The Church Growth Movement That Begins With You

You: The Beginning of a Movement

“You can do it.” The moment I heard those simple words — “You can do it” — it was like someone had reached inside my soul and flipped on a switch. What had seemed impossible just moments before was now suddenly possible! Before you finish reading this chapter, I want you to have that same experience. I believe that sometime during the next several pages, God will reach inside your soul and convince you that what might seem impossible is possible, what you think is improbable can happen, and what you may have thought was just a pipe dream may very well be a God thing. But before we get to all that, let me back up a bit and tell you a bit of my story.

Our Dream on a Napkin

As a college student, I had way too much time on my hands. Together with my friends, I would spend hours inventing games and pulling pranks on underclassmen, just to pass the time. “Lang Hall Fall Wall Ball” was a game we invented that combined handball and dodgeball and was played in the hallway of Lang Hall. Though it does absolutely nothing for your GPA, a small rubber ball and a dormitory hallway can provide hours of entertainment and competition. When we weren’t playing games in the hallway, we’d think of creative ways to fool unsuspecting freshmen. One of my favorite pranks in those years was sneaking into rooms and setting clocks five hours ahead, getting our helpless freshmen roommates to believe it was 6:00 a.m. when it was really 1:00 a.m. We’d laugh our heads off watching them shower, dress, and head out the door to the cafeteria, only to find it closed. But those years weren’t just a time for playing games and wasting time. We also did our share of dreaming in college. Not just daydreaming through our classes but also really dreaming big about how God might want to use us.

A few years after graduating, I was sitting in Potter’s Place, this little dive of a Mexican restaurant in downtown Naperville, thinking back on those college years. Together with my college roommate, Scott Alexander, my brother, Jon, and his friend, Darren Sloniger, we had just started Community Chris­tian Church. The four of us had shared a common dream — reaching out to the Chicagoland area. We knew that it would take a very “complicated” strategy for us to actually reach all eight million ­people in the greater metro area of Chicago. So to get started, we had taken a map of Chicago and pinned it to a bulletin board on our dorm room wall. Then we divided Chicago among the four of us in the room and devised an innovative and “sophisticated” strategy for taking the entire city and the suburbs for ­Jesus. Each of us agreed to take a fourth of the metro area and accepted the mission of reaching a mere two million ­people. At the time, it was a grand idea and we were completely naive, but we actually believed it was possible.

As I sat in the Mexican restaurant that day remembering the God-sized dreams that had led us to plant our church, it got me dreaming again. So I pulled out a napkin and sketched out a completely new plan. I drew Lake Michigan, filled out the boundaries of the city of Chicago, and then began to draw circles, each representing different churches — possible sites of Community that would be scattered all over the Chicago area. I was beginning to get a sense of a fresh vision, looking beyond my dream of four individuals dividing up a city to a dream of one church with many locations reaching various parts of the Chicagoland area. I thought about what I had drawn, then folded up the napkin and slipped it inside my journal.

That napkin stayed in my journal for the next four years. To be honest, I never showed the napkin to anyone and basically kept it to myself. Then one morning I was having breakfast with my friend Larry. Larry was a very successful entrepreneur. He drove a light blue Mercedes and was always dressed to the nines. In some ways, the trappings of wealth and the several businesses he had started impressed me. Larry was also finding his way back to God, and he had expressed some interest in how we did church. Even though he was still growing as a Christian, he was able to see some parallels between his entrepreneurial endeavors and how we had started our church from scratch. About halfway through my scrambled eggs and bacon, Larry asked me a very direct question. “So Dave, what is the dream?” He paused for a moment, and then he added a real zinger that I wasn’t expecting. “If you could do anything, what would you do?”

There was silence on my end. I began thinking to myself, “Do I really tell him my dream? What if he thinks I’m crazy?” Even though it may seem innocent, a question about someone’s life dream is really very personal. I knew that if I were to answer the question honestly and tell him the truth about my dream, it would be out there and I’d feel like I had to own it. I’d be forced to pursue it. So I didn’t respond right away. I was afraid.

But Larry was persistent, and after a few seconds he asked me again, “Dave, what is the dream?”

And in that moment, for the first time in four years, I pulled out the napkin from my journal. I unfolded it on the table between us and said, “Larry, if I could do anything, this is what I would do.” Larry looked at the napkin for a moment, looked up at me, and then said something that was simple yet life-changing.

