The Three-Legged Stool- Three Balanced Focuses
What It Actually Means to Lead a Disciple-Making Movement
Three practices consistently appear in leaders who catalyze disciple-making movements: they remain disciples themselves, they multiply disciplemakers, and they lead strategically for multiplication.
Across the global church today, many leaders are asking the same question: what does it actually take to see disciple-making movements emerge and endure? Strategies and models abound, but movements rarely grow from strategy alone. Again and again, they emerge through leaders who walk in the way of Jesus and help others do the same. I saw a glimpse of this years ago in an unexpected place.
At the time, I was new to ministry and working with youth, and I was watching something unfold in the ministry I oversaw that made me deeply uncomfortable. I realized something I had not wanted to see: I was doing ministry to my students rather than equipping them to disciple others. I cared about the mission more than I cared about the students themselves — and they knew it before I did. When I started praying for each student by name, spending time in their worlds, doing life with them — everything changed.
That shift — from performing ministry to genuinely investing in people — is what opened the door to what happened next.
Chris was sixteen years old. He had come to faith not long before and was still learning what it meant to follow Jesus. We had just started helping our teens be better equipped to share their faith and do ministry with each other and those outside faith in Christ. He was beginning to consider how to share his faith with his peers. But he knew one thing: someone had helped him follow Jesus, and he could help someone else do the same — by sharing his own personal experience with Jesus.
So Chris invited his friend Casey to a youth gathering where the gospel was shared and students were encouraged to talk about their stories over pizza at the end of the evening. That night, Casey — who was not yet a Christian — turned to Chris and asked him directly: are you a Christian? Chris responded yes. And when Chris shared his personal experience, Casey said he wanted to follow Jesus too. He prayed that evening, expressing his desire for Jesus to be his Savior and to follow Him.
Casey was like a sponge in the weeks that followed. He started attending our youth ministry and a small group weekly. I vividly remember him sharing with us one night that he wanted to do for others what Chris had done for him. He started telling his friends at school about his new relationship with Jesus.
A few weeks later Casey shared the gospel with his friend Brian and invited him to our youth ministry. On a walk home from youth group that evening, Brian trusted Christ. As they entered Brian’s home together, he told his sister — who was sitting on the sofa when they walked in — what Casey had just shared about Jesus. His sister Erin expressed interest in making the same decision. Brian and Casey prayed with her that night, and she and her brother began regularly attending our youth ministry. Casey also began discipling both Brian and his sister through sharing what he was learning about following Jesus. In only a few months, four generations of disciples had formed from a single conversation between two teenagers.
I learned that disciple-making has to remain highly relational — rooted in genuine love for those you invest in, and for those they will later invest in. And when we faithfully invest in a few, life on life, sometimes the Holy Spirit shows up in extraordinary ways.
By the way, Chris has been a disciple-making movement leader and pastor for 30 years now. He has raised up and influenced many others, most of whom I will never meet. But I know some of their stories. And Chris was just one of many teens in that ministry who became disciple-makers and then started leading disciple-making movements from their own sphere and beyond. What that season showed me was a progression worth naming: people following Jesus and becoming like him in his character and priorities, then becoming disciple-makers, and then some becoming disciple-making movement leaders. It is that progression — and those distinctions — that this article attempts to explore.
Those early experiences did more for my theology of ministry than most of the books I had read. They raised questions I could not easily dismiss: What does it actually mean to make disciples? Not manage them, not impress them, not even inspire them — not build big programs to bring people in — but genuinely make them? And more disquieting still: what does it mean to lead others in doing the same? And from there, how do some leaders begin to shape environments and cultures in such a way that they help foster movements of disciple-making that grow far beyond their own influence or knowledge?
These are not abstract questions. They sit at the heart of Jesus’ final commission, and they have a way of exposing the gap between the ministry we perform and the ministry Jesus modeled. Before we go further, it is worth pausing to define our terms. By a disciple-making movement we mean an exponential multiplication of indigenous disciples who make disciples, resulting in new communities of believers that spread organically through relational networks. Leadership reproduces at every level, and the movement is sustained primarily through obedience to Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit rather than external resources or centralized control. That is what we are aiming for.
