These are the kinds of questions I’ve been asking myself as I stand in awe of what God has done in the past year. Last year, God spoke to us to catalyze 10 networks of multiplying disciples and churches in Raleigh-Durham (RDU) by 2030. My wife and I broke that down into smaller, short-term chunks, and we made a goal to find 6-10 potential church multipliers by August 1, 2026 (aka, earlier this month).

When I started making posts on Substack chronicling the 365 day mission plan, I was nervous to put myself out there. “What if I publicly declare these goals, and it just doesn’t happen?!” But God has shown up and I am happy to say that the goal was achieved.

What amazes me so much is how it happened.

Vision Recap

Before we dive into what happened, here’s a quick recap of our ministry direction for this year.

The overall vision God put on our heart:

• The gospel to every person and a multiplying church in every community of RDU until there is No Place Left.

The current 5 year strategic objective:

• Our goal is to have 10 networks of multiplying disciples and churches using movement principles by Dec. 31, 2030.

The current short term objective:

• Identify 6-10 potential church planting multipliers, which will lead to 3 more actual multipliers by August 1, 2026.

For more explanation on this, read the previous post

What God Did

As I mentioned in my last post, before the end of April, God had sent 7 potential catalysts. Most of these reached out to me, and I didn’t do much of anything to find them. Since then, I’ve met 3 more potential catalysts bringing the total to 10, which means we have achieved our goal. Again, all of them found me, I didn’t find them.

Of the 10, I believe 3 are the most likely to go from potential to actual catalysts. Now, I’m not counting the others out or anything, but these 3 are all-in on the vision, while others have other opportunities pulling them away from multiplication.

The three:

• Are not a part of any other ministry

• Are not a part of any other kind of church

• Are actively sharing with lost people

• Have a God-sized vision

• Have developed a pathway for multiplication (or are trying to)

• Have Christ-like character

The other 7 are great, but don’t quite have the same mindset.

What I Did

As I reflect on everything that I’ve done, what stands out is the almost two years of praying and fasting I did with my wife before ever getting this 2030 vision. Deep in my soul, I believe that was the real work. Spending time in the woods alone listening to God. Pushing through our tiredness to pray after we put our kids to bed.

Sure, we did other stuff. But I don’t think that is where the fruit really came from. We only bear fruit when we abide in Christ, not when we fill every second of our time “because that’s what a good disciple-maker does.”

I have realized that in the last year, I haven’t really prayed that much. At least not as much as I did when I was asking God what vision He wanted us to pursue. And that doesn’t sit right with me.

Why Do I Only Pray When I’m Frustrated?

As I look down the road ahead, I want to make some 2027 targets to shoot for, but I haven’t taken the time to pray with my wife and teammates about what those goals should be. So I’m going to decline saying what next year’s goal will be, but one thing I know for sure. I want to commit to praying as fervently as I did in that previous two year time frame.

We prayed diligently for two years before God spoke the vision He wanted us to pursue. Do you know why I prayed so much? Because I was frustrated in ministry. We hadn’t gotten to no place left in RDU, and I didn’t see how we ever would.

I wasn’t just frustrated, but I was scared. I was scared of being a failure thinking, “what if we never get to no place left?”

Fear and frustration drove me into the woods to pray. Now, those seem like terrible reasons to me. Why don’t I supplicate before the Lord because He loves me and I love Him? Why do I seek Him when I’m feeling upbeat, and not just when I feel down?

That’s something I want to change by the end of 2027. I want to abide in Christ and go to Him for no other reason than His Glory and His love. Praying more is the most important strategic shift I need to make in the next year.

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In this episode, I reflect on what God has done.

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The thought of filtering is difficult for me because it feels like something that will create a bunch of hurt feelings and broken relationships. This creates conflict in my mind because I know that the only way to get to multiplication is to give extra time to those who are multipliers.

So the question becomes, how can I pour deeply into the few, while also not causing harm to everyone else? The answer is given by Jesus (like always). Jesus modeled how to focus deeply on leaders while not leaving other disciples or the lost behind.

Precision Harvesting

This is something we see Jesus model in the Gospels. You should study the Word on your own to learn from the master before reading any of my thoughts: Precision Harvesting.

When you read the Word, you will see that Jesus filtered to find leaders using:

1. Hard Sayings: “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’ … From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:60, 66)

2. Parables: “When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables’” (Mark 4:10-11)

3. Lordship Issues: “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” … “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 6:46, 9:23)

Practical Application

When I first heard about Precision Harvesting, I understood it theoretically, but failed to translate what I had learned into practical applications. To illustrate how I use it now, here are some real-world scenarios where I have used hard sayings, parables, and lordship issues:

Training on Sharing the Gospel

• Hard Saying: “Jesus calls us to make disciples of all nations in Matthew 28:18-20. That means that he wants all of you to share His gospel with those around you”

• Parable: “Let’s study John 4:4-42 to discover how God used the Samaritan Woman to make disciples of those around her.”

• Lordship Issue: “Jesus calls us to make disciples and be like the Samaritan woman. Who in your life is He leading you to share with? Next time we see each other, I’ll ask how you did in obeying what Jesus called you to do.”

Starting a Church in a Home

This scenario comes after several weeks of meeting with a group, praying, studying the Word, and generally seeking the Lord together.

• Parable: “Let’s study Acts 2:37-47 to discover what the early church did”

• Hard Saying: “Can we do these same activities that the Acts 2 church did right here in our home? Or do we have to meet in a building? What’s stopping us from calling ourselves a church right here?”

• Lordship Issues: “Are we willing to commit to following Jesus together as the church?”

Finding Elders

Even though the emphasis in this post is on finding multiplying leaders, precision harvesting can be used to find all types of leaders (and all types of leaders are needed in a church planting movement!)

In this scenario, I started a church, but need to move on to start another one elsewhere. I’m trying to identify Elders to shepherd and teach the church long term:

• Hard Sayings: “We see in Acts 14:23 that Paul and Barnabas appointed elders to continue leading the churches that they started. They went on to start more churches in other areas. I feel led to go start more churches like Paul and Barnabas, so I think we are at the point where we need to appoint some elders”

• Parables: “Let’s study 1 Timothy 3:1-7 to discover who an elder should be and what they should do”

• Lordship Issues: “Are we ready to follow the pattern from the Word and appoint elders? Who is God raising up to be an elder of this church?”

Getting Fooled By Early Faithfulness

I’m an “all gas, no breaks” type of guy. This can be good, but when I first started learning to multiply disciples and churches like Jesus, it caused me problems. I was too naive to know how to use my energy in the right places.

Back then, when I saw someone being faithful to share the gospel, I went all-in with the relationship and treated that person like they were going to be a multiplier. I trained them on how to disciple new believers and study the Word with their lost friends. They loved the teaching, but after a few weeks, I realized they never applied it. A lot of seed sowers never wanted to follow up with the people they shared the gospel with. They wanted to catch the fish, but let someone else clean it.

These relationships became very awkward very quickly. I was training and pushing them to do something they didn’t really want to do. I could feel the frustration from both sides. When I saw that I had overcommitted, I knew that I would need to give less time to these people. It was uncomfortable to back out of these relationships I had committed to.

This same situation has come up in various ways in ministry.

Some folks were willing to follow up and disciple new believers, but were unwilling to start a church.

Even fewer were willing to start a church in their home.

An even smaller group of disciples were willing to identify the disciple makers in their church to invest in deeply.

I needed to stop letting early faithfulness fool me into thinking that everyone was going to be a multiplier. I had to start applying precision harvesting at every stage of ministry.

Filter Many To Find The Few

Jesus went through every town and village in Galilee preaching the gospel (Matthew 9:35). According to scholar Eckard Schnabel, this would have been roughly 200,000 people. And yet, he was left with only around 500 disciples (1 Corinthians 15:6), and deeply invested in just 12 men.

If Jesus had to preach to so many people to find the faithful few, how many people do you think you need to go to?

I have learned to give a lot of people a little bit of time in the beginning, then a little more to those who obey, and more still who keep on obeying. I keep filtering like this until I find the people to spend 60-90 days a year with for 2-3 years. I only give that kind of time to multipliers.

If it feels like I’ve slammed into a brick wall with someone, then that’s a clue that I’ve developed this person as far as I can, and I don’t give them anymore focused time.

In filtering like this, I don’t get fooled by early faithfulness and overcommit to relationships, which saves me and them from frustration and hurt feelings.