“Dave, you can do that. Yeah, I can see you doing that.”
Each of us has that moment in our life when we can look back and see that from that point forward, everything changed. And if I were to point to a single moment when everything changed for me, it would be that moment sitting at breakfast with Larry. With those simple words, everything went from off to on. What had just moments before seemed impossible was, for some strange and unexpected reason, now possible in my mind. I left our breakfast meeting that morning truly believing that the dream God had given to me would somehow come to life.

“You Can Do It”

I don’t know if anyone has ever said those words to you before. If not, let me be the first: “You can do it.” Yes, I’m talking to you. Yes, you — the one holding this book in your hands, the one reading the words on this page. I want you to hear this and believe that as sure as the day you were born, God has birthed within you a dream.

You may even have a hunch about that dream. Or maybe you are still searching and have yet to discover it. Perhaps, like me, you’ve tucked the dream away for the last several years and have not had the courage to say it out loud. You haven’t talked about it with anyone. It might even seem a little foolish to you. Regardless of where you are at right now, I want you to hear those words again: “You can do it.” If it were possible for me to sit across the table from you right now and speak to you face-to-face, I would love for you to hear those words personally spoken over your life.

Now, when I tell you, “You can do it,” I don’t want you to just take my word for it. I say these words to you because I want you to take ­Jesus at his word — to have faith in his word to you. Just before ­Jesus left this planet, he gave us, his followers, the mission of helping ­people find their way back to God. He promised us that we would have everything we would need to fulfill the mission he had for us: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Notice again what ­Jesus says about this mission. Reread the verse for a moment.

Who does ­Jesus say will receive power?

Who does ­Jesus say will be his witnesses?

Who does ­Jesus say will accomplish God’s dream of world redemption?

­Jesus is quite clear as he speaks to his followers. He says “you.” In other words, ­Jesus is saying to them and to us who follow him today, “You can do it.” Sure, we have a million questions about how all of this will actually come true, but right now I want you to forget about the specifics and the details and just listen to what ­Jesus is saying to you. He is telling you that he wants you to do it. God is saying to you, to your friends, and to each of his followers, “You can do it.” The movement that will eventually accomplish the mission of ­Jesus lives within you and me!

The Story of Community Christian Church

The naivete of our college-dorm dream to reach Chicago would somehow resurrect itself every time the four of us got together. Each of us was leading ministries at various places scattered throughout the Midwest. Our conversations were often spontaneous. They would happen on the phone or when we would hang out together on the weekends. Eventually this group of four friends started meeting together to seriously plan the launch of a new church. One of our meeting places was the exotic Hen House Restaurant in Dwight, Illinois. It was there that we agreed on the specifics of a three-phased vision for Community.

Our Vision

Phase 1: Impact Church

To be an impact church meant we would be a church that was relentless about impacting ­people who were living outside a relationship with ­Jesus. We were never interested in reaching ­people who were already attending church. Our intent was to reach ­people who were far from God. That is why our mission statement was “Helping ­people find their way back to God,” and it has remained the same to this day.

Phase 2: Reproducing Church

Even in the beginning, we weren’t content with simply growing one large church that would reach a lot of ­people. We thought we could reach more ­people by growing big as well as reproducing over and over again. At that time, the idea of a multisite church was virtually nonexistent, and so we assumed that we would accomplish all of this by planting lots of new churches.

Phase 3: Catalyst for a Movement of Reproducing Churches

Our vision was to have an impact far beyond the city of Chicago or even the United States. We hoped to one day see a movement of reproducing churches. Our team talked about this and committed it to prayer, but when we would share the vision with others, we would often only talk about the first two phases and leave this phase out. Why? I don’t think we really believed that it was possible. But in our most courageous moments we would state this as part of our vision.

Our Mission

It took us only an afternoon to figure out a three-phase vision that we are still trying to accomplish, but it took us more than a year to settle on a phrase that best expresses our mission. It was about eighteen months into the life of Community that Jon and I heard Lyman Coleman retell the story of the prodigal son. With great conviction, he reminded us that we are all prodigals and that there are many prodigals in our communities who have yet to find their way back to the Father. Listening to Lyman share his passion for prodigals made our hearts beat fast, and we were convinced that we had just found our mission statement: “Helping ­people find their way back to God.”

This mission statement resonates with the unchurched in their growing spiritual hunger. However, the churched will sometimes say, “Why do you say ‘back’ to God if we are trying to reach lost ­people?” The answer starts with the understanding that “in the beginning” God created a perfect world and had a perfect relationship with all of his creation, including man. This is evident by God’s declaring that creation “is very good.” But in the middle of this perfect ­community, man sinned and put relational distance between himself and God. Man went from intimacy with God to a state of lostness, and just like the father in the story of the prodigal son, our heavenly Father was grieved and desired for all of us to find our way back to him. Second Corinthians 5:18, 20 explains this: “It is all from God. He brought us back to himself through Christ’s death on the cross. And he has given us the task of bringing others back to him through Christ. … So we are Christ’s official messengers.

