:31–32 is direct: a disciple is someone who abides in his word, knows the truth, and is set free by it. Discipleship is not a course you complete. It is a relationship you live inside for the rest of your life.

How do you disciple someone? What does it actually look like?

You disciple someone by spending sustained, intentional time with them around the Bible, prayer, honest conversation, and lived obedience to what Jesus taught.

Practically, this usually means meeting one-on-one or in a small group of three to eight people over six to twelve months. You read Scripture together, you pray together, you talk about how Jesus is changing your daily lives, and you do this consistently enough that growth becomes visible. The relational depth matters more than the content covered. Disciple-making is closer to apprenticing than to teaching a class.

How do I disciple others if I've never been discipled myself?

You start where you are. You do not need to have been discipled by someone first to begin discipling others.

Acts 4:13 describes the original disciple-makers as "uneducated, common men" whose only credential was that they had "been with Jesus." If you have a real relationship with Jesus, an open Bible, and one other person willing to walk with you for six to twelve months, you have what is required. Most disciple-makers learn by doing. The first group you lead will teach you more than any pre-training would have. Imperfect discipleship from a willing leader will outperform polished discipleship from a reluctant one every time.Free training resources are available to walk you through how to do it.

What are the best discipleship programs for adults?

The best adult discipleship programs are structured processes that pair sustained relationship with biblical content, run six to twelve months, and prepare participants to lead others through the same process.

Several established American disciple-making frameworks meet this standard, surveyed in Part Seven of this research: the Navigators' 2:7 Series, Replicate Ministries' D-Groups, Real Life Ministries' Real-Life Discipleship framework, Greg Ogden's Discipleship Essentials triads, Mike Breen's Building a Discipling Culture, and the Ordinary Movement twenty-seven-session process described in Part Eight. The right fit depends on your church's existing culture, your time commitment, and whether your goal is individual formation or multi-generational reproduction. The model proposed in this paper is designed specifically for multi-generational reproduction in American soil.

What does the Bible say about disciple-making?

The structuring text is Matthew 28:18–20, the Great Commission, where Jesus commands his followers to "make disciples of all nations." The Greek verb mathēteusate ("make disciples") is the central imperative of the entire commission. Acts 4:13 establishes that ordinary believers ("uneducated, common men") who have been with Jesus are sufficient for the work. 2 Timothy 2:2 establishes the four-generation pattern: "the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others." John 8:31–32 gives Jesus' own definition of a disciple: one who abides in his word, knows the truth, and is set free. Discipleship is relational, costly, and reproductive by biblical definition.

Can ordinary believers really disciple others, or do you need to be a pastor or seminary graduate?

Ordinary believers can and should disciple others. Acts 4:13 establishes the textual ground for this. Peter and John were "uneducated, common men" without formal training in the rabbinic schools, but the Sanhedrin recognized that "they had been with Jesus." The presence of Jesus in their lives produced what the religious establishment could not produce in itself. The Protestant Reformation's recovery of the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9) is the theological ground for ordinary-believer ministry across the Christian tradition. Every believer is responsible for participating in the church's disciple-making mission.

What is the difference between addition and multiplication in discipleship?

Addition is one-time growth: a church adds new attenders, new members, new participants. The math is linear. Multiplication is generational reproduction: disciples produce disciples who produce disciples. The math is exponential over time. A church can grow steadily through addition for decades without producing multiplication. The 2020 Grey Matter study found that twenty-seven percent of American churches are growing through addition. Fewer than five percent are reproducing disciple-makers. Zero churches were statistically verified at the four-generation multiplication standard.

How long does it take to make a disciple?

A serious disciple-making process takes six to twelve months at minimum, often longer. A full four-generation disciple-making chain takes six to ten years to develop from the origin group, even when every gate succeeds. American disciple-making strategies that promise faster results are promising what the soil does not produce. David Watson, whose Bhojpuri work is the most-cited multi-generational case in modern disciple-making, has written: "Nothing is quick. It only appears to be because more and more leaders are produced in obedience. We go slowly but appear to go fast. We invest extensively in one person to reach and train many."

