Moving at the Speed of God

This past week I had the opportunity to sit down with a leader in church planting in my tribe. His name is David Jackson, and he is the church multiplication and church planting guru of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware. He also does a podcast called Moving at the Speed of God. David is a collegue and coached me for a year. We were able to put together a podcast on my experiences in church planting, church restarts, and being a parenting church. Enjoy!

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Organisms reproduce.  Institutions get bloated.

That is a large difference between the MIROR, Missional church and others.

Reproduction is not copying you, it is creating something new.

Remember the movie Multiplicity? In the movie, Michael Keaton’s character, Doug Kinney, is a stressed-out family man who meets up with a scientist who has developed a successful means for cloning humans. The scientist allows Doug to make a clone of himself that can take over for him at work, while he tries to spend some quality time with his family. The clone, called “Two” (while having all the knowledge, memory and experience of Doug), turns out to be overly macho and easily irritated, suffering a residual personality quirk of the cloning process.

Eventually two more clones are made. “Three”, in sharp contrast to two, is extremely sensitive and thoughtful (“Two” considers him a ‘wuss’). “Four” is cloned from “Two”, and has the mentality of an overly-curious child. Unfortunately since he is a clone-of-a-clone, his IQ is considerably lower than that of his predecessors, since the personality defects are more pronounced when a clone is cloned (The analogy from the movie refers to how a copy of a copy may not be as ’sharp’ as the original). One night Doug leaves home for a business trip. While Doug is gone each of the clones run into Laura and each one sleeps with her. The next day “Two” comes down with a cold and can’t go to work, so he sends “Three”. As “Three” goes to work not knowing a thing about construction, an inspection on site is on that day. “Three” unimpresses the inspector which leads to him losing Doug’s job.

As the movie progresses, Doug’s wife becomes increasingly upset with her husband, not realizing that many times she is speaking to a clone. After she pours out her heart to “Four”, mentioning how he (Doug) has never kept his promise on fixing the house, she asks him what he wants and is unromantically told “I want pizza”. Upset, she takes the children to live with her parents. When Doug returns he learns that Laura and the kids have left. He also learns from the clones’ confessions that he has lost his job and each one of them have slept with Laura. Trying to figure out how to get Laura back, “Four” tells him about what she said to him on how he never fixed the house. With the help of the clones, Doug remodels the house and wins back the love of his wife. With their purposes served, the three clones leave and set up a pizza shop called “Three Men from Nowhere”. There “Two” becomes the business man of the shop, “Three” is the chef and “Four” is the delivery boy. (1)

Reproducing is not cloning; it is not going multi-campus.  Reproducing involves birthing something new and separate with its own DNA.

Reproducing requires sacrifices from the parent.

The parents of any organism sacrifice for the sake of the child. This could require the release of a number of your current church members as they participate in the birth of the new organism.  In our church, though we were a small church of 50-70, we released three families, eight people in all who felt God was leading them to our plant.  We encouraged our planter to build relationships knowing that we could have members released to him.  We lost almost 10% of our membership.  However, it really was not our church.  It was HIS church.

Reproduction expands the influence of the parenting church.

The child church will reach people the parenting church cannot.  The child church will be able to be contextual as it reaches people through the personality of the church in the context it resides.

So how do you go about reproducing?

1.  Spend some time with Bob Robert’s book The Multiplying Church: The New Math for Starting New Churches. It’s one of the best books on multiplication written.

2. Talk to denominational leadership or other church planting organizations. There are many church planting organizations out there, from Glocal.net to Acts 29 to Church Multiplication Associates.

3.  Develop a church planting process and system.

4.  Find areas in your community where there are large populations of unchurched.

5. Plant a church.

Notes:

(1) Wikipedia contributors, “Multiplicity (film),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiplicity_(film)&oldid=243283039 (accessed November 3, 2008).

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I’ve spent 3 days away finishing drafts of my dissertation.  They are off to the editor and to the professor.  I was not going to post this week because technically I’m on vacation until Monday, but I just couldn’t let these two posts go without commenting.

A couple of days ago, my friend Steve Addison, an Australian, had a post entitled Southern Baptist success?  Maybe.  He states:

I keep bumping into church leaders of different persuasions whose goal it is to see their church plants grow to 500+.

If you want a case study of how it’s done, try the Southern Baptists. I’ve just finished a 1994 article by Roger Finke that shows between 1920 and 1990 the average size of a Southern Baptist church soared from 115 to 396. Impressive.

The other trend he noticed was the dramatic increase in seminary trained professional clergy. Before 1950 the Southern Baptist seminaries produced 10,000 graduates. From 1950-90 the number grew to 60,000.

The Southern Baptists heritage was all about small churches and lay leadership. Today it’s professional staff and large churches.

Bigger churches. Trained clergy. Sounds like a recipe for success.

Maybe.

I commented on Steve’s post that the irony is that 1950 was the year Southern Baptists started our trned downward, increasing at a decreasing rate to the point that membership has declined this year.  And the trend in a continuing decrease unless something drastic is done.

Correlation?  Maybe.

We’ve trained people how to do weddings and funerals and run a church.  What we haven’t taught them to do is release people to do ministry, to reproduce, and to consider God’s kingdom before the church’s (or pastor’s) kingdom.

Which brings me to the second post I want to highlight.

Bob Roberts blogged this week about How DFW got the Buckle on the Bible Belt.  He states:

People sometimes make fun of Dallas-Fort Worth being the buckle on the Bible belt. It isn’t anymore. It’s unbuckled. The stats are in and church attendance is around the 17% mark – in northeast Tarrant county where I live it’s probably more like 9%. We think because we see churches and some of them big that we are churched. We are not. A lot of the shelves (pews) are empty in those stores! The ones that are full are often filled with people looking for a different kind of church – not Jesus! If we were “churched” anywhere near what we were just 35 years ago at a minimum we would have to double the number of churches out here.

For some pastors that would freak them out – more competition! We need to shift our mindset from one that says “I pastor a church to reach this community . . . ” to one that says “I pastor a church to create communities of faith in this community all over.” One thinks like a preacher/pastor the other a missionary/mobilizer.

And I thought DFW was supposed to be the most churched area in the country!

I heard an interesting statement last year at a missional leadership conference by a Canadian Southern Baptist.  He said, when churches go mega, the kingdom decreases.  Why?  Because they kill a lot of small & medium-sized churches.

Maybe instead of growing tall and increasing overhead, churches should reproduce and increase the kingdom.

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