The Balance

Just because someone isn’t a leader doesn’t mean I can’t give them some time. It’s just only going to be my “go” time. Any disciple is able to be a part of my church where I can fellowship with them and we can grow together. Anybody can come to a game night, a prayer and worship night, or run an errand with me.

These are all activities that are already in my schedule. I’m not carving out extra time for them. In this way, I can still have relationships with non-believers, believers, and leaders all at once. It is a balance that Jesus models and I try to emulate.

Ruthless Evaluation

To do this well, you have to ignore your personal feelings and ruthlessly evaluate what people are doing. You cannot invest in people based on their potential, but on their actions. This can be tricky to identify, so in the next post in this series, we will dive into what it means for someone to be Faithful, Available, and Teachable.

This is part 2 of an 8ish part series. Be sure to subscribe to see to keep up with the rest.

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Precision Harvesting Study

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I wrote a few paragraphs, made the three and a half minute voiceover, then closed my laptop with a sense of accomplishment. I wouldn’t have to pick up the topic again for a while.

Then Andy commented. He is looking for help, and I am happy to share what the Lord has taught me in hopes that it will help you too. But I have a feeling this is the start of a multi-stage post.

The first step is identifying leaders, so we’ll start there today. Actually, we’ll start with the first part of the first step.

Pre-Requisite Learning

There’s only one thing that I have come up with by myself in pursuing movements. Everything else, I have gotten from someone else or developed in a community of other brothers and sisters.1

So before diving into my thoughts, you should dive into the studies that have influenced me. The three big studies that anchor everything I do in identifying leaders are:

1. Elder qualifications in Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3

2. Precision Harvesting

3. Faithful, Available, and Teachable (FAT)

These points will frame the next three posts.

Elder qualifications in Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3

By “leader” I don’t mean only “elder”. People can (and should) lead out in different areas of the church, but all types of leaders should exemplify Christ-like character. 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9 give the most clear character lists in the entire New Testament.

An elder must be blameless, the husband of one wife, with faithful children who cannot be charged with dissipation or rebellion. For the overseer must be blameless as one entrusted with God’s work, not arrogant, not prone to anger, not a drunkard, not violent, not greedy for gain. Instead he must be hospitable, devoted to what is good, sensible, upright, devout, and self-controlled. He must hold firmly to the faithful message as it has been taught, so that he will be able to give exhortation in such healthy teaching and correct those who speak against it.

Titus 1:6-9 (NET)

A leader must exhibit most if not all of these attributes before looking to see if they have the skills of leadership. It doesn’t matter how gifted a person is, if they don’t have a passion to pursue holiness in Christ, whatever they start will eventually crumble.

I like what Curtis Sergeant says: not all multiplication is good. Tumors come from the rapid multiplication of unhealthy cells. We don’t want that. We want healthy, Christlike multiplication.

When I see someone with the skills of leadership, I always start developing their character first because it is so essential.

Ticking Time Bomb

There have been a handful of times where I have witnessed a disciple-maker given more leadership responsibility without the integrity to back it up. Sometimes, I’ve been the one to raise up this person. Every time, this has created a ticking time bomb that wreaks havoc when it finally explodes.

Churches fizzle, disciples leave, feelings are hurt, and it only gets worse. I’ve seen this lead to divorce, adultery, falling away from the faith, alcoholism, and almost every other sin in the book.

This usually happens when I see so much potential in someone that I overlook their immoral habits. Maybe I am taken in by their charisma, or maybe they are eager and keep showing up. Either way, I put the mission ahead of what Jesus really wants in that moment. He wants all of His children to be more like him.

Taking time to examine someone’s fruit before trying to make them into a leader is never time wasted.

The Hope

No one is perfect and growing in holiness is a lifelong process, so I never write off anyone. My first step in training any leader is helping them grow in Christlikeness, and several have overcome sin or immaturity so they can lead other disciples as well.2

If they grow in faithfulness, then it might be time to give them more responsibility, but if they don’t, then it’s clear that I should look to invest deeply in someone else.

Remember, charm and giftedness are not the basis of being a leader. Your best leader may be the mild-mannered friend sitting right next to you in your church gathering. Look first for character, not charisma.

This is part 1 of an 8ish part series. Be sure to subscribe to see to keep up with the rest.

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It's like how some talk about life emerging out of this chemical swamp somewhere by chance. It's almost a bit like that idea.

Something was fermenting among 6 to a dozen practitioners, and what popped out was the movements paradigm.”

That’s what Steve Addison said to me a few months ago. I was interviewing him for the missionary biography of Bill and Susan Smith that I’ll be releasing later this year, and we got to talking about the development of the disciple making and church planting movement paradigm.

Steve has researched movements more than almost anyone else in the world and he couldn’t pin down exactly where movements came from. The paradigm seemed to pop out of nowhere in the 1990s.

It hit me while I was talking with Steve that as I’ve been writing this book, I’ve gathered a wealth of knowledge from several practitioners who were there when movements emerged. I realized that I could answer the question: where did movements come from?

To answer that question, I’ll need to talk a lot about Bill and Susan Smith.

Nothing New Under The Sun

To be clear, I mean to answer the question, “where did the modern movements paradigm come from?” There have been many Church Planting Movements throughout the history of Christianity. The Forests in the Seed briefly mentions several, but here’s a short list of historical movements:

• John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and the Methodists

• Shubal Stearns, John Gano, and the Southern Baptists

• Ko Tha Byu, Adonirum Judson, and the Karen

• Peter Waldo and the Waldensians

• The book of Acts

I’ll go into depth on these, and more historic movements, in about three books from now, but in the meantime, I’ll leave it up to you to research these movements. I wanted to mention them to point out that the Holy Spirit has always been about multiplying disciples and churches.

The modern notion of CPMs and DMMs is one of the most important influences on modern missions, but don’t think the Smiths or anyone invented the paradigm out of nowhere in the 1990s.

Voices From the Past

Bill Smith is a data junkie, and studied the movements above and many other mission thinkers to learn how to be a more effective missionary. Through this, the great cloud of witnesses from throughout history contributed to the development of movements.

Acts

Bill and Susan started studying Acts in the 1970s when they hit the mission field in Thailand. They, along with their Bangkok Urban Strategy (BUS) team, talked about what they learned, and asked each other, “how can we see this today?”

They were convinced that if they did what the New Testament church did, they would start to see what the New Testament church saw. Leaders like Peter, John, and Paul became models for them on how multiply churches.

Writers

Many writers penned concepts that would seep into the movement idea.

• The early 20th century Anglican missionary, Roland Allen, foresaw the idea of church multiplication in his books The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? He never saw a movement himself, but wrote about the need to have fully indigenous churches where all believers took on the task of making disciples.

• George Patterson struggled against religious tradition in Honduras in the mid-20th century. He saw these historic church practices as a hinderance to the ongoing mission of God and the multiplication of His church. Patterson advocated for simplicity in discipleship and church so that it could be easily reproduced. He also emphasized the need for obedience-based discipleship to help new believers grow and be transformed in Christ.

• At the same time as Patterson, Donald McGavran, was articulating the need for people movements. In his view, missionaries should try to reach whole communities and not just individuals so the new believers could remain in their culture instead of being extracted from it. This way, they could continue to spread the gospel to their friends and family. McGavran also articulated the Homogeneous Unit Principle. This controversial principle stated that people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.

• Brother Thom and Carol Davis noticed the concept of the Person of Peace in Luke 10 and saw that many times in the New Testament, whole households or “oikos” would come to Christ. They began spreading around these ideas in the 1980s and 90s.

All of the concepts from these believers are essential components of the movement paradigm today. Bill and Susan learned from these people, applied their concepts and spread it to others.

The Most Important Question

When Bill Smith coached other missions leaders, he would repeatedly ask the same questions to keep them focused on the vision that God had given them. Questions like, “How many of your people will hear the gospel today?” and “if you do this activity, how many of your people will get saved?”

One question topped all the rest as being the most pivotal: WIGTake. As in “What’s it gonna take?”

In the 1970s, when the Smiths were in Thailand, they and their team asked, “What’s it gonna take to reach all of Bangkok?” This was paradigm shattering for most missionaries at the time who instead focused on “what are some ministry activities I can do?”, or “how can I plant a church?”

The starting points of each perspective were at opposite ends of the spectrum. The WIGTake question started with the end goal in mind, and focused on reaching a large segment. The latter questions started with where a missionary was right at that moment, and focused on what was right in front of them.

The Smiths and their Bangkok Urban Strategy team, like Bill Beckman and Judson Lennon, took this WIGTake question seriously. They would only engage in activities that would help them reach the millions in their city, not just the few around them.