Why isn't the sermon enough for discipleship?

The sermon does what the sermon is designed to do: proclaim the Word to the gathered church. It is necessary infrastructure for Christian life. But the data shows it is not sufficient for disciple-making. Ninety to ninety-four percent of churchgoers cannot remember specific sermon content seventy-two hours after hearing it. Approximately ninety-five percent of sermon content is forgotten within three days. Eighty-nine percent of American pastors use the sermon as their primary discipleship approach. The tool pastors are most confident in is the tool with the lowest retention. Disciple-making requires sustained relational investment, accountability, and apprenticeship-style leadership development that no stage-based teaching event can provide alone.

What is the difference between Ordinary Movement and other discipleship programs?

Ordinary Movement is not, structurally, a discipleship program. It is a disciple-making process designed to be replicated across generations. Three features distinguish it from many existing American disciple-making frameworks. First, it measures lineage (named multi-generational chains) rather than attendance or program completion. Second, it operates without a founding church platform, denomination, or publishing-house pipeline, meaning growth happens through volitional adoption by ordinary leaders rather than through institutional distribution. Third, it is designed to run alongside existing local churches as a parallel track rather than to replace small group infrastructure. The model serves the church. It does not replace it. Other excellent disciple-making frameworks exist; this paper surveys many of them in Part Seven and treats them as friends and partners in shared work.

What is the difference between Ordinary Movement and a Discovery Bible Study (DBS) or DMM approach?

Discovery Bible Study and disciple-making movement (DMM) approaches typically use a discovery-based methodology, where participants engage Scripture inductively through structured questions and obey what they discover, often forming simple house-church structures as the movement reproduces. Ordinary Movement uses a structured twenty-seven-session formation process within existing church contexts, designed to produce participants who can lead the same process for the next generation. Both approaches share the four-generation reproduction goal and the conviction that ordinary believers can disciple others. They differ in operational pattern (structured curriculum vs. discovery), ecclesial relationship (alongside the church vs. forming new house-church structures), and primary global context (Ordinary Movement is designed for American soil; DMM has produced its strongest fruit in Global South contexts).

How does Ordinary Movement work with my local church?

The model is designed to runalongside existing church infrastructure as a parallel track. A church running small groups for connection, Alpha for new believers, and other ministries for healing or theology can adopt the Ordinary Movement model for participants ready to commit to a structured formation process aimed at multiplication. The model does not replace small groups. It serves the participants ready for the next level of commitment. The framing offered to pastors is direct: keep your small groups. Add this model as a parallel track for the willing. Both are needed in a healthy church. Sacramental functions (baptism, the Lord's Supper) remain with the local church and its ordained leadership.

Are online discipleship courses effective?

Online courses can support discipleship but cannot replace the sustained relational investment that the New Testament describes as discipleship itself.

An online course can teach the Bible, transmit theological content, and even simulate small-group discussion. What it cannot provide is the in-person, week-after-week presence that Jesus modeled with his twelve disciples and that Paul modeled with Timothy. The most effective approach combines online content with in-person community. The Ordinary Movement model uses an app-based platform for leader training and resources, but the disciple-making itself happens in physical or video-call groups meeting consistently over six to twelve months. Course completion is not the same as discipleship. Discipleship is what happens in the relationships the course supports.

Is multi-generational disciple-making movement actually possible in America?

The honest answer is: the question is structurally open. The 2020 Grey Matter Research study could not statistically verify a single Level 5 multiplication church in the United States. The Navigators, after ninety-two years of serious work and global deployment across 115 countries, do not publicly claim to have produced an American multi-generational movement at scale. The structural obstacles in American soil (consumer Christianity, small willing-leader pool, sermon-centric formation, prayer-intensity gap, individualism, time-horizon compression, and others documented in Part Five) are real. What is also real is that one network has documented multi-generational fruit consistent with the field-recognized standard, in American soil, across thirty-five states. The next decade will tell the field whether this pattern holds at scale.

How is Ordinary Movement different from Saddleback, Willow Creek, Church of the Highlands, or other megachurch models?

