- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web - iOS
- Developer
- Gospel Ambition Inc.
- Launched
- 2017
- Updated
- Aug 5, 2026
The verdict
Zúme Training is one of the few genuinely free and genuinely complete discipleship courses online: 20 hours, 32 named concepts, three schedules, downloadable workbooks and a free coach, with no upsell. It suits small groups and churches that already accept disciple-making-movement methods, and lay leaders who want structure without a teacher. It is a poor fit for anyone who needs a published statement of faith, audited participation numbers, or a maintained mobile app before adopting curriculum.
Try Zúme Training ↗Opens zume.training
Zúme Training is a web platform, not an app, and the distinction matters when you go looking for it. The faith.tools listing files it as a "Christian Small Groups App" and points at store records. The iOS listing is real but frozen: version 1.0.0, released 9 September 2022, with the same date recorded for its most recent version. The linked Google Play package, app.training.zume, returns HTTP 404 when requested on 6 August 2026, as does the alternative wrapper package training.zume.app.twa. The training actually happens at zume.training, a browser application rebuilt more recently than either store record suggests. Review the website; treat the apps as leftovers.
What the website contains is a 20-hour course covering what the homepage calls "32 Concepts and Skills," split into a being-a-disciple track and a making-disciples track. The same 20 hours is offered on three schedules: ten two-hour sessions, usually weekly; twenty shorter sessions for groups that want more practice per concept; or an intensive of five four-hour blocks, typically a Friday evening plus a full Saturday and Sunday. The print edition from William Carey Publishing describes the target group as four to twelve people. Nothing is gated: registration, all sessions, workbooks, PowerPoint and Keynote decks, and a coach are free.
Who is behind it is less clear than the curriculum. The about page states that "Zúme Training remains an open initiative without formal organizational control or a separate entity," and that because no single organisation runs it there is no formal statement of faith - only that everyone involved "would agree with the Lausanne Covenant." Yet the App Store record names GOSPEL AMBITION INC as seller, and Gospel Ambition's giving page for Zúme identifies it as "a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization" with EIN 83-1935026, listing Zúme alongside Disciple.Tools, Prayer.Tools and Kingdom.Training. Both statements can be defended - an open initiative hosted and paid for by a registered charity - but a church doing due diligence should know the second one exists.
The methodology is the part a reader most needs named. Zúme teaches disciple-making movement practice in the Training for Trainers lineage: the 3/3 group meeting pattern, the Four Fields tool, generational mapping, the person of peace, S.O.A.P.S. Bible study, a List of 100 relational contacts, and a three-month multiplication plan with scheduled accountability. That family of methods has both serious advocates and serious published critics inside evangelical missiology. This review reports the argument and does not settle it.
✓ The good
- Free with no upsell at any point - registration, all 32 concepts, session workbooks, PowerPoint and Keynote decks and a human coach all cost nothing, and the site says plainly "We are crowdfunded"
- Three genuine schedules for the same content - ten two-hour sessions, twenty shorter sessions, or five four-hour intensive blocks, so 20 hours fits a weekly small group or a single weekend
- Self-facilitated by design - the course does not require a trained teacher, and the homepage describes a group working through short videos, discussion questions and simple exercises together
- Every session ends in an assignment rather than a quiz - the List of 100, a three-minute testimony, prayer walking, baptism practice and a three-month plan with staged check-ins
- Free optional coaching, matched by language and country, with a male, female or no-preference option, from coaches the site says have all completed the training themselves
- The tools are named and portable - S.O.A.P.S., the 3/3 group pattern, Four Fields, generational mapping, the 3-Circles gospel presentation and the BLESS prayer pattern survive outside the course
- It sits inside a maintained ecosystem - Gospel Ambition also publishes Disciple.Tools for movement tracking, Prayer.Tools and Kingdom.Training, so a group that finishes Zúme has somewhere to go
✗ Watch out
- The headline language claim is not verifiable from the site - the homepage badge reads "50+ Languages" as of 6 August 2026, while Gospel Ambition's giving page for the same product says the course "is in 43 languages," and no page publishes the actual list