The WIGTake question forced them to do city-wide data gathering and research, extensive mobilization of believers, and they wouldn’t do any mass evangelism campaigns unless they had a plan to follow up and start churches with new believers.

Bill and Susan were asked to help with many ministries that could not be replicated by locals, but they refused. They only wanted to do something that could be reproduced by the Thai people.

They never saw a movement in Thailand, but they carried the WIGTake question with them as they trained others to reach UPGs numbering in the millions. In time, they would learn that the best way to answer the WIGTake question was through a movement of multiplying disciples and churches.

The Environment

A lot of the reason the Smiths did not see a movement in Thailand was because all of the churches were above ground, and there were no restrictions from the Thai government. This is counterintuitive, but it’s true. They needed to move to a country that was hostile to Christianity to develop movement principles.

In Thailand, they could use attractional events for evangelism and invite people back to a church building. They saw thousands of people come to Christ, helped start several churches that were led by Thai pastors, and saw some multiplication. To most missionaries, this would constitute a success, but not to the Smiths. The strategy did not reach the bulk of lostness in Bangkok or Thailand because it was too complex to reproduce rapidly.

When they shifted to China, almost everything they did in Thailand was illegal, and ineffective. The environment forced them to be innovative. These innovations had to be simpler and more relational because they couldn’t be event-based or attractional.

They didn’t have to start from scratch though because the Chinese church had learned how to exist exclusively in house churches.

The Chinese Christians had been isolated from the western world and were forced underground by the Communists for decades. They followed Christ in villages, towns, and cities where they were poor and could only meet in homes. By the time the Smiths arrived in the late-1980s, there might have been as many as 1,000,000 house churches in the country.

Bill and Susan had many Chinese friends to learn from as they sought to reach the Zhuang, a UPG that numbered in the millions. They asked the WIGTake question for their new ministry and saw a gap. Even though they learned from the past and from the local Christians, they would have to be innovative if they wanted to see the total evangelization of the Zhuang.

100 Options

David Barrett, a renowned researcher who wrote the first World Christian Encyclopedia, was the first person to point the Smiths to the Zhuang in 1987. He challenged them to find anything they could on this people group. A few months later, Bill came back to Barrett with boxes and boxes of documents about the Zhuang that he had photocopied. Bill took this a step further and came a binder containing 100 Options for evangelizing the Zhuang.

Bill thought of ways to get the gospel to the Zhuang through sports, medical care, businesses, radio, the Jesus Film, and much more. Barrett was astounded. This research helped convince the IMB to send the Smiths into China at a time when they (and every other mission agency) never sent anyone into restricted countries.

They lived in Hong Kong, but they needed to reach the Zhuang who were in southern China. Because of this, they began implementing the 100 Options and much more as non-resident missionaries (NRM).

As the IMB mobilized more NRMs to restricted countries, Bill supervised many of them. He trained them to come up with 100 Options too. As they all began to implement the ideas that ranged from the mundane to the crazy, they saw what worked and what didn’t.

Within a few years, there were one hundred NRM teams that had been taught the 100 Options. Most didn’t see much fruit. Maybe only a church a two. But a few started to see growth and multiplication.

The NRMs who were interested would get together and discuss what they were learning. This community of practice sharpened one another, and as the years wore on best practices emerged.

Bill is an extrovert off the charts, so whenever he saw something that was working, he’d spread it around to everyone he talked to. In this way, many missionaries in the IMB and other agencies began learning how to research, evangelize, church plant, and multiply among UPGs.

Prophetic Focus

Bill had to be the prophetic voice for the people who were starting to see multiplication. He had to keep them focused on what God had called them to.

When Bruce and Gloria Carlton made it to Cambodia, they had no idea how to reach the people. The nation was coming out of years of genocide and civil war, and had very few Christians. Bill and Susan would visit and talk with them to encourage them and to ask them pointed questions:

“How many of your people will hear the gospel today?”

“What’s it gonna take to reach all of the Cambodians?”

Bruce told me, “when someone keeps asking you these questions, you start to think what the answer might be”. Bruce and Gloria began implementing the 100 Options, and God brought them Cambodian leaders to invest in. The Cambodians came up with the Rural Leaders Training Program which equipped many local church planters. This work in Cambodia in the mid-1990s emerged as one of the first Church Planting Movements.

David Watson was called to reach the Bhojpuri in India. Bill supervised him too and like the Carltons, he had to ask him the same questions to keep him focused. Many other saw that David was a high level leader and asked him to lead various ministries in India: an orphanage over here, or a factory over there.

Bill would say to him, “David, that factory sounds good, but how many Bhojpuri are going to come to Christ through that?” David would reply, “None”. Bill would repeat back, “What’s it gonna take to reach the Bhojpuri?” With that, David would drop the factory idea and turn back to the vision God had given him.

The Bhojpuri work emerged as one of the largest disciple making movements starting from that point in the 1990s.

Once these movements emerged, Bill began spreading their stories across his and many other agencies. That’s how the movement paradigm started and spread to become one of the most influential shifts in modern Christianity.

Not Quite Emerging From Nowhere

God has started an untold number of movements in centuries past. Many lessons from across Christendom influenced those who would see movements emerge over the last few decades.

God convicted Bill, Susan and a few others to have a big vision to reach millions of people at once. The restrictions of working among UPGs forced these missionaries to think innovatively and simply. As they avoided good ministries to focus on the best ministry, God taught them how to multiply.

Now all of us who work in the world of disciple making and church planting movements can look back and thank those who came before us while also keeping our hand to the plow and looking ahead to what God will do. Know this fellow disciple maker, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

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In this episode, I share lessons I’ve learned about networking to find movement catalysts, and how it’s more about making friends than networking anyway.

To see my overall strategic plan for 2026, see the post HERE

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The word networking feels as lifeless as a graveyard in a ghost town. If I could squish networking with my foot, everything terrible about corporate America would ooze out between my toes.

I would rather lie facedown on my concrete driveway for two hours breathing in the chalk from my toddlers’ artwork than doing whatever networking is. At least that’s how the word makes me feel.

I only say the word because you know what I mean when I say it. But every time the word leaves my mouth, I feel a piece of my soul leaving with it. Right now, networking is my highest value activity to accomplish our strategic plan for 2026, but networking doesn’t capture the heart of what I’m trying to do.

When I read the Word, I don’t see leaders networking. I see them making more and more friends. So that’s how I think about it: I’m trying to make more friends who want to team up in God’s mission.

Let me explain.

Vision Recap

Before we dive into networking, here’s a quick recap of my ministry direction for this year.

The overall vision God put on our heart:

The gospel to every person and a multiplying church in every community of RDU1 until there is No Place Left.

The current 5 year strategic objective:

Our goal is to have 10 networks of multiplying disciples and churches using movement principles by Dec. 31, 2030.

The current short term objective:

Identify 6-10 potential church planting multipliers, which will lead to 3 more actual multipliers by August 1, 2026

For more explanation on this, read the previous post

Paul’s Example

For the longest time, I thought there weren’t any examples of networking to find leaders in the New Testament because there were so few believers at that time. The Holy Spirit showed me I was wrong. Almost every person who Paul teamed up with had been his friend for at least a year before they started working together.

Barnabas

Paul met his first teammate, Barnabas, soon after his salvation (Acts 9:27). If anything, Barnabas was a mentor to Paul and they worked alongside each other for years in Antioch before God called them to be sent out at the beginning of Acts 13. They brought along John Mark who was Barnabas’ cousin, so another close, years-long relationship (Colossians 4:10).

Silas

Paul met Silas during the Jerusalem council and worked alongside him as they delivered the message from the counsel to Antioch (Acts 15:22-35). When Paul chose Silas to team up with him on his Second Journey, they had already known and worked with one another for some time.

Timothy

Paul didn’t know Timothy before they teamed together in the Second Journey, but he did know Timothy’s church and probably his mother and grandmother for years (Acts 16:1-3, 2 Timothy 1:5). Timothy joined Paul and Silas after a strong recommendation from the churches in Lystra and Iconium.

Aquila and Priscilla

I believe Priscilla and Aquila were already believers when Paul met them in Corinth at the workplace.2 They were all tentmakers together. After a year and a half in Corinth, the couple accompanied Paul in his travels. (Acts 18:1-3, 11, 18)

My Takeaway

There is a pattern of Paul teaming with people who he had known for some time, or who was recommended by someone he was close to. He also spent time working alongside them before they traveled together.

From Paul’s example, I should expect to build relationships for some time with many people before I find a leader who will want to team up and catalyze more networks of multiplication.

