Movement Is Not The Goal (but it might be the fruit)

By S. Crawley

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash‍ ‍

Let me say something that might sound controversial: if our goal is to produce a disciple-making movement, we are in trouble.

What do I mean by that?

To be clear - God is interested in multiplication.

People multiplying and filling the earth as they walk in relationship with God and carry His authority (Gen 1:26-28). The knowledge of His glory covering the earth like waters cover the sea (Hab 2:14). Disciples making disciples amongst every people (Mt 28:16-20).

This is His declared goal, way beyond anything we could produce ourselves.

But if movement becomes our goal — if we are trying to engineer it, measuring ourselves by it, pressing the people around us to produce it — we have quietly moved the wrong thing to the centre.

The Pressure That Enters The Room

When movement is the goal, it produces a particular kind of pressure.

The language shifts toward metrics: how many groups, how many generations, how many gospel shares. These are not bad things, but when they are the centre, the people around us begin to feel like pieces in a strategy.

Discovery groups, one-on-one conversations, serving brokenness in a community - these are good things, too. But with the wrong emphasis, they begin to feel like a sales pipeline, where we’re try to move people to the next stage of a funnel.

In that process, people whom God loves as His children and are somewhere on a journey toward Him - people who might be beginning to experience His presence and respond to His Word - get measured against a timeline they did not agree to and that God did not set.

We need to ask ourselves, whose agenda is this really serving?

What Our Actual Goal Is

Here is an agenda that keeps us centred on what is pleasing to our Father and will always be life-giving for the people we’re serving: our goal is to help people listen to God, trust Him, obey Him — and to empower them to help others do the same.

That is the whole assignment.

It is completely consistent with the entire narrative of the Bible, is made possible solely through Jesus’ death and resurrection and Pentecost, and is consistent with the teaching emphasis of Jesus and Paul.

It also relieves an enormous amount of pressure: we simply serve the people God has given us to serve. We help them grow in their relationship with the Father. We equip them so that when God moves in and through and around them, they are already equipped with what they need to join Him and pass it on to others.

And it keeps us from quietly building reliance on ourselves.

We can build the capacity for replication in people.

We cannot activate it. Only the Holy Spirit does that.

What This Looks Like With Real People

A friend of mine recently told me about a group he is facilitating — men carrying deep, long-term brokenness, addiction, gang history, time in prison.

They are in a Discovery group together.

They are nowhere near ready to plant their own groups in the conventional sense, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But they are learning through experience to walk a journey with God and with each other.

Recently, one of them mentioned being at a gathering of his unchurched friends and telling them as he left that he had a Bible study to get to. "You should come sometime," he said.

He said that because he was experiencing something good and he wanted to share it with his friends. Nobody engineered that moment. Nobody set it as a target. It emerged from a living relationship with the Father, and care for the people around him.

Like ‘movement’, a Discovery Bible Study is a terrible master, but a great servant. If it becomes a ‘thing’ that we must ‘do’ to people, it can be a form of religious slavery. But as a tool for serving hunger and interest, it is life-giving.

People internalise the pattern because it’s simple and it is giving them something they value. As listening to God through His Word becomes a way of life, it becomes easy for them to bring someone else on that same journey.

They will do it when the Spirit or those around them prompt them, and it will carry life precisely because nobody forced it.

The Vision We Can Cast With Confidence

Movement is not the goal.

We hope, pray and desire that it might be the fruit, but the Holy Spirit activates replication in God's time and God's way. We need to hold two things separately: the things we know God will do and the things we are still discerning.

He WILL cause the knowledge of His glory to cover the earth: we can declare that with complete confidence.

What about wanting sons and daughters to be reconciled to Himself across every city and every affinity group? Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Confirmed. He has said He will do this. Lock it in.

Everything else — how it unfolds in our specific context, through which people, by which pathways — requires ongoing discernment, and staying humble and attentive to where the Father is already moving.

If our goal is to seek to listen to God, trust and obey Him, then we’re in the best place we can possibly be. If our goal is to help others do that so that they are able to help others do that, then movement will take care of itself.

Getting Practical

As you think about God's vision for your city and/or affinity group:

1) John 15:4–5 — "Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine." What does this passage reveal about the relationship between our faithfulness and the fruit God produces — and where that puts the weight?

2) Where have you seen the most natural, organic multiplication in the people or communities you are part of? What conditions seemed to allow it?

3) As you reflect on the way you disciple others, what are you doing that is easily replicable by them? What things are not? Is there anything you need to tweak?

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S. Crawley serves leaders and teams in Asia carrying a vision for their cities and is passionate about helping people grow in authentic relationships. He also knows how to make nachos.

© 2026 S. Crawley. All rights reserved.