Saddleback, Willow Creek, and Church of the Highlands are remarkable congregations that have produced genuine kingdom fruit through attractional ministry models. They operate at scale measured in tens of thousands of attendees. None of them, however, has yet produced a four-generation disciple-making movement under the standard the Grey Matter / Discipleship.org study uses. The categorical difference is that megachurch models excel at moving people from the parking lot to a seat, while the Ordinary Movement model is designed to move people from a seat to disciple-making maturity. Both kinds of work are needed. The contemporary American church has many large attractional congregations and very few documented multi-generational disciple-making patterns.

Why do you say American disciple-making is in crisis?

The 2020 National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches, conducted by Grey Matter Research for Discipleship.org and Exponential, documents the following: fewer than five percent of U.S. churches qualify as Level 4 (reproducing disciple-makers); zero churches were statistically verified at Level 5 (multiplying disciple-makers across four generations); eighty percent of U.S. churches scored negatively on the disciple-making scorecard. Separate Barna research conducted for the Navigators in 2015 documented the underlying gap: eighty-seven percent of church leaders said discipleship was a top-three priority, but only twenty-seven percent reported having a clearly articulated plan for it. Additional current data: forty-two percent of American pastors seriously considered quitting full-time ministry at the 2022 peak, a figure that has since dropped to twenty-four percent as of January 2026 but remains substantially elevated above the pre-pandemic baseline; forty million Americans have disaffiliated from Christianity since 1990; fifteen thousand American churches are projected to close in 2025 alone; only four percent of American adults hold a biblical worldview. The combined picture documents a structural crisis in the American church's central mission.

How can I start a disciple-making group?

The basic structure is straightforward. Find one to ten people who are willing to commit to six to twelve months of weekly or bi-weekly meetings. Use a structured process that has been designed for replication across generations. Begin with intimacy with Jesus as the primary value rather than with mission or methodology. Plan from the first session for participants to become leaders of their own groups. Expect that some will and some will not. Mentor the ones who do. The Ordinary Movement model uses a twenty-seven-session process organized into four modules: Foundation, Core Values, the Holy Spirit, and Discipleship Principles.Materials and training resources are available without cost at ordinarymovement.com.

What does it cost to participate in Ordinary Movement?

Ordinary Movement makes its platform, training materials, app, and ongoing coaching available without cost to leaders and participants. The model is sustained through individual donor contributions rather than through participant fees. The decision to make the resources free is a strategic commitment to platform independence and to maximum accessibility for ordinary believers, including those who would be priced out of paid disciple-making curricula.

What is Ordinary Movement actually trying to do?

Ordinary Movement exists to help ordinary believers, men and women who often feel disqualified for ministry, become disciples who make disciples.

The deeper goal is a cultural shift in the American church. The shift is from passive consumer Christianity to purposeful, intentional Jesus-following. The model serves that shift by giving ordinary believers a structured process they can lead, a framework that does not require seminary training, and a path that reproduces across generations. Every documented multi-generational chain in this paper began with an ordinary person who said yes. The work is measured by whether that pattern holds at scale, not by any single numerical target.

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Appendix B: Glossary

Addition model. A church-growth approach that focuses on adding new attenders, participants, or members through evangelism, programs, and recruitment. Distinguished from multiplication, which involves disciples reproducing disciples across generations. Most American megachurch growth models are addition-based.

Apostolic catalyst. A leader who, through their disciple-making work, produces multiple downstream multi-generational chains. The term is borrowed from disciple-making movement literature and describes the New Testament pattern of apostolic figures (Paul, Barnabas, Timothy) whose ministry produced widespread reproduction beyond their direct contact.

Catechesis. The structured formation of converts in the basic teaching of the Christian faith. The early church catechumenate often lasted three years before baptism. The contemporary catechetical renewal seeks to recover this pattern of intentional pre-baptismal and post-conversion formation.

Cell church. A church structured around small groups (cells) as its primary organizational unit. Cell churches typically integrate small groups with Sunday gatherings, maintain explicit multiplication goals for cells, and run on distributed leadership through cell leaders rather than centralized clergy ministry.

