Day 4 PM, Church Planting Movements Training Transcripts (Unedited)

In church planting, I find that church planters get stuck in five different places. Often they have no coping mechanisms. Here are five ways of moving forward:

 

1. Getting access to a community through ministry. It can be business, medical, etc. It’s about them, not about us. We always have to ask what they need. We need to focus the access on meeting their needs. Ministry is meeting people’s felt needs. When we do it in a new community, it becomes an access. But access is not the motive for ministry. We do it because the people have a need and in the Name of Jesus we meet the need.

 

1. Finding the Person of Peace. You have to live a life among them that helps them find you. If you live out Deut. 6, a life of obedience and making statements that indicate you are a spiritual person and through thick and thin they see you as a spiritual person, or that you’ve changed, the people that want that find you. So often, it’s not that we go out and search high and low for a person of peace, but in the act of doing ministry, the persons of peace find us. The point is you have to be touching a lot of lives for that person to find you. When I see a church planter who is not having a lot of success, I ask “How many people are you meeting?” “What kind of ministry are you doing?” I can tell if you’re going to be a good church planter by walking in your office. If you’re in the office, you’re not a church planter. You have to be hanging out with the lost people. Who do you spend your time with? If you spend your time with saved people, you’re not going to plant churches. You have to be among them, yet different. Be in the world, but not of the world. I love hanging out with Christians. But I am a church planter, so I have to give up that which I love in order to do that which Christ has commanded. It takes walking from comfort to discomfort. I am obedient to what Christ has told me to do. I will do this until He tells me he wants me to do something else. You have to live this way until you find the person of peace. If you’re comfortable, you’re not going to find the person of peace. If you’re comfortable in your life, you’re not going to find him. He’s somewhere else. Remember the “Go!” that Jesus said? It’s where it’s uncomfortable. Those are the places we go to. This is where church planting lives, on that edge. The edge is something we’re creating. The edge is where the Gospel meets lostness. If you’re around saved people all the time, you’re not anywhere near the edge. You can’t even see the edge. You have to get out there in the lost world. If you go there living sh’ma, hearing and obeying, you create the edge right where you are. This is what we have to understand as church planters. We have to create the edge where the Gospel creates lostness. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the uttermost parts of the earth. The edge can be right in your living room if you have family. Neighbors. There are edges we can create everywhere, from inside our household to going around the world many times. If we are going to find persons of peace, we have to step off the ledge and find the edge. Some say it’s just too hard and sit back down on the couch and just won’t do it. You have to come to the point of saying, “I will create edges in my family, in my neighborhood, wherever God tells us to go.” Our presence at the edge is what permits the person of peace to be revealed. They don’t know they are persons of peace until they see something in you, a spiritual life in you, and then they say, “There’s something in you I want.” Here’s the other thing: New Christians are already at the edge. They’re the best people to find persons of peace. Don’t yank the edge out from underneath people’s feet. Support the edge. CPM is not about throwing out rescue tubes in the ocean. We give them a boat kit and they build their own boat. We get them engaged in it and they build it out further and further.
2. Moving the relationship from just the Person of Peace to the Family/Group of Peace. There is a barrier from moving the person of peace to the community he/she is a part of. Having a relationship before you start transmit information. Information doesn’t bring relationship. You have to hang out with people and get to know them and they get to know you. As you build the relationship, you can say, “You’re only seeing a part of me. I’d like you to know the other part of me – my spiritual side.” This moves slowly. Yes. I went the fast evangelism explosion route, the CWT route, and we called it success if we had 1 out of 100. Our ministry has baptized over 5 million people in the last 12.5 years. Personal evangelism is not the biblical model. Three people in the New Testament: The Ethiopian eunuch, Paul, and another temple leader that Paul led to Christ. Then we have a period of time in early Acts, where we had mass evangelism: 3000 came to the Lord. Within a few weeks after Pentecost, we don’t see that again. When Paul tries to go back to mass evangelism, Paul gets beaten up. Acts 10 – the pattern begins: Cornelius and his household believed and were baptized, Lydia, the Philippian jailer, etc. Oikos. The pattern of evangelism focuses on minimal social units. But you can’t accept Christ for other people. When you evangelize social units, the individuals come to Christ in clumps; like picking entire grape clusters rather than individual grapes. Instead of presenting a Gospel that will be turned down 199 times out of 200, we spend 20 weeks, teaching them by example and by word, to reach a community. That’s how you get explosive growth; moving from a social relationship into their oikos and their community.
3. Moving a group from conversation to Discovery Bible Study. This takes time and energy. A lot of people approach it long. If you announce you have a 26-week Bible study, it’s just not in our culture. If you start out by asking if you can share something you’ve learned about God and open up your Bible and read that. Ask how they would say it in their own words. Then ask “What does this tell us about God?” You’ve just done a discovery Bible study, but you haven’t made a big deal. Next week, say you’ve learned something about God today, but nothing more. Someone will ask. Then you can do it again. You can transition from having discussion to have a discovery Bible study. If you do it right, you will keep it interesting. If they get scared and back away, you just need to have patience. Some of you were really not wanting to be here this week, but some of you have told me you have changed your mind. The process changed your mind. Process matters. How you do it will determine your success rate. No one method works every time. It’s a relationship deal. You have to learn how to communicate that. Jesus was not always “successful” – think about the rich young ruler. Sometimes you can do it the very best you can do it and it’s not going to work. Being a church planter is about being a failure. It will fail more often than it will succeed, but when it succeeds, you will get a lot of fruit. If you have a method that fails every single time, you might want to change your method.
4. Transition from Bible Study Group to Church. After four to six months they might believe and be baptized. How do you move it? This is your goal. This is also your homework.