The leader who catalyzes such a movement is equally specific. A disciple-making movement leader is not simply a gifted communicator or a visionary organizational builder — though they may be both. They are someone who personally reflects and the character and priorities of Christ, lives as a Jesus-centered disciple-maker, multiplying their life and influence through disciples and disciplemakers across generations and cultures to at least the fourth generation. That is their foundation — not a strategy they employ, but a life they embody. From that personal foundation, they embed the same multiplication DNA into the systems around them — training pathways, leadership development, and ministry structures — developing reproducing leaders and birthing new movements with kingdom impact that extends well beyond their direct involvement or purview. They help pioneer into new communities, cultures, and countries.
Over decades of observing and working alongside leaders who have catalyzed such movements, I have come to believe they consistently share three defining practices: they remain disciples themselves, they multiply disciplemakers, and they lead ministry strategically for multiplication. This article is an attempt to explore all three — not to present a new program, but to offer a clearer picture of the kind of person God uses to catalyze lasting, multiplying movements. It is a picture drawn first from Jesus himself, then from the leaders he shaped, and finally from what I have observed in leaders I have worked alongside — and some of the time gotten it wrong personally. It is important to note that the scale and breadth may vary from one of these leaders to another, but the practices, characteristics, and priorities they embody span across them all.
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The Stool That Cannot Stand on Two Legs
There is an old image in leadership circles — the three-legged stool — used to describe the interdependence of essential qualities in a healthy leader. I want to borrow the image and put it to a specific use. When we talk about a disciple-making movement leader, there are three legs that must all be present, all be sturdy, and all be load-bearing. Remove any one of them, and what you have is not a stool with a flaw. What you have is a pile of wood that will leave you stranded on the floor the moment you lean on it.
The first leg is this: Be a Disciple. The second: Multiply Disciplemakers. The third: Lead Strategic Ministry for Multiplication. Every leader who has ever catalyzed a sustainable movement of the gospel has positioned themselves on all three. Every movement that has eventually stalled or collapsed has, on inspection, been wobbling on one or two.
We will come to each leg in turn. But before we do, we need to establish the foundation beneath the stool itself — the ground on which it stands. Because without that ground, the most well-constructed stool will simply sink.
The Ground Beneath Everything: A Christ-Centered Foundation
Before any leg of the stool can bear weight, the ground beneath it must be solid. That ground is a Christ-centered foundation — not as a theological concept to affirm, but as a daily reality to inhabit.
George Ladd, whose work on the kingdom of God reshaped a generation of evangelical thinking, argued that the kingdom Jesus proclaimed was not primarily a program to be administered but a reign to be entered — a present, dynamic reality breaking into history through persons yielded to the King. That framing matters enormously here, because it means the movement leader is not first a strategist deploying resources toward kingdom ends. They are, first and before anything else, someone who has entered the kingdom and living under its rule. Jesus is transforming their lives in an active, dynamic manner.
Steve Addison, who has studied disciple-making movements more carefully than almost anyone this century, wrote that “Jesus is the pioneer and apostle of the Christian movement. He is our model of movement leadership — the obedient Son surrendered to his Father’s living Word, dependent on the Holy Spirit, resolute in his mission.” That sentence deserves to be read slowly, because it is doing a great deal of theological work.
Jesus did not launch his movement by gathering a crowd. He did not begin with a strategy document or a vision statement. He began by being baptized, by receiving the Spirit’s anointing, and by spending forty days in the wilderness in intimate, costly communion with his Father (Matthew 3–4). The public ministry — the teaching, the healing, the calling and equipping of disciples — flows from that prior reality. And before Jesus ministry launch, he spent many years in his earthly father’s shop, doing ordinary work alongside him as a teknon — a word often translated “carpenter” but perhaps more accurately meaning craftsman, stone mason, or handyman.
Movements are downstream of intimacy with God.
