Thank God for the amazing fruit we have seen this year!
Please pray for God’s protection over the group leaders and for continued growth of the disciples into the image of Jesus.
Please pray that the Holy Spirit would show us what is the God-Sized Vision we should pursue for 2025.
Dear Joyful Friends,
This is the first email of a two part update. A year ago last November we did a survey of the Hong Kong DMM network. At the time, we had 131 Discovery Bible Study (DBS) groups meeting with a total of 446 people attending (these numbers were for Hong Kong only).
Near the end of 2023, we met Brother Benjamin. Brother Benjamin is an extremely fruitful DMM catalyst who has impact throughout Asia. He has become an important mentor for us in Hong Kong and was the keynote speaker at our DMM conference in March of 2024. The very first time he met us, he challenged us to set a goal to reach 500 DMM groups as soon as possible. At the time it seemed a ridiculous goal: from 131 groups to 500? Were we getting ahead of God? But the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit seemed to accompany the goal as we shared it amongst our key leaders. Haltingly, barely with faith to see the goal, we began to pray for this new goal. We even called our conference in March, “The Road to 500”. (At the end of this email I will include a link to the video of Brother Benjamin laying out the goal for 500 groups.)
So did we hit the goal of 500 DMM groups in 2024? Well not exactly… but we got so much closer than I could have imagined at the time! I feel rebuked that I did not always have the faith to see the progress being made. But as usual, God did abundantly above all we could ask or think. Jesus is building His Kingdom and the gates of Hell cannot prevail against it!
Results of 2024 DMM Survey (Hong Kong and worldwide):
So did we hit 500 DMM groups? No… But we did grow from 131 DMM groups to 433 over the course of the year, a growth of 231%! Praise be to our Wonderful Jesus and His wonderful working through the Holy Spirit!
Here’s the results of the survey conducted in November 2024, covering our entire DMM network, including both Hong Kong and at least 7 other countries/regions that were catalyzed by core Hong Kong leaders:
433 total Discovery Bible Study (DBS) groups meeting with a total of 1,910 people attending.
13 DMM church groups started with a total attendance of 289 people.
291 groups in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation, with attendance of 1,376 people. (2nd generation and higher denotes DMM groups that have replicated from an original group. It’s a measure of effectiveness at multiplication.)
71 baptisms in the past year.
1,056 new disciples in the past year.
382 DMM workers.
an average of 549 man-hours spent in prayer in the network for DMM.
I have to confess my sin to you: my faith that we would see such growth was not what it should have been. And I’ll tell you why: In the beginning, I only had eyes for Hong Kong. I felt like it was important to stay focused on our own backyard. But God had other plans. I should have known. If you are endeavoring to catalyze a movement of obedience to the Great Commission, you are actually calling people to a lifestyle of going into all the world with the gospel to make disciples. And that’s what happened. A number of core leaders in the Hong Kong DMM network followed the Holy Spirit’s leading and spent time catalyzing leaders and networks overseas from Hong Kong. Its from these streams that the most progress was made in getting close to the 500 group goal. What a rebuke to my weak faith and puny vision! God help me to learn the lesson and see with the eyes of God-sized vision!
This email is just the first part of a two part update. In this email we wanted to share with you the exciting update so you can praise God with us! In our follow up email, we will “get into the weeds” with some of the numbers to help better see what God is doing in Hong Kong and overseas and gain more insight as we pray for obedience steps towards seeing Disciple Making Movements catalyzed amongst our networks.
VIDEO OF ENCOURAGEMENT
Here is the video of Brother Benjamin challenging us to get to 500 groups as soon as possible. For security reasons this video is posted to Vimeo rather than Youtube. The password is: blesshk
To watch click on the link below and enter the following password: blesshk