It is as if God were making his appeal through us. Here is what Christ wants us to beg you to do. Come back to God!” (NIrV). God’s love was so passionate that he came in the person of ­Jesus to provide the way back to that perfect relationship with the Father. As followers of ­Jesus, we are given the task of “helping ­people find their way back to God.”

While the phrase “helping ­people find their way back to God” reflects the heartbeat of Community, two numbers remind us of whom we are working to reach: sixty-seven and twenty. If the world were a village of a hundred ­people, sixty-seven would be far from God, facing a Christless existence. And twenty of the one hundred would be living in extreme poverty. It is our mission to reach the sixty-seven and come alongside the twenty, helping all ­people find their way back to God.

Getting Started

A few months after my wife, Sue, and I were married, we moved to the western suburbs of Chicago. At about that same time, my friend Scott invited a seminary buddy of his, Georgia Kurko, to join our team. With my wife and Georgia, our initial church-planting team had already increased by 50 percent! Darren and Scott shared an apartment, and my brother, Jon, moved in with me and my new bride. Georgia’s apartment served as our multipurpose facility — all six hundred square feet of it. We used it for everything from children’s ministry training to student ministry activities to equipment storage. Scott was the oldest person in our group at twenty-six, and Darren the youngest at twenty-one. We had no money to speak of, no ­people to help us, and, truthfully, no clue what we were doing! We were true entrepreneurs.

Every day for four months straight, we knocked on doors, getting to know the ­people in our new community. Marketing gurus now tell us that about 250 surveys provide you with a good random sampling. We knocked on more than 5,000 doors. We figured that if door-to-door surveys worked for Rick Warren when he started his church, then we might as well try to do as many as we possibly could.

We asked ­people what they might look for in a new church. We asked them what they believed were the most significant needs in their community. We even asked them, “If you were to attend a church based only on the name, which church would you attend?” Then we showed them our short list of possible names to see which ones they liked best.

Every church planter thinks that it’s the name of his church that will attract the crowds and change the world, and so they come up with all sorts of “cool-sounding” names. You’ll even find some of those names among our NewThing churches, names like The Pursuit, Reunion, Restore, 242, Paseo, Crossing — all of them very cool-sounding. I’m not sure what they all mean, really, but I’m sure they are cool! Obviously, we also wanted a creative and hip name for our church. But my wife, Sue, kept insisting on Community Chris­tian Church. “I like Community Chris­tian Church,” she’d say. “It’s simple and makes sense . . . you should just call it Community Chris­tian Church.” I hated the name. It was boring, predictable, and lacked any sense of creativity. But she insisted and insisted. Finally, totally confident that unchurched ­people would support my view and prove her wrong, I added her suggested name to our survey along with my favorites. You can probably guess what happened. After surveying thousands of ­people in our community, we found that the name they liked best (by a ratio of ten to one) was Community Chris­tian Church. And that’s the name we’ve kept ever since.

Five Reproducing Principles We’ve Learned

Reproducing Small Groups

Long before we launched a celebration ser­vice, each one of us started a small group. We had only one problem. We had no ­people in our church. To solve this dilemma, we decided we’d each start a group and then show up at each other’s group meetings so we could create a perception that there were at least a few ­people interested in this new church. We all discussed the same small group lesson and used the same icebreaker every night of the week. You can probably imagine how monotonous this was for us, hearing the same answers to the same questions from the same ­people night after night, and pretending like it was the first time we’d heard them. Looking back, it was a crazy way to start, but as a church planter, you just do whatever you have to do to get things going.
The key to reproducing each of those first small groups that we led was asking someone in our group to be our apprentice leader. An apprentice leader is someone who agrees to be developed and mentored as a leader and is eventually released to start a new small group. One of my first small group apprentices was a guy by the name of Jerry. Jerry was not even a believer, but he was actively searching for God, and that was good enough for me. Jerry eventually made a commitment to become a Christ follower, was baptized, and then immediately reproduced and started leading a new small group. Since that time, those small groups of eight to twelve ­people have reproduced countless times. Today we are a church with more than seven thousand attenders and a network of more than thirty thousand ­people celebrating every week with several thousand reproducing small groups.

