Author: Jonathan Dodson

As I continue to lead a church plant, make disciples, and read missiology, I am struck by a possible tension between movement and gospel. I know, this sounds silly. After all, the gospel has led to radical, Spirit-empowered, life-changing, culture-renewing movements throughout history–Early Church, Martoma Church, Celtic Christianity, Great Awakenings, Latin American Renewals, Chinese House Churches, and African Independent Church movements.

Manageable Movements

However, some current missiology attempts to capture the “elements of movement” from this historical periods in order to prescribe what is needed for current movements. It is as if we are trying to reverse engineer a unique past work of the Spirit into man’s work in the present. Some common movement elements include:

• Rapid
• Strategic
• Scalable
• Multiplying
• Decentralized

These five words are largely managable. In other words, they are something we can do in order to cultivate movement. We can plan strategically, create scalable structures, emphasize multiplying disciples, and decentralize our organization. “Rapid” is seems to be the only one we can’t manage, but is frequently descriptive of church planting movements. David Garrison is big on the rapidity of CPMs. But perhaps the rapidity is meant only to be descriptive not prescriptive.

Unmanageable Movements

What goes rather unnoticed and unpracticed are the unmanageable elements of movement. These elements can not be “done”, but are, in God’s providence, done anyway. They include:

• Rapid
• Prayerful
• Gospel/Incarnation
• Spirit-empowered

These seem to be all over the book of Acts. Perhaps our obsession with the manageable elements of movement have handicapped unmanageable movement in the U.S. What would happen if we opened our church structures, knelt in prayer more often, pressed into the Gospel for understanding and power, actively relied and related with the Holy Spirit, expecting the unexpected. Perhaps then we would see rapid movement? I fear what might become of being rapid and movement focused.

Gospel and Movement?

So where is the tension between Gospel and Movement? I suggest it lies between discipleship and manageable movement. If we reinterpret movement through the lens of manageable elements of movement, our planting and discipling will change and force us to put very young believers in places of leadership very early, so that rapid reproduction can occur. In the name of Organic, we have one year old believers functioning as pastors. Paul warned against this. But we also get rapid reproduction. New Christians share out of joy, not duty, and contagiously spread the gospel.

However, if they are leaders we end up with immature small groups, filled with doubt, wild faith, and confusion. Heresies pop up. They did during the Great Awakenings. Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses were a spin off of undiscipled converts in New England. There’s almost a heresy for every house church in China (I exaggerated I know). There are thousands of denominations in Africa (11,500 to be exact), many of which are doctrinally shallow. And the Base Ecclessial Communities in Latin America are incredibly varied. Movements can result in a gospel that is gradually thinned, strained, turned, and perverted, producing disciples of weak faith or faith in something else altogether.

It seems that the gospel would compel us to make disciples who bear fruit, who grow in the grace and the knowledge of Christ, who grow up into the full stature of Jesus, who increase in the knowledge of God, who watch their life and doctrine closely. Does this slow movement? It certainly isn’t as “manageable” but, perhaps, being more gospel focused and less movement focused, we could end up with a gospel movement on our hands, instead of truncated Christianities and heretical, hypocritical followers?

What do you think? Is there a tension between Gospel and Movement?