Movement Stages

Our good friends on the Great Lakes Regional Team (this is schools in IN, MI, IL, OH) have been having some good discussions on planting and growing movements – and what happens at different stages. Here is a rough overview – courtesy of Nancy Bartolec <Nancy.Bartolec@uscm.org>.

Defining the Stages of a Movement

1. Launching - this is when and how a movement starts. The movement is started with W/B/S DNA from the beginning. It is throwing lots of outside resources at the target (campus, ethnic group) to share Christ with everyone and try to find insiders. You don’t move from Launching until you have at least 1 KEY leader ( team of leaders) and 5-10 mission aligned students (and some followers). ( It could be best to have a team of leaders as the bridge point between launching and growing - the number is vague - it could be 3 or 4 in some situations or 12 in others- this generation just functions so much better with a team. if we just focus on getting one leader and not a team we are too dependent on the up and down cycle of riding with that one person)

2. Growing - W/B/S is at the heart of this movement and the ministry of the HS is evident. It still involves lots of evangelism from the outside but it means you have some insiders (your leadership team at the least) starting to join you as well. during this time student multipliers should be raised up. A movement in this phase begins to put strategies in place to reach their scope (could involve freshman strategy…specific strategies for the type of movement being launched). They would stay in this phase until there are enough laborers to allow every student in the ethnic community/ campus/ target audience to know someone who knows Jesus.

3. Transforming - there are numerous student multipliers and leaders involved in W/B/S. we are at the point where we are positioned so that everyone in the target(campus, ethnic group) could know someone who knows Jesus and those people tell them about Jesus(the key bridge here is they tell them); evangelism is done largely now by insiders.

4. Movement launching - at a stage where this movement can now launch a new movement because they can free up leaders to go and be outsiders and penetrate into a new community without hurting the sending movement. Because this isn’t linear we could start to see Sending before we have Growing /Transforming. There are several ways to launch a movement. A movement that naturally raises up a key insider in an ethnic community could launch another movement much earlier. A movement that wants to "shock and awe" a community to find leaders inside could do this earlier. A movement that wants to release current leaders to become leaders in a new movement would wait till here.

One more key observation - evangelism is at the heart of each phase - Launching can involve outsiders doing lots of evangelism. Growing involves both outsiders and insiders doing lots of evangelism. Transforming involves the insiders actually telling everyone they know about Jesus. Outsiders (i.e. staff) then become more coaches at this phase (although they can sure still share their faith a lot here) Movement launching involves going back to #1.