- Governance is described two ways - the about page says Zúme has no "separate entity," while the App Store seller is GOSPEL AMBITION INC and the giving page cites a 501(c)(3) with EIN 83-1935026
- The Android listing is effectively gone - the package linked from the listing, app.training.zume, returns HTTP 404 on 6 August 2026, and so does the newer wrapper package
- The iOS app has not been updated since launch - version 1.0.0 from 9 September 2022, with only ten declared localisations, none of them a large-population language
- No statement of faith is published - the about page offers only broad agreement with the Lausanne Covenant, which leaves a church unable to check doctrinal specifics before adopting the curriculum
- Reported reach is unaudited and dated - "Over 1,000,000 training sessions ... in virtually every country and territory on the planet," with no methodology, on a page still promising a Zúme 5.0 release by early 2024
Best for
- Small groups of four to twelve wanting a structured 20-hour course
- Churches already committed to disciple-making-movement practice
- Cross-cultural workers needing free multilingual training material
- Lay leaders with no teaching background or budget
Avoid if
- You require a published statement of faith before adopting curriculum
- You want a maintained mobile app rather than a browser tool
- You are looking for doctrinal or academic theological depth
- You need audited participation numbers for a mission board
What Zúme Training is
Zúme Training is a free, self-facilitated online course that teaches a small group how to make disciples who go on to make disciples. The name is Greek for yeast, drawn from Matthew 13:33, where the kingdom is compared to yeast worked through a large batch of dough. The about page dates the launch to 14 February 2017, following a 2015 Jonathan Project leadership meeting, and says the principles have been "tested globally for over thirty years."
Practically, a group gathers - in person or on a call - opens the session in the browser, watches short videos, works through discussion questions, practises a skill, and leaves with something to do before the next meeting. The site tracks progress, offers to match the group with a free coach, and provides workbooks and presenter decks to download. Twenty hours completes the course on any of the three schedules.
Twenty hours, three schedules, and no facilitator required
Most discipleship curricula assume a teacher. Zúme assumes there is nobody available and designs around it. The homepage word is "Self-Facilitated," and the structure carries the load a leader normally would: each session is pre-built as short video, discussion prompt, exercise and assignment, so the group only has to press play and answer honestly. The 10-session format is ten two-hour meetings, often weekly for ten weeks. The 20-session format covers the same ground in shorter meetings with more repetition per skill. The intensive compresses it into five four-hour blocks - by the site's description a Friday evening plus all day Saturday and Sunday, which is 4 + 8 + 8 = 20 hours.
The coaching is the second half of the design. A coach is optional, free, and offered before, during or after the training; requests are matched by language and country, with a stated male, female or no-preference option, and the site says every coach has been through the course. That combination - zero cost, no required facilitator, and a real person available anyway - is unusual at this depth of content.
The 32 concepts and the toolkit underneath them
The course splits into two tracks. Being a disciple covers What's a Disciple?, What's a Church?, Keys to Spiritual Growth, Personal Bible Study, Strong Prayer Life and The Power of Obedient Faith. Making disciples covers Sharing God's Story, Telling Your Story, Engaging Seekers, Vision Casting Multiplication, Leading a Simple Church and Training Others.
Underneath sit named, reusable tools listed on the site: S.O.A.P.S. Bible study, accountability groups, Relational Stewardship - List of 100, the gospel and how to share it, a prepared three-minute testimony, baptism and how to do it, the Lord's Supper and how to lead it, prayer walking, the BLESS prayer pattern, how to spend an hour in prayer, the 3-Circles gospel presentation, the 3/3 group meeting pattern, the Four Fields tool, generational mapping, a training cycle for maturing disciples, a three-month plan and a coaching checklist. A group that finishes has practised each of these at least once.
Assignments, not homework reading
The 20-session outline published for Zúme groups sets each meeting at roughly an hour with a fixed rhythm: opening prayer, video or audio, about ten minutes of discussion, an exercise, a between-session challenge, closing prayer. The between-session work is the point. Participants build a List of 100 relational contacts, practise a rehearsed testimony and gospel presentation, walk and pray a specific area, and study daily using S.O.A.P.S.
