3 P's of church planting

Try reading aloud the following lines...

All atouhirty has been gevin to Me in haeevn and on eraht. Go terherofe and mkae dipsiciles of all the notians, bipatizng tehm in the nmae of the Fehtar and the Son and the Hloy Siript, ticheang tehm to osberve all that I cammonedd you; and lo, I am whih you ayawls, eevn to the end of the age.

Even with the atrocious spelling, I am fairly certain that 99% were able to read and understand the message. Why?

1) you had a pretty good understanding of the general context of the message.

2) the first and last letters of each word are correct and the mind reorders the middle letters to their proper place.

The above paragraph is what our church planting looks like more often than not. It is a jumbled mess, yet somehow, God breaks through and does something beautiful to iron out the wrinkles.

So, if the overall context is important, and the first and last letters are important, how does this translate into the 3 P's of church planting?

The three most important words in church planting are...

Prayer
Passion
Perseverance

Prayer is the most important ingredient for a church planter. Prayer gives us the needed guidance and context for understanding God's ways. Prayer keeps us on course even though we may make a huge mess of things between steps in the church plant.

The second most important words for the church planter are passion and perseverance. If the first and last letters are needed to make sense of a word, passion and perseverance are the equivalents needed to see churches planted. When passion and perseverance are on the ends of each church planting step, a lot can go wrong in between and still come out OK.

I find it reassuring to know that if I will focus upon prayer at the center of my life and ministry, asking the Spirit to fan the flames of passion within, and persevere regardless of the ups and downs along the way, God will take care of the rest. He will reorder the "letters" in such a way that His church gets planted.

You can make a lot of mistakes in church planting but when prayer, passion, and perseverance are present there will be power.

Ministry Happens

One of my mottos is "ministry happens." I think that at least 90% of the ministry that happens in the gospels is spontaneous. Jesus was headed from one place to another and an opportunity would present itself. Jesus was willing to get off the beaten path and take the road less traveled. He didn't see them as detours or dead ends. Too often we mistake human interruptions for divine appointments. --from a Mark Batterson message entitled "Wild Goose Chase."

For people like myself who are geared toward intentional ministry, the above thought is a needed reflection. Am I too busy to take time for someone interrupting "my ministry?" Am I so geared towards that 10% intentional ministry that I overlook the 90% God sets in my path daily?

Is not that 90% as much "real ministry" as the 10% I set out to accomplish?

"Intentional ministry" people often hide behind the excuse of thinking we are too busy with real ministry. We simply do not have time for unplanned spontaneous ministry. The reality is we view our own agenda as more important than the needs of others. Their need for feedback and/or attention is secondary to our accomplishing our more important intentional ministry agenda.

Was that Christ's attitude who often left the crowds and made time to go eat at Zaccheus' house? Healing blind beggar Bartimaeus? Stopping in his tracks on his way to a resurrection when the woman touched the hem of his robe? Taking time for the children, leaving the crowds to wait? 90% of ministry happens when we seize those spontaneous opportunities that come disguised as detours or interruptions.

Think social media are a fad? Think again!

When is a group unreached?

Article below from The Network for Strategic Missions by Justin Long. Can you spot the problems and challenges in the following analysis?

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One of the difficulties in measuring which groups are unreached and need to be prioritized is the challenge of measuring the definition of an unreached group:

“An unreached or least-reached people is a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group.” (1982 Lausanne Committee Chicago meeting, www.joshuaproject.net/definitions.php)

“Adequate numbers and resources” is the challenge. What is “adequate”? The original Joshua Project editorial committee selected the criteria of less than 2% Evangelical Christianity and less than 5% Christian...

...For our purposes we need only the AD 2000 figures as follows:

• Latent Christians (inactive in mission): 1,351,743,000
• Lay activists (intercessors, givers, short-timers, etc): 642,297,000
• Pastoral workers (bishops, clergy, pastors, chaplains, etc): 3,969,000
• Home missionaries (e.g. Americans among Americans): 925,000
• Cross-cultural home missionaries (e.g. British in England among Somalis): 210,000
• World C foreign missionaries (in Christianized countries): 306,800
• World B foreign missionaries (in World B countries): 103,000
• World A (unevangelized) foreign missionaries: 10,200
  

Total home missionaries (near-culture + cross-culture) = 925,000 + 210,000 = 1,135,000
Total foreign missionaries = 306,800 + 103,000 + 10,200 = 419,200

Note that this includes missionaries of all traditions and Christians of all traditions. We’ll use this as a global average. Rounded, we can see that there are 1 million home missionaries and 0.4 million foreign for 2 billion Christians,

or 1,000 home missionaries and 400 foreign missionaries for every 2 million believers
or 500 home missionaries and 200 foreign missionaries for every 1 million believers
or 50 home missionaries and 20 foreign missionaries for every 100,000 believers
or 5 home missionaries and 2 foreign missionaries for every 10,000 believers
or 2 home missionaries and 1 foreign missionary for every 5,000 believers.

“What will it take” (Momentum, September 2006) suggests we need 1 worker (foreign or home) who raises up 100 home workers who each reach 1,000 people. If we accept this as a general rule of thumb, then a people group of 1 million people needs:

* 1 (foreign or home) worker to pioneer: which requires at least 5,000 believers
* 100 home workers to fully reach: which requires at least 200,000 believers.

Now, can you spot some of the problems in this analysis? What does this challenge mean for the church? What are the implications?

Tears of the saints

Having seen all this you can choose to look the other way, but you can never say again, 'I did not know.' -William Wilberforce

What would happen if institutional churches closed their doors?

Wayne Jacobsen needs no introduction for those livng their Christian faith outside of the institutional/legacy church system. In his What If Everyone Left the Sunday Morning Institutions? Wayne shares an interesting perspective.

