Quality or Quantity? Fast or Slow?

I’ve just read the article on the Lausanne website on the danger of preferring speed to faithfulness in disciple making/church planting movements.

The author argues that practitioners of these movements who go after rapid multiplication are prone to pragmatism. They think they “will engineer a movement” through innovation and creativity that produce new strategies and tools.

Seeking success they honor “strategies, steps and solutions rather than mysteries, mystics and martyrs.”

The answer given to this problem is to rest in the sovereignty of God. Practitioners must learn that “God gives growth as weak heralds proclaim a foolish message, trusting in God’s sovereign timing and purposes rather than our own.” That statement is true, but it’s only half the story.

The same concern and solution were once offered to William Carey when he proposed that something be done about a lost world.

Recently I sat with five Indian movement leaders. They were not pragmatic secularists, but men of God who had all suffered for the gospel. They’d all been beaten, some had seen the inside of a jail.

They know how to map their progress and identify unreached people groups. They have strategies, methods and tools, but before all else, they are men of God’s Word, laying down their lives for the gospel.

When they and their people go into an unreached neighborhood or village, they go with an offer of prayer, the gospel and an invitation to sit and read the stories about Jesus and learn to follow him together.

They use technology when it’s helpful, Biblical and reproducible. In one movement a simple SD card loaded with audio and text Bibles and simple discipleship studies has multiplied the impact of their workers. But it’s not the SD card that is the engine room of this rapidly growing movement, it’s the Word of God carried by ordinary believers to their friends and family and people far away.

Tens of thousands have turned to Christ and are meeting in homes as a result. Is that too rapid? Well, in this movement you don’t hear the challenge to repent and believe until you have completed thirty-five studies that begin with Creation and end with Christ. That’s not rapid. But it is.

Those households who repent and believe are baptized and told their baptism, like Christ’s, is their commissioning to make disciples.

Soon they’re opening up unreached homes and villages taking households through the thirty-five studies.

It is not a “rapid” strategy if it relies on thirty-five lessons before someone repents and believes — unless 80% of the disciples are out making disciples. That’s a rapidly growing movement that relies on a slow and careful method of discipleship and church formation. There are much easier and faster ways to “save souls” in India. But these disciples are making disciples and forming new churches to the glory of God. They regard Jesus’ command to make disciples of the nations as urgent.

Here’s the point. In Acts, Luke doesn’t choose between the sovereignty of God and the part we play in God’s mission. It’s a movement of God, driven forward by the dynamic Word of God, through ordinary people. They have a mandate to go to the ends of the earth, reaching every people and every place.

So should we go for quality or quantity? For depth or breath? Fast or slow? These are false dichotomies.

What farmer wants quality OR quantity? A wise farmer works for both. He works for a high-quality crop and lots of it.