Lessons on Finding Leaders From A Cambodian CPM

I picked up Bruce Carlton’s book, Amazing Grace, while doing some research for a missionary biography I’m planning to release later this year on Bill and Susan Smith. Bill supervised and coached the Carltons as God worked through them to birth a Church Planting Movement in Cambodia.

One pivotal moment for the Carltons came in 1992 when God led them to invest in leaders who would multiply. Bruce received this directive, but told God that He would have to bring the leaders. Bruce wouldn’t go find them.

To his amazement, the first leader came to Bruce a few months later, Rith. Rith and Bruce had known each other for a couple of years and had built a relationship like Paul had with people in Acts. At this crucial moment, Rith told Bruce that he felt led by God to be trained by Bruce.

This captures the heart of what I’ve learned about networking to find catalytic leaders. It’s less about me finding them and more about them finding me. God has to bring the leaders.

This is why I think it’s so important to build relationships for a while. There needs to be good trust before another leader would agree to team up.

The Last 3 Months

I have been shocked. I doubted that God would bring 6-10 potential network catalysts this year, but yet again, He has proved my doubts wrong. The Holy Spirit has introduced me to 7 potential catalysts and April is not even done yet. Most of them came through long standing relationships (like Paul) and they found me, I didn’t look for them (like Bruce).

Here’s a quick rundown of these families:

• 4 have already started a church in their home

• 1 has started a hybrid church. Trying to have a simple Sunday gathering and focus on multiplying from the home.

• 2 plan to start a church soon

• I’ve gone out evangelizing with 2

• Only 1 was a cold-call reach out from me

• All have said that they want to multiply using movement principles

Here’s a snapshot of how I met one of these people.

The German at the Library

As I was posting about the Western Europe Church Planting Movement last month, I ran into someone from this movement in my own city. It was an act of providence.

I was catching up with a friend at the library of a local seminary. He works behind the desk and has a big heart for evangelism. He was asking me about my church then pointed to his co-worker next to him and said, “this guy has a church in his home too”.

I thought he was joking, so I tried to humor my friend and asked the man about it. I realized it was serious. This German man had seen a few people come to Christ and gathered them in his living room with his wife to disciple them as a church.

I was stunned. I asked, “Why did you do that?” He replied, “I’m a disciple of Jesus and that’s what you do.” I agreed, but I told him that most people would still not do that. As we kept talking, I mentioned the CPM above, and he said that he had been a part of that in Germany, and was now here studying at the seminary. God had answered our prayers and placed an already-trained church multiplier in my city.

He gave me a sly look out of the side of his eye and said that we had actually met a few years earlier. My eyes grew wide because I couldn’t remember him at all. He told me that he had come over to my house for a meeting. Now I was downright embarrassed. I vaguely remembered the meeting he was talking about, but still didn’t remember him.

He had enough grace to not shame me too much more than this, and even though I didn’t remember him, he remembered me and that meant we had already known each other for over a year. We planned to meet for lunch a couple of weeks later. He shared the celebrations and struggles with his church and welcomed me to visit sometime.

Time Is Key

The only reason the German was so open was because of time. That’s what I believe. If we had not met a year and a half earlier, I don’t think there would have been as much trust. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t talked between then and now.

One of the couples that invited me out evangelizing was in the same place. I met them one time, two years earlier. They remembered me—it’s hard to forget the guy who walks around your apartment complex barefoot—and immediately invited me outreaching.

I’ve met with people many times over the course of a few months and have not had this level of openness. It’s like I always need a few years of connecting and communicating with someone before getting to collaborating.

When I was in Houston, my team would try to network with ministry leaders and set up trainings in the first or second meeting. We did this for three and a half years, and it led to only a few one-time event trainings. More often, we didn’t even get that far.

Even though my team had high level leaders with magnetic personalities, we still only got long-term ministry partnerships via references from other close, trusted friends. I can’t get around the conclusion that time is essential to get to collaboration in ministry.

Conclusion

The top three lessons in making friends and avoiding networking:

1. Focus on building relationships, and not pushing for collaborating right away.

2. Be findable so the right leaders can reach out to you.

3. While doing 1 and 2, pray that God would send the right people.

I will keep connecting and communicating with each of these 7 friends and prayerfully discern how God might want us to collaborate. My desire is for each of them to succeed in the vision that God has placed on their hearts. If they do this, then I’ll be closer to accomplishing my vision as well.

In the meantime, I’ll avoid networking and instead focus on making friends until there is no place left. I’m doing everything I can to be findable so when the right leader comes along, they can reach out to me.

I daily repeat the prayer that Bruce prayed, “God, you need to bring the leaders to me.”

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I was thinking deeply about this and I realized that there is one huge draw back to disciple making in these places. People are only in these environments temporarily, and when they move on, it doesn’t always go smoothly.

My Experience

I came to Christ and became a disciple maker in college, so I was in one of these three environments. I graduated a semester earlier than most of my peers and within two months I was sitting at home waiting to get hired while they were still going to class. I felt very lonely.

I felt like no one wanted to hang out with me, I spent a lot of time by myself, and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I tried to tell my friends what I was going through, but they didn’t see it. I didn’t have a full grasp of what I was experiencing, so I had a hard time communicating why I felt the way I felt.

I still lived in the same house right by campus, was the same person that I had been a few short months earlier, so my feelings of isolation didn’t make sense to me. What I didn’t realize is that I had stepped out of one culture and into another that I had never been a part of before. I was no longer a student, but a young professional.

The way I made friends had to change. The amount of time I could commit to them had to change. My goals, values, and responsibilities had to change.

Now, over a decade after graduation, I have had dozens of conversations with friends graduating who hit the same point as I did. I’ve talked with so many people about this that I’ve started calling this life inflection point the “community crisis”. I think it was more mainstream for Millennials to call this distressing time in their lives a “quarter life crisis”, but it’s more or less the same thing. It’s the point where you either adapt or drown.

As I grasped the life changes I would need to make, I realized that the way I made disciples needed to change too.

Hard to Adapt

The free world is different than jail, the real world is different than school, and the civilian world is different than the military.

Time and again, I have witnessed disciple makers in one of these three environments move to the next stage of life and hit massive road blocks like me. In each of these shifts, your culture gets flipped on its head.

I had to learn to meet people, share the gospel, and gather as the church in different ways. It took a lot of failing forward alongside friends who were in the same place as me to make the switch. I’ve met a lot of people who never did.

Crissy

Crissy came to my wife and I adamant that being in a house church was the best way to grow in Christ as the structures of the institutional church held people back from living out the fullness of the Christian life. She made a friend at her Christian college who was trying to start a church in her dorm and taught Crissy about being the church in a simple way. Crissy grew up in a traditional church, but now was trying to convince her believing friends that there was a better way.

She met us just after graduating and was clear that she wanted to do what she did in college now that she was a software engineer. And she was all for it. At least for a few months. That’s when it started to get hard for her.

She stopped coming around as much and my wife and I knew something was up. We stopped hearing from her until we got a voice message saying she was having a tough time so she started trying out different churches and found one she liked.

Doug

Doug slammed his fist on the table, red in the face and declared, “I’m never going to believe anyone will keep walking with Jesus after they leave prison!”

Doug had been in jail for a number of years where he came to Christ and learned to multiply disciples. He got out then started going back to minister to inmates and train them to multiply. The ministry had grown and spread to other prison units, so Doug spent his days driving to and from state institutions following up the dispersed disciple makers who started churches in their different units.

As people got to the free world, Doug was often the one there to pick them up and drive them home even if that meant driving 5 hours, and turning around to drive all the way back. These guys had changed lives in prison, but to a man, they all fell back into their old sins once they got back to their hometown. Many didn’t make it past 6 months before they were arrested again.

Rob

“Whatever happened to Rob?” I asked my friend Camp. I had met Rob a year or two earlier at a training. He had started a church in his home with his wife and kids. It had multiplied and I wondered what happened to him.

Camp replied, “He got burned out and stopped. He knows he needs to obey the Great Commission, but is too tired right now.”

Rob learned movement principles while in the military, and tried to replicate the exact methods once he moved onto a new career. He tried to keep up the pace he had while living on base with the exact same rhythms of life and ministry. It wasn’t sustainablee for him or his family, so he felt he hadd no choice but to quit.

The Lesson

Each of these true stories—with changed names—have a common theme: these individuals hit a barrier where they couldn’t be disciples or make disciples in the same way as they could when they started. They had to adapt.

The problem is that their adaptation in response to stress and burn out involved sin, shifting away from movements, and quitting being on mission.

