Early Insights from DMC Dashboard Conversations
By David Dixon, EPD Executive Director
As we move into 2025, we're seeing encouraging momentum in a district-wide initiative to help church leaders evaluate and strengthen their church’s disciple-making efforts through the Disciple-Making Community (DMC) Dashboard conversations.
What is the DMC Dashboard again?
The DMC Dashboard is a conversational tool to help church leaders assess their current reality in making disciples. Think of it like your car's dashboard—it provides indicators of how things are running and where attention might be needed. Through twelve targeted questions, leadership teams evaluate their church's fruitfulness in areas ranging from having a clear definition of discipleship, to fostering an environment where transformation stories are regularly shared, to the level of courage needed to make changes.
Early Learnings
The initial round of conversations has revealed several encouraging patterns:
Strong Leadership Engagement: Church leadership teams are demonstrating remarkable openness and honesty in evaluating their fruitfulness in making disciples. The conversations have been marked by healthy dialogue and a willingness to identify both strengths and weaknesses. Our team is grateful for such a high-level of engagement as it demonstrates how much love they have for the disciples of Jesus in their church.
Lives are Being Changed: We're hearing powerful stories of transformation and seeing evidence of lives being changed through faithful ministry in our churches. We are seeing the Holy Spirit working in fresh ways. These aren’t old stories; they are new stories of people coming to faith in Jesus and significant transformation. In this, we are praising God and asking Him for more.
Common Growth Area: One clear pattern emerging from these first conversations centers on a single word: intentionality. There's a healthy recognition that while good ministry is happening, more intentional frameworks could enhance effectiveness and multiplication. One example that came up in our conversations was a church discussing their need to "build a bigger boat" to accommodate more people. While this shows a heart for growth, further discussion led to reframing the goal as “rather than building one bigger boat, what if we focused on teaching people to build boats?” This shift from expanding capacity to multiplying disciples will require intentional design at every level of ministry.
What's Next?
Our team is currently scheduling 30+ more of these conversations with half of our Alliance churches and looking to hold conversations with the other half in 2026. If your church has not yet been contacted, that means you have been selected for next year.
We're excited to continue these important conversations and to see how God uses this tool to help shape our district's culture toward multiplication. Through your participation and openness, we believe your regions and our district will see increasing gospel impact.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue learning together through this process. If you have questions about the DMC Dashboard or when your church might participate, please reach out to any one of the district team.