Connecting for discipleship.
In August of 2016, someone put me in touch with Fatima for the first time. I got her phone number and a few days later we sat down in a coffee shop together. Fatima described herself as open minded. I shared the Gospel with her, gave her a New Testament, and we fruitfully discussed what it means to follow Jesus. A decade earlier, Fatima watched a series on TV about the life of the Messiah and found Him compelling. In the weeks that passed I periodically sent her an SMS but she got busy and stopped responding. Fatima remained one of dozens of contacts in my phone with a similar story… a seemingly one-and-done Gospel conversation.
Fast forward to June of 2021. I look down on my phone and see a text from Fatima, “Hi [my name] how are you? Miss u”. I, of course, rejoiced to know she still had my phone number and possibly wanted to restart our conversations about Christ. However, I never would have remembered the details in the first paragraph of this article if it weren’t for a free software our team uses called Disciple.Tools.
I typed in Fatima’s phone number into the secure CRM (customer relationship manager), Disciple.Tools, and within a few seconds I was reading notes I had made about my first meeting with Fatima nearly five years ago.
The story of Disciple.Tools started in 2013. A field team in North Africa, working in collaboration with various organizations and nationalities, began to develop a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in a proprietary software gifted to them through their organization. That software was extremely modular and allowed them to develop a system that served most of the needs of their nationwide media-to-movement initiative without much need for technical development.
Other field teams, disciple makers, and organizations saw the system they built and wanted to use it for their disciple making movement efforts as well. The proprietary nature of the software they were using, however, prevented them from giving the tool away to others. Additionally, the coalition that the team served began to outgrow the collaborative nature of the tool as they stored thousands of records while partnering with over a hundred disciple makers. Security became a significant issue.
The team saw the need for a software specifically designed for disciple and church multiplication movements that any field team could use. The idea for Disciple.Tools was born — a software for disciple makers by disciple makers.
Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations…” Disciple.Tools software exists to aid disciple makers in doing that very thing. Without collaboration and accountability, we risk squandering the opportunity Christ gave our generation to make disciples among all nations.
Disciple.Tools enables the disciple maker and discipling team to take seriously every name and every group God gives them to shepherd. It provides the accountability our lazy hearts need to dig deep and stay faithful with the disciple making task. It allows a community of disciple makers to move past anecdotal and soft understandings of the progress of the Gospel within their ministry, and get concrete about who, what, when and where the Gospel is advancing.
Finally, Disciple.Tools helps remind this worker in the Arab world of the details from a sweet conversation with a seeker five years ago. It reminds me of Jesus’ words, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.” (Mark 4:26-27) Sometimes we need software to remind us of what’s happening in between the scattering and sprouting of seed.
Go to https://disciple.tools and launch a demo today. The software is always free.