Class meeting. The small group structure that anchored American Methodism from the 1790s through the late nineteenth century. Methodist class meetings of approximately twelve people met weekly under lay class leaders to address the question "How is it with your soul?" The class meeting is the closest American historical parallel to global disciple-making movements.

Continuationism. The theological position that the gifts of the Holy Spirit (including prophecy, tongues, healing, and miracles) continue in the contemporary church. Distinguished from cessationism, which holds that these gifts ceased with the apostolic age. The model proposed in this paper assumes a continuationist framework consistent with the broader evangelical and Pentecostal-charismatic tradition.

Disciple. A follower of Jesus who is being shaped by Him in intimate relationship, called into intentional community with other followers, and increasingly oriented toward making other disciples. Drawn from Matthew 28:19–20, Acts 4:13, and 2 Timothy 2:2.

Disciple-making. The intentional relational process by which a follower of Jesus invests in another person such that the other person becomes a follower of Jesus who is themselves equipped and shaped to disciple others. Per the Discipleship.org definition: "entering into relationships to intentionally help people follow Jesus, be changed by Jesus, and join the mission of Jesus."

Disciple-making movement (DMM). Per the Discipleship.org / Grey Matter / Exponential 2020 study: "A disciple-making movement exists when churches plant multiple churches (within a few short years), through gospel activity, that has abundant fruit among the lost, that multiplies these disciples (people growing in obedience to all of Jesus' commands), who in turn replicate themselves in others, so that we can see at least four generations regularly produced in multiple streams of disciple-making activity and these streams multiply consistently into churches."

Discovery Bible Study (DBS). An inductive, question-based approach to Scripture engagement developed primarily for use in disciple-making movement contexts. Participants discover meaning from the text through structured questions rather than through teaching by a leader, with explicit obedience commitments shaping each meeting.

Five Levels of Disciple-Making Churches. The classification framework used in the 2020 national study:

• Level 1: Subtracting from disciple-making efforts (29% of U.S. churches)

• Level 2: Plateaued (44%)

• Level 3: Adding disciples through church programs (27%)

• Level 4: Reproducing personal disciple-makers (under 5%)

• Level 5: Multiplying disciple-makers across four generations (could not statistically verify in the U.S. sample)

Generation (as a disciple-making term). A countable cohort within a disciple-making lineage. Within this paper, a generation is counted only when the named leader has completed a structured twenty-seven-session disciple-making process and then launched a group in which the next generation also completes the same process.

High challenge, high grace. A disciple-making cultural posture that pairs serious commitment expectations (substantial time, consistent attendance, real life change) with substantial gospel-grounded patience around failure, doubt, and slow growth. The two elements are theologically inseparable.

House church movement. A stream within contemporary Christianity that proposes replacing traditional congregational structures with networks of smaller, simpler church communities meeting in homes. Distinguished from cell church models that integrate small groups with traditional congregational structures.

Lineage. A documented chain of generations within the disciple-making process. A four-generation lineage involves four named individuals, each of whom completed the structured process under the supervision of the previous generation.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). The sociologist Christian Smith's term for the dominant religious worldview among American teenagers and young adults: belief that God exists primarily to make people happy and morally adequate, with little reference to sin, repentance, or substantive doctrinal content. Documented in Smith's Soul Searching (2005) and Souls in Transition (2009).

Multiplication. The reproduction of disciple-makers and groups across generations. Distinguished from addition, which is the growth of a single group or ministry through the recruitment of new participants.

OC Group (Ordinary Community Group). A lightweight, peer-led ongoing community formed when an Ordinary Movement discipleship group completes the twenty-seven-session process. Centers on two questions: "How is your heart?" and "What is God saying to you, and what are you going to do about it?" Functions as the structural answer to the cultural resistance to splitting documented by Allen White and others.

Person of peace. A term drawn from Luke 10:5–7 and used in disciple-making movement literature to describe the receptive individual within an existing social network whom the Spirit has prepared to receive the gospel and become the entry point for further disciple-making within their network.

