After just a little more than a year, Baja Christian Ministries' Purple Book Discipleship Programme has graduated about 2,300 people with more than 9,500 currently participating in the programme.
Organisers say their campaign to disciple one million people in the Mexican state of Baja California within 20 years using the Purple Book is going better than expected.
"It's working. It's actually working and it's actually growing by leaps and bounds," David Angulo, BCM director of the purple book programme, told The Christian Post.
Angulo, who is currently living in Baja California to oversee the campaign, said the Purple Book programme has taken a "life of its own" and pastors are volunteering to introduce it to their congregation.
"When you go down to the nitty-gritty it's warfare for souls that are living in darkness," Angulo said, offering a mental picture. "Picture a superpower in the sense of funding, and you have allies that are brothers in Christ in another country. What we're basically doing is supplying all these guerilla warfares with the tools they need to wage war on the battle for souls."
"We picture ourselves as gun runners for the Lord," Angulo joked.
In Mexico, there is little Christian education in churches so most people have not had a chance to be discipled. Studies have even shown some Mexican pastors have less knowledge of the Bible than the average church-going Christian in the likes of the US.
"I am just supplying for the troops out here," the Purple Book director said. "Basically we're just putting tools in their hands and they're going out there and facing the enemy in their daily lives with these tools."
Since 1992, BCM has worked in poor communities in Baja California - the peninsula located just south of the California-Mexico border - building houses and evangelising people in the area.
But it was not until 2007 that the ministry incorporated a method to account for how many people it had discipled and how close it was to its one million goal.
The Purple Book: Biblical Foundations for Building Strong Disciples, by Rice Broocks and Steve Murrell, was used as the basis for the ministry's tracking system. Each person who completed the Bible study workbook, dubbed the Purple Book because of its purple cover, was counted as one new disciple for Christ.
"It is not just a matter of leading people to the Lord and giving them a Bible," BCM founder Bob Sanders contends. "We want to actually see them grow in faith.
"This Purple Book is just the perfect tool because it engages them. It engages them in an active Bible study," he said.
The book works hand-in-hand with the Bible by asking questions that readers can find the answers to in the Bible.
"It takes about 25 sermons to cover what is in this Purple Book and that's why you are [giving] a good dose of the Gospel to the people through doing this book," Sanders said.
