Meeting Seekers Face-to-Face
1. Read
The Offline Portion of your Critical Path
Your offline strategy will be fueled by your DMM training. As seekers discover, share, and obey, you’ll want to meet them in person.
Consider the example Critical Path in the previous step:
- Seeker is exposed to social media
- Seeker begins two-way dialogue with media ministry
- Seeker is ready to meet a disciple maker face-to-face
- Seeker is assigned to a disciple maker
- Disciple maker attempts contact with seeker
- Disciple maker establishes contact with seeker
- First meeting takes place between seeker and disciple maker
- Seeker responds by sharing God’s Word with others and starts a group
- Seeker engages group in discovering, sharing, and obeying God’s Word
- Group comes to a point of baptism, becoming a church
- Church multiplies other churches
- Disciple Making Movement
The critical stepping stones 5-12 above make up the offline portion of the Critical Path. So your offline strategy will fill-in some of the details for how you will go about fulfilling these offline steps. Your offline plan may note the roles needed, the security protocol required, and/or the Gospel-sharing tools or skills to prioritize. Again, your DMM training and vision, as well as your context and (ongoing) experience will significantly influence your offline strategy. Below are more considerations and helpful resources that you may find helpful in crafting your offline strategy that will help seekers move forward.
Determine what will happen once a seeker expresses interest in meeting face-to-face or receiving a Bible.
- Who will be the one that contacts a specific seeker?
- What kind of communication process will you use so the workers know when and who to contact?
- How long is too long for a seeker to wait for initial contact?
- How will you organize and keep track of contacts?
- Consider starting off with a simple and collaborative contact database with your team (i.e. Disciple.Tools)
- How will you avoid contacts falling through the cracks?
- What information needs to be recorded?
- Who will monitor their progress?
Plan how you will attempt initial contact with a seeker to meet face-to-face.
- What will be your method of contact?
- Phone call
- Messaging App (i.e. WhatsApp)
- Text message
- What will you say or ask?
- What will be your goal(s)?
- Verify they are truly a seeker and not a security risk?
- Establish a planned meeting time and location?
- Invite them to bring another seeker?
The more hands a seeker passes through, the stickier it can get. It is important that you minimize the number of hand-offs of a contact because it isn’t usually successful. These are real people who are risking their lives to trust you. If you are faced with a situation where a disciple maker is no longer able to meet with a contact, that hand-off to a new disciple maker should be handled with great care, love and prayer.
Learn the language, when applicable.
- Focus your language learning on spiritual vocabulary that will prepare you to meet with seekers and people of peace.
- You may need to practice telephone skills or have a lesson in texting if you will be setting up appointments via phone calls or text messages.
Start small.
- You CAN get started by yourself. You don’t necessarily need others to launch a social media page, chat with seekers online, and meet with them face-to-face on your own. Start with what you have and then look for what you need.
- Eventually, you may need to consider how to involve a larger group of people in your follow-up system (make sure everyone aligns with the vision.)
- Do you need a team to do this?
- Do you need to build a coalition with others already on the field?
- Do you need to train and work with national partners to see this accomplished?
- What else on your critical path do you need to fill in with details?
2. Fill Out Workbook
Before marking this unit as complete, be sure to finish the corresponding questions in your workbook.
3. Go Deeper
Resources:
- Phone Calling Best Practices (download)– Think through the process of making your first phone call to a new contact.
- First Time Meeting Best Practices (download)– Think through what material you will take them through on a first visit, as they come to faith, as they are baptized, baptizing others, and forming groups and churches.
- Here is an example first meeting case study (download)
- The Gospel of Matthew Method (download) – Check out this guide on how to use the Gospel of Matthew as a method to disciple someone on how to discover, share, and obey God’s Word
- DMM models – DBS or T4T
- Oral Storying – The OneStory sets are a group of Bible stories translated into multiple languages and developed to present a redemptive panorama that best interacts with each particular worldview and socio-cultural setting.
- The First and Last Sacrifice Story is a resource adapted from Mike Shipman’s book Any-3 and could be easily translated and adapted for your context.
- What do you do when you start getting more contacts than you can handle? (all downloads)