Platform independence. The structural feature of a disciple-making network that operates without a founding church, denomination, seminary, or publishing house as its primary distribution channel. Growth happens through volitional adoption by ordinary leaders one at a time. Structurally harder in the short term, structurally more movement-like in the long term.

Priesthood of all believers. The doctrinal recovery of the Protestant Reformation, articulated most famously in Martin Luther's To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) and grounded in 1 Peter 2:9. Every believer is a priest who has direct access to God in Christ and bears ministry responsibility in the body. The theological ground for ordinary-believer disciple-making.

Process, not program. A disciple-making structure designed for replication across generations rather than consumption as a discrete study. The same content, run the same way, by every leader in every generation. Required for honest lineage tracking.

The Loop. The dominant pattern in American Christianity over the past forty years: attend, consume, repeat. Named in this paper and in Ordinary Movement's public materials as the structural problem the disciple-making conversation has to address.

T4T (Training for Trainers). A disciple-making methodology developed by Ying Kai in South China and documented by Steve Smith. Designed for rapid multiplication through structured training that emphasizes immediate practice and accountability. Has produced significant fruit in East Asian contexts; less in American contexts.

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Appendix C: Bibliography

This bibliography organizes the sources cited throughout the paper. Citation style follows the Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style (SBL) for theological sources and The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, for general academic sources.

Primary Theological and Biblical Sources

Augustine. On Catechizing the Uninstructed. Translated by S. D. F. Salmond. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, volume 3, edited by Philip Schaff. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1887.

Bauer, Walter, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Carson, D. A. "Matthew." In The Expositor's Bible Commentary, rev. ed. Vol. 9. Edited by Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010.

Clowney, Edmund. The Church. Contours of Christian Theology. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1995.

Luther, Martin. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. In Luther's Works, vol. 44. Edited by Helmut T. Lehmann. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966.

Milavec, Aaron. The Didache: Faith, Hope, and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50–70 C.E. New York: Newman Press, 2003.

Tertullian. On Baptism. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885.

Theological Works on Discipleship

Bruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts. Rev. ed. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988.

Campbell, Constantine R. Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012.

Coleman, Robert E. The Master Plan of Evangelism. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Revell, 1993.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2. Edited by John E. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

Harrington, Bobby, and Josh Patrick. The Disciple Maker's Handbook: Seven Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017.

Hull, Bill. The Complete Book of Discipleship: On Being and Making Followers of Christ. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006.

———. The Disciple-Making Pastor. Grand Rapids: Revell, 1988.

Ogden, Greg. Discipleship Essentials: A Guide to Building Your Life in Christ. Rev. ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2018.

———. Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Packer, J. I., and Gary A. Parrett. Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010.

Smith, Chuck. Calvary Chapel Distinctives. Costa Mesa, CA: Word for Today, 2000.

———. Why Grace Changes Everything. Costa Mesa, CA: Word for Today, 2010.

Stott, John. The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007.

Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.

———. The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

Disciple-Making Movement Literature

Aikman, David. Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003.

Breen, Mike. Building a Discipling Culture: How to Release a Missional Movement by Discipling People Like Jesus Did. Pawleys Island, SC: 3DM Publishing, 2011.

Cole, Neil. Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Comiskey, Joel. Home Cell Group Explosion: How Your Small Group Can Grow and Multiply. Houston: Touch Publications, 1998.

Garrison, David. Church Planting Movements: How God Is Redeeming a Lost World. Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2004.

———. A Wind in the House of Islam: How God Is Drawing Muslims around the World to Faith in Jesus Christ. Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2014.

Hattaway, Paul, with Brother Yun, Peter Xu Yongze, and Enoch Wang. Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders Share Their Vision to Complete the Great Commission. Carlisle, UK: Piquant, 2003.

John, Victor, with Dave Coles. Bhojpuri Breakthrough: A Movement That Keeps Multiplying. Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2019.

Neighbour, Ralph W., Jr. Where Do We Go from Here? A Guidebook for the Cell Group Church. Houston: Touch Publications, 1990.

