Timing and posture

Two things decide how this goes, and neither one rescues the other.

Posture is chapter 3: alongside, never over. Timing is chapter 6: faith plus desire, one person at a time. A church with a beautiful posture that moves too early still smothers a young group — gently, warmly, and completely. A church with perfect timing that comes over the top instead of alongside gets a group that complies and stops multiplying.

You need both, and you will be tempted to settle for whichever comes more naturally to you.

The temptation is love, not ambition

It is worth naming what actually goes wrong, because it is almost never what a leader expects to be warned about.

Very few church leaders set out to absorb a movement. What happens is that a leader meets somebody who came to faith six months ago, is delighted by them, and wants everyone he loves to meet them right now. That is affection, not empire. But delight is a bad clock, and eagerness produces exactly the same damage as ambition does.

So the discipline this class asks for is not suspicion of your own motives. It is patience with good ones.

What you are aiming at

Not a merger. Not a satellite. Something that looks like this:

Groups multiplying, with facilitators who know you are for them and would ring you at midnight. A congregation that has stopped counting attendance as the whole story. People arriving in your gathering one at a time, when their own faith and their own desire bring them — and arriving as partners who expect obedience to be normal, because nobody trained it out of them on the way in.

And a church that has been changed by receiving them.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond these essential requirements: — Acts 15:28 (OTB)

That is the established church, holding every advantage, deciding what not to require. It is the last word this class has to offer, and it is the hardest one to practise, because nothing in church life rewards a leader for the burdens he declined to impose.

Three questions to sit with

Take these slowly. They are the class.

What dangers do you see in connecting DBS groups to traditional churches too soon? Answer it about your congregation specifically, not about churches in general.

How do we prepare these disciples to be change agents rather than to be assimilated? What would have to be true of them, and what would have to be true of your people receiving them?

How could this DNA breathe life into your existing congregation? Which of the four practices in chapter 7 could you start this month — and who is the first person you would ask?

Where this leaves you

DBS and the local church are partners in one mission. That has been true the whole time; the only questions were when and how.

Bring new groups into a sleeping congregation too early and you lose their zeal. Come alongside them patiently, while doing the slow work of waking your own people, and you get both — multiplication that keeps going, and a congregation that comes back to life because it finally saw what obedience looks like up close.

Pray for the timing. It is the part you cannot manufacture.