“The parents at my school really need to hear this.”
Carmen, a newly appointed vice principal at a school in northern Lima (Peru), was answering one of the standard Discovery Bible Study (DBS) questions: “Who will you share this with?” Carmen’s school was in a very rough part of Lima. There were a lot of broken families, drugs, prostitution (even among the high school students), gangs, and fatherlessness. Domestic abuse was also a huge concern.
Carmen was a new believer. Her neighbor, Jessica, who worked for a Christian ministry called Reflejo, had been trained and challenged to start making new disciples through Novo’s Disciple-Making Cohort (previously called the Movement Pathway). Jessica was a mover and a shaker in her ministry organization, focused on mobilizing people to pray for unreached people groups. But she hadn’t stepped into that strategic missional space of making disciples through DBSs before. After the Novo training, Jessica had invited 17 non-Christian women in the neighborhood, including Carmen, to join a 6-week DBS. Amazingly, 13 of the 17 women became believers.
As Carmen encountered the life-changing, hope-giving truths about Jesus through Jessica’s study, she knew her student families needed to hear it. But how could she tell them?
Carmen asked her Discovery Group if they would help lead a DBS for parents at her school. “I can invite all the parents in the school to come, and open up the school for them to meet if they’re interested.” The group of women prayed about it and decided to “start small” with parents from just two elementary classrooms, inviting them to a short talk on parenting principles, followed by a DBS. The group prayed, fasted, and prepared for this meeting for about a month.
May of 2024 marked their first meeting. It went well, so they met again for a second week with the parents. This time something unexpected happened: the principal, who wasn’t a believer, showed up. “What are you guys doing?” She asked. “Nobody asked me. We’ve got a little thing called church and state here. This is not allowed.”
Jessica sent out an SOS by text to her ministry coworkers: “Hey, 911 prayer time. I’m about to go to the principal's office. I don’t know what’s going to happen. This whole thing could fall flat right now.”
She told the principal what they were doing—that they were all about the gospel and helping parents and families. And something remarkable happened: The principal decided the group could meet with the parents in all the elementary school classrooms and with all the high school parents as well. They could even come during the school day. She would tell teachers to stop their classes when the group came so they could do Discovery Bible Studies with the students. The whole school and facilities were open to them!
The principal had never allowed any organizations or nonprofits to come into the school, but she opened up everything to Carmen and Jessica’s group of women!
So they continued to meet at the school, with additional classrooms now added, both parents and students. About a month in, 130 parents asked the DBS facilitators to teach them how to pray over their children. “We want to be better parents,” they said. “We want to keep coming and invite others to come.”
Word started to get out about the Discovery Bible Studies. Other schools wanted in! Just two months after the first parent DBS, the women were facilitating DBSs at four schools. Both parents and kids were accepting Christ, being baptized, and being transformed as they dug into the word of God. In one morning alone, 17 students gave their lives to Jesus, and there were dozens of new followers of Jesus every week!
By this time Carmen, Jessica, and the other women had been joined by about 10 additional volunteers from local churches. Many of these folks dropped everything to get involved with what God was clearly doing in the schools, wanting to ride the wave of this move of God. “We’ve never seen God at work like this before!” they said.
This core group of 25 people are totally sold out and have made facilitating DBSs a way of life—they go to the school in the morning to lead a DBS with students, and then go back in the afternoon to facilitate a study with parents. Five days a week! Many of them had to be creative to squeeze their DBSs in around full work schedules, puzzling together how they could make space. On Saturdays the core group gathers together to be trained and prepped for the next week’s ministry, fasting and praying together.
There are now over 1,000 people every week attending these DBSs in Lima schools. Over 100 parents and students have started following Jesus and over 60 “lapsed” believers have repented and returned to God. The reports coming out of their ongoing work in the schools are just incredible—multiple people are being baptized every week. There is even a waiting list of five other schools wanting Jessica and Carmen’s team to come and do DBSs with them.
For now, the team is at capacity and can’t take on the additional schools. But the beauty of DBS is that anyone can become a facilitator—even a brand new believer, as this story so powerfully demonstrates. These 100 new disciples in the schools may be just the “tip of the spear” to carry the good news all over Lima and beyond.
This isn’t what we at Novo would call a gospel movement yet, but it has all the earmarkings of becoming that soon! And it began with just one believer being equipped to make disciples, and one new believer opening up a door to the school system.
What if God wanted to do the same thing through you?
It might seem crazy to think you could find yourself in the midst of a budding gospel movement, but doing incredible things through “everyday believers” is exactly what God seems to be up to right now. And you could go through the same Novo training that Jessica did. It’s called the Disciple Making Cohort. It’s a 6-week course that delves into the components of a gospel movement and is filled with practical tools, exercises, and mentoring to help you get started. These are the same ministry strategies our Novo missionaries are using to catalyze gospel movements around the world. But they aren’t just tools for missionaries. Jessica’s not the only believer we’ve seen activated into something incredible God is doing after being equipped this way. You can learn more and sign up for an upcoming training here.
Join What God Is Doing in Lima!
Jessica’s team is currently at capacity and unable to expand to send volunteers to the five schools on their waiting list. Funding this ministry initiative will dramatically increase their ability to mobilize more volunteers into the schools and ultimately make more disciples among the lost. Learn more about how you can get involved with what God is doing in Lima and give at novo.org/peru-dbs.
ABOUT THIS STORY
Jessica is from Lima, Peru. She started working with Reflejo, a Novo partner ministry to mobilize Latinos to pray for and go to unreached people groups, in 2020. Jessica eventually became the co-director for the global prayer initiative for the Pashtun people, RAP, overseeing the ministry in 12-17 countries. In 2023 she passed off leadership of RAP to someone else so she could focus on launching a new prayer ministry to mobilize prayers for the unreached Tajik people group. She was trained in gospel movement principles by Novo in 2023 through the Disciple Making Cohort, and did her initial neighborhood DBS that same year. The 13 new believers from that study are not only making a huge impact at schools, but have started DBSs in other contexts as well, including rural slum communities.