This is worth lingering on, because it runs against almost every instinct formed in us by Western organizational culture. We are trained to begin with the plan, the platform, the pathway to scale. Jesus began with the Father. John’s Gospel makes this almost relentless: “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing” (John 5:19). The movement Jesus catalyzed did not originate in his strategic genius. It originated in his relationship with the Father.
A.W. Tozer understood this with a clarity that has become increasingly rare. In The Pursuit of God he wrote that the soul’s great need is not more activity but more of God himself — that the modern church’s besetting sin is not wickedness but shallowness, a willingness to be satisfied with knowing about God rather than actually knowing him. The movement leader who has not cultivated genuine intimacy with God will inevitably default to pragmatism. And pragmatism does not produce movements. It produces organizations.
Dann Spader spent decades studying Jesus’ disciple-making strategy and calling believers back to the patterns found in the Gospels. He frames the essential challenge this way:
When in doubt, don’t ask WWJD — what would Jesus do. First study to see WDJD — what did Jesus do. Jesus showed us how to live in a sin-soaked world, and He did it perfectly. Our ultimate goal is to become like Him in every thought and deed. — Dann Spader
The distinction matters more than it first appears. The question “what would Jesus do?” is a question about ethics, applied in the moment. The question “what did Jesus do?” is a question about formation, pursued over a lifetime. Martyn Lloyd-Jones argued that renewal rarely begins with strategy — it begins when men and women encounter the living Christ in Scripture and respond with repentance, obedience, and faith. That kind of formation moves from the head downward until it governs the whole person. One can answer the first question with a reasonable guess. The second reshapes not just our decisions but our instincts.
Galatians 2:20 is the irreducible personal statement of this foundation: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” The movement leader is not someone who has added Christian ministry to their identity. They are someone whose identity has been replaced. The self-promotion, the reputation management, the instinct toward accumulation of influence — these must be genuinely crucified, not merely suppressed. Peers can usually tell the difference. John Stott, in his commentary on Galatians, observes that this crucifixion is not a single past event to be claimed but an ongoing reality to be inhabited — a daily reckoning with the self that insists on its own centrality. The movement leader who has not learned this reckoning will find, sooner or later, that the movement they are building is more about them than they realized. The fruit will show it, even if the metrics do not.
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Leg One: Be a Disciple
The first leg of the stool is the most foundational and the most easily faked. It is possible to appear to be a disciple while actually being a ministry professional. I say this not as a condemnation of ministry professionals — I have been one for most of my adult life — but as a diagnostic. There is a kind of ministerial competence that can substitute, for years, for the real thing. The danger is not that it looks bad. The danger is that it looks good. It is an unfortunate reality, but you and I probably both know the stories of too many prominent leaders in North America, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe who led high-profile ministries but were later exposed for their lack of integrity in following Jesus.
But our concern should not only be the propensity toward fraud or charlatanism. We should be equally concerned about the quieter danger: complacency, and the willingness to settle for mediocrity in our own followership of Christ.
J.C. Ryle, writing about nominal Christianity in nineteenth-century England, put the problem with characteristic bluntness: the great disease of the church in every age is not outright infidelity but the prevalence of a Christianity that is respectable, outwardly correct, and inwardly hollow — a form of godliness that has never been broken open by genuine encounter with God. Ryle was writing to Victorian churchgoers, but the diagnosis travels across time and continents. The ministry leader whose spiritual life consists primarily in preparing content for others is not immune to this disease simply because they are in full-time service.
Jesus called his first disciples not to a program but to a person. “Follow me,” he said, and the verb is continuous — keep following, go on following, make following the fundamental orientation of your life. The disciple-making movement leader is, first and before anything else, someone who is still following Jesus and daily pursuing him. The moment the leader stops following — stops being genuinely formed by their encounter with Jesus — they begin, however unconsciously, to lead people toward themselves rather than toward Christ. And that is a dangerous road for all.
What does it look like to actually be a disciple? John 17:3 frames it with elegant precision: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” The Greek word for “know” here is ginosko — not intellectual acquaintance, but relational intimacy, the kind of knowing that develops through shared history and ongoing presence. F.F. Bruce, in his commentary on John, notes that this definition of eternal life is startling in its relational specificity — it is not a state to be achieved but a person to be known. The disciple is someone for whom this relationship is the animating center of everything else. It may be conceived with a prayer, but it grows within an active ongoing relationship.