Though we didn’t fully realize it at the time, I cannot overstate the significance of insisting that every small group begin with a leader and an apprentice leader. Looking back, that one decision was foundational in establishing us as a reproducing church. Don’t just skim over these words. I realize you may have heard this before. But take the time to highlight it if it will help you remember it. As I look back, I am convinced that insisting every small group begin with a leader and an apprentice leader was one of the most important choices we ever made. This is our first reproducing principle.

Reproducing Celebration Ser­vices

When we finally had our first public ser­vice, there were about forty ­people in small groups that made up our launch team (I’m not counting all the doubles, since our team was still attending every group!). We depended heavily on guerrilla marketing techniques like direct mail, newspaper advertising, billboards, and telemarketing. I’m serious; we actually did telemarketing for our church! I’m not proud of it. I don’t recommend it. But we did it. Fifty-two thousand dial-ups! We somehow managed to get the word out about this new church, and a grand total of 465 ­people showed up for our very first ser­vice at Naperville Central High School. After all the energy we had invested to pull off that first ser­vice, I remember our tired team thinking, “We gotta do this every week now?!” And of course we did.

We began with a single celebration ser­vice at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning in the high school cafeteria. After our grand opening Sunday, we worked tirelessly to get as many ­people connected to our small groups as we possibly could. By the time summer rolled around, we had somehow managed to shrink that crowd of 465 down to a low of 130 adults and children.

Even though we weren’t seeing nearly as many ­people as we had hoped on weekends, that summer we made the decision to add a second ser­vice, just six months after we launched. I like to remind Jon that he didn’t think we were ready to add another ser­vice. He likes to remind me that we had a grand total of about ninety adults sitting in a room that could easily hold five hundred. At the end of the debate, we decided to reproduce a celebration ser­vice and have one at 9:00 a.m. and another at 10:30 a.m. Why? Because we were convinced that an additional ser­vice would provide more space and another option that would help even more ­people find their way back to God.

About that same time, John and Cindy Arney, a ­couple in our church, had just given birth to twin boys. In preparation for the launch of our second ser­vice, I brought the twins onstage with me — one in each arm. I said to our young congregation, “This is what we are going to do in just a few months. We are going to reproduce. We will soon have two identical ser­vices, one at 9:00 a.m. and another at 10:30 a.m.” This decision was based on another important reproducing principle.

The cafeteria at Naperville Central High School had room for more than four times the number of adults who were currently attending. With several hundred thousand square feet of space available, we had plenty of room for Kids’ City, our children’s ministry. We were using only a fraction of the parking available, so parking wasn’t a challenge either. We weren’t going to wait until the room was 80 percent full or we ran out of parking spaces before we reproduced.

We reproduced another ser­vice because we believed that a new ser­vice would give more ­people more options. As long as we were prepared to care for these new ­people in our reproducing small groups, we believed God would send us ­people who needed to find their way back to him. This was the first time we actually put into practice the reproducing principle that we would be proactive and not reactive about our reproduction as a church. We intentionally decided that we would not simply wait for growth to happen to us — we would make room for ­people who weren’t even there yet. We would make room for ­people while anticipating that growth would happen. And we’ve continued to reproduce celebration ser­vices ever since that day. We now have more than twenty-nine ser­vices every weekend, scattered across our various campuses in the Chicagoland area, and NewThing (our network of reproducing churches) has churches all over the world that are proactively reproducing celebration ser­vices on a regular basis.

Reproducing Campuses

Over the next several years, Community steadily grew to about seven hundred ­people by reproducing our small groups and our celebration ser­vices. This growth forced us to move from the cafeteria to a small theater at Naperville Central High School and eventually to a larger, seven-hundred-seat auditorium at Naperville North High School.

It was at that time that a real estate developer attending one of our small groups, who had recently become a Christ follower, asked me yet another life-changing question: “How can we get this experience of genuine community in the twenty-six properties we are developing across the Midwest?” We’ll share more of the events that followed his question, but suffice it to say that the answer we came up with eventually led to a partnership and the building of a brand-new community center for the church. Our only challenge in building this new facility was that the center would be located two towns away from our current location, in a town called Romeoville. At the time, I just couldn’t see how I could possibly ask seven hundred ­people to gather in a community where most of them didn’t live. As we processed through this question, it raised a different question for us, one we had never considered before.
“What if we had one church that met in two different locations?”

I don’t know which one of us first asked the question. My friend in real estate had one company with twenty-six locations, and I had my dream to reach Chicago on the back of a napkin in my journal. Regardless of which one of us first asked it, Community eventually decided to have two locations, and we became one of the first churches in the United States to be one church with multiple locations.

