Dave Coles, ed. God on the Move: Making Disciples Among the Nations. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2025. 136 pp. Paperback, $12.99.
The goal of forming movements of disciples from among the unreached and underserved people groups of the world has captured the attention and imagination of many today. Whether one is focused on the goal of Church Planting Movements (CPM) or Disciple Making Movements (DMM), there has been significant attention to testimonies of how God is working powerfully, as well as to what it would look like to follow movement practices and principles towards those ends. God is on the Move: Making Disciples Among the Nations (2025) is a condensed, accessible version of Motus Dei: The Movement of God to Disciple the Nations (2021). While broader conversations about reporting and numbers related to DMM and CPM most certainly still need further consideration, this resource is a helpful summary of the positive case for such movements and the Mission of God.
Structured into two sections of four chapters each, the first part focuses on what is happening in the world today, while the second part explores how to make sense of it. In the initial chapter, “Fifteen Years of Disciple Making Movements,” Samuel Kebreab sets the stage by unpacking the features of Disciple Making Movements and examining the roles of data collection and verification. In their analysis of 129 movements that have reached the DMM threshold, they note that they “found that, on average, it takes three and a half years (42 months) for a DMM engagement to reach the movement stage (one hundred churches and four generations)” (10). Unfortunately, the reader may miss that these stories of explosive growth have tended to happen in more tribal-type contexts. The reader may also miss that we are neglecting to consider the role of previous Christian witness in that context and how it may have prepared these soils for what appears to be rapid growth. One interesting rule of thumb gleaned from this chapter was the 4-3-2 rule: “finding roughly four persons of peace will produce three discovery groups, and three discovery groups will eventually become two churches” (13). This linkage, while setting a standard or expectation that may be unrealistic to replicate in every cultural context, could help keep important lead and lag measures in front of kingdom workers.
The remaining chapters in Part 1 provide useful case studies from East Africa, India, and Thailand. Chapter 2, “Transferring Spiritual DNA in East Africa” (Tasse and Corley), works through significant shifts needed for movements to take place. They noted, for example, that “the biggest challenge has been overcoming centuries of an individual-focused, information-heavy Western approach to discipleship” (21). Unfortunately, this chapter references but neglects to challenge some controversial advice from mentors like David Watson to “decontextualize, not contextualize, the gospel” (20). Could it be that one of the reasons why movements in some places (outside the scope of this chapter) have burned hot like a brush fire and then just as quickly burn out may be linked to this dismissal of the important practice of rooted contextualization? Tasse and Corley conclude as much with helpful reflections on their research methodology and initial observations from their overall analysis. Chapters 3 (“Bhojpuri Case Study” by John and Coles) and 4 (“A Thai Multiplication Movement” by Bailey) are also instructive and worthy of attention and reflection.
In Part 2, Farah’s “Discipleship Movements Today” made a significant impression on me. This chapter offers well-crafted, useful summaries of important perspectives on movements from history, ecclesiology, sociology, and practice. Then Craig Ott, in his chapter, explores the book of Acts and Church Planting Movements. Ott wisely counsels the reader not to “try to find a Bible verse to support every single mission strategy or method,” but balances that by noting that we should consider if CPMs “are consistent with the direction and theology of Acts” (74). While distilling principles from narratives can certainly be problematic, Ott models how to do so well. At one point, he notes that the “rapid growth of the Jerusalem church” was linked to “resolving conflicts among the disciples (Acts 6:1-7)” (76). It made me wish that an author had included those challenging reconciliation stories in the modern-day movement literature as well. I found chapter 7, on “God’s Expanding Family: The Social Architecture of Ekklesia Movements” (Larsen), to be the least helpful in this volume, as the sudden shift from CPMs and DMMs to his term “Ekklesia Movements” lacked definition and distinction. This chapter’s use of biblical texts alongside this author’s experience of a modern movement seemed to conflate the Ekklesia term in Scripture with the expression of the movement in this author’s context. The book finishes strong, though, with a chapter by Coles where he deftly answers eight main objections to CPMs and DMMs. The reader will find some useful gems in this section, like: “DMM is sometimes used to mean the same as CPM, but it is better understood as one of several processes leading toward a CPM” (96); and “So, rapid reproduction comes to us not as a promise but as a positive value in New Testament kingdom growth” (97).
Overall, this book is a useful resource for those who would like an introduction to the place of movements in Christian missions, and for those looking to think, speak, and participate in these movements today. I believe this book achieves what it set out to do: providing a “shorter and easier-to-read book” and functioning as an “appetizer for the full-course banquet” of the larger Motus Dei (2021) volume (xv-xvi). The book’s hope, then, is to inspire and edify readers with greater awareness of what God is doing around the globe (xvi). My only hesitation, then, in recommending this book is this: I worry that readers may fill up on the appetizers, exchange movement hope for movement hype, and make this volume their only stop on their learning journey. That concern is linked to the need for continued conversation, caution, and reflection about the role of numbers, metrics, outcomes, and accuracy in movement-focused missions literature. I certainly plan on sharing this book with others, but will do so in conversation with other voices for faithful and fruitful participation in Christ’s mission.