Practically, this means the movement leader is someone whose daily life is genuinely ordered around encountering God rather than producing for God. These can look similar on the surface. Both involve reading Scripture. Both involve prayer. But one is oriented toward hearing from God; the other is oriented toward preparing oneself for ministry “success.” One keeps the leader genuinely humble and genuinely dependent; the other tends to produce a functional self-sufficiency dressed in spiritual language.
The incarnational dimension of discipleship deserves particular attention here. John 1:14 — “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” — is not merely a statement of Christology. It is a model of ministry. Jesus did not manage the human condition from a distance. He entered it, fully and without reservation. The disciple who is being formed by this pattern will find themselves drawn, over time, toward genuine presence with the people they are serving — not as a technique, but as an expression of love.
I have met many leaders who are excellent at thinking about ministry and genuinely poor at being present with people.
One simple diagnostic reveals the truth: the calendar does not lie.
If the people you are supposedly making disciples of cannot reach you, cannot bring you their real struggles, cannot find you when the bottom falls out — then whatever you are doing, you are probably not making disciples. You may be delivering religious content. That is not nothing, but it is not the same thing. This is not a call to be available to everyone. Jesus wasn’t. What it is a call to do is choose deliberately — to identify the few you will invest in deeply, who will invest in others, who will do the same. That is the replication strategy. It is simple, demanding, and irreplaceable.
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Leg Two: Multiply Disciplemakers
The second leg of the stool is where the movement leader’s work becomes distinct from the work of a faithful pastor, teacher, or evangelist. All of those are essential callings. None of them is necessarily the same as making disciples who make disciples who make disciples. The movement leader is not merely trying to produce good Christians. They are trying to produce disciples who produce disciples who produce disciples — and who keep producing long after the original leader is gone.
Paul’s instruction to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2 is the clearest statement of this in the New Testament: “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” Four generations in one sentence: Paul (first), Timothy (second), reliable people (third), others (fourth). A.T. Robertson, in his word study on this passage, draws attention to the verb “entrust” — paratithemi — which carries the sense of depositing something of great value for safekeeping and eventual transfer. Paul is not merely asking Timothy to pass on information. He is asking him to transfer a living inheritance — a pattern of life, relationship, and ministry — to people who will do the same.
The critical word in that verse, which is often overlooked in the rush to count generations, is “reliable.” Paul does not tell Timothy to entrust his teaching to the most gifted people, or the most enthusiastic, or the ones with the most impressive following. He says reliable people. The Greek is pistos — faithful, trustworthy, proven. The movement leader’s task is not to find the most talented people in the room and invest in them. It is to find the available, faithful, and teachable — and invest deeply, patiently, and personally.
This has significant implications for how movement leaders select the people they invest in most heavily. Jesus modeled this with uncomfortable clarity. He had large crowds. He had the seventy-two he sent out. He had the twelve. And within the twelve, he had three — Peter, James, and John — who received a quality of access and investment that the others did not. He took them up the mountain for the transfiguration (Matthew 17). He took them deeper into Gethsemane (Matthew 26). He was not being unfair to the others or choosing favorites. He was being strategic about multiplication. The ones who would carry the movement forward needed to be formed more deeply, not just taught more content.
The movement leader who tries to invest equally in everyone ends up investing superficially in everyone. This is not elitism. It is stewardship. The question is not “who deserves my investment?” — the answer to that is everyone, and you cannot give everyone what multiplication requires. The question is: “who, if I invest deeply in them, will multiply that investment into generations I will never meet?” We need to ask, who is faithful, available, responsive and teachable.
The Difference Between Production and Reproduction
Many ministries operate with a production mindset — measuring success by what they produce: programs, events, sermons, attendance. These are not bad questions. They measure real things. But they measure addition, not multiplication. And addition, however impressive, does not produce movements.
A reproduction mindset asks different questions: Who is being equipped to disciple others? Where is multiplication occurring? Are disciples making disciples beyond the second generation?