The final stretch converts all of it into a three-month plan with accountability checkpoints at weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12. That is how the course claims to produce behaviour rather than notes, and it is also what critics point at when they argue the model rewards activity over formation. Either way, a group should know before enrolling that the design expects them to do these things in public.
The Gospel Ambition ecosystem
Zúme is one of four tools Gospel Ambition publishes. Disciple.Tools is the software side - by Gospel Ambition's description, software that "boosts collaboration, clarity, and accountability for disciple and church multiplication movements," which is where groups that finish Zúme are expected to record and follow up contacts. Prayer.Tools supports strategic prayer for movements, and Kingdom.Training handles media strategy.
Practically this means Zúme is the on-ramp to a stack, not a standalone Bible study - a strength if a church wants the whole approach, a caution if it wants a course only.
Pricing
Free
Free
Everything: an account, all 32 concepts across the 10-session, 20-session and intensive schedules, downloadable session workbooks with QR codes to the videos, PowerPoint and Keynote presenter decks, progress tracking, and assignment to a free coach. There is no paid tier, no per-seat charge and no per-church licence. Funding is donation-based - the donate page says "We are crowdfunded" and routes gifts through an external giving platform, and Gospel Ambition, the 501(c)(3) named on the App Store listing and on the giving page, carries the hosting and translation costs.
Print edition (optional)
$12.99
The one thing in the Zúme orbit with a price. William Carey Publishing sells Zúme Training by Curtis Sergeant as a 150-page paperback for $12.99, published 2022, organised as ten two-hour sessions for groups of four to twelve. It is a convenience purchase, not a requirement: the same session material is downloadable as PDF workbooks from the site at no cost, so a group of eight that buys books spends 8 x $12.99 = $103.92 to avoid printing.
There is one price and it is nothing. Registration, the full 32-concept course on all three schedules, downloadable workbooks and presenter decks, progress tracking and a coach are all free, with no per-seat, per-church or per-translation charge published anywhere on the site.
The funding is donation-based and stated as such. The donate page says "We are crowdfunded" and hands off to an external giving platform. Gospel Ambition's Zúme giving page identifies the receiving entity as a 501(c)(3) with EIN 83-1935026 and asks specifically for help paying for "some language upgrades," which tells you where the marginal cost sits: translation, not hosting.
The only priced artefact is paper: the William Carey Publishing workbook at $12.99, whose content is also free as PDF.
Nothing on the site is time-limited, and no page describes a trial, a premium tier or a future paid version. If Zúme were to add one it would be a change of model, not an unlock of something already built.
Where Zúme Training falls behind
No published list of languages. The homepage badge reads "50+ Languages" - checked on 6 August 2026 - and it is the most prominent claim on the site, but Gospel Ambition's own giving page for the same product says the course "is in 43 languages that are the mother tongue of over 5.5 billion people." Two figures, no reconciliation, and no page that simply enumerates them. The gap is probably defensible under some definition of partial versus complete translation; the site does not supply that definition.
Two accounts of who runs it. The about page says Zúme "remains an open initiative without formal organizational control or a separate entity" and therefore has no formal statement of faith. The App Store record names GOSPEL AMBITION INC as seller and the giving page names Gospel Ambition as a 501(c)(3) with an EIN. These can coexist, but a mission committee comparing curricula will want to reconcile them before signing off.
Mobile is abandoned rather than supported. The iOS app is still version 1.0.0 from 9 September 2022 with ten declared localisations - Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, Scottish Gaelic, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Turkish - a set that omits every large-population language the web platform claims. The Android package linked from the faith.tools listing returns HTTP 404 on 6 August 2026. The iOS listing shows 4.5 stars from two ratings, a sample too small to mean anything, which is why the score at the top of this review is editorial rather than a store aggregate. In practice Zúme is a mobile-friendly website, and offline-first use in low-connectivity settings is better served by the downloadable PDF workbooks than by an app.
