EL’s Dribble

I want to share an entry from another organic church leader’s that simply says what I think most church practitioners don’t really get. It’s a continuation of my entry “the people are the product“. It’s the fact that we’re out to make disciples and not plant churches. When I was working my way through the church planting training mechanism of our denomination, I constantly heard, “The only way to evangelize the United States is through saturation church planting.” Which means, we need to plant as many churches as possible [specifically institutional style churches with a hip makeover]. Because new churches always are geared towards evangelism and old churches are geared towards taking care of their own. So the only way is to just keep planting as many as financially possible.

But that misses the point all together – because: first, new churches of that stripe aren’t necessarily evangelizing/disciplemaking more so than they are working to get more people in the building; and secondly it’s then wrongly assuming that building more institutions leads to more disciples. That is a lie of the devil – the same as having a nice home leads to whole and healthy families. Maybe sorta… but really, no.

Roger Thoman’s post is simply reminding us that our goal and heart and passion should be making disciples… helping them fall deeply in love with Jesus, follow him with reckless abandon and then help them help others… and continuing the viral nature of the Gospel through the world. Check it out.

Discipling Viral Disciplers
By Roger Thoman
Originally Posted HERE

I no longer try to start simple/house churches.  I think house churches are great.  They provide a place for people to experience participatory, everyone-matters church life.  They provide a way for people to really connect into authentic, one-another community.  They often provide a place for people to recover from some of the pains caused by institutional church life.  But house churches are no longer the end game for me.

“Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: ‘What does his voice sound like? What games does he like best? Does he collect butterflies?’. They ask: ‘How old is he? How many brothers does he have? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?’ Only then do they think they know him.”
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I talk to a lot of people about our community and the churchier people always ask about numbers. And then ask very little after that. It’s always a race to get more in the door… and not a look at what “more” really is. Many a prophet [Leonard Sweet, Reggie McNeal, etc] have talked about changing the metrics of church and church planting… “measuring” the important things that reflect transformation not accumulation.

I had to explain to my boss what was getting me excited lately… things that reflect the right kind of growth. Lisa and Serg have been in our community for a long time and have been leading a house church for quite some time. They were good and faithful leaders, but have struggled at times and were surely learning on the job [that's intentional]. But over the course of the last few years, they along with myself have realized that they have a discernable passion for high school students. And as I began to notice it more I wondered, “Why the heck are they leading a group full of their peers. It ought to be high school kids!”

Lisa and Serg helped at a youth retreat recently discovering yet again that the passion in them for students wasn’t arbitrary, but certainly God-planted. So when Lisa returned she prayed how she might move out among her students to bring Jesus to them. Through prayer, she was led to 5 students – 2 of whom do not know Jesus. She asked all 5 students if they wanted to meet up to study the Bible together and all of them gave a resounding ‘yes’. They’ll start it up at McDonald’s this Saturday.

During the retreat Serg had a great connection with one student and made a very tangible impact in his life. The student returned back to school and after a week, told Lisa and Serg that he had 3 classmates who didn’t know Jesus but were interested in learning more. And he asked them what he was supposed to do now and Serg is now discipling this student to continue to bring the Gospel to his classmates.

I realize that I can’t count any of these people as “members” of Haven. And I don’t want to. It doesn’t work all to well with the traditional metrics of church planting. And the truth is that Lisa and Serg likely needed to grow in certain areas of their lives before they were able to get to this point. It’s hard to “measure” their growth over the course of the last few years… numbers don’t reflect that either. But it’s their growth as lovers and followers of Jesus that precipitated God placing them in the right place with the right heart to begin transformational movement among people that they have true passion for. Either way… numbers don’t reflect that.

I have had to wrestle away the importance of numbers in my own spirit. Wrestle away my need to base my value/significance on the numbers. And relearn what it means to see the important things… about people and about community. And begin to live it even when my spirit screams otherwise.

I realize that my little church planting experiment has done more for me than any one else… but I’m glad some of what I’m learning is rubbing off on the people who are coming along for the ride.

I hesitate to write those two words because those are specific to church people… and not just any church people, but church leaders describing organizational process. In anycase, if you fit into that category… then here’s an interesting article with Neil Cole and Ed Young, two leaders who sit on the opposite extreme of the missional/attractional spectrum.

The article says, “The contrasts between Young and Cole are striking: extrovert and introvert, megachurch and microchurch, centralized and decentralized. But what’s surprising is what these two leaders share in common.” When I read the interview… I can’t think of one thing that the two guys have in common. As a house church guy, I find Young’s answers ridiculous especially as they compare and contrast them in the interview. I’m not a big fan of blogging about church methodology, but thought this article was interesting.

Coming and Going
Two leaders. One mission. Two very different strategies.
a Leadership interview

Monday, November 24, 2008

Observing Neil Cole and Ed Young Jr. is a study in contrasts. The soft-spoken Cole quietly entered the vacant sanctuary where we were meeting. He lingered in the back for a while before anyone realized he had arrived. By contrast, Young burst into the room with a shout—every head turned. The sanctuary was immediately electrified.

Their contrasting personalities are paired with very different approaches to ministry. Ed Young Jr. is senior pastor of Fellowship Church, a seeker-driven congregation that began in Dallas in 1990. After surpassing 20,000 in weekly attendance, Fellowship Church is still growing with a highly structured multi-site model that uses video broadcasts of Young’s sermons. The megachurch now has four locations in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and recently launched its fifth campus in Miami, Florida.

Neil Cole is a pastor and the director of Church Multiplication Associates (CMA), a “growing family of organic church networks.” Cole advocates a decentralized, micro-church strategy to reach the growing number of people who will never be attracted to a worship service. CMA began in 1990, the same year as Young’s Fellowship Church. In that time, Cole’s network has launched hundreds of churches in homes and coffeeshops across forty states and thirty countries.

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“After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force… the movement is natural, arising spontaneously. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with the time; therefore no harm results”
~ Ancient Chinese Saying

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