Why I Stopped Using the “Five Ms”

I was the Youth and Young Adults Minister at Figtree Anglican Church for six years. Just before I started, 60 young people turned up at the final night of youth led by my predecessor. Six years later, our weekly average attendance had grown to 230.

We built our ministry around the Five Ms from Saddleback. Every one of my 40 youth leaders could recite and define them by heart. Half of our youth were in a midweek discipleship group, and they too knew the Five Ms like second nature.

I even made the pilgrimage to Saddleback Church in Orange County and Willow Creek in Chicago. I spent a day with Doug Fields, the youth pastor and author of Purpose Driven Youth Ministry. I sat in on the youth program. I was in the congregation at Saddleback the weekend The Purpose Driven Life launched.

Figtree was one of the first churches in Australia to adopt the Five Ms. I remember many conversations with ministry colleagues who were sceptical about The Purpose Driven Church. Then, in 2004, I moved to Tasmania, where I served as rector of an Anglican church for a decade. From there, I became Senior Pastor of a large Baptist church in Melbourne, serving for six and a half years.

In 2020, I returned to Sydney. Strangely, despite the success I had early on, I no longer use the Five Ms as a ministry model. What surprises me is how many others now do. In some circles, the Five Ms have become almost untouchable—the default framework.

So why have I stopped using them? Why are they such a phenomenon? And what are their strengths—and their blind spots?

The Biblical Basis for the Five Ms

“A great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will grow a great church.” —Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church

This phrase has become something of a motto for the Purpose Driven movement. It suggests that if a church devotes itself wholeheartedly to loving God (the Great Commandment) and making disciples (the Great Commission), it will become a healthy and fruitful church.

In the Great Commandment, Jesus distils the law into two directives: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind,” and “Love your neighbour as yourself.” This twofold love—vertical and horizontal—forms the heart of Christian life. From this come the purposes of Magnification (worship) and Membership (fellowship).

The Great Commission then extends that love into the world. Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them… and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” From this flow Mission (evangelism), Maturity (discipleship), and Ministry (service). Making disciples involves proclaiming the gospel (Mission), nurturing believers toward Christlikeness (Maturity), and equipping them to serve others in love (Ministry).

The Five Ms weren’t designed as a strategic overlay imposed upon the church but as an attempt to reflect biblical principles about what it means to be the people of God.

Saddleback Church

The youth ministry growth I oversaw was modest compared to what happened at Saddleback. In 1980, it began as a small Bible study in Rick and Kay Warren’s home. By 1995, it had reached 10,000 members, making it one of the fastest-growing churches in the USA. By 2020, Saddleback’s average weekly attendance was over 23,000, with more than 50,000 baptisms since its founding.

Put together: timeless biblical principles + phenomenal numerical growth = a compelling, reproducible model.

Blind Spots

The Five Ms aren’t universally loved. Some reject Warren’s framework, arguing it lacks theological depth. For a thoughtful critique, see Paul Alexander’s review over at 9Marks: https://www.9marks.org/review/purpose-driven-church-rick-warren.

That said, it’s easy to see the strengths in Warren’s approach—and to incorporate them into a more theologically grounded ministry. I still believe in clearly defining core outcomes, building systems that help achieve those goals, and measuring fruitfulness.

So my decision not to use the Five Ms isn’t about theology. I agree with parts of Warren’s strategic thinking. But, for me, there are deeper issues that make the model less suitable in our current context.

The Five Ms – Timeless Principles?

Every age has a zeitgeist. The early church lived in a world where faith and empire were interwoven. The Reformation focused on doctrinal purity and the ministry of Word and sacrament. The 17th–18th century Pietist and Revivalist movements shifted the focus to conversion and personal experience of grace. Revival movements emphasised heartfelt religion and moral reform—mirroring the Romanticism of the time.

Fast forward: the idea that there are universal, timeless ministry principles is itself a product of Enlightenment thinking. The belief that we can define truth, set objectives, and engineer strategies to achieve measurable goals—that’s Modernism.

Warren’s approach sees ministry as something we organise and run—a set of programs designed to achieve growth. It’s strategic, structured, and results-oriented.

That mindset brings two dangers. First, the disenchanted assumptions: church as machine, minister as engineer. Get the structure and inputs right, and outcomes will follow. It frames God as the watchmaker—hands-off. Church becomes a social structure that, if built correctly, will automatically produce results.