No doctrinal detail for churches that need it. Agreement with the Lausanne Covenant is a broad evangelical marker, not a statement on baptism, church order or eldership - and the course teaches groups to practise baptism and to lead the Lord's Supper. A congregation with defined polity should read those sessions first, because the material assumes lay administration of both.
Reach figures are assertions. "Over 1,000,000 training sessions ... in virtually every country and territory on the planet" appears on the giving page with no definition of a session and no audit, and the same page still forecasts a Zúme 5.0 release "by early 2024," which dates it. A separate Zúme article counting 21 Zúme reading plans on the YouVersion Bible App with "above 183,000 subscribers" is at least a third-party-hosted number, but it too carries a 2023 timestamp.
Zúme Training vs. Safar Discipleship vs. GodTools
All three are free and multilingual, and they solve different problems. Zúme is the curriculum: 20 hours, 32 concepts, a group of four to twelve, and an explicit goal of starting simple churches that multiply. Safar Discipleship from Elam Ministries is one-to-one - 30 steps in three stages - and aims at grounding a new believer rather than launching a movement. GodTools from Cru is not a course at all but a conversation toolkit for a single encounter, with visual gospel presentations you hand across a language barrier.
If the need is "our group of eight wants to learn to make disciples and we have no teacher and no budget," Zúme is the obvious answer and nothing else in the category is as complete for free. If the need is "one new believer needs someone to walk with them," Safar fits better and asks far less of the leader. If the need is "I want something in my pocket for a conversation on a plane," GodTools or The Four is the right size and Zúme is twenty hours too big.
The real comparison for Zúme is not another app but a printed curriculum from a denominational publisher, and there Zúme wins on price and loses on documentation. That kind of course arrives with a statement of faith, a named author team and a doctrinal appendix. Zúme arrives with more content, at no cost, in more languages, and with a governance description that requires cross-checking two pages.
The bottom line
Zúme Training is the most substantial free discipleship curriculum a small group can pick up without a teacher, a budget or a login fee, and the depth of its toolkit - S.O.A.P.S., the List of 100, 3/3 groups, Four Fields, a three-month plan with dated check-ins - is well past what free usually means in this category. It is also a resource whose distinctive claim, its language count, is stated four different ways across its own ecosystem, whose governance is described as having no entity by one page and a 501(c)(3) EIN by another, and whose methodology sits in the middle of a live and well-published argument within evangelical missions. Groups already inside the disciple-making-movement world will find it excellent and free. Churches that need doctrinal specifics and auditable numbers before adopting curriculum should read the about page, the giving page and both sides of the DMM literature first, and then decide.
Alternatives to Zúme Training
Safar DiscipleshipElam Ministries' 30-step, one-to-one discipleship path in three stages. Far less demanding than Zúme and better suited to grounding a single new believer, with no movement-multiplication framing.
GodToolsCru's free multilingual conversation toolkit. A single-encounter aid rather than a course, useful alongside Zúme for the gospel-sharing sessions but no substitute for the 20 hours.
Life on MissionThe North American Mission Board's free gospel-conversation app, including AI role-play for rehearsal. Narrower than Zúme, denominationally identified, and much easier to check doctrinally.
The FourA four-symbol gospel outline from Cru Switzerland in 40+ regional translations. The thinnest option in the category and the fastest to learn - the opposite trade-off to Zúme's twenty hours.Frequently asked questions
Is Zúme Training really free, and who pays for it?
Yes. Registration, all 32 concepts on all three schedules, downloadable workbooks and presenter decks, progress tracking and coaching are free, with no paid tier published anywhere on the site. The donate page says "We are crowdfunded," and Gospel Ambition - a 501(c)(3) with EIN 83-1935026 on its giving page, and the seller named on the App Store listing - carries the costs, asking specifically for help paying for language upgrades. The only priced item is the optional 150-page printed workbook from William Carey Publishing at $12.99.
How many sessions is it and how long does each one take?