There is a way to adapt that involves still running hard after Jesus and his mission. Doug did it and I’ve seen others like Mike do it too.

Mike

“You know, I’ve always seen the two church principle in the Bible, but I now think there are some other biblical ways to multiply churches,” said Mike as we were catching up over the phone. Mike came to Christ in college and immediately began multiplying disciples and churches. Since then he has graduated, handed off the university work to other leaders, and started ministry work out in the community.

Not only that, but he has gotten married and had a baby.

“Yeah, the two church principle worked in college, but it’s not working with young families, so we went back to the Word. I think we’re going to switch some of these practices”

The underlying principles for multiplication stayed the same for Mike, but some of the ways they were doing church changed. He was honest about he and his family’s capacity and made changes through prayer and going back to the Word.

Hold Tightly to the Word, Not Methods

Mike was able to make the cultural switch without giving up on the mission. His example teaches a good lesson. We need to hold tightly to the biblical principles while being open handed with tools, processes and practices.1

We can foster this by creating a culture of genuine wrestling through the Word alongside other disciples. In a learning environment like this, everyone is allowed to discover what it says for themselves and come to personal convictions from God. This is a slow process involving a lot of discussion and prayer.

The faster, but less fruitful method is to give the answers you want someone to see in the Bible. I’ve done this and seen plenty of others do it as well. I’ve brought up the Word, asked what the answer is, but only have one thing in mind. If they don’t get what I want them to get, I tell them the supposed right answer (as in, my answer). Once they superficially agree with me, I move on quickly before the truth can sink into their heart.

Slower is faster. If you teach someone to dig into the Word for themselves in a learning community, they will learn to listen to the Holy Spirit and make plans based on what He leads them to. If you just give the answers, you’ve made them dependent on you to understand the Word and solve any problems they may face.

In the former case, they will have the skills to adapt their methods in any different environment they encounter. In the latter, they’ll hold tightly to the methods they learned and be unable to adapt. Mike learned to adapt to a new environment by going back to the Word. Crissy, Doug, and Rob did not.

The Hope

I’m trying to highlight this reality to provide a caution, but not to dissuade. I know of many believers who learned to make disciples in college, prison, or the military who continue following Jesus and fishing for men with great passion in their hearts after they move into the next stage of life.

The key to making sure this transition happens smoothly is to train disciples to form their mission strategy from the Word and not from methodologies. If you can do that, then prisons, universities, and military bases turn from being merely great harvest fields to being training grounds for the next generation of disciple-makers.

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• Want to learn more about Movements in America? —> Get The Book

• Sign up to pray for my ministry! —> Pray

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It’s a case study of the first Church Planting Movement in the modern West. I believe I got it from Steve Smith some years ago. I’ve copied it verbatim except for a few headings I added for clarity. I enjoy reading it every so often and hope you learn from it as I have.

It’s a lengthy case study, so I’ve broken it into two posts. This is part 2. Check out part one here.

Western Europe Case Study

90-Minute Regions

In the summer of 2010, when we prayed again, God made it very clear that we should make a big move and divide the country into 90-minute regions. The theory behind it was this: it’s normal for people in our country on a weekend to get in a car and go somewhere 90 minutes away. Maybe they go to a beach or to meet someone, or they go have coffee somewhere and return home. That’s what people do anyway.

Driving that distance for outreach would not be a major sacrifice; just refocusing their social behavior. So we started to communicate this at leadership meetings: we would like to go everywhere now – everywhere within a 90-minute drive of our existing work.

We told the leaders: “Instead of having your own house church meeting, take the whole house church. Go somewhere for 90 minutes. Pray and ask God where to go and just do it. If you just go there and pray for the town, it’s already a step forward. Just move in small steps. If you have a friend somewhere, get in the car, drive there, get to know him. If there’s a town festival, just get in the car and go there. See if you can get to know people.”

That plan really shaped the pattern of ministry around us amazingly. It became normal, very normal. At the same time we started to talk about the 90-minute regions, we felt God reminding us: we never wanted to be a movement just for our own country. Even in our first year, I often shared: “There will be people coming to Christ who will be discipled and go somewhere else. I would like our country to send out ten thousand missionaries.”

New Countries

So it was very clear: we should pray for different countries and we should challenge our people to pray and to look for God’s leading. So in 2012, we began to take steps beyond the 90-minute regions and we aimed to focus on Europe as a whole. We had started some house churches in one neighboring country, but it was not very effective. So we knew we had to relearn that as well.

One couple among our leadership team both independently heard God say, “Move to [a country next door].” Both had said back to God, “If you really want to see this happen, you’ll need to get through to my spouse.” It was very clear that couple was called. So we raised money and sent them officially into a nearby country with a full-time ministry approach (because back then we didn’t know better).

I never regretted it, because it was a step of obedience – not just for them, but also for us, to say “We prayed for Europe, and this is how God got us moving into that.” But coming back to 90-minute regions: that really shaped our faith that planting churches is possible everywhere.

No Hierarchy

At that time I was full-time and two or three others were full-time or part-time. We traveled a lot and whenever somebody showed up, we started to train them. I went to places on the fringe of the country in various directions – the places far away from everybody else. So I really traveled like crazy through those years.

I was trying to change to a more apostolic approach: “Let’s get it going.” And during that period I started to realize two main things. First, now a lot of people were coming in who had a Christian background – very different from our guys in the beginning who all had unchurched backgrounds. And some of my guys with unchurched backgrounds felt they didn’t know how to train those new people.

That was one major thing. It was really a clash of culture – not negative, but definitely a clash of culture. In one city, the key leader at that time had an unchurched background; he’s an amazing guy. But now suddenly Christian-background people showed up who also had a very clear vision for the city.

When I looked carefully at both of them, I knew it wouldn’t work to put them together. So I completely said goodbye to any hierarchical structure that I still had in the back of my mind. I concluded, “We cannot function in a hierarchical way. People have to be able to work together, wherever that puts them relationally. We can’t tell people they have to report to a certain leader. We have to find different ways to approach this.”

So I started a bigger meeting where I brought all those new pioneers together. At that time, we had about 100 house churches. At the joint festival in 2012, I think there were about 600 people. It started to feel different.

In late 2012, I heard the Holy Spirit say very clearly: “2014 is the last joint festival. After that it will get too big. It will become too complicated, and the whole leadership team would all have to go in a public and full-time role or it wouldn’t work anymore. So in one and a half years, you have to stop the joint festival.” When I communicated that, people were not happy about it. But they respected me enough so nobody got angry.

In 2013, in one of the meetings where I was sitting together with all those new pioneers, I got really rebuked by the Holy Spirit. Up until then everything had run according to my leadership style. I’m a very disciplined person. I get up very early in the morning, I pray, I make plans, I prepare stuff, I talk with people, and I travel a lot. And I had always assumed that’s how everybody functioned!

The Holy Spirit rebuked me for keeping Him out. I understood immediately what He meant. It was not that I had tried to calm the Holy Spirit down. But I had acted as if everybody had to listen to God the way I listen to God.

Starting from that meeting, God made it clear he wanted to speak to everybody. So for six months I stepped down. I discussed it with the leadership team and the apostolic team and asked another couple to take over. I still continued to lead the pioneering ministry. But for all the strategic decisions and meetings I stepped down so others could lead the meetings and reshape the atmosphere with much more joint prayer.

That was the situation from October 2013 to Pentecost 2014. And at that last joint festival, the atmosphere changed. There was much more freedom to listen to God, much more freedom to prepare meetings differently. There was much more freedom in what was taught and what was not taught.

More than 1000 people attended. That felt nice too. And at the end of the festival I felt like God was putting a medal on my chest. It was clear: things had changed. Up until today, if you show me a map of Europe, I can start crying when I think of all those places that are completely untouched. I knew that most of our people are not motivated like that.

So I expected God to say something new, like, “The 90-minute region’s done. Start going into all the European countries. I expected something new to come, but God was quiet. He didn’t say anything about a next step. The only thing I could envision was: “If we continue to grow like we have been, by Pentecost 2016, we should have about 500 house churches.” That was my projection.

But I didn’t know what to do with it. The work just kept growing. After 2014 we didn’t have joint festivals any more, but a lot of the house church clusters (networks of house churches) started their own festivals – sometimes with 200 people, sometimes with only 30 people – to have a big celebration together once a year.

I started a new training crew with about 15 young men who I thought were apostolically gifted. They were mostly in their early 20’s. I brought them together for a weekend once a quarter for what we called “apostolic multiplier training.” And I didn’t know really what to do with them.