Production gathers people.
Reproduction sends them.
The movement leader must know which one is actually driving their decisions.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who preached and wrote extensively on the church’s mission, warned repeatedly against what he called the “activism” of the modern church — the tendency to substitute organized religious busyness for the Spirit’s genuine work. His concern was that activity could become a kind of narcotic, producing enough visible results to quiet the conscience while the deeper work of genuine multiplication went undone. It is a warning that lands differently — and harder — when you have been in ministry long enough to recognize yourself in it.
The reproducible methods Jesus used are striking precisely because of their simplicity. He taught in ways that could be retold. He modeled practices — prayer, service, breaking bread together — that required no professional training to imitate. He gave his disciples authority and sent them out before they felt ready (Luke 10:1–9), which is one of the most counterintuitive and important leadership moves in the Gospels. He did not wait until they were fully formed. He commissioned them while they were still in process, because the doing is part of the forming.
The leader who waits until their disciples are ready before releasing them will wait forever. Permission-giving leadership — releasing people before they feel fully prepared — is not recklessness. It is the recognition that the stretch is precisely the point. We stretch those we invest in, then walk with them through what that stretch reveals.
Fourth Generation Fruit: The Real Measure
The ultimate test of multiplication is not whether your disciples are thriving. It is whether your disciples’ disciples’ disciples are thriving. Third and fourth generation fruit is the evidence that the movement is genuinely self-sustaining — that it does not depend on your ongoing presence, your resources, or your direct involvement to continue.
This is a humbling standard. Most of us rarely track multiplication beyond the second generation. Yet if the gospel is truly multiplying, the evidence will appear not only in those we disciple, but in the disciples of our disciples — in communities and contexts we may never know about, among people whose names we will never learn. That is not a failure. That is precisely what a movement looks like when it is working.
The movement leader must make peace with this invisibility. The goal is not to build something you can see, control, and measure. The goal is to release something that outlives you. Psalm 78:4 captures the spirit of it: “We will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done.” The generation not yet born is always part of the audience. Every discipleship investment is, in a very real sense, an investment in people you will never meet.
Ben Witherington, in his commentary on Acts, observes that Luke’s summary statements about the growth of the early church — “the number of disciples increased” (Acts 6:7), “the churches were strengthened in faith and grew daily in numbers” (Acts 16:5) — are not mere headcounts. They are theological affirmations that the word of God was doing what God’s word does: bearing fruit, multiplying, reaching further than any single leader planned or could manage. The movement leader who grasps this relaxes, in the best possible way. They are not managing a movement. They are participating in one that God is already running.
I think of Rupesh, a young pastor from Nagaland in northeast India, whom I met at a Concentric team gathering in Delhi. He was quiet, small in stature, easy to underestimate at first glance. What I didn’t know when we sat down together over a meal was the depth of adversity he and his family had been walking through — or the extraordinary multiplication happening through his ministry in spite of it. In the years since that first conversation, Rupesh has planted ten additional churches in his region and equipped hundreds of pastors in making disciples who make disciples. He is training and coaching many local pastors in living out the Great Commission each year. None of that was centrally planned or externally resourced. It spread organically, through relational streams, sustained by obedience to the Word and the Spirit. Rupesh is not a name most of the world will ever know. But he is exactly what fourth-generation fruit looks like when God is running the movement. Rupesh did not build this through a strategy document. He built it by embodying the three legs of the stool — a disciple making disciples while building structures that could multiply. (You can read more of his story at concentricglobal.org/rupeshs-story.)
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Leg Three: Lead Strategic Ministry for Multiplication
The third leg of the stool is the one that most naturally attracts the attention of organizationally gifted leaders, and therefore the one most in need of being held in proper proportion. Strategy matters. Systems matter. The structures within which disciple-making happens either enable or constrain multiplication. But strategy without the first two legs is not a stool. It is a plank on a pole — capable of supporting weight for a while, leaning against a wall, but not self-sustaining over time.