Twenty hours in total, on your choice of three schedules. The original format is ten two-hour sessions, commonly run once a week for ten weeks. The 20-session format spreads the same content over shorter meetings - the published 20-meeting outline sets each at about an hour - to give more practice per skill. The intensive format is five four-hour blocks, described as a Friday evening plus all day Saturday and Sunday, which totals 4 + 8 + 8 = 20 hours.
How many languages is it available in?
The site's own figures disagree. The homepage badge read "50+ Languages" on 6 August 2026, while Gospel Ambition's giving page for Zúme says the course "is in 43 languages that are the mother tongue of over 5.5 billion people." No page on zume.training enumerates the list, so the honest answer is somewhere between 43 and 50-plus depending on what counts as a completed translation - a term the site does not define. The iOS app, separately, declares only ten localisations.
Do we need a coach or a trained facilitator to run it?
No. The homepage word is "Self-Facilitated": the sessions are pre-built as short videos, discussion questions and exercises, so a group can run them without a teacher. A free coach is offered as an option before, during or after the training, matched by language and country, with a male, female or no-preference setting, and the site says all coaches have completed the training themselves. Coach availability depends on language - the platform has language-specific waiting and notification states - so a group in a less-served language may run the course unaccompanied.
What actually happens in a session?
A group of roughly four to twelve gathers in person or on a call, opens the session in the browser, and works through a fixed rhythm: prayer, a short video or audio segment, about ten minutes of discussion, an exercise, and a challenge to complete before next time. Skills are practised rather than described - building a List of 100 contacts, rehearsing a three-minute testimony, S.O.A.P.S. Bible study, prayer walking, the 3-Circles gospel presentation, the 3/3 group meeting pattern, and then a three-month plan with accountability checkpoints at weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12.
What is the relationship between Zúme, Disciple.Tools and the wider DMM world?
Both Zúme Training and Disciple.Tools are published by Gospel Ambition, alongside Prayer.Tools and Kingdom.Training. Zúme teaches the practice; Disciple.Tools is the software for tracking contacts, groups and generational reporting once a group is working. The content itself sits in the disciple-making movement and Training for Trainers lineage - the print edition is authored by Curtis Sergeant - and the toolkit is recognisably that tradition: person of peace, 3/3 groups, Four Fields, generational mapping, obedience-based assignments. Gospel Ambition's stated aim, on the associated vision site, is "to saturate the world with multiplying disciples in our generation," with numeric targets such as one trainer per 5,000 people in North America and per 50,000 globally.
Is disciple-making-movement methodology controversial, and what do the critics say?
It is contested in print by people who share the same broad evangelical convictions, and a church should read both sides. The best-known published critique is Matt Rhodes, No Shortcut to Success: A Manifesto for Modern Missions (2022), which argues against what it calls the "amateurization of missions" and against an insistence on rapid growth, and raises concerns about installing ill-prepared leaders, obedience-based discipleship, person-of-peace strategy and self-discovery methods. Reviewing it in Themelios 47.1, C. J. Moore of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary recommends the book but notes that Rhodes draws on "a carefully-selected handful" of older sources and risks caricature. On the other side, Fellowship International publishes point-by-point responses from Pam Arlund, Warrick Farah and Mark Naylor to Rhodes, J. D. Stiles and Chad Vegas, arguing that multiplication is about sustainability rather than speed and that Scripture is the primary safeguard against error. Reported multiplication numbers are disputed on both sides, which is one reason Zúme's own unaudited "over 1,000,000 training sessions" claim should be read as an assertion. This review reports the argument; it does not adjudicate it.
Sources & further reading
- Zúme Training official site ↗
- What is Zúme Training? (about page) ↗
- Zúme training schedules and course content ↗
- Gospel Ambition giving page for Zúme Training ↗
- Gospel Ambition (parent organisation and sibling tools) ↗
- Zúme Training print edition, William Carey Publishing ↗
- Themelios 47.1 review of Matt Rhodes, No Shortcut to Success ↗
- Fellowship International: Addressing Disciple-Making Movement Critiques ↗
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