Discipleship Done Differently
ARISE!
Living the By Peter Dunn
How did Biglife begin? About 20 years ago my good friend John, then a business man, was given a book to read by an elderly woman in his church. Reluctantly he took it and then a week later, the night before he was sure that he would meet her in church, he thought that he should at least skim through it. He picked the book up and found that he couldn’t put it down. One phrase struck him, “Are you leading an ordinary life for yourself, or a big life for God?”, and so Biglife was born. John came to see that he had opted for an ordinary life. Yes, he went to church faithfully, he enjoyed fellowship, but there was something missing in terms of what it really meant to be a follower of Jesus. A few years later John ended up in India with another friend of mine called Ben, a Bengali
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man with a career in banking. There, with Ani, a vegetable grower and Mr Mondal, an electrician, Biglife really took off.
But what is a Big Life? Ordinary people committed themselves to living a Biglife and today there are millions of people across the world who are part of what some term Disciple Making Movements (DMMs). They are ordinary people committed to the Lord, and to making disciples who in turn make more disciples. Biglife is a multiplying movement that is focused on empowering and equipping disciples to make disciples who make disciples. I first encountered Biglife about 12 years ago. Initially I thought this was just a uniquely Asian phenomenon, but over time I came to see that it was at its heart a
movement of God rooted in the Bible and the principles and practices of Jesus in making disciples. Then, two years ago I came onboard with Biglife as their European Director, and moved to Sheffield with my wife Jane to live the Biglife out for ourselves. Setting aside the rest of Europe, we have seen about 40 groups start in Sheffield and across Yorkshire in the past 2 years, as people have come to faith and others have committed themselves to the lifestyle of being disciple makers. The house-church movement in China is perhaps one of the earliest of the more recent expressions of DMMs. As the missionaries were expelled from China in the 1950s, so the “professionals” left and ordinary people with simply the Bible in their hands put things into action. They had no manual for church
