“Go slow to go fast,” we teach our missionaries.

Adventist Frontier Missions exists to establish indigenous Seventh-day Adventist church- planting movements among unreached people groups. When we talk about movements, however, some people worry. A movement involves rapid multiplication. Could this allow for spiritual immaturity and unbiblical beliefs to creep in? This concern is valid. However, it often stems from an incomplete understanding of the church-planting movement found in the New Testament.

First, rapid growth in a movement does not mean quick conversion or discipleship. In fact, we teach missionaries to “Go slow to go fast.” Just as Jesus did, we dedicate several years to thoroughly training and mentoring disciples. The rapid growth of the movement comes when this careful discipleship multiplies. The growing disciples are trained to lead others to Christ and to train these others to repeat the process. Thus, the overall growth becomes increasingly faster, while individual training occurs more slowly.

Second, a church-planting movement is built on training groups of people to read, understand and obey the Bible. The authority in such a movement is found in Jesus and His word. Discipleship happens in groups that, led by the Holy Spirit, study the Bible, learn to understand it, and hold each other accountable to apply it to their lives and cultures.

As this happens, we have found that biblical church-planting movements lead to incredible theological depth while having a much lower incidence of unbiblical teaching than is often found in systems based on formal academic theological training. At the same time, since all people have equal access to God‘s word and are being trained to obey and teach others from the very beginning, multiplication accelerates to rapid growth, just as we see in the New Testament.

This is what a modern New Testament discipleship movement looks like. We would love to train you to start one!

• Twitter