Focus on the Few to Scale to the Many

DMMs grow rapidly from a different sort of function from mass evangelism: a scaling function that combines quality with rapid reproduction.

In a DMM, each disciple-maker focuses over a long time on just a few while trying to envision, empower, and release those few to do the same.

Dunbar’s Number suggests, at most, we have 15 key relationships (including family, work, and friends), and a wider tribe of 150 associates, colleagues, or more distant relationships.

As a thought exercise, imagine a disciple maker focusing on just those 15. He spends his time discipling just those. Of those 15, only three go out and make disciples of their 15 relationships - but they do that in the first year of their discipleship.

The gen0 leader doesn’t stop discipling the 15. He continues to pour into them—off and on, perhaps, for years. (Consider the model of families: parents pour into their children, and even when those children are grown and gone, they often continue to have relationships of support, love, and influence.) The same thing happens with Gen1, Gen2, Gen3, Gen4, and onward.

So qualitative discipleship can continue over the years, while multiplication might begin in year 1 and grow each year. What might be the theoretical result?

In this model, year 3 exceeds the number in the average American church, and year 5 qualifies as a megachurch (on the basis of size alone). Yet year 5 would be strongly based on a core of over 250 disciple-makers, grown up as a network in 1x3 relationships.

This is not a method that focuses on rapid growth. Rather, it is a method that focuses on strong relationships between a small number of disciple-makers who in turn seek to saturate their immediate friends-and-family networks, and spread, oikos-by-oikos, relationally through communities. It’s only comparatively rapid because most churches spread industrially rather than organically.