What is a gospel movement?

A church planting movement (CPM) or disciple making movement (DMM) can be defined as “the multiplication of disciples making disciples and leaders developing leaders, resulting in indigenous churches planting churches which begin to spread rapidly through a people group or population segment.” Click here to read more about gospel movements.

Declare a Promise

Psalm 82:8 “Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the peoples of Lebanon!”

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Lord, arise! Arise from your throne. Rise to show compassion (Isa 30:18). Stand in judgment. But Lord! We plead that you not judge your lost children; do not cast them aside. Instead, with a strong right arm, judge the rulers and principalities (Eph 6), and throw them down. Today, we declare the favor of the Lord over Lebanon, and we press in to the promises of scripture that God, the one Lord and King, will inherit Lebanon as his special people, his special possession. So Lord, move! Move against what keeps your people in darkness, in bondage, in chaos. Rise, O King, to show compassion.

PRAYING R.A.M.A.D.A.N

Today, we’re going to repeat our RAMADAN template.

Disciple Making Movements are multifaceted with many layers of nuance in both theory and practice. Today, rather than focusing on one aspect of movement, we will pray through a number of them using the acronym RAMADAN.

  • R: REMOVE THE BLINDERS
  • A: ACCESS NEW COMMUNITIES
  • M: MORE POWER ENCOUNTERS
  • A: ALL PEOPLE GROUPS IN LEBANON
  • D: DISCOVERY GROUPS THAT MULTIPLY
  • A: AVOID THE TOXIC 3
  • N: NURTURE 3 LEADERSHIP NEEDS

Remove the Blinders

2 Cor 3:15 “Yes, even today when they read Moses’ writings, their hearts are covered with a veil, and they do not understand.”

  1. Lord, remove the veil. Remove the blinders that keep Lebanese from seeing the truth of Christ. May the gospel liberate people from blindness. May the principalities and powers and spiritual forces of evil in Lebanon (Eph 6) be shut down, silenced, broken, rendered impotent. Jesus, your cross conquered the powers: the powers of death and the satan and his kingdom. You have won the victory. And now, our Lord and Christ, we call on your presence and power, your angels and ministers, to move in the spiritual realm here in Lebanon, to change the atmosphere. We intercede! As Daniel prayed and angels were dispatched and fought wars in the heavenly places, we believe your angels over Lebanon are on the move, and we expect spiritual breakthrough this month of Ramadan.

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Access New Communities

John 4:42 “Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not just because of what you told us, but because we have heard him ourselves. Now we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”

  1. Lord, as the Samaritan woman connected Jesus and his disciples to an entirely new community–and a marginalized one at that!–we now pray that people of peace would open up new communities to church planters laboring in Lebanon. Father, in all the streams of emerging movements we have now in Lebanon, we ask during Ramadan for breakthrough into new communities. Jesus, give your Lebanese and Syrian and Palestinian leaders the strategies on your heart to access new neighborhoods, new villages, and new communities.

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More Power Encounters

Acts 3:6-8 But Peter said, “I don’t have any silver or gold for you. But I’ll give you what I have. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk!” Then Peter took the lame man by the right hand and helped him up. And as he did, the man’s feet and ankles were instantly healed and strengthened.  He jumped up, stood on his feet, and began to walk! Then, walking, leaping, and praising God, he went into the Temple with them.

Rom 15:19 “By the power of signs and wonders [and] by the power of the Spirit of God…I have fully proclaimed the good news of Christ.”

  1. Lord, empower your disciples to do miracles in the name of Jesus, healing the sick and taking authority over evil spirits. May the Lebanese see the power of God. Silence the scoffers! Demonstrate your authority! We need the power of God. Just like Paul the Apostle, we want to fully proclaim the gospel of Christ by demonstrating it and rendering it into the world through signs and wonders and the power of God. Lord, we do not come with mere empty words. We come in your power. Demonstrate it. Your Spirit is life-giving power and presence. Lord, make it known.

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All People Groups in Lebanon