 

Questions:

Can you share stories about #4? Walk in and ask questions. It’s about relationship, being creative, being intentional, moving from conversation as friends. If you start the relationship with spiritual conversation, it’s not so hard to move it. If you start it with high fives and sports teams, it’s a lot harder.

 

Can you elaborate a little bit on #5? You’ve already spent 25-30 weeks doing DBS, you moved it to obedience and then you start introducing passages on church and they grow into it.

 

Before the person of peace goes out and starts training others, is it our responsibility to make sure they’re believers and baptized? Remember in the DBS, “Who are you going to share it with?” These guys start sharing with others right away. Does the facilitator of a DBS save the lost? You’re making disciples of lost people and they’re doing the work. When Jesus sent the 12 out ahead of him to the villages, were they saved yet? He had them doing things before they even knew He was the Messiah.

 

Could you respond to Luke 9:7, 8, 9. It seems to be conviction or stirring. How often have you seen this? We’ve seen transformation so powerful that villages 20-30 km away have come saying, “We want what is happening here.” There is nothing secret about what we do. You can be spiritual and not overtly Christian cultural. You can be a follower of Christ without being too Christian cultural.

 

We can be part of an existing, established church and do parties with them, but you can spend the other 3-6 days a week creating edge. That has to be a mindset. You can’t say, “I’ve gone to church and I’ve done my responsibility.”

 

You have touched on a hot button when you talked about lost people facilitating groups. The theology of lost people – getting the DNA wrong. If we don’t settle that issue, this is one of those tweaking things that will cause it to go wrong. I’ve got staff that doesn’t trust that. You have to resolve in your mind that it’s okay to let a lost person lead a 3-column study. If you’re struggling with that, it’s okay. We need to camp there a little.

 

People who shudder about lost people lead a 3-column study. I never let a lost person teach or preach. But if you let a lost person lead a DBS, asking the questions doesn’t require all the questions. If you go out and try it, you’ll realize that as sophisticated as we are in your library, you will find that the opinions will fit within the norms of the commentators. Heresy doesn’t come from lost people, but from educated Christian people who take authority and drag people down the road. Work with the facilitator, let the facilitator take over. Churches planted by an outside will not reproduce. But if you coach the lost facilitator to lead a 3-column Bible study. It is counterintuitive to your Christian background. Try it. Be honest with the try. Jesus sent out his disciples to proclaim the Gospel. We’ve put up barriers around the Gospel with our religion. If something’s not true where does it come from? Satan. Spiritual warfare for the most part is Satan convincing you not to do something because it’s not conventional. He’s saying to settle for traditional church for what it is, and I won’t let you get to the best. Is personal evangelism good or bad? Good. But is it best? In some circumstances, it might be. But if all we settle for is ‘good’ we never get to best.