Smith, Steve, and Ying Kai. T4T: A Discipleship Re-Revolution. Monument, CO: WIGTake Resources, 2011.

Stockstill, Larry. The Cell Church: Preparing Your Church for the Coming Harvest. Ventura, CA: Regal, 1998.

Trousdale, Jerry. Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012.

Trousdale, Jerry, and Glenn Sunshine. The Kingdom Unleashed: How Jesus' 1st-Century Kingdom Values Are Transforming Thousands of Cultures and Awakening His Church. Murfreesboro, TN: DMM Library, 2018.

Watson, David L., and Paul D. Watson. Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2014.

Watson, Kevin M. The Class Meeting: Reclaiming a Forgotten (and Essential) Small Group Experience. Wilmore, KY: Seedbed, 2014.

American Disciple-Making Practitioner Literature

Addison, Steve. The Rise and Fall of Movements: A Roadmap for Leaders. Cody, WY: 100Movements, 2018.

Burrier, Doug. How to Make Disciples. Self-published.

———. Well Made Well Done. Self-published.

Chan, Francis, and Mark Beuving. Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples. Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2012.

Gallaty, Robby. Growing Up: How to Be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2013.

———. Rediscovering Discipleship: Making Jesus' Final Words Our First Work. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015.

Putman, Jim. Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches That Make Disciples. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2010.

Putman, Jim, Avery Willis, Brandon Guindon, and Bill Krause. Real-Life Discipleship Training Manual: Equipping Disciples Who Make Disciples. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2010.

Skinner, Betty Lee. Daws: The Story of Dawson Trotman, Founder of the Navigators. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974.

Warren, Rick. The Purpose Driven Church. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995.

———. The Purpose Driven Life. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

White, Allen. Exponential Groups: Unleashing Your Church's Potential. Indianapolis: Wesleyan Publishing, 2017.

Research and Sociological Sources

Barna, George. American Worldview Inventory 2025. Glendale, AZ: Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 2025.

———. 2025 Trends Outlook. Glendale, AZ: Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 2025.

Barna Group. Pastors Share Top Reasons They've Considered Quitting Ministry in the Past Year. Ventura, CA: Barna, April 27, 2022.

———. The State of Discipleship. Commissioned by NavPress and the Navigators. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2015.

———. The State of the Church. Ventura, CA: Barna, 2020.

———. State of Pastors Volume 2. Ventura, CA: Barna, 2024.

———. Pastors Quitting Ministry: New Barna Data Shows a Shift. Ventura, CA: Barna, January 27, 2026.

———. Two in Five Christians Are Not Engaged in Discipleship. Ventura, CA: Barna, 2022.

Barrett, David B., and Todd M. Johnson. World Christian Trends, AD 30–AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2001.

Boylan, Anne. Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Burge, Ryan. The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023.

GAMAAN. Iranians' Attitudes Toward Religion: A 2020 Survey Report. Netherlands: GAMAAN, 2020.

Grey Matter Research and Consulting. National Study on Disciple Making in USA Churches: High Aspirations Amidst Disappointing Results. Conducted for Discipleship.org and Exponential, March 2020.

Hawkins, Greg L., and Cally Parkinson. Reveal: Where Are You? South Barrington, IL: Willow Creek Resources, 2007.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Lifeway Research. Pastors Views on Discipleship. Nashville: Lifeway Research, 2024.

Martin, William. A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991.

Pew Research Center. In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace. October 17, 2019.

———. Religious Landscape Study. 2014; updated 2020.

Pinetops Foundation. The Great Opportunity: The American Church in 2050. 2nd ed. Pinetops Foundation, 2018.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Rainer, Thom S. Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive. Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2014.

———. I Am a Church Member: Discovering the Attitude That Makes the Difference. Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2013.

Smith, Christian, and Amy Adamczyk. Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Smith, Christian, with Melinda Lundquist Denton. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Smith, Christian, with Patricia Snell. Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Watson, David Lowes. The Early Methodist Class Meeting: Its Origins and Significance. Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1985.