What the movement leader brings to organizational life is a particular kind of imagination — the ability to look at every structure, every program, every allocation of resources and ask: does this reproduce, or does it merely produce?
This is a hard question that most leaders don’t want to ask, let alone answer honestly. Acts 6 is a remarkable case study. The early Jerusalem church had a ministry crisis — widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The apostles’ response is instructive: they did not try to do the work themselves, and they did not simply delegate it. They identified people “known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom” (Acts 6:3) and formally released them into leadership. The result was not just a solved problem. It was a multiplication of leadership capacity, and Luke notes that “the word of God spread” and “the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly” (Acts 6:7). The structural solution created the conditions for the movement to accelerate.
F.F. Bruce, commenting on this passage, notes that the apostles’ willingness to release the table ministry was not a diminishment of their calling but a clarification of it — by giving away what they could give away, they protected what only they could do. This is a principle the movement leader must internalize at a structural level: the things worth protecting are almost never the things most visible. Guard the word and prayer. Release everything else as fast as you possibly can.
Honest assessment is not optional for the movement leader. Luke 14:28–30 — Jesus’ parable of the man who begins building a tower without calculating whether he can finish it — is usually read as a call to count the cost of discipleship. It is also, implicitly, a call to honest evaluation of whether what you are building is actually working. The movement leader who cannot look at their own systems and ask hard questions — not to condemn but to improve — will keep investing in structures that no longer serve multiplication.
The Pioneer Dimension
There is a pioneering dimension to movement leadership that resists institutional domestication. The movement leader is, by definition, someone who is willing to go where the movement has not yet gone — across cultural boundaries, into relational streams that have not been reached, toward people groups that no existing ministry structure is effectively serving.
Paul’s strategy in Acts 13 is a useful model. He and Barnabas were sent out by the Antioch church (Acts 13:2–3) and moved deliberately toward places where the gospel had not taken root. Cultural intelligence was not a courtesy; it was a necessity. In Lystra, they recognized that their Jewish scriptural framework meant nothing to a pagan audience and adapted their approach entirely (Acts 14:15–17). The core message did not change. The method changed completely. Ben Witherington notes that Paul’s speech at Lystra represents one of the earliest examples of contextualized gospel proclamation in the New Testament record — meeting people where their actual worldview began rather than where Paul wished it began.
1 Corinthians 9:22 — “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” — is sometimes read as a kind of strategic opportunism. It is actually a statement of profound cultural humility. Paul was willing to become the kind of person his audience could hear, without becoming someone who said something different in order to be heard. The distinction between adapting method and compromising message is one that the movement leader must hold with clear-eyed precision, especially when crossing cultural or denominational boundaries.
Pioneering courage — the willingness to enter uncharted territory for kingdom advancement — is not the same as recklessness. Joshua 1:9 frames it carefully: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” The courage is grounded in the promise of presence, not in confidence in one’s own competence. The pioneer who forgets this distinction eventually becomes an adventurer rather than a missionary — doing bold things for the sake of boldness rather than for the sake of the kingdom.
Building for What Outlasts You
The movement leader’s ultimate organizational goal is sustainable impact — ministries and leaders thriving without their direct involvement. This is both the hardest goal to work toward and the most important. It is hard because it requires consistently giving away the work that makes you feel most valuable.
If a leader is indispensable, the movement is unsustainable. They have built a dependency.
Paul’s letter to Titus contains what is, in organizational terms, a startling directive: “The reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town” (Titus 1:5). Paul did not stay to ensure it was done correctly. He left, and entrusted the completion of the work to Titus, who would in turn appoint others. This is the logic of multiplication applied to organizational development: the work must be released before it feels finished, because the releasing is how it gets finished.
Kingdom collaboration — the willingness to partner with other movements, other denominations, other ministry streams for collective kingdom impact — is the final mark of this third leg. Mark 9:38–40 records the disciples telling Jesus they had tried to stop someone driving out demons in his name, “because he was not one of us.” Jesus’ response is gentle but unambiguous: “Do not stop him… for whoever is not against us is for us.” John Stott, reflecting on this passage, observes that the disciples’ instinct was understandable — boundary-maintenance is a natural organizational reflex — but that Jesus consistently subordinated organizational loyalty to kingdom purpose. The movement leader who is genuinely kingdom-minded will find it relatively easy to celebrate what God is doing through others, even when it happens entirely outside their own orbit.