I pretty much had only my own experience to know what to do. So the first year was rather bad. But in 2016 it got better and better. I had learned my lesson about giving space to the Holy Spirit. One of the things I’ve learned about recognizing apostolic leaders or teams: they are self-motivated. If not, nothing will ever happen.

We do mentor leaders and communicate and teach in joint meetings. But we don’t have joint meetings very often. It’s when I see somebody going into the next city and starting to send his own people out, that I know he is observing the pattern I have laid, because he’s self-motivated.

By Pentecost 2016 we counted about 520 house churches. By that time, the move outside our country had grown. We had started work in a Muslim-majority country. It is still slow but it is happening. We have started in three other European countries, in different directions.

Our most recent apostolic meeting was attended by 70 adults. I’m still doing pioneer work. To my surprise, in December 2015, God told me to start going into a fourth European country, but completely evangelizing. Not looking for Christians but starting from zero again. So last year I went with some others into that country and started from zero again. I don’t speak that language, so I have to find English-speaking people at universities and wherever I can.

Staying connected

People often ask me: “How do you stick together?” I tell them three major things. We don’t have a joint branding; they even use different names now. So that cannot be the reason.

But all the key leaders meet in apostolic meetings. The mentoring is really strong. It’s never as strong as I would like it to be, but it is strong. Anybody in the movement can tell you who their mentor is, and I don’t do one hour a week with all the guys I mentor any more. A lot of the guys I mentor don’t need it. But that has really helped to create strong relationships and friendships.

The second thing: we try to get people together. We encourage all the leadership teams (on all levels) to have regional days, networking meetings and festivals. But we don’t tell them how often to do those or what to do there. But it’s part of the DNA, to get people together, to help them to see a larger picture and learn from each other.

I tell the leaders: if you’re humble, you know that especially in a house church movement, you will multiply your own personality. Therefore you personally will not multiply a lot of other kingdom values, because you do not feel them strongly enough. So if you don’t get your people together with other believers, you will sooner or later become very narrow in what is happening behind you.

The third thing is that although we don’t have much central administration we establish what we call support modules. These are trainings that all the different house churches can send their people to. We have about eight different support modules right now, and they vary in quality.

One module is one week or one weekend trainings where they can learn to study the Bible theologically and philosophically. That was one of the first things we established. We also established three month programs where house churches that have problems with evangelism can ask stronger evangelists to come in and take them out on the street or wherever they want to go to practice sharing their faith. I want to make these support modules even stronger in the next couple of years than they are at present.

House church patterns

In the house churches, everybody is involved. I don’t feel it’s helpful in Western subcultures if the house church is open. We usually have one really closed meeting for the team. That’s where they pray and plan. And that’s where they start on a weekly level.

For everything else, like having another meeting to invite people, they decide what to do. We encourage the house churches to be small rather than large. If a group grows large, it becomes more complicated, and the leader has to be more capable. He has to be able to communicate with a lot of different people. So usually the team is four to six adults; definitely not larger.

Then they have three other people around them per team member. So the whole group gathering would be between nine and eighteen people. And on average they reach about three new people a week, so that’s quite a lot.

Persecution

In the early years we endured some persecution mainly from traditional churches. People came to Christ, and somebody would get worried because a person got baptized. So they would ask a cult investigation agency: “Who are these people? Are they listed as a cult or a recognized church?” But it was not that difficult. We very politely asked for an interview.

I was once invited to the annual gathering of the anti-cult experts from one of the traditional denominations. Two of our guys and I sat opposite 40-50 people interviewing us. It felt like a Roman inquisition. But we were polite and absolutely transparent.

We don’t have much administration, but if they had wanted they could have looked through our finances. We told them pretty much, “We understand you guys are important. There are evil people out there. If after this interview, you think we’re evil, that’s up to you.”

That seemed to satisfy them, and we haven’t had a problem with that recently. On a personal level, though, you always have persecution. I’ve seen people lose their jobs; I’ve seen parents burn Bibles. I’ve seen it all. And I’m not talking about the Muslim-majority country. I’m talking about here in our country.

Impacting traditional churches

We’ve had some limited success in impacting existing, established churches with buildings here in Europe. The issue is complex because the various denominations are very different from each other.

I did train one traditional pastor. First I trained his eldership, but that didn’t work. He would have had to change everything: his pattern of finance, his pattern of meetings and so on. But what we succeeded in is this: his young guys started to understand, “Church is not because we belong to this denomination. What’s important is the person who really helps me to live as his disciple. And if I move to another city, I will not go looking for another church. I will start a new house church there.”

So out of this traditional church they have started many house churches in different cities. I have not seen a complete change of a traditional church. I tell people: “Go and look for a group of people that is motivated to try something new. Don’t put pressure on anybody to change everything they have done for the last 30 or 40 years. Focus on those who are open to something different. Start a parallel approach; take them out, let them pioneer and see what the Lord will do. I still lack experience and also time to know if it could work in an entire pre-existing church here.

Cycles – describe any key cycles of training / training events / leadership meetings, evaluation, strategy planning, etc.

• Meeting with leaders for training once a quarter in one of the major cities

• Training for all at annual celebrations.

In the early days the festival looked much more Christian than the gatherings now. It had worship, teaching, time to pray and a lot of free time activities and workshops and so on. And usually baptisms.

Nowadays, if there are sessions, they look very different. The key issue would still be having avenues where they learn from each other. So nowadays even in the main sessions, you would see much less teaching, much more prayer, and much more interaction. And there would be a huge number of workshops, of platforms where people can meet together with different interests. They would all be there, and there would be a lot of fun too. A lot of fun.

• Support modules open to all believers in the movement

Roles of the outside catalysts

• Assistance and encouragement at the beginning

Roles of key inside leaders

• Vision-casting

• Much fasting and prayer

• Evangelism

• Setting patterns for house churches

• Listening to the Spirit and discerning future direction

• Training of early generations of leaders

• Establishing a stable leadership team for the whole country

• Identifying, training and launching apostolic leaders

Disappointments/Challenges

• Lack of mentors or fruitful patterns; needing to figure out everything by trial and error or the Spirit’s leading

• Major differences in perspective between unchurched and church background leaders

Statistical Information

• 2000 – a couple of baptisms

• 2001- started first generation groups in two or three other places in country

• 2003 – slow-down in growth

• 2004 – 12 or 13 house churches

• 2007 to 2010 – divided the country into eight regions, and pioneered in regions where we hadn’t started any house church yet

• 2008 – 200-250 people total

• 2012 – 100 house churches; about 600 people at festival

• 2014 – about 140 house churches; over 1000 people at festival

• 2016 – about 520 house churches

Future Plans

I’m currently in another conversation with Jesus. I told him my longing to take the gospel to the last subculture, not just of our country but all over the world. I asked him, “What should be the next step?” And I felt he asked me “What would you speak as a next benchmark?”

I said, “One thousand house churches would be manageable. Two thousand would be manageable; even five thousand doesn’t excite me. It will get there eventually. But ten thousand, I have no clue how to get there and what to do. Or what would be my role and how to do it.” So that’s what I communicated as the next benchmark.

Then I said, “But what’s my role?” What I got was, “You have done this process of seeing a group of new believers rising up, growing up to become an apostolic team. And at the time of the last joint festival there were about 140 house churches. So you have seen it grow and you didn’t stay there. You released the guys. How about if you do this process with 100 apostolic teams?”

So that’s what I want to see over the next couple of years. I would like to see 100 apostolic teams launching their own movements. If on average each movement had 100 house churches, that would be 10,000 house churches to start with. That is quite exciting.

Some apostolic teams among us have already started new apostolic teams. There are some (especially cross-culturally) where we’re still in the early stages. But that is the next major step, from what I can see.

There’s a story I tell a lot to convey my vision for the future. I would like to see on a playground in a small rural town, a young father talking with another young father and trying to share the gospel with him. And this other young father says, “Thank you very much for sharing, but I already came to Christ a year ago. And when they tell each other their stories, they realize, “Oh, my spiritual grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather and your spiritual grandfather’s grandfather’s, grandfather, were once sitting together in this apostolic multiplier training that I’m doing now.”

If God would bring that to pass, I would be happy.

• Want to learn more about Movements in America? —> Get The Book

• Sign up to pray for my ministry! —> Pray

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My substack was created to say “they are happening here” and this podcast is a prime example. It’s Part 2 of a case study of the first modern church planting movement in the west.

