Urban DMM Research Report: Multiplication from the Margins

Multiplying disciples often begins not with the capable and connected, but among the broken and overlooked. The margins are not just a place to serve. They may be where everything starts.

Maybe making disciples isn’t that complicated? Maybe we’re already qualified?

A practitioner shares his story and what he concluded.

“Where do you go to church?” A simple, straightforward question for many Christians, but the assumptions it contains make it awkward for disciples whose ministry means that their community doesn’t fit the traditional mould.

One harvest worker shares how God shaped him through his wrestle with this question.

Cities scatter us. The communal heart of the Great Commission may feel out of reach. But what if the problem isn't commitment — it's that we're holding a fixed picture of what "going together" has to look like?

Four approaches from Asian cities suggest there may be more options than we think.

Most of us were invited to a destination. But the earliest followers of Jesus were called people of the Way.

What does it mean to recover a gospel that is less transaction and more way of life — and what does that demand of those of us asking others to follow?

Relational authenticity isn’t a performance. When leaders drop the fig leaves, something opens in community.

A practitioner reflects on what genuine honesty between generations actually builds.

Urban DMM Research Report: The Discipleship Gap

Most of us know how to discuss a passage of Scripture. We're far less practiced at obeying it — and by Thursday, the Sunday sermon has often faded into good intention. What would it look like if ordinary believers, in ordinary places, were expected not just to understand God's word together, but to act on it before they met again?

Every people group carries a spiritual history — and that history is still shaping how they see God, themselves, and whether they'll come near Him at all. Spiritual mapping is how you read that terrain before you engage it. It gives your prayer coordinates. And it often starts not with the people you're praying for, but with you.

A young man stranded in Kabul told the missionary who'd spent weeks with him: "I really like your Jesus, but I can't stand you."

That line has stayed with Marko for years — and it gets at a potentially uncomfortable reality. The lack of harvest in our cities may not be from a lack of care or vision. It may be because we never stopped to ask what we needed to become.

The same Spirit, working across wildly different cities. Practitioners from East Asia to Central Asia keep reporting the same patterns — brokenness opening doors, simple obedience producing fruit, youth moving without waiting for permission.

These aren't coincidences, and they aren't models to copy. They're fingerprints. What does it mean when God's methods look this consistent across such diverse contexts?

Most disciplemakers are wrestling with two hard questions: what stops people from engaging with those far from Jesus, and what stops discipleship from taking root?

But there's a third question that most practitioners never ask — and it transforms the other two. If discipleship can't replicate without you, you may have built dependence, not disciples.

The gap between God's vision for our cities and the reality in front of us is vast — and it refuses to close no matter how much we programme, engineer, or expertise our way toward it.

Sixty urban disciple-makers across Asian cities sat with that tension together, and what emerged wasn't a better strategy. It was a return to something far simpler — and far more reproducible.

Have you ever felt the pressure to pack the entire gospel into one coffee session? Let’s look more closely at the message that Jesus asked the disciples to share and how “showing” one bit at a time could be more powerful than “telling”.

Evangelism may seem intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be. What if we just need to start conversations instead?

We know that it doesn’t have to be all work and no joy. But how do we “get” or “find” joy? There is a reliable pathway. Join me on this journey… joy is just down the road.

What else is left to do?

In the final article of this current series, David shares a critical step that sets up his team to keep learning and growing in effectiveness.

The joy was drying up… there was a disconnect between what David and his team were living and what they were trying to sow.

They needed to take stock and recalibrate. What did they learn?

I need to tell you about something that shook me during our last gathering in our city.

What shook me was not someone sharing a revolutionary new strategy, but because I finally saw what was already there.