 

When you have a lost person facilitating a Bible study, how long have you trained that person? I lead a Bible study for women who had never studied the Bible. How do you learn to keep them on track? It’s messy, but it’s the best way. It’s like cleaning your children’s rooms. If you always do it, you will always do it. You have to let them clean it up themselves. I meet with people about an hour before the meeting. I go over the passage, walk them through the 3-column study. When someone goes off track, you ask them the question, “Where does that come from in Scripture?” and if people are talking about something that is off track, you can say, “That’s a very interesting thing, but for the next 30 minutes, we are going to talk about this.” And take it back to the study.

 

Is there a suggested Scripture series? We have a series. It’s not a long process. You can start anywhere, but that doesn’t make everywhere you start beneficial. We need to help people understand who God is. You need to help them understand the separation from God. If they don’t understand that, they won’t understand why Jesus died for them.

 

Going powerless to new communities and not be powerful – how does that look in our context of working with bringing a lot of resources to low-income communities where we do big events and they see us in public? Sometimes hundreds of families come to these events. How can we improve that approach so that it will be more in tune with being powerless, as we just learned? There are places for events to discover potential persons of peace and they can require resources. But, if that’s the way we do it, we could actually limit the growth with our resources. In India, we don’t have those kinds of resources. We have totally different ways of getting at communities. Part of the answer to your question is that we as Christians are to be a generous people. Generosity should be a part of our culture and nature. If we have and do not share, are we being generous? We have to find ways to use our generosity without causing people to feel embarrassed or beholden. How do we use our resources so that it doesn’t handicap the next generation of church planters? How do we use our resources without blowing our own horn? The reality is, we have to raise bucks. Every one who is out beating the bushes for it – without Marketing and Development – we would all be doing a lot less. They’re in here to understand what we’re doing. There’s a balancing act in all of this. We just have to be aware and keep asking ourselves the right questions. I don’t have the answers.

 

You talked about the church planter going into the family – is it essential that the church planter be at every meeting with the family? You need to be there enough so that you keep it going in the right direction and you absolutely must meet with your facilitator each week and do the debrief. Did you do thankfulness?, did you ask for needs? etc. You have to manage the system, you can’t just throw it out there and expect it to work.

 

The apostles later were financed and given stuff to go forward with the work; they needed money. How does this work?

 

We all need money. Why are we being paid? Attitude nad motive make a huge difference. If we pay someone to be minister of the gospel, that just sounds weird to me. Here’s why you pay people. You are so good at ministering to me and my family, I want to make sure you have more time to do that. I am going to pay you so that you can devote more time to doing what you’re really good at doing. I am going to pay you not to work, so you can spend more time sharing the Gospel. People don’t get paid because they have some piece of paper from a university. People get paid because they’ve demonstrated their call, their purpose and the people of God say, “You’re so good at this, we want to pay you so you can do this.” I don’t want anybody to pay me for being a church planter.

 

In some groups there are multiple facilitators; if people want to share the facilitating how do you do that? If you have a group that doesn’t have an obvious spiritual leader, you might move facilitating around to see who is the obvious spiritual leader, but often if I ask the group, they know who it is inside the family or affinity group. If there is not an obvious spiritual leader, ask the group or move facilitating around until you discover it.

 

Are there any warnings about people who are codependent? Crisis after crisis, etc.? God told us to be wise as serpents. The person who takes your time, energy and training and never gives it away is a tool of Satan. You have to learn as a leader to say ‘no’ to those people. Everything I teach you you must teach to someone else or they’re gone. If they can teach it back to me next time I see them, that means they’re doing it. I remind them of the covenant we’ve made. You have to be firm. Spiritual warfare is never easy. If Satan can get you wrapped up with this really nice guy and it takes your time and they are doing nothing, not starting new groups. This is spiritual warfare. They will beg, plead. Don’t believe them. If six months you want to try this again, you can contact me again and we can start over. I’ve never had someone contact me again. They’re not the kind of people to do that. They’re the distracters. When Satan was tapping on Jesus’ shoulder, Jesus told him to get behind him. It was Peter. Jesus saw it for what it was.

