How DBS Reliably, Effectively, and Naturally Leads People to Jesus!

Recently several small villages in Africa were turned upside down when a well known witch doctor became a radical follower of Jesus and began planting churches among the people she used to curse! She had been led to the Lord by her nephew who had spent years trying everything to convince her to repent. Gospel tracks, debates, practical service, you name it, he tried it.

So what finally made her change?

One day, a visiting disciple maker taught the witch doctor’s nephew about Discovery Bible Study, a method of encountering God through a simple inductive reading of His Word. The nephew was skeptical. He had scoured the internet finding the most sophisticated tools to share with his aunt. How could simply reading the Bible change her worldview so completely? 

But, the disciple maker also shared the Waha app, which makes it so easy to facilitate a DBS than anyone can do it with no training, so the young man figured he would give it a try.

Within weeks of using the Waha app, his aunt was weeping and giving her heart to Jesus!

This is just one example of radical life-change through DBS that has resulted in skeptics becoming lifelong disciples who make more disciples. In fact, missiologists and researchers estimate that approximately 77 million people have come to Christ within the last decade through DBS, often in the most unreached places.1

 Most of us think of Bible study as something that happens after people are evangelized, not before. So, does DBS count as evangelism?

What is DBS and why does it work?

A DBS is when a group of seekers read a passage of scripture, then discuss their answers to a few simple, open-ended questions about what they just read. For example, “What does this story teach us about God?” The goal is not to convince anyone of anything, but simply to explore and discover for themselves in a welcoming environment. 

But there are two key questions asked in every DBS that make all the difference:

• “How will you put into practice what you’ve learned this week?”
• “With whom will you share something you learned from this passage, this week?” 

(For a more detailed explanation of DBS, you can check out this article.)

So, why does this work so well? According to the pros, there are three reasons:

1: The Discovery Approach

Nearly every parent looks for the same things when trying to find the perfect school for their children: Lots of hands-on activities and as few lectures and worksheets as possible! 

Why is that? 

Teachers and educational psychologists tell us what we all know instinctively. People learn best when they are allowed to discover truth for themselves, rather than be told what to believe. 2

It turns out scripture taught these ideas long before the experts figured it out: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” (Proverbs 25:2 NIV) This is why Jesus only preached two to five sermons, but asked over 300 questions in the Gospels. 3

John 6:44-46 teaches us that the people who ultimately decide to follow Jesus are taught by God Himself. Although God can certainly use the ideas and words of a human evangelist to reach people, how much easier is it for people to be taught by God through His Word, not ours?

2: Obedience-Based Discipleship

Jesus wasn’t just concerned with people learning about God as an idea. He taught that anyone who doesn’t put their faith into practice would be like a house built on sand that gets washed away as soon as the storms of life show up. It’s only the people whose faith becomes an actionable lifestyle who prove to be disciples who make it for the long-haul. (Matt. 7:24-27) 

After all, Jesus didn’t commission us to make disciples of all nations by teaching them about all He has commanded; He told us to teach them to obey all He has commanded! (Matt. 28:19) Theologians have explained this is because obedience is actually central to someone changing their worldview:

“Making Christ the Lord of our lives is not a single decision. It is an initial decision followed by decisions to obey him. In theological terms, justification and sanctification are parts of the same conversion and cannot be divorced.” 4

Part of the reason DBS is so effective as an evangelistic tool is because from the very beginning it asks seekers to put into practice what they are learning.

3:  Multiplication through Social Networks

In 2020, it only took about two months for the Covid-19 virus to go from a small infection in China to a pandemic on a global scale. 5 Similarly viral, it only took the early church about 300 years to grow from 1,000 to over 44 million believers! 6

How was that possible!?

In a letter of advice about ministry, Paul lets Timothy in on the secret that led to the early church’s viral growth:

“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” (2 Tim. 2:2 NIV)

From its very beginning, the early church didn’t see its commission as just leading people to Jesus in all nations. Instead, it set out to make disciples, who made disciples, who made disciples, who made disciples of all nations! That’s why we rarely see individuals coming to faith in the Bible, as opposed to entire family units. Jesus taught His disciples to go to a new village and stay with the first disciple they make, rather than moving onto the next person. (Luke 10:6-7 NIV) That way, more people would hear the message from a trusted member of their social network rather than a stranger, and were therefore more likely to accept the message. 

Taking this into consideration, it’s easy to see why DBS–which encourages seekers to immediately share what they’re learning–has been shown to multiply believers virally like the early church did!

Is it Evangelism?

In a typical DBS curriculum, everything communicated in most popular evangelistic tools is communicated. They often begin, for example, with a broad overview of salvation history in a series called Creation to Christ before moving onto the life and teachings of Jesus. In this way, DBS covers Bill Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws, on which most popular evangelistic presentations today are based. 7

But DBS also encompasses the techniques used in a variety of evangelistic tools. Comparative stories linking the prophets to Christ are common in Muslim settings 8 and are covered in Creation to Christ. Romans Road 9 is covered in DBS curriculums about our response to Jesus. The only difference is that evangelism is treated as a process rather than an event.

Does this all mean DBS counts as evangelism or not? It depends on what is meant by evangelism. After all, many people have different definitions of the term. So, if evangelism means a Christian engages a non-believer in conversation in order to successfully convince them to change their entire worldview on the spot after just a short conversation, then no, DBS is not evangelism. 

But suppose we define evangelism as a process by which we help seekers discover Jesus Christ and transform their entire worldview and lifestyle to one of obedience to Him and help their friends and family to do the same… 

That might not just be evangelism, but the kind of evangelism that can transform even the hardest-hearted of witchdoctors into passionate evangelists themselves.

Footnotes:

1. Justin Long, “1% of the World: A Macroanalysis of 1,369 Movements to Christ,” Mission Frontiers 42, no. 6 (2020): 37-42. https://2414now.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1-of-the-World-Long.pdf
2. See the works of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Albert Bandura, all of whom are foundational experts whose ideas about discovery-based learning are taught in nearly every teacher preparation program!
3. Martin B. Copenhaver, Jesus Is the Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the 3 He Answered, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2014
4. Paul Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008) pg. 472
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “COVID-19 Timeline,” CDC Museum, last reviewed January 18, 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html
6. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996
7. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life (1), we are sinful and separated from God (2), Jesus Christ died for our sins and was resurrected to defeat death (3), we must individually accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior (4).
8. Samuel Green, Where to Start with Islam, Sydney: Matthias Media, 2019.
9. Romans 3:23, 6:23, 5:8, 10:9-13, 5:1