Episode Description

Doug Lucas, president of Team Expansion and an active movement practitioner, reflects on the blessing and value Zúme has been on his personal journey of disciple making and its contribution in the global movement of the Kingdom.

Episode Notes

Team Expansionhttps://teamexpansion.org

More Discipleshttps://moredisciples.com

Episode Transcription

Narrator: I'm excited to talk with you, Doug and to see what God is doing in the ways that you are seeing Zúme and using it, but also creating these alternative ways to mix and match it. I would just love to hear your vision.

Doug: Thanks so much, Mary. It's an honor to be asked. I'm delighted anytime anybody asks anything about Zúme, so I'm I'm happy to respond. Zúme to me is a kind of dream come true in a way. I have to confess, Mary, I had trouble getting my arms around what DMMs are. But when Zúme rolled out I finally had a set of, I don't know what you call, hat hooks or coat hooks to be able to hang ideas on. I could finally fashion the answer I was gonna give if somebody asked what are disciple making movements. I finally had a way to describe it.

Narrator: So good. How are you seeing Zúme work in existing churches?

Doug: It's a hassle or a challenge for existing churches because they pretty much want to maintain their flock. I don't want to lump all of the existing church leaders together in one place because I know that everybody's different. But it seems like a lot of churches are worried about losing control, identity, or their brand.

So when they're doing these new congregations it's like they roll out these box churches, these alternative sites. And they try to make them all look alike. They've all got to have the same screen and they have to have the same projection of the same preacher. They build these 30 foot tall screens so that he stands there in front of the congregation and looks identical.

That's why it's really hard to to introduce something like Zúme which is so different. One of the things we've looked for is churches that have a high value on multiplication of disciples and if they care about that then they should care about Zúme. One of the things we volunteered for them is that they tell us what they need Zúme to be like.

I'll give you a concrete example. We worked with a church up in southwestern Ohio. They basically said that they didn't have a single meeting ever anytime in their church that was 2 hours long so. They wanted to know how they do Zúme so that it would be shorter.

When they first rolled out Zúme it was basically packaged as a two-hour identity feature and if you didn't do the two hours then you just couldn't do the discipleship course. But I'm so grateful to the developers of Zúme and to the thought leaders that they've now opened that up so we can now take the individual components and help a local church like this one in southwestern Ohio. They've designed their Zúme course so that it fits their culture and it's 1 hour long. This way it'll fit into their existing components.

That's one of the things that we see a church do a lot of times. They restack the components so they don't leave anything out but so that it fits within a length of meeting. For instance, the format that they already have is just one idea.

Narrator: So great. It's amazing how in Zúme you can use the tools and the sessions as it is on the website but you can also just pull them out and do them in a different order or a different timeline. The creative possibilities without losing the depth of content and wisdom are amazing. Curtis talked about this a little bit in one of our episodes together.

Doug: You're hitting the nail on the head. Can I tell you a quick little background story on Zúme?

Narrator: Please do!

Doug: I was on the nine person team for like the first year that it was rolling out. And I remember the meeting in which they brought us session 6,