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.