Find Part 1 HERE

• Want to learn more about Movements in America? —> Get The Book

• Sign up to pray for my ministry! —> Pray

• Donate to support my work —> Donate

My substack was created to say “they are happening here” and this podcast is a prime example. It’s Part 1 of a case study of the first modern church planting movement in the west.

• Want to learn more about Movements in America? —> Get The Book

• Sign up to pray for my ministry! —> Pray

• Donate to support my work —> Donate

It’s a case study of the first Church Planting Movement in the modern West. I believe I got it from Steve Smith some years ago. I’ve copied it verbatim except for a few headings I added for clarity. I enjoy reading it every so often and hope you learn from it as I have.

It’s a lengthy case study, so I’m going to break it up into two posts.

Western Europe Case Study

March 2017

• Size of the movement at this writing: about 500 house churches

• Status (Active/Plateaued/Fizzled) at writing: Active

Where are you on the CPM continuum?

5. CPM: Consistent multiple streams of 4th generation churches

Name of Focus Group

Majority people of a Western European country

Historical narrative of work among the group

Personal Background

When I was 15, I really searched for God with all my heart in my daily prayer times between 7:00 and 8:00 pm. Monday was my fasting day. At that time I experienced a calling, which even up to today feels very real.

I saw a map of my country with a lot of dots on the map, and from that day I started to share the gospel with my classmates. I invited them to come to church with me and read the Bible together and that’s what we did. In the first year about five or six friends from my class came to Christ.

That’s when I would say I started the first church ever. Some of them really got in trouble at home when they told their parents they wanted to be serious followers of Jesus. That’s how everything started.

A couple of years later, we experienced great openness, and for about two and a half years everything was possible. A few of my friends and I went to the headmaster in local schools in the neighboring villages and towns and we asked to share about Christ. I was in my late teens and my friends were about the same age.

And we really taught about Christ to whole schools. And on weekends in those villages we did a youth service and some youth activities to get them together.

After a couple of years, the situation started to change and new regulations and laws came in. That’s when I hit the biggest identity crisis in my life. Because all the things that had worked before didn’t work anymore. I was finished with high school and hadn’t decided what to do with my life.

The only thing I really wanted to do at that time was to serve the Lord and continue what I had been doing. I had been traveling around the country trying to look for (what I call now) someone to disciple me.

I met a lot of amazing people, but they all wanted me to join their Bible schools and ministries. I never heard anybody say, “Wow, this is what you have started? Can I come and visit you? I would like to see it; I would like to see how to develop it.” So I was really frustrated.

I didn’t know any better, so I went to study theology at a liberal theological university. It didn’t help me much. For four years I disappeared. I stopped going to church; I stopped praying. I stopped reaching out; I stopped pretty much everything.

After that I was so disillusioned that I took the first job I could find, in an English-speaking country. Then, after a couple of years, I moved to Asia in 1996. I started attending a church because I met a Christian who told me if I wanted to learn the language I’d do better going to a church than a Buddhist temple.

CPM Awakening

I ended up attending a church that was part of the most dynamic church planting movement in the country: very charismatic, very Asian, very hierarchical, very authoritarian. For me, that was the perfect place.

After one year, I heard Jesus say very clearly, “When you were 15 I called you. The calling is still on. You ran away; I haven’t changed my mind.” That evening I knew I had to go back to God.

The next morning I told one of the church leaders about it and he said, “OK, I’m going to train you.” So from day one he took me out evangelizing. He taught me Bible all day and took me out in the countryside for church planting. They took me into their life; I lived together with one couple for one year.

They challenged me to start an international church with all the sex tourists and Westerners who had come to study Buddhism. That was how I really restarted. It was like learning to love again. After only a couple of months it was very clear: I’m going to stay here for a bit longer to learn, but after that I have to go back to my home country.

Back Home

I knew I wanted to start a church planting movement, with strong discipleship and unbelievers coming to Christ. So I came back to my country in 1999. I knew exactly one person in the city where I started.

The only people committed to this vision were myself and an Asian woman who worked at the embassy as a diplomat. She supported me and opened her nice flat for meetings. We started reaching out from day one. I was reaching out everywhere, and she reached out to embassy people, wherever she met them.

I deliberately kept myself outside the traditional Christian scene and in the beginning only shared with people who had grown up outside the church. It was the subculture I was most used to. But it also really felt like that’s what I should be doing. I should provide an environment where new believers can grow up first.

After three months, we really had a breakthrough. The first couple came to Christ. Our country is not an easy place to evangelize. But it happened and God spoke directly into people’s lives.

For example, we had invited one lady for coffee and she was making fun of us when she left. She went to the subway and then called us three hours later and said, “I don’t know what you guys did, but when I was standing at the traffic light, I suddenly knew everything you guys had said was true. God is real and I have to change my life.”

So we visited her the same evening and baptized her about a week later. Those kinds of things happened and I’m not sure where I would have been if that period hadn’t happened. (I can testify that even up until today it can happen everywhere and the Holy Spirit moves everywhere and people are touched.)

That was in early 2000; there were a couple of baptisms and things looked good. We had started a Sunday service right from the beginning. It looked absolutely unprofessional, but all these new believers thought, “Something special is happening with us,” so they brought their friends along.

I probably would have continued down that road, but a couple of things happened. First, we were discipling on a one to one level. Up to today I say: “If somebody new comes to Christ, please try to really meet them every week for at least an hour – to pray to study the word of God, to help them get their life in order. Everything on top of that is bonus. But show them their own importance by meeting them one on one and helping them to understand they should be doing the same thing with people behind them.”

We’ve always done that, starting year one and we’ve never stopped. So my schedule quickly filled up with the discipleship and I couldn’t reach out much anymore. Also, there were no mature Christians involved, and all our new believers had limits in discipling the new people. So I would do it differently now, but I wouldn’t compromise the one on one interaction, the very personal touch.

Nowadays I give leaders a different perspective. I ask: “Who behind you is already reaching out to others? Who behind you just needs help in the beginning?”

In the beginning my focus was very much on church growth. Very little on how Jesus can help people get free, be delivered, and get routines in their lives? So nowadays, I say: “Focus on the very strongest and on the very weakest.”

Take the strongest together and take the weakest together. But don’t burden new leaders with all the people who have problems. With the weakest – those who really need help – try to find different patterns.

Take them together for breakfast once a week and use the time to really pray. Talk about problems and pray with them. But don’t burden your next generation leaders too much with them.

First House Church

Also, pretty quickly, the first of our new guys got admission to a university in a different town. He said, “We can do everything that we have seen. We can reach out, we can disciple, but we cannot start a Sunday service.”

So I realized very quickly, already in 2000-2001, that if we went with a Sunday service, it wouldn’t work. It would be too slow. Then one of my friends said, “If you ever make me preach on a Sunday, I will leave. I cannot do that.” He has changed his mind now, but that helped me realized that a Sunday service with preaching was not the model to use.

So we started to communicate very clearly way back then: “We will not start Sunday services. We will start communities. We will start house churches.” But (something else I would now do differently), we kept dabbling with a Sunday service for a very long time. Too long.

The ministry grew step by step. There was no money involved at all. There were no missionary funds and no “missions” money from our own people. At the beginning they were all new believers from an atheistic background. We were all working, trying to work as little as possible to have enough time.

But that was also part of what we really wanted to see. I taught them: “If you want to see a church planting movement, we have to set the pattern first. We have to be able to do it contrary to the normal church pattern here. So of course our time was incredibly limited.

I got married in 2003 and we had our first child in 2005. That didn’t help me have more time; that was definitely a reason to slow down.

Another reason the growth slowed down for a while: our first generation of believers were very excited, hard-working people. The next generation, who came to Christ through them, were more dependent on help.

They saw a community of believers – a community that was warm and loving – and felt: “that’s a good group to be part of.” It took us some years to get a good balance inbetween really helping people press forward, and taking care of all the others. In the beginning we didn’t know how to do that.

Right from the beginning though (in 2001), we started first generation groups in two or three other places in our country. From that time on I met with all of them together once a quarter in one of the major cities. We prayed and I taught a lot (more than I would now).

For one thing, some biblical foundation was necessary, but at the same time, I didn’t know what else to do besides teaching, teaching, and more teaching. They learned a lot and the friendships were quite close. There were constant breakthroughs; people were always coming to Christ. But it took much longer than I had expected.

I thought the growth would continue explosively, as it had at the beginning. But that wasn’t how it happened.

Slow Down

In 2003, after experiencing the slow-down in growth, I started to pray and fast a lot. By 2004, we had twelve or thirteen house churches. I felt it was time to establish a more stable leadership team for the whole country. I had a short list of brothers I felt would be good for that, and out of that list, I put together a team of nine (later ten) people to start to lead the work.