 

So, the two-strike rule, is that with believers or nonbelievers? Believers.

 

So with nonbelievers, as you’re training them and asking them who they shared this with. What would motivate them to share it with people they know? You don’t have to motivate them that much. The point is that people want to please, by and large. If you give an expectation, they’ll fulfill it. If we never put the expectation out there, we won’t get it. Don’t treat lost people like the saved. If they’re going through the Bible studies themselves, I will have some confidence that at some point it will work. If it never works, then we figure out that it’s a dead line. There are very few lines that starts dead. Almost everything replicates once. Sometimes 500 times.

 

Can you think of anything from experience where a facilitator has not been able to continue by your decision? No, generally not. I’ve had people quit, but that’s good because better that than spend 16-20 weeks.

 

When I’m down in Oakland, people want to gravitate together or have the concept of worshiping. What should we suggest to those kinds of people without falling into the traditional worship service? No good answer to that question. We try to talk to people in Christianized environments to talk about relationship to God instead of church.

 

Where music is a part of their culture? Dance a little. If you let something happen and then that group doesn’t multiply, don’t use it next time.

 

In letting people choose their leadership I’ve found the results aren’t as good if the people choose their own leadership. Is there a priority list as you transition into church? No. I don’t bring in anything except the Gospel. As they read the Gospel and begin to become obedient to the Gospel, they bring up baptism. They read the passages on baptism. Same thing on the Lord’s supper. They start reading those passages and they start doing it. They start identifying those who are pastors. In India they asked what songs they should sing? And we asked them back what songs they wanted to sing. Not translated western songs.

 

We read the story and wondered if you’ve ever had to shake the dust off your feet with a village?

We take it as being some sort of rude, cursing event. It’s not. You proclaim to them the Kingdom of Heaven is near. The shaking the dust off was a symbol of it’s time to move on. We can do that without being rude or ugly. We can do it very quietly. We can say to people, “I have enjoyed my time here. I pray you will understand that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. But now it’s time for me to move on.” And you move on. One of the things that Satan does to us is say, “If you’ll just spend another week here…” We had an evangelist who refused to move on. Finally I said, either you move to the next village or you’re off the team.” He was angry and grabbed up his bag and started a Bible study in the next village. And she started to weep and said, “Why didn’t you come before? Last week the witch doctor told us to sacrifice a child to improve our crops, and we did, it was my child.” Satan is the most intelligent. Even the archangel Michael will not argue with him. He is not going to throw things in our face things that are obvious. He will play on our sympathies. He will keep us spending one more week. That’s not what Jesus said to do. “If they don’t receive you, tell them, ‘The Kingdom of God is near.’ And move on.” Sometimes we’re too stupid to listen to God because what Satan is saying feels right to our humanness. You can’t go by the feelings, you have to listen to the obedience.

 

ASSIGNMENT for tomorrow:

1 Chronicles 16:8-36

Underline all the activities a church is supposed to do

Notice the first half of the psalm is focused internally; second half is focused externally

70-80% of functions of church are evaluated in this

This is the psalm David wrote for the dedication of the Temple; it’s the oldest psalm in the Bible.