Wuthnow, Robert. I Come Away Stronger: How Small Groups Are Shaping American Religion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

Ordinary Movement Internal Sources

Ordinary Movement. 2025 Full Ministry Overview. October 2025.

———. Internal multiplication tracker. Current through April 2026.

———. Internal participant survey, year-end 2025.

———. Church and Discipleship Statistics. February 2026. Available atordinarymovement.com/library/church-stats.

———. State of Discipleship and the Church. Available atordinarymovement.com/state-of-discipleship-and-church.

Online and Periodical Sources

Discipleship.org. Disciple Making Movements: Why Not Here? Franklin, TN: Discipleship.org, 2021.

Harper, Luke. "What the Iranian Church Needs Now." Radical.net, January 2026.

International Christian Concern. Iran: Country Report. 2024.

Jones, Jeffrey M. "U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time." Gallup, March 29, 2021.

Lifeway Research. "Discipleship Is a Priority Without a Plan for Many Churches." August 21, 2025.

Long, Justin D. "Global Movements: Where They Are and Where They Are Headed." Mission Frontiers, January–February 2024.

Ozbun, Cory. "Why Slow and Steady Wins: Reflections from KC Underground." 2023.

Roys, Julie. "Survey: Pastors Say Church Does Worship Services Well; Discipleship Ranks Last." The Roys Report. Citing Lifeway Research data.

Sheep Among Wolves Volume II. Directed by Dalton Thomas. Frontier Alliance International, 2019. Documentary film.

Shimron, Yonat. "Survey: More U.S. Churches Closing than Opening." Religion News Service, May 26, 2021.

Southern Baptist Convention. Annual Church Profile. 2022.

White, Allen. "Why Small Groups Don't Multiply (And How to Change That)." Church Leaders, March 2018.

"Willow Creek Finds Limits to Its Model: Spiritual Growth Not Keeping Pace." Christian Century, January 29, 2008.

Wyatt, Tim. "Multiplying Disciples in the 'Graveyard of Missions.'" Premier Christianity, March 2024.

Appendix D: Methodology Notes

This appendix documents the methodology supporting the data presented in Part Nine. It is offered for researchers, journalists, and practitioners who wish to evaluate the rigor of the network's measurement practice.

D.1 The Multiplication Tracker

The Ordinary Movement multiplication tracker is the internal database of named leaders and their generational relationships. It documents, for each group launched in the network, the following data:

• The first-generation leader's name

• The launch date of the group

• The participants in the group

• The completion status of each participant (completed the full twenty-seven sessions or did not)

• The group end date

• Any second-generation groups launched by participants from that group

• The full downstream chain of subsequent generations

The tracker has been maintained since 2018 and is reconciled quarterly. The data presented in Part Nine reflects the state of the tracker as of April 2026.

D.2 How Generations Are Counted

A generation is counted only when both of the following conditions are met:

First, the named leader has completed the full twenty-seven-session structured process as a participant in a prior generation group. Mere attendance at a few sessions does not qualify.

Second, the named leader has subsequently launched their own group in which the next generation of participants has either completed the twenty-seven-session process (qualifying that group for further generation counting) or is currently in the process of completing it.

This standard is stricter than most published disciple-making movement counts globally, which often count generations based on church-planting or group-launching rather than on individual completion of a structured process. The stricter standard produces lower headline numbers but higher confidence in what each number represents.

D.3 Time-Based Cohort Analysis

The variance in conversion rates between cohorts (40 percent at 15-plus months of runway, 47.8 percent at 24-plus months, 51.9 percent for the mature 2018–2022 cohort) is documented through time-based filtering of the tracker rather than through assumption.

Specifically, the analysis filters all first-generation groups by their launch date and then measures how many of those groups produced at least one second-generation group within specific time windows. This methodology controls for the structural lag the American church calendar introduces (the typical 8-to-30-month gap between when a participant becomes ready to lead and when they actually launch a new group aligned to a fall, spring, or summer launch window).