We didn’t know how to be a team together, but those were the people I felt God had given me. So for two years we tried to form as a leadership team. I felt in my spirit: “It’s not good to just continue to just go and go and go forward. We have to establish a level of stability to be crazy enough to reach out and take the next steps of expansion.”

It took about two years for us to start functioning as a team. I heard God say very clearly: “You always wanted to go into every county, every city, every subculture in this country. Now it’s time to move again. Divide the country into eight regions, and in those regions where you haven’t started any house church yet, go in and begin to pioneer.”

At that time we were not as dynamic as we are now. We didn’t even know what to do. It took us one year to reshape our mindset and just get in the car in the morning, pray and go to another city and just go out in the street and start talking with people. During the first year we were more trying to challenge the more experienced guys to move into some of those areas of the country.

We did that from 2007 to 2010.

In 2008 I got trained in an established pattern for evangelism, it helped us a lot in the years since then. We learned how to share with people anywhere, how to get to know people anywhere, and mentor people anywhere. We learned how to do it through telephone, through Skype, to just do it anywhere, wherever you find somebody willing to come to Christ and accept Jesus and start to be a disciple.

That was when it became clear: now it’s time for three of us to go full-time, to help the apostolic work to grow. That was not possible part-time any more. In 2008 I started traveling extensively. At that time my wife was pregnant with our second child.

But she released me a lot; I traveled every week. And we saw a major breakthrough: once a year, every Pentecost, we all came together and it was still small at that time: 200-250 people. But we came together and you could see the atmosphere change. There was a new excitement in the whole thing.

This is the end of Part 1. Find Part 2 HERE

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Almost all of my posts have been reflections on movements in America that are derived from the Scripture and from research and data gathering I’ve done. My posts have been more about sharing ethos and principles than practical “how to” guidance.

This post is going to be a lot more about the nuts and bolts of ministry. In particular, the nuts and bolts of my ministry.

I want to share them with you because I covet your feedback. Does it sound like good or bad strategy? Any questions you want to ask me? Basically, I’m looking to crowdsource my strategizing with my wise and spirit-filled Substack followers (as in you)

Some Background

I moved back to the Raleigh-Durham (RDU) area in 2019 with a burden to reach its 1.6 million lost. One goal that God had placed on my heart: multiply a church to the fourth generation. By the end of 2021, that goal was accomplished by God’s grace, and even though some churches have faded away, new ones have always started so that there’s always been a consistent 4th generation church.

After pumping my fist a few times and feeling good about myself for a few weeks, my heart became unsatisfied. There was still 1.6 million lost in my city. Even though we had started a fourth generation church, there was only a total of seven gatherings in our network. Seven. It didn’t feel like I’d even made it to the starting line yet.

This frustrated me because I don’t like to say that God has led me to do something and then fall short of actually doing it.

This drove my wife and I to a year of prayer to ask the Lord what we were supposed to do next. Our vision is to get the gospel to every person and a multiplying church in every community of RDU until there is No Place Left. We just needed to know the practical next steps.

Vision for 2030

Through this prayer time as a married couple and with other brothers and sisters, we realized that we had started a network of multiplying churches, and to reach the whole city we needed a whole lot more networks.

When Paul said that he had No Place Left for the gospel in Romans 15:23, he had started networks of churches that met in homes in the different cities he had visited. All the churches in a city like Corinth, Thessalonica, or Ephesus related to one another as a city church. This city church was a church of churches.

Through prayer, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to be like Paul and catalyze several networks of churches across the city.

Our goal is to have 10 networks of multiplying disciples and churches using movement principles by Dec. 31, 2030.

If God does that, then maybe it will feel like the gun just went off and we took the first step across the starting line.

Breaking It Down Into Smaller Steps

The vision for 10 networks is a long-term goal, so we looked for some markers along the way that would show we’re on the right track:

Mid-Term Goal

To have 10 networks by the end of 2030, we need 10 church planting multipliers by Dec. 31, 2028

Going back to my last post, multiplication happens through leadership development. If God brings us the 10 right leaders, they will be able to gather a band of other leaders who will be able to catalyze a network of multiplication.

On Paul’s second journey, he brought Silas along with him, picked up Timothy, and Priscilla and Aquilla along the way. All those coworkers were pivotal leaders who helped start more multiplying churches around the eastern Mediterranean.

That’s what we’re going for in RDU. Just like Paul picked up leaders, we need to pick up a total of 10 leaders by the end of 2028. That timeframe gives each leader at least two years to start a network.

Short Term Goal

Before we get to 10 multipliers, we have a goal to get 3 more church planting multipliers by August 1, 2026.

We started writing these goals down in the Summer of last year, so an August cut off date is in line with a one year goal.

One thing to note about finding 3 multipliers this year: we’ll need to identify at least 6-10 potential multipliers by August because we know not everyone with potential will in turn see multiplication.

Current Status

Before we even set the goal of wanting to see 10 networks started, there were already two networks going. Ours and one at NC State University. So we’re already 20% of the way there!

There was also a handful of people who were just starting to reach out or start their first church. These 5 or so people are all potential multipliers. We’re staying in relationship with them and waiting to see what the Lord does.

Since setting the goal of finding 3 more church planting multipliers in a year, we have found 3 more potential couples. One couple has already started two gatherings through their ministry. One couple came to Christ relatively recently through our work, though are some generations away from us. They have started their own church and may start their own network. And the third has started a few gatherings in a previous city, but just moved here and is getting started again.

Biggest Stuckage

There’s one big stuckage we face with these goals. Catalysts move on too quickly. It’s as if they get a vision for moving overseas at the same time they get a vision for multiplication, and start planning their exit right away. Since coming to RDU, I feel like it’s a huge success if a potential multiplier stays in the city for longer than a year.

I was watching a David Watson interview today, and he talked about how leaders move on too soon in this country. He said that one key for catalyzing movements in America is accepting the fact that it takes 2-3 years to develop a leader.

When these potential multipliers move on so quickly, their work is wiped away. They didn’t give themselves enough time to develop another leader. The potential to multiply is never fulfilled.

If all the leaders we’ve worked with hadn’t moved on from RDU, we would probably already have 4-5 networks and 50 total gatherings in the city. I’ll be addressing this stuckage further in a later post.

What do you think? I would love some encouragement, constructive criticism, or questions in the comments.

I plan to post an update on this every few months for the sake of accountability and to bring you guys along on the journey. If you would like more frequent updates or ways to pray for us, feel free to sign up for our prayer newsletter.

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Learn more about how God is multiplying disciples and churches in America from my book Movements in America (find the book HERE)

That is the one thing you need to do to move from addition to multiplication.

End post.

Shortest post ever.

Okay, you might want more elaboration, so keep reading if you want me to explain this further.

I Didn’t Get This At First

Years ago, Jeff S told me that getting to multiplication was a question of leadership development, and I had no idea what he was talking about. God used Jeff and his team to catalyze a movement in South Asia, so I knew that he knew what he was talking about. I’m just kind of a slow learner when it comes to movement stuff, so it took me years to understand what he was saying.

Here’s what God taught me: Leading a few people to Christ is addition. Discipling them is addition. Starting a church with those people is addition. All these activities are essential for starting a church planting movement, but will only get you to addition.

Training someone to gospel share, training someone to disciple, and training someone to start a church will get to multiplication. At least theoretically. This is actually where I got stuck. I was training people to do all of this stuff, and assumed I would get multiplication, but I didn’t. What I actually got was confusion, frustration, and self-doubt.

Getting Unstuck

Praise the Lord that He speaks through prayer, the Word and His people so I could get unstuck!

What I learned is that leadership development starts with finding the right person who God has prepared to become a leader. It’s good to see the potential in everyone, but it’s taken me a long time to learn to recognize when someone is or is not going to be a multiplier.

I think this is the heart of 2 Timothy 2:2:

“…and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”

Paul found Timothy as a leader in a group of many witnesses and he is instructing Timothy to do the same and train the faithful people to do the same. The core of the verse is an instruction to hone in on the leaders in the midst of a group of disciples.

Staying Focused

If you want to see multiplication, you must be thinking about leadership development from the first prayer, the first gospel share, the first salvation, the first church start.

There is a lot more I could say on this topic, but in light of trying to stay focused, I’m going to end this post here. Just remember: the only way to multiplication is leadership development.

Comment below if you want me to elaborate more on how to identify or develop leaders!

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