 

Group Activity:

Mark 5:18-20

 

Sharing from 3-column Bible study:

 

• We will look to our own family and friends first of all that we haven’t shared with before we go out.
• I will study and be careful to understand the commands of the Lord and encourage others to do the same
• I will do better at spending time at my extended family so they can see all God has done for me
• I can model for them, but not live for them
• I will not try to extract families or individuals to come to an existing community, but rather go to their homes and train them and coach them how they can share what God is doing in their lives and what they’re learning
• I will be thankful for what God is doing in my life and be a good testimony to the Lord to others and look for whoever doesn’t know him
• I will encourage those who find Christ to not go to seminary first but to go back to their community and share the good news with their family and friends (Dave Hunt shared that we are not anti-seminary; training like that is good at the right time)
• I will go to my neighbors and communicate and find a way to tell them about the mercy of God
• We are sometimes afraid to release people when they’re young in the Lord; Jesus gave him the message to speak very clearly. We should release people when they’re young in the Lord to speak about how good God is and what He’s done.
• In AA they’re encouraged to go back and try to make amends for the problems they’ve caused in their family. If you bring your gift to the altar and remember something someone has against you, go first and make peace with your brother; Jesus saying to straighten out things with your family.
• In the context of the people getting into the boat and the man interrupting him. I will not hurry; I will be okay with interruptions.
• There is a family I know who is surrounded by evil and I will take this text back and work it through with them for their context.
• He was already famous as the crazy man in that area. That’s probably part of why Jesus sent him back because that is where the greatest testimony is. He probably didn’t have too many friends.
• This was probably an amazing testimony to see this man who had been chained now in his right mind
• In Addis Ababa there is a crazy man in a loin cloth by the Commercial Bank; what an incredible thing it would be if that guy was transformed and shared his testimony
• The town didn’t want Jesus to come in, but this man was sent in where they didn’t want Jesus to go.
• Jesus was the example because he caused a movement. Everywhere you go, he was doing something. He never stayed in one place. Paul or Peter found a person of peace, but when Jesus started this, he gave the example of doing this. He never stayed in one place. When David said, Jesus never planted a church. He freed those with demons. There is no excuse to not do this. To establish the Kingdom everywhere we go.
• Often God uses the lowliest to have the highest impact.

 

Break-out Group Discussion Response to question: “What

 

• Ask our clients to share what God has done or is doing in them, and ask them to come back with specific responses
• We are ready to do that cell group split, to form another cell group and implement this already into some of the people that we know and that I think will benefit and also implement the facilitation in the next 48 hours. Step #1 is to use this method in my Saturday night class and then I am going to facilitate for a couple of times for Richard to start one.
• Think in terms of multiples – 5 or 10 – don’t think in terms of one more group
• Go to my neighbor and talk about what God has been doing and explore possibility of them being persons of peace
• Encourage people to share what the Lord was doing in their family; there is an opportunity in the family to use that text as a possible doorway for starting a DBS
• With international students who are coming to San Francisco have their parents in China, but no siblings, no oikos, we’re thinking of creating some kind of community for them
• I have a neighbor upstairs who has lived in the same apartment for about 20 years; as I’ve been underemployed, he has been bringing us groceries. He is kind of a curmudgeon, but now we’re starting to talk. I realized I need to get closer and thank God for how through this man God is helping us survive and see how it starts to change the nature of our conversations. Tonight I will go up to see him and thank him for helping us and thank God.
• Build a relationship with someone in the neighborhood where I live.
• Train the staff to go out two by two with their clients to coach them to plant the Gospel in the community or culture they come from
• I will begin to look for persons of peace in the shelter I work with in Oakland
• Individually we will go back to our family and friends; I’ve been targeting my oldest son; I will resist the urge to stay at Jesus’ feet for myself and this prevents us from going. Gotta do it, not just sit around talking about it.
• I will ask my wife to go to the fire station with me
• I have some church planters I’ve trained who may have lost the perception of the edge; to look at that. To pull in the presentation by Walt, the fata morgana – perception of an ice shelf that isn’t really there.
• A family we’re fellowshipping with. We have been praying for him and he got a job. I am going to encourage him to thank God. Also, when we give things to families to encourage them to shrae with families.
• I am going to pray that the Holy Spirit will convict us all so we do the things we need to do instead of talking about them.

 

Dave Hunt: Make sure when you leave here tomorrow that between you and God that you have some “I will” statements because it’s when you start doing it and telling others about it that it starts working. Make it personal and make it real. Pray that God will give you the courage and commitment to follow through with your commitments and move forward.