Our first church plant was full of conflict.
My wife and I had parachuted into an empty church building in a town where we knew no one outside our own household and a few friends from neighboring communities.
Most of our early members were “off-the-street” converts, brand new to the church scene. However, several people had a history in other churches. As the tiny congregation grew, we found ourselves attracting disaffected members from other ministries. They came in groups, bringing their spiritual culture and traditions along with them. As a result, we encountered substantial disunity. Cliques and spiritual heritage groups emerged. Each group had its own “power plays” to corral us into someone else’s ministry culture.
Soon our congregation of 80 had four conflicting leaders, and I was being pulled in directions contrary to the ministry style God was building into my life.
Banding Together
After a fit of prideful frustration, I felt the Lord encouraging me to pastor the other pastors in addition to the members—not always an easy task in a new and somewhat divisive atmosphere.
I decided to teach unity from Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth, and publicly address the problem we had. After that, I phoned each of the other three pastors once a week and had coffee with each one monthly. Our conversations formed bonds that overshadowed any friction between us concerning doctrine and church practices. Friendships were born.
Together, we gleaned a beginner’s lesson about working as a team. I also saw A.P.E.S.T. gifts (apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, teacher; see Eph. 4:11–12) that differed from my own. We began utilizing those leaders and their gifts in ways that bore fruit—ways that we never would have seen if we’d relied solely on my strength as a teacher.
Hope Chapel became an invading army. All platoons united under a common purpose and identity, yet each was unique in approach. Some groups centered on prayer, others on inductive Bible study, while others majored in gifts of the Spirit. We came together on Sundays to celebrate mutual victories. Those groups met in homes, hospital cafeterias, and on the lawn of the UCLA campus. Once I even got to lead a Bible study in a Vietnam-era missile factory. God thoroughly blessed these little bands of Christians at a time when most churches still viewed off-campus Bible studies as a “tool of the devil.”
In a matter of weeks, we were reaching more than 200 people weekly (though our Sunday attendance was still far smaller).
Our approach accomplished three things:
• It caused spiritual growth in individuals.
• It provided logistics to grow the number of people we could shepherd.
• It gave leaders a forum to develop pastoral abilities.
Young leaders could test their skills and gifts without significant risk. Several of those early leaders now pastor thriving churches. They learned the ministry by doing the ministry, much like the disciples of Jesus.
A ‘New’ Thing
God called our church to plant new churches. That was a “new” thing—new to us but not to church history.
It had been decades since a congregation in our circles had sent pastors out to start new churches. It had been even longer since they had worked with pastors who’d been trained in a local church by a disciple maker. For at least two decades, our denomination had forgotten the biblical pattern of church planting.
Church culture and polity had excluded aggressive disciple making and the idea of local churches planting churches. However, these factors are the story of the apostles. There is a reason why 21 of 28 chapters in the book of Acts focus directly on Barnabas and Paul—they made disciples and planted churches.
But tradition is strong. My spiritual heritage straitjacketed me so tightly that even though I had soaked in the book of Acts during college, I never applied its lessons to my life. I suspect that is the case with many church leaders today.
Joining the Adventure
The New Testament is an adventure story. A great King is rejected and murdered by his people. Three days after the murder, he secretly appears to his closest friends and colleagues. Forty days later, he sends them as envoys to the whole world. They are to spread the news of his resurrection and message of eternal life. His followers fan out across the known world in one generation. Their accomplishment is the most fantastic success story of all time.
The original Twelve were slow to act, but their followers took up the torch. The church moved across ethnic and national boundaries, but only after persecution led by Saul of Tarsus forced a change of tactics.
How did they achieve so much? The key was trust, both in God and men.
Wherever they went, they preached to anyone who would listen. Jesus had taught them to brush off those who rejected their message (Matt. 10:12–14). But among those who believed, they quickly found naturally gifted leaders, appointing them to watch over the rest.
Even then, persecution seems to have generated a tipping point. After Paul was stoned and left for dead, he and Barnabas snuck back into the towns where they previously made disciples. When they did, they appointed elders from among those disciples—which means they planted churches. I love that they “turned the elders over to the care of the Lord, in whom they had put their trust” (Acts 14:23). Oh, that we trusted the conjunction of disciple making and the oversight of the Holy Spirit as much as they did.
Paul’s strategy on his third journey became a model for us. He spent three years in one city, two of them teaching daily in the school of Tyrannus. His stationary disciple making produced leaders who reproduced the work. Archaeology reveals the remains of 20 churches in Asia Minor. This can only be explained by understanding Paul’s sense of teamwork and reproduction through locally produced church multipliers.
Once we understood the juxtaposition between teams and disciple making leading to reproduction, we were on our way to generating a movement—one that God would use and bless in ways we could never have imagined.