Of the seven hundred ­people who attended, only a few lived in Romeoville. So how could we start a new campus there? To start a new location, you need to have lots of ­people, right? Well, not quite. What you really need is not large numbers of ­people but the right person. Our venture into the world of multisite was forcing us to come to grips with yet another reproducing principle.

If we could find the right leader, then the right ­people and the right number of ­people would follow. We found that Troy McMahon was the right leader for this new campus. He had proven his faithfulness as an apprentice leader, as a leader, as a coach, and as a director on our staff. Troy left his fast-track corporate climb in the business world to join our team and lead the charge in starting this new location. Along with Troy were 120 ­people who followed him to be a part of the launch team for our Romeoville campus. Since the launch of that first campus, Community has launched ten other campuses and as of this writing has a total of eleven sites locally in the Chicago area. Along with our campuses, every one of the churches planted in our NewThing church-planting network is committed to reproducing sites and new churches.

Reproducing Churches

As we continued to reproduce groups, celebration ser­vices, and campuses, God was clearly shaping us into something new — a reproducing church. A ­couple of years after our Romeoville launch, Dave Richa, our student community director, came to us and said he was interested in planting a new church in Denver, Colorado. Truthfully, I was a little put out that he didn’t want to stay at Community. To be honest, it was kind of annoying that he had a vision for how to do church better than we were doing it. Dave took that vision to Denver, where he met with the pastors of several large churches, as well as a ­couple of church-planting organizations. They shared his vision and were enthusiastic about his coming to Denver to plant a new church. He returned to tell us that these leaders were not only excited about his vision; they were inspired enough to commit thousands of dollars to seeing it come to life. We couldn’t deny that God was at work, and through these circumstances we learned another reproducing principle.

I remember standing in front of Community and telling our ­people, “If God is sending Dave Richa to start a new church in Denver, then God wants some of you to go with him.” Over the next several weeks, ­people began to respond to God’s prompting. It was amazing — thirty-five ­people sold their homes, got new jobs or transferred schools, and went with Dave to start this new church. The launch of this church became the first of what is now an international network of reproducing churches called NewThing.

Reproducing Networks

As we helped start even more reproducing churches and as existing churches began to align themselves with NewThing, we decided that we would host a semiannual gathering of the lead pastors from these reproducing churches. There were only four of us at the first gathering, six at the second, and nine at the third. As we continued to reproduce, we began to believe that this little network of church leaders had the potential to become a movement. The move from a network to a movement required us to recognize that what was happening was now much bigger than our church or even our church network. Until that time, Community had been at the center of everything related to NewThing and was the driving force behind the reproduction of our new campuses and churches. To move to the next level, we would need to begin reproducing on the edges, having every NewThing church begin starting new campuses and churches. This realization opened our eyes to yet another reproducing principle.

At that third NewThing gathering of nine leaders, we decided to expand from one network to three. I asked Dave Dummitt, lead pastor of 242 Community Church in Detroit, and Greg Lee, lead pastor at SunCrest Chris­tian Church in northwest Indiana, to become network leaders and to find an apprentice network leader. A year later we reproduced three more networks led by Troy McMahon of Restore Community Church in Kansas City, Hank Wilson of Reunion Church in Boston, and Mark Nelson from Crossings in Knoxville. As we looked to the future and began formulating our vision to catalyze a movement of reproducing churches, we became convinced that a movement is created by the reproduction of networks. A movement is more than a single network of churches; it is what you have when those networks begin reproducing.

That brings us to where we are today. We are just starting to recognize where God has taken us and are starting to put each of these specific reproducing principles to work as we grow into a missional movement. Looking back, I’m amazed to see what God has done with a small group of friends from college who had a dream of helping ­people find their way back to him. And as I look ahead to the future, I see the outlines of a movement that has the unlimited potential of exponential reproduction.

Movements like this don’t happen overnight. They are created through a process of reproduction, as ­people follow their God-given dreams, raise up apprentice leaders, start new sites and churches, and reproduce networks of churches. But it has to start with someone, and God is looking for someone. First Chronicles 16:9 says, “The eyes of the LORD search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (NLT). Whatever your dream, wherever you are today, remember this: that someone can be you. Yes, a movement can start with you.

Taken from Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement by Dave Ferguson and Jon Ferguson. Copyright © 2010 by Dave Ferguson and Jon Ferguson. Used by permission of Zondervan. Zondervan.com.

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