Rev 7:9 “After this I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands.“

  1. Pray for the main three non-Christian sects in Lebanon: Sunnis, Shiite, and Druze, which together with refugee populations comprise about 80% of Lebanon’s current population
    • We pray for the Sunnis family, that you would bless them and draw them to you. In Tripoli, the main city of the Sunnis, we ask for worshipers of Jesus. We pray that their devotion to religious tradition would be transformed into a passion to obey the life-giving commands of Christ.
    • We pray, too, for the Shiite family; redeem them for your purposes. Take their longing for purpose and their willingness to suffer for it, and turn that longing toward Jesus and his Kingdom. May they suffer for love and for nonviolence and for Jesus! Bless them, Lord, in their main city, Sur, and in the Southern Suburbs of Beirut and in the slums of Hei el Sulam.
    • And finally, we pray for the Druze family. We bless them. We ask that they would worship their true King, Jesus, and that you would give them a place of honor at your table. May disciples of Jesus from Druze background transform their communities scattered throughout the Chouf, Aley, and the mountainous regions of this nation.
  2. Pray for secular populations that are often neglected in missionary and church-planting engagement. Most laborers focus on Syrians and those with a religious worldview. But there are also bar-goers, artists, poets, skaters, hipsters, the LGBTQ+ communities, musicians, the secularists, the drug users, the political activists, the prostitute rings, the hippies. Pray for these ‘non-religious’ Muslim and Christian communities, the ones who have abandoned their religious traditions.
    • Father, we pray for the non-religious today. We pray for Lebanon’s Red Light District, Maamoltein, and the girls being trafficked in sex work. We pray for the party scene in Badaro and Gemmayze and Mar Mkhayel and Jounieh and Batroun. We pray for marginalized communities on the fringe who want nothing to do with religion: the skaters, the LGBTQ+ community, and the drug users. Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy. We declare that each and every one of these communities will have worshipers before your throne in the new heavens and new earth!

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Discovery Groups that Multiply

John 6:45 “As it is written in the Scriptures, ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.“

  1. Lord Jesus Christ, would you, and not we, be the teacher! Would you, and not we, lead seekers into truth. Would you, and not we, be the head. We ask that simple groups of seekers could discover from the Scriptures the truth of God, that they would simply obey what they learn, and that they would share it with others while meeting needs in the community: obey, share, meet needs, the DNA of reproducing churches. Lord, may new ‘discovery groups’ multiply and start other groups, and may these groups become baptized churches, in Jesus’ name!

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Avoid the Toxic 3

No Big Egos : No Big Budgets : No Big Programs: Over the decades, we have learned that these Big 3 will often undermine or even kill an emerging disciple making movement. (1) Big, dynamic personalities who need to be the center of attention; (2) puffed up, large budgets for ever-increasing ‘size’ of ministries; and (3) overly busy, overly programmed activities that suck energy into themselves rather than release that energy and momentum out into the community.

  1. Father, we ask for your protection from these 3 pitfalls. Protect each and every emerging ‘stream’ of churches and discovery groups from these dangers. Keep us, Lord, from the love of self, from the love of money, and from the love of activity. Help us to keep the first commandments first: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love one another. Grant us, dear Lord, your humility.

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Nurture 3 Leadership Needs

Training : Coaching : and Mentoring: If big egos, big budgets, and big programs undermine gospel movements, it is equally true that (1) training, (2) coaching, and (3) mentoring new leaders is foundational. Leaders are the engine that drives movements. In all gospel movements, a great deal of time, energy, and attention are invested into cultivating healthy and whole leaders. Let us pray, then, for these aspects of leadership development.

  1. Training is about knowledge: what to do vs not do, how to strategize and think, what to wrestle with, paradigms of ministry and Kingdom, etc.
    • Lord, we pray blessing over the trainings that equip emerging leaders with the paradigms they need to plant churches and make disciples. Pour your grace out upon all trainings, God, and grant a spirit of wisdom and understanding and sound thinking. Father, help all emerging leaders in Lebanon to be equipped with knowledge.
  2. Coaching is about skill sets: training only takes us so far before we need to ‘put our hands to the plow’; in coaching, leaders get hands-on feedback about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, and they get equipped with new tools and skillsets for the tasks.
    • Jesus, help your emerging leaders to be coached well. May you protect the coaching relationships that are so crucial for healthy leaders! Help church planters never to neglect this crucial ‘coming alongside’ partnership, for mutual learning in the context of action and implementation.
  3. Mentoring is about holistic health and capacity: all of the following can limit capacity: bad time management, poor sleep habits, addiction to screens, patterns of sin, and styles of communication during conflict. They drain energy, fill up time, and capture attention. And all of them need mentoring to be addressed. While discovery groups get things started, life-on-life mentoring is what really makes movements happen. Leaders need to be healthy and whole; their ‘roots’ must protect the ‘fruits.’
    • Lord Jesus, we bless the emerging leaders of churches and discovery groups in all the streams of church planting throughout Lebanon. And we ask for healthy and whole leaders. We pray for the grace of mentorship in their lives, that this would never be neglected. Help us to never put ‘quick and easy fruit’ and numbers ahead of depth and quality of discipleship.

No Place Left

Each day, we pray for various regions of Lebanon, believing in faith that a disciple making movement will touch each and every community throughout the nation.

Today, pray by name for the areas of Baalbek.

Hermel – Fissane – Qasr – Aarsal – Majdaloun – Nahleh – Flaaweh – Kfar Dan