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Five Characteristics That Hold It Together
The three legs describe what movement leaders do. But movements do not ultimately rise or fall on strategy — they rise or fall on the kind of person leading them. Over time I have noticed five characteristics that consistently appear in leaders who sustain this kind of ministry. These are not competencies to be acquired but marks of a life being formed. They cannot be faked indefinitely, and they cannot be manufactured on demand. They grow, or they do not grow, in proportion to the depth of the foundation.
1. Christ-Centered Foundation
The leader who is building something significant faces a constant temptation to let the building consume the relationship that makes the building worthwhile. Tozer saw this clearly: “We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.” The movement leader who loses that urge — who has let ministry crowd out the pursuit of God himself — is running on borrowed fuel. The tank looks full from the outside. It is not.
2. Intentional Investment
Movement leaders are not passive about their investment of time and relationship. They are strategic, though the word strategic should not be allowed to drain the warmth from the practice. To invest intentionally is to look at the people in your orbit and ask, with genuine prayerfulness: who is available, faithful, teachable, and responsive to authority? And then to give those people something more than your public ministry can offer — your honest struggles, your ongoing formation, your willingness to be known rather than merely admired. It is like pulling back the curtain and taking them backstage — letting them see the real work, the real struggles, the real formation happening beneath the public ministry.
The train-coach-mentor framework — equipping people in knowledge and skills, then coaching them in application to their ministry context, then mentoring them so they can multiply what they have learned and applied to broader audiences— is a way of describing what Jesus did with the twelve across three years. It is not a curriculum. It is a relationship, structured and intentional enough to produce genuine formation, flexible enough to meet each person where they actually are with ongoing investment.
3. Multiplication Priority
The movement leader has internalized, at a level deep enough to affect actual decisions, the conviction that reproduction matters more than production. This shows up in concrete ways: in how they spend their Mondays, in which meetings they attend and which they delegate, in whether they are more energized by a great Sunday than by a disciple reporting that their disciple has just started a new group in a neighborhood they have never visited, and in which decisions they freely hand off to others to make.
The question “how will this multiply?” is not a technique. It is a habit of mind that, once genuinely formed, changes the shape of almost every decision a leader makes. Lloyd-Jones was right that the great danger is substituting activity for genuine kingdom work. The multiplication question is one of the most reliable tools available for cutting through that substitution.
4. Pioneering Courage
Movements do not stay where they begin. By definition, they move. The movement leader maintains an orientation toward the edges — toward the people and places not yet reached — that resists the gravitational pull of institutionalization. Ladd’s theology of the kingdom is clarifying here: the kingdom of God is always pressing toward its own consummation, always breaking into new territory, always reaching toward the “not yet” of its full arrival. The movement leader who is living under kingdom rule will feel that same pressure — a restlessness toward the unreached that is not anxiety but mission.
The Great Commission is geographically and ethnographically unlimited: “all nations” (Matthew 28:19), “the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The movement leader keeps this horizon in view even while investing deeply in the immediate. These are not in tension. The depth of local investment is precisely what funds the reach of global multiplication.
5. Proven Fruitfulness
This is the characteristic that cannot be claimed; it can only be demonstrated over time. Paul’s deepest sense of what ministry actually produces is captured in 1 Thessalonians 2:19–20: “For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy.” The fruit of a movement leader’s life is not a ministry. It is people — specific, named, known people — who are following Jesus and multiplying that following into the next generation.
The question that cuts most honestly to the heart of proven fruitfulness is not “how many people have you reached?” It is: can you name three or four generations of disciples? Can you point to the person you invested in, who invested in someone else, who invested in someone else, who is now investing in someone else? If you can, something is working. If you cannot — if the chain stops at the second generation — then the most important work is not ahead of you in a new strategic initiative. It is directly in front of you, in the people you are currently developing.
