The Multiplying Church

Bob Roberts Jr.

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780310313250
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Multiplying Church is a primer for pastors and lay leaders involved in, or wanting to learn about, the church multiplication groundswell in North America. It shows how multiplying churches should be a natural, regular function of every church to reach the 70 percent of Americans who have no meaningful church relationship.Detailing the stories and guiding principles of this dramatic growth, this guide offers insight on: • Why churches are multiplying in the East but not in the West• Keys to church multiplication• The missing link—pregnant mother churches• Antioch vs. Jerusalem: Which got it right?• What kind of churches should we start?• What is the end game of church planting?• How big does a church have to be to start multiplying churches?• Church planting movements or Jesus movements?Bob Roberts helps us return to an early-church model of multiplication where a single church sent laypeople out to plant other communities of believers.

PART 1: THE NEW MATH

Chapter 1: MADE IN
ASIA — JESUS
MOVEMENTS

Autumn in Hanoi, Vietnam

BEING MISSIONAL

Blog posted by Bob Roberts Jr.

I just returned from Vietnam where the church is exploding. What I have seen on this trip and in the past is a church growing not because of Western involvement (or any other that I could detect), but from unique stories of how individuals came to faith in Christ through unexpected ways and then wound up leading friends to faith in Christ. That led to them starting groups to pray and worship and reach out. I’ve yet to meet someone who deliberately set out to start a church. It just happened because they were leading their friends to faith in Christ — just like what happened in Acts 11. Church wasn’t something they intentionally started to reach all these lost seekers. It was a community that developed and emerged from following Christ together.

Often at church planter gatherings I’ll hear people say they wanted to start a church because they wanted to reach seekers — that’s good. I’ll hear them say they wanted to be a part of something fresh and new and more culturally relevant — that’s good, too. Those that are theologically adept (like me!) will say they want to start churches to glorify God. The big thing now is to “start something missional” — obviously to me that’s very good. But I’ve NEVER heard that in Vietnam or other countries where the Gospel is exploding sometimes under difficult situations.

It’s the rage right now in the West though. We have built a whole religious industry around being missional, primarily for young pastors. But all of us feel the tug. Recently my speaking schedule began to get too full and cramp my schedule for how I’m actually on the ground at my home base and around the world working. In other words, I had to choose to “speak” missional or “do” missional!

At best, in the West we’ve tried to implement a few things or activities that we hope are “missional.” Yet those who are experiencing it don’t realize it; they can’t explain it — but they are it! Neither could they give a lecture on it.

You can’t find talks, lectures, research, explanations, or steps on what is “missional” or how to be more “missional” coming from the emerging church in the East. It’s just what and who they are. If you called them missional, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. It’s fascinating — we’re dissecting the word, developing concepts, forming lectures and teachings on what it is, mapping out plans on how to be “missional,” and yet most of us have never even experienced it. This humbles me tremendously as a westerner.

This may be the biggest difference between how we intentionally start churches in the West and how they unintentionally start movements in the East that explode like wildfire.

Even so, many are talking about starting movements here in the West. We fund, plan and strategize our focus on starting something that grows into a movement from a single church. And often we get the growing church — yet not the movement. On the other hand, the believers in the two-thirds world get the movement even though they were not expecting it! The differences in the philosophy, focus, the expected results, and the motive are all reversed! Their philosophy is based more on discipleship where people know who Christ is and follow it together, never expecting big results. People who are focusing on church planting are talking movement language because we’ve seen it “over there” and want it “here.” What would it look like for us here in the United States to learn from the church in Vietnam, China, or even Tehran? I wonder.

How Can That Be?

I have a vision and a dream. Let’s start a thousand churches over the next ten years, each one running a minimum of two thousand members, and in just ten years we will turn America upside down with the gospel! That would work, right? Wrong — that scenario just happened over the past ten years, and there are fewer people in church today than ever before. How can that be? How could we have spent billions to start two thousand megachurches and yet have fewer people in church and a society that largely feels the church is antagonistic?

The answer is, in part, that it’s not enough just to start churches for the sake of evangelism that will end when “conversion” takes place. Books on starting churches generally operate on the premise that we need to start churches because it is the best evangelistic method that exists. That is a true statement — but an insufficient reason for starting churches. Any research regarding the state of church growth and Christianity in America says it is in decline. Thom Rainer, author and columnist, wrote:

I am by nature an optimist. I have seen the hand of God too often in my life to live in a state of despair and defeatism. However, the state of evangelism in the American Church is such that I do have my moments when I wonder if the Church is headed down the path of many European congregations: decline and death. The facts of a 2004 research project I led are sobering.¹

Regardless of the religious right and despite the emergence of mega-churches, postmodern churches, and house churches, nothing has stemmed the tide of Christianity’s slow decline in the West. We continue to decline while the church is simultaneously exploding in the East as the world has never known.

Everyone is working on it, however. We are designing systems and templates to see a movement happen in the West. Great systems are emerging. We feel successful if a denomination, network, or group of churches plants a few hundred churches — as if we may be on the brink of something. We get excited if a few hundred people or a few thousand gather to discuss church planting at conferences — and we should. However, our standards for impact are incredibly low compared to how churches are multiplying around the world. Upon examination, the movements that are exploding often have poor systems, little control, and massive fruit. They defy both logic and explanation. It’s almost as if the paradoxical principle is that great resources and systems produce little, while few (if any) resources and systems produce masses. Could there be a correlation?

