In Church Planting Movements, or Disciple Making Movements, there are ten key features in every movement. The first one is “Extraordinary Prayer.” The second one is “Abundant Evangelism.”
Abundant Evangelism simply means that the believers share the Gospel with everyone.
In David Garrison’s book, Church Planting Movements, he says, “In Church Planting Movements we find hundreds and thousands of people hearing the Gospel every day and out of this abundant sowing, a growing harvest begins to take place.” He calls it the principle of “over-sowing,” where thousands of encounters produces hundreds of conversions.
If we want to see a CPM/DMM, we know that we must share the Gospel with everyone everywhere. So where does something like Ultimate Treasure Hunting come in, where we expect the Holy Spirit to lead us to a particular individual?
UTH allows us to work with the Holy Spirit to find specific people that He has prepared for us. It may be they need healing, or a word of encouragement, but it opens the door for us to share the Gospel with them as they see God taking a personal interest in them.
When I first learned about UTH, I had a “clue” of “left arm.” I went out with my wife and a friend, and came across an old lady that had suffered a stroke, her left arm being immobilized. We approached her and prayed for her healing, but she wasn’t visibly healed. However, we continued talking to her, and she told us that she was a Christian, and had two unbelieving adult sons that she was greatly concerned about. As we talked, one of her sons came up to us, and when he found out how God had led us to his mother, he was shocked. He didn’t become a believer there and then, but we do know that both he and his mother saw God at work.
Mark Virkler, who teaches people how to hear God’s voice, tells that in his early days of being a pastor, he decided to do door-to-door evangelism. He visited a trailer park next door to his church, knocked on a door, and had a big, ugly guy answer the door, and growl, “What do you want?” Mark decided that door-to-door evangelism wasn’t for him.
However, later on, he was praying and journaling, and God said, “Go back to that guy.” He was nervous, but obeyed. When he knocked on the door this time, the guy answered and said, “Have you seen my family?” They had left him because he was too mean.
Mark helped him find his wife, and they both became Christians and joined his church.
That should be the result of UTH…people getting saved, joining a church, becoming a disciple, and — with the goal of this site in mind — becoming disciple makers.
However, UTH, no matter how cool it is to see God work in an individual’s life, is a slow process. It may take an hour or two to find the clues that God gives you, where you could use that same time to witness to one, two, three or more people. And if you live in an area where you’re free to pass out tracts, you could pass out hundreds of tracts in that time frame.
Ultimate Treasure Hunting — letting God lead you to a specific individual to show them His love — is awesome. Not only does it encourage the person we witness to, it encourages us — God speaks to me! He is actively working with me in proclaiming the Gospel and showing His love to people. This is Philip being told to “Go south to the desert road…Go to that chariot and stay near it.”
Over-sowing is Philip “preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.”
We need to do the latter, but ask God for some of the former.