Second, it can position the church, in the minds of some, as a kind of spiritual gym. The Five Ms become a framework for self-actualisation. The pastor becomes a life coach, the Bible a playbook. Follow the program, and you’ll be spiritually fit—and feel good doing it.

The Five Ms were born in a world where leadership meant strategy and execution. Where people understood themselves as autonomous individuals in search of meaning, purpose, and growth. Define the goals, build the programs, execute well, and you’ll flourish.

But here’s the thing: that model is individualistic, doing-focused, structuralist, and transactional—if we do the work, God will bless.

Discipleship Pathways Before the Five Ms

In the logic of The Purpose Driven Church, I detect a hierarchy. First things first, define your purpose and vision. In the later stages of the book Warren does turn his proactive mind to discipleship. He maps a progression: Community → Crowd → Congregation → Committed → Core.

The task of ministry is to move people along that path—drawing the unchurched in, encouraging commitment, developing mature, serving believers. Goals, followed by programs that achieve those goals.

But here's the problem: when churches differentiate and atomise goals first, then plan around those parts, a quiet confidence in structuralism creeps in. Discipleship becomes a system. Sign up, complete the courses, round the baseball diamond bases—and you will mature.

I loathe false dichotomies. Every church needs both movement toward Christ and breadth across which that movement unfolds. But when you make the parts central, instead of the whole; the systems can become ends in themselves.

For me, disciple-making is the why. The Five Ms are one way to frame parts of the how. We must always let the “why” lead the “how.”

Defining Core Outcomes: Strategic, But Not Supreme

So can we use the Five Ms in a secondary way? Absolutely. But I still choose not to. Why? Three reasons—stated not as rejection, but caution and conviction.

First, while categories like the Five Ms offer clarity, they’re best seen as strategic tools, not biblical mandates. Churches committed to continuous growing disciples will naturally do evangelism, spiritual formation, worship, fellowship, and service. These are essential. But when they become locked into a fixed framework, they can harden into programs—and programs can become ends in themselves. That’s when we risk trusting our systems more than God’s Spirit.

I still use frameworks. I find "Up," "In," and "Out" to be intuitive and flexible. They connect faithfully and easily with Scripture, help us assess balance, and are open to adaptation. But I never present them as universal. They’re strategic, not prescriptive.

Second, the Five Ms often foster atomistic thinking. They can morph into ministry departments—each with separate goals, budgets, and priorities. Evangelism becomes one-fifth of church life. Small groups handle maturity. Musicians focus on worship. Silos emerge, and mission (or any M) gets boxed in as one department, rather than being a culture that pervades the whole.

Third, once we treat frameworks like the Five Ms as “the biblical model”, we flatten history and context. Jesus didn’t send the twelve out with a five-point plan. Paul adjusted his message depending on whether he was in Antioch, Lystra, or Athens. The church in Jerusalem functioned differently from Corinth or Ephesus (under Timothy). That diversity reflects a core truth: the gospel is unchanging, but the church’s expression of it is always contextual.

Ancient Rome, Reformation Germany, present day Soweto, Shanghai, and Sydney—they are all different contexts. Ministry and mission express themselves differently in each context. When we elevate ministry models to timeless status, we downplay the missional call to contextualise: to listen to our culture, speak faithfully, and embody the gospel in ways that dialogue with the existential questions of our day.

When I reflect on why Purpose Driven Church worked so well at Figtree, part of the answer is that the context matched the model. At the time, the dominant occupations in Figtree were engineers from the steelworks and university lecturers. Their children were rational, educated—products of the late Enlightenment. Orange County, where Saddleback is based, shares much DNA with outer suburban Sydney.

The structured, program-driven church worked well in that world. But the world God has called us to reach now is different. I’m not unpacking that world here—but you and I know it’s different. Reliance on structuralism – structures designed in and for a previous era, may hinder more than help.

Conclusion

Strategies matter. But they’re not sacred. They have a used-by date. They serve the mission—they’re not the mission itself.

I’m not against the Five Ms. They’re clear, comprehensive, and strategic. But they can be co-opted by our culture—as a pathway to spiritual self-actualisation—and be mistaken by the church as a timeless blueprint for success.

When that happens, they risk displacing the church’s core mission—to bring timeless good news to a time bound context, and grow disciples who inhabit and reach out within that world, and do all this with a deep dependence on God.