Not long ago, I sat across the table from an extremely wealthy and successful man who was looking to invest his millions. Church planting was high on his list — he has funded different forms of it for years. However, his question to me was, “Is church planting really working?” My answer was succinct. “Not if we keep planting the same kinds of churches.” Our tendency has been to look at the form and model — be it seeker, postmodern, house church, whatever. Rarely have we looked at the core, the essence of what a church really is. The result is that we build buildings or gather people, but to what end? We cannot look at converts alone — we have to ask, “Are the churches we are a part of seeing transformation?”

I was at a meeting with Eric Swanson alongside several Christian world leaders at the Global Learning Community gathering. One man named Layo began to speak and his words blew me away and affected Eric as well.

WHY LAYO IS NOT CELEBRATING
FORTY YEARS OF MINISTRY

Blog posted by Eric Swanson

Layo Lieva will not be celebrating 40 years of his ministry’s presence in El Salvador. But why? Layo has been in ministry for over 30 years, so he has the long view of ministry in one country. He told us about how, when he was a student, he and his friends would dream of what their country would be like if a third of the people in El Salvador knew Christ. “What if . . . ? grew legs as they began strategizing on reaching their country. Now, 30 years later, 32% of El Salvadorenos are believers, the country has statistically been evangelized at least three-times over and there is one church for every 700 El Salvadorenos. (The Saturation Church Planting folks suggest that one church for every thousand people is saturation.) Christian TV and radio stations abound, missionaries flow freely into the country and visiting Christian dignitaries often visit the country’s president to pray with him and have their photo taken. There are Jesus marches replete with banners and bands. Layo notes that there is “a festival of Christian work.” By many accounts there is much cause for rejoicing. So why is Layo so discontent? Why is he unwilling to have a celebration of his ministry’s 40th anniversary in this country?

Let’s take a closer look . Layo says that the mental and moral infrastructure of the country is destroyed. Nine people a day die by violent crimes. Drug use is out of control. 35% of people are unemployed. Gangs are prolific and violent. One study showed that 32% of gang members come from evangelical homes. The most common complaint to the police is “evangelical noise”. . . preachers who drive through the streets blaring their message from speakers mounted atop their cars. The country is much worse off now than in 1980 when there were only 5% believers.

So what went wrong? Layo gives us his deliberate thought. . .“We don’t need to do better but we do need to do different. I’m not sure if we need any more church plants that are like the ones we have. We need a different kind of church.” El Salvador, in some ways, is a laboratory for ministry methods. We can see the end game of simple saturation strategies. We can learn a lot about tactics, strategies but most important “the gospel.”

One might conclude from El Salvador that the gospel is not efficacious. But maybe the problem lies not with the gospel, in all its fullness, that Jesus preached and what we have passed off as the gospel. It’s not the gospel plus something else, but a matter of unpacking the genuine gospel . . . it is about the King and the Kingdom. It’s about Ephesians 2:10 as well as Ephesians 2:8, 9. It’s about loving one’s neighbor as well as loving God. It’s about community transformation as well as personal transformation. It’s about you . . . and about me.

Surprising Discoveries

Why have people started churches throughout history? (Keep in mind this is a purely Western perspective on the reason why.)

We don’t have any record of believers starting churches in Jerusalem. What we do know is that they met from house to house and also had large gatherings. The reason the church happened in Jerusalem was to coalesce all the people who became believers, starting from the day of Pentecost forward. In other words, the church in Jerusalem began for a different reason than the one in Antioch. The church in Antioch started churches to transform the world. Likewise, the motivation changed for the church in Constantine’s era and thereafter when churches were started to spread Christendom and an empire.

Figure 1: Why Start Churches?

From AD 340 to 800, churches were started in other lands for evangelization — St. Patrick would be the prototype. In 900, it was about the Holy Roman Empire. In 1517, starting churches was about reforming the church. In the nineteenth century, it was about denominations (a trend that is almost over). In the 1970s, it was about relevance. For the most part, our church planting rationale drove church planting globally until after World War II.

There was a great increase in missionaries after World War II because of soldiers who went to war and saw the world. They planted the seeds for the emergence of the global church that is now coming of age. Their reason for planting churches was not to bring about “incarnation” — that’s how they lived.

Today, the reasons why the East plants other churches have to do with every single person getting an opportunity to hear and respond to the good news of Jesus. It’s about hope and reconciliation in a developing world that is difficult for many people. So while we are deconstructing church, attempting to remake or reinvent it here out of frustration in order to build it back, they are constructing it there out of excitement, enthusiasm, and hope.

The question as to why we are starting churches is crucial to our future. In the West, many leaders are talking about Church Planting Movements (hereafter referred to as CPMs). It is a term derived by missionaries to describe what they saw occurring in certain places in the world. Immediately we picked up on it in the West and began using the “movement” vocabulary despite the fact that there is no one alive today who has ever seen one. In the United States it’s been over 120 years since we’ve seen a church planting movement.

Much is being written right now about what CPMs are and how they happen, but those writing have not been involved in one. CPMs are a non-North American phenomenon that we are trying to claim for ourselves (or build