Bear Much Fruit

This was not a traditional sermon but a ministry report and appeal from Norris Williams, a long-term missionary supported by First B Jackson, who spoke about the disciple-making movement work he leads through Church Resource Ministries. Norris described what God is doing among Muslims, refugees, disabled people, and others across the Middle East, Africa, and Eurasia through ordinary people making disciples who make more disciples. He also shared how that same approach is beginning to take root in the United States.

What was said

Norris opened by grounding everything in a simple problem: the great commission calls every follower of Jesus to make disciples, but most believers are not doing it. He pointed to the early church as the model, arguing that what spread the gospel in the first century was not organization or resources but ordinary people obeying Jesus and passing on what they had learned to others in their natural networks. He called this a disciple-making movement, and said the engine of it is a discovery Bible study built around three questions: what does the passage say, what does it mean, and what will I do in response, followed by asking who else can I tell so another group can start.

He then described what this looks like on the ground. In Lebanon's Beqa Valley, a Sunni Muslim tribal chief with 13,000 people under him came to faith and opened a school where a thousand children, all from Muslim families, are now doing discovery Bible studies and going home to tell their parents what they are learning. In Southern Beirut, a contact is running Bible studies among Hezbollah fighters. A Syrian refugee woman named Miram set a goal to start 50 new discovery groups in a year and hit it by February, after which she and her team began starting one new group every week.

Norris shared several accounts of God healing people in the midst of this work, including his own shoulder being healed by a Syrian refugee woman in Beirut after his surgeon had told him he needed surgery. He described a disabled girl in Egypt, seven years old and never having spoken or stood, who stood up and spoke the word "papa" in the middle of a meeting after her father came to faith. He was careful to frame these not as spectacles but as signs that accompanied ordinary obedience.

He used his own cherry and apricot farming as an extended picture of what fruitful discipleship requires. A cherry tree, he explained, does not naturally produce fruit. It has to be trained, its branches bent and anchored, its suckers pruned away every year. The same is true for disciple makers. Producing fruit is hard relational work, done together, not something that happens on its own.

When describing the leaders his team looks for, Norris said humility is the first quality. He looks for people who are not trying to build their own ministry, who are willing to give leadership away, who would do the work even if there were no pay, and who are willing to die to see the kingdom grow. He said money functions as a litmus test: when people learn there is no funding attached, those who were only interested in a job disappear, leaving the ones who genuinely want to see the kingdom spread.

He closed with results: 35,000 new churches across East, West, and North Africa in seven years, thousands more in Southern Africa, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and between 500,000 and 600,000 new believers, at a cost of roughly $20 per baptism. He mentioned that a retired Egyptian police officer had prophesied over him about twelve years ago that a global movement and a voice among nations was coming, something he said he kept to himself for five years because it seemed too large. He ended by saying that what he once could not imagine is now visibly happening, and that similar movements are beginning in cities across the United States.