The leader archive provides an additional cross-check. The archive tracks completed groups with both launch and end dates. Cross-referencing the archive against the multiplication tracker reveals that groups which ended twelve or more months ago multiplied at 2.2 times the rate of groups that ended within the past year, even when controlling for cohort age. This provides direct evidence that time since completion is a real driver of multiplication, not a methodological artifact.

D.4 Participant-Level Multiplication Calculation

The participant-level multiplication rate (12 to 17 percent, with a central estimate of 15 percent) is calculated through the following methodology:

Numerator: the count of unique individuals in the multiplication tracker's curated chain documentation who served as a second-generation leader after participating in a first-generation group. As of April 2026, this number is 71.

Denominator: the estimated number of participants in mature first-generation groups (those with at least 15 months of runway since launch). This estimation uses an empirical average group size of 5.45 participants per group, calculated from internal operational data, applied to the 85 mature first-generation groups in the tracker, yielding approximately 463 mature participants.

Sensitivity analysis at three different group-size assumptions (5, 6, and 7 participants per group) produces a band of 12 to 17 percent. The 15 percent central estimate uses the empirical group-size average.

The methodology is bounded. It does not capture:

• Participants who became disciple-makers in non-Ordinary-Movement contexts (their fruit is real but not countable here)

• Second-generation leaders whose chains have not yet extended to third generation (the curated chain documentation focuses on lineage-traceable cases)

• Surge cohort participants whose multiplication has not yet had time to mature

These bounds suggest the true participant-level rate is likely somewhat higher than 15 percent, though the difference cannot be quantified from the available data.

D.5 Transformation Survey Methodology

The transformation survey data (91 percent in the public October 2025 report, 99 percent in the most recent internal survey) reflects self-reported participant assessment of growth in intimacy with Jesus through the process.

The survey methodology has the following features:

• Surveys are administered at the end of the twenty-seven-session process

• Response rates are high but not universal; participants who did not complete the process are not represented

• The survey is administered by the leader of each group, which creates some risk of social desirability bias in responses

• The question asked is whether the participant experienced measurable growth in intimacy with Jesus, with response options on a multi-point scale

The limitations are real and worth acknowledging:

• Self-reported subjective growth is not equivalent to objective character transformation

• The administration of the survey by the group leader rather than by an independent party introduces possible bias

• Non-completers are not represented in the data

The strength of the data is its consistency across multiple survey windows and its alignment with the lineage data. A network producing fabricated or social-desirability-driven transformation data would not be expected to produce concurrent multi-generational lineage chains at the rates documented. The combination of the two measurements is what gives the data its credibility, not either measurement alone.

D.6 Limitations and Open Questions

The methodology has known limitations that should temper any conclusions drawn from the data:

First, the network's data covers eight years of operation. This is too short a window to make definitive claims about long-term sustainability. The 2025–2026 surge cohort has not yet produced its downstream multiplication. The data in 2030 will be substantially more informative than the data in 2026.

Second, the network's data is a single-network dataset. The fruit documented could reflect characteristics of this particular network (its founders, its specific 27-session content, its cultural reach within particular states) rather than characteristics that would generalize to other networks attempting similar work.

Third, the participant-level multiplication rate calculation depends on assumptions about average group size that, while grounded in empirical data, introduce uncertainty into the central estimate.

Fourth, the transformation survey data is self-reported and subject to the biases that affect all such measurement.

Fifth, the four-generation chains documented in the tracker, while produced under a rigorous completion standard, have not been independently verified by an outside research organization. The methodology is internally rigorous and externally describable. A formal external audit would substantially strengthen the data's evidentiary weight.

Sixth, the network's data does not address the question of how the disciple-making fruit it documents relates to broader transformation in the participating churches or communities. The model is designed to produce multi-generational disciple-making chains. It is not designed to produce, and the data does not document, the broader cultural transformation that the Navigators' GiDC framework targets.

These limitations are offered transparently. They do not undermine what the data shows. They contextualize what the data shows and clarify what additional work would strengthen the field's understanding of whether and how American disciple-making movement is possible.

The American Discipleship Question. Published by Ordinary Movement. First Edition, May 2026.

For inquiries, citations, or to share feedback, contact info@ordinarymovement.com