Johan sat alone in his office, the echo of Sunday’s half-empty sanctuary still ringing in his ears.

Johan had been a pastor as long as he could remember, but there was a problem. The people of Sweden, where he lived, had been in a steady decline of church attendance for decades. It was quickly becoming one of the most secular countries in Europe and Johan felt the pain! Week after week, fewer people came to his services. His once-thriving church was slowly aging out of existence.

He felt as if he had tried everything. He made his sermons as engaging and relevant as possible. He experimented with different music to see which styles of worship would strike a note. He worked so hard to meet with each of his congregants, and practice personal evangelism himself, that he nearly burnt out! Nothing seemed to work. Church just seemed irrelevant to most people.

One day, he grabbed a notepad and scribbled some numbers. The average age of his congregation was now over 60. If the trend continued, he calculated, in 15 years there would be no church left.

He bowed his head and whispered, “God, what do I do?”

Desperate for direction, Johan opened his laptop and googled:

“How to grow a church when no one wants church.”

A millions websites popped up, each one claiming to have the perfect recipe for success. But many of them were contradictory. There seemed to be no shortage of people with their own opinions about how to “do” church. How was he supposed to know which strategy would be right for him?

There was one phrase, however, that caught his eye: Disciple Making Movements. It reminded him of Christ’s ministry… Jesus, he recalled, never worried about how to conduct a service that attracted spiritually uninterested people. He just shared His life with a handful of men He called disciples and things grew organically from their life-on-life relationships. He clicked the link and read. Much of what he found sparked his imagination in a new way. One website talked about leading others to their own understanding of God through a discovery process. Another explained the power of accessing entire households of people rather than just targeting individuals.

He found some videos online that offered training in many of these skills. The videos made the DMM process seem simple, and reproducible. For the first time in a long time, hope sparked within Johan!

But, could he really get the people in his country interested in something like this? After all, most of the Swedes he knew were religiously apathetic. He had a difficult enough time trying to get them to attend a church service. How would he ever be able to get them to start their own Discovery Bible Studies with their friends and family, let alone come to one?

That’s when he found Waha.

Waha made it seem easy to facilitate a Discovery Bible Study. All you have to do is push a button and the app runs the whole meeting for you! It even had a full series of automated DMM training on the app. There was just one problem:

It was not yet available in Swedish.

But Johan felt God stirring hope in his heart, so he reached out. We at Waha were excited to work with him to add a new language, so we started working on the project right away. Johan put in extra time to work through all the translations. He even enlisted the help of others to translate, proofread, and record audio. Eventually, the new language was ready to launch. What God did next was incredible…

Just three months after Swedish launched, we recorded 562 Discovery Bible Studies had been facilitated in Sweden! They have only continued to increase to this day.

Johan was overjoyed. His church had gone from the verge of decline… To incredible multiplication! But what impacted Johan the most was how God carried him from a place of despair… To a radical confidence that God is not done with Sweden.