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The Person God Chooses
Emanuel Prinz, who has consulted with many disciple-making movements including Concentric, writes: “While we cannot manufacture a movement, we can become the kind of person God uses to start one. The question is not whether God can use us, but whether we are willing to become the kind of people he consistently chooses to catalyze movements.”
That is a sentence worth sitting with, because it reframes everything. We are not in the business of producing movements. We are in the business of becoming the kind of people through whom God, in his sovereign grace, might choose to work. The distinction is not a counsel of passivity. It is a counsel of orientation — and it changes everything about how we invest ourselves and how we measure a life in ministry.
Everything we have explored in this article matters — the intimacy with God, the careful investment in people, the reproducible methods, the courageous pioneering, the kingdom-minded collaboration, the honest willingness to be assessed by fruit rather than activity. But it all flows from a prior surrender, and it all culminates not in what we have built but in who we have become and who we have helped others become.
Tozer’s warning has haunted me for years: “The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and the servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God passes us largely because we do not dare to pursue God with the abandoned devotion that He invites.”
The three-legged stool describes a life ordered around Jesus, poured into others, and built for multiplication. It is the kind of life that produces fruit that remains (John 15:16). The kind of fruit that shows up in the third and fourth generation, in communities you will never visit, among people whose names you will never know, whose lives were changed because someone you invested in invested in someone who invested in someone who — by grace — said yes to following Jesus.
In the end, movements are not manufactured. They are stewarded.
We do not build them through strategy alone. They emerge when leaders become the kind of disciples Jesus can trust with multiplication. The question before us is not simply whether we understand movements. The deeper question is whether we are becoming the kind of leaders through whom God delights to multiply his kingdom.
Disciple-making movements rarely begin with strategy. They begin with ordinary men and women who have chosen to follow Jesus deeply, invest in a few intentionally, and release those disciples to do the same.
The image is simple: a leader must remain a disciple, multiply disciplemakers, and lead strategically for multiplication — all grounded in a Christ-centered life. When these realities align, movements often emerge in ways no strategy alone could ever produce.
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Questions for Reflection and Discussion
If this article has challenged your understanding of disciple-making leadership, here are some questions to help you examine where you stand and where God may be calling you to grow.
1. Which of the three legs — Be a Disciple, Multiply Disciple-makers, or Lead Strategic Ministry for Multiplication — is currently the strongest in your life and ministry? Which is the weakest, and what is the specific cost of that imbalance?
2. Can you trace a line of disciples to the fourth generation? If you can, celebrate it and ask what enabled it. If you cannot, ask honestly: where does the chain break, and why?
3. Where in your ministry are you currently measuring production — addition — when you should be measuring reproduction? What would need to change for multiplication to become your primary metric of success?
3. Who are you currently investing in most deeply, and do they know it? Are they investing in others? If not, what specifically needs to happen in the next thirty days to move that forward?
If you’re interested in receiving a sample 25 question assessment based on the five characteristics, you can write me and request a copy at: [email protected].
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Bibliography
Addison, Steve. Movements That Change the World. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2011.
Addison, Steve. The Rise and Fall of Movements. 100 Movements Publishing, 2019.
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Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.
Ladd, George Eldon. The Gospel of the Kingdom. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959.
Ladd, George Eldon. A Theology of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974.
Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. Preaching and Preachers. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971.
Lloyd-Jones, Martyn. The Christian Warfare. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976.
Prinz, Emanuel. Movements. Quoted in Concentric Global training materials, Cebu Round Table 2025.
Robertson, A.T. Word Pictures in the New Testament. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1931.
Ryle, J.C. Holiness. London: William Hunt, 1879. Reprinted, Durham: Evangelical Press, 1979.
Spader, Dann. 4 Chair Discipling. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014.
Stott, John. The Message of Galatians. The Bible Speaks Today. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1968.
Stott, John. The Message of Acts. The Bible Speaks Today. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1990.
Tozer, A.W. The Pursuit of God. Camp Hill: Christian Publications, 1948.
Witherington, Ben. The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
Witherington, Ben. Conflict and Community in Corinth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
