Movement Leader, 

We want to help you multiply your movement using the DCPI System! Whether you’re a seasoned movement leader or just starting out on your church planting journey, this blog will walk you through how to customize DCPI training to fit your movement and propel your vision forward.

Let’s start with your vision. Picture yourself five years down the road. What churches would you love to see planted? What people would you love to see involved in reaching your community for Christ? Once you have that in mind, let’s think about working backward from there to where you are today. The intermediate step that’s missing is what? Training. 

Training is how the military takes a normal person and makes them a part of the best fighting force in the world. Training is how a McDonald’s hamburger can taste the same on one side of the country to the other side of the country. Training is the ingredient that will help your vision go from a possibility to a reality. Your people need to know what they don’t know now. Your movement needs the vocabulary to get everyone speaking the same language. Your leaders need years of wisdom and insight to navigate church planting effectively and efficiently. 

That’s where DCPI comes in. We’ve devoted our entire history to perfecting the training of church planters, so they know everything they need to know to plant healthy, reproductive, dynamic churches that are effective at reaching their communities for Christ. We’re here because we care about the gospel, and we’re here because we care about you being able to do that big vision God has given you.

Now, let’s dream bigger for a minute. What would it look like if all of your churches could multiply, and millions of people could hear the message about Jesus? What would it look like if your network or denomination could see transformational growth? 

Well it’s absolutely a reality, and it can happen for you. Let’s look at what happened for the Church of the Nazarene, starting in 2010, when they began using DCPI training to equip their church planters. Mark Bane, their Director, Evangelism and New Church Development for USA/ Canada Region said, “Since using DCPI training in 2010, we have increased churches planted significantly. From 2010-2023 we have planted 1850 new churches using DCPI training. That’s an average of 132 churches a year, compared to 60 a year prior to DCPI!”

DCPI was a part of catalyzing sustainable growth for the Church of the Nazarene. And, with all of our 69 translations of DCPI materials, they have carried this training into the other regions of the world and continue accelerating churches planted in Latin America and Brazil! 

But it’s not just about planting churches – it’s about planting the right kind of churches. We don’t just want to plant churches. We want to help you plant healthy–the leaders and systems are healthy, reproductive–planting daughter churches, and dynamic–reaching their communities for Christ– churches that fulfill the Great Commission! DCPI training is designed to equip leaders with the tools and mindset needed to cultivate this kind of churches.

So let’s get into what the DCPI System is made of. The system is designed to be scalable for your movement and flexible enough to fit your culture and context.  With a train-the-trainer model and 8 training tracks that are based on biblical principles, we want to empower your movement to grow, fast. DCPI offers a comprehensive framework for effective church planting. From avoiding common pitfalls to creating space for people to listen to God guidance, each track is meticulously designed to address key aspects of the church planting journey.

To make sure you’re helping your leaders to become thoroughly equipped, we have divided our 8 training tracks into four categories: planting, thriving, cultivating, and multiplying. 

DCPI’s Planting Trainings are Church Planting Essentials and House Church Planting are designed specifically to take a leader and prepare him or her to plant a church. In order to customize your movement’s plan, you can choose one or both of these trainings. In some contexts, you may not need House Church Planting, or in other contexts you may not need Church Planting Essentials, so you can decide which training tracks from the planting trainings are relevant to their movement.

DCPI’s Thriving Trainings are Healthy Church Dynamics and Mentoring Church Planters. In the DCPI System, we give you the choice to use one or both of these trainings in your training system. Often, people will use both of them because Healthy Church Dynamics is for leaders– often leaders who are already in a church–but also new leaders, and Mentoring Church Planters is actually for people who’ve already planted a church before or people who are going to come alongside those leaders who are planting a church. Often you’ll want to include both of these training tracks in your movement. 

DCPI’s Cultivating Trainings are Churches Planting Churches and NexGen Challenge. These trainings are for raising up new leaders for future church plants. What’s key for you as a church planting movement leader is that you need to be thinking further out than just getting more churches today or this year. You need to be thinking, “Who are my future leaders? What churches need to be getting ready to plant daughter churches? Who needs to be trained to get their church healthy now? Who needs to be trained for the future?” As you think this way, that’s what starts to make their movement have forward progress. When you work all those pieces together, you to see how training can help you multiply a church planting movement. 

At the leadership level, DCPI’s Multiplying Trainings are Church Planting Movements and Certified Trainer, which will equip the leaders in your movement who are going to train other people. So these two tracks should both be used to prepare your leadership to think strategically about a movement. 

At DCPI, we are passionate about making sure that it’s not “lonely at the top,” which is why we come alongside you to help you think through your movement’s systems and training, and why we provide certification, so that your trainers can stand alongside you and equip more people to plant churches. 

When you put all of categories of DCPI training together it forms a flywheel that rotates around the leadership team, whose job it is to keep this spinning. You can choose which Planting Trainings, which Thriving Trainings, which Cultivating Trainings, and which Multiplying Trainings you use in your customized system, and then you begin getting you and your leaders certified, so you can start putting these trainings on your calendar. 

For example, let’s think about what this would look like for one of your church planters. If you choose Church Planting Essentials for your Planting Training, your church planter is going to start with Church Planting Essentials. After that, he or she is going to plant a church. After that church is planted, that leader may take Healthy Church Dynamics and work on getting the systems and the leadership healthy within that church because we do not want to duplicate a church that is not healthy. Then, they will take Churches Planting Churches and begin planting daughter churches. Those daughter church leaders can then take Church Planting Essentials before they plant their church, and so the cycle continues. 

For a future-church-planter in your movement, for example, they may start with NexGen Challenge. Then, when they’re ready to gear up for planting a church, they would take Church Planting Essentials, and then Healthy Church Dynamics. Then, they would potentially take Churches Planting Churches, so they would be ready to plant daughter churches.

For the leadership level in your movement, for example, they would be someone who has already planted a church sometime in the past, and they would take one DCPI planting, thriving, or cultivating training track. They have to take at least one before they can become a Certified Trainer. For any of the tracks that they would like to train people in, they have to have attended that track before they can start training. For this example, they would have planted a church sometime, take a DCPI training, and jump straight into Church Planning Movements and Certified Trainer, so that they’re ready to help accelerate the movement. 

We would love to help you customize this plan for your movement. The pieces of the DCPI System are comprehensive and aimed at helping you and your entire team to be thoroughly equipped for whatever good work God is calling you to do, and we believe training is the missing ingredient. 

Would you like us to help you set up a customized plan for your training system? Contact us here today, and we’d love to help!