Let’s say today everyone stops attending our Sunday (or Saturday) morning institutions. Would the Church lose its presence in the world? I don’t think so, and in fact I think you could argue that it would have both a greater and more effective impact. Admittedly there would be some chaos with so many support staff out of work, and dealing with buildings that would be difficult to sell, but once we got through all of that, I am convinced the church would take on a GREATER presence in the world. Our world wouldn’t have a daily reminder driving down their streets how fragmented Christianity is into its various institutions because people simply wouldn’t learn how to love each other they way they are loved by God.

Those who really love Jesus would find themselves liberated from all the machinery that consumes a huge amount of time, energy and resource and find their lives in more spacious places where they would have time to get to know and love their neighbor, their colleagues at work and people they pass on the street. Admittedly that wouldn’t be everyone’s response, but the reason I don’t fear people not being ‘committed anywhere’ is that they will get to find out just how committed to Jesus they really are. And that’s good for them and good for the world. Many Sunday-attenders have no idea they are missing out on what it means to be truly committed to Jesus. They think that attending a service and dropping some coins in the offering basket validate the depth of their faith. Yes, some would end up disgruntled and fragmented, but they wouldn’t be mistaken for those who really ‘get’ this journey and live in the increasing reality of being transformed by Jesus.

To survive, people would have to become more active in their faith, seeking out opportunities for growth, for relationship and for sharing God’s life in the world. They would lose the passivity that allows people to sit through a meeting on Sunday and live unchanged the rest of the week. New believers would be taught to know the Lord in small groups who share the life of the family together, rather than as cogs in a big machine. And we would have so many more resources to do whatever God might ask us to do, like reach out to AIDs patients, build hospitals in third world countries, feed the poor or host an outreach in a local park where others might come to know him. Leaders would emerge not by their education, vocation, or ability to draw a crowd, but because they have a gift to help people grow and live hospitably so that they actually come in contact with real people.

In summary, the Church would take on a greater presence in the world just because of the number of active believers scattered throughout it every day to make him known. And it would be more authentic as well, since it would be Jesus demonstrating himself through transformed lives, which I think is far more powerful than ornate buildings, spurious TV preachers, or the excesses and failures of our institutional leaders today...

I think Jesus saw it that way too, which is why he didn’t leave us with the institutional instructions. Or so that’s how I see it…

How do you see it? Do you agree with Wayne's analysis? What do you think would happen if institutional churches closed their doors?

Best kid in the world

My wife, Linda, posted on her blog A Foreign Life some of the thoughts and feelings we have for our son, Josh. She has done so through a series of photos dating back to when we first brought Josh home to live with us. We are proud of our son, Josh and want our friends and readers to get to know why we think he is the "best kid in the world!"

What is truth?

This post grows out of a response to the long comment chain from this post a couple of weeks ago.

Pilate asks Jesus, "What is truth?"

To me it is an ever-deepening and growing awareness of the truths of our Lord.

Truth is like a house.

We start by getting to know the house by entering through the main door into the foyer. Here we admire the prints on the walls, hang our coat on the rack, and wipe our feet on the door mat.

Just about the time we think we have figured out the house based on our experience and observations of the foyer, our host leads us into the living room of the house. There we discover even more wonders of the house as we sit in the soft chairs, walk on the plush carpet, and admire the flower arrangements on the coffee table and mantel.

With our visit to the living room we are even more sure we know and understand what the house is all about. We begin to tell our friends about all we have seen and experienced based on the foyer and living room.

One of our friends says what he liked about the house was the fried chicken and mashed potatoes he had enjoyed in the dining room.

Fried chicken? Mashed potatoes? Dining room? For one not yet introduced to the dining room and kitchen areas of the house, this sounds suspect from our foyer/living room point of view.

I begin to deny the "truth" of my friends fried chicken experience. I lovingly try to correct him in his error and restore him to the FULL TRUTH as was revealed to me in the foyer and living room parts of the house.

While this is certainly a crude and maybe flawed illustration of how we understand truth, it does reveal how many of us interpret truth based upon our experience of a portion of the whole.

Back 20 years ago, as a new missionary to Guayaquil, a national friend invited a bunch of us over for a Sunday evening parillada (Bar-B-Que). I was horrified and disappointed that the invitation was for a Sunday evening at 7:00pm. Why? That, of course, was the same time as the Sunday evening church service. What would God think of us having a parillada when we all should be sitting in church? Sunday was the Lord's Day, not a day for parilladas and friends.

I remember sitting in church that Sunday evening totally convinced that I was right and my worldly brothers were wrong for going ahead with the parillada. I had understood the truth of church through my limited exposure as something I had learned in the "foyer." Since the kitchen, patio, Bar-b-que grill and dining room portions of this truth had not yet been revealed to me, I was quite certain that my paradigm of church was right, and that my unspiritual brothers were quite immature in their worldly ways. It was up to me to correct their "dining room theology" with my "foyer theology".

Isn't truth an ever-deepening revelation as we allow the Lord to lead us further into his "house of truth?" Just when we think we have finally discovered the truth of one of God's mysteries, He leads us through a new door into another room of the house, revealing yet more wonders which add to our understanding of that truth.

It seems to me a lot of the arguing, and divisiveness going on--especially amongst fellow believers--is that we argue our case for truth out of our limited exposure to only a portion of the whole truth. Those who have journeyed through only the foyer and living room think those enjoying fried chicken in the dining room are way out of bounds.

But could it be that the riches of Christ Jesus, the author of all truth, go so much deeper than most of us have experienced to date?

What do your think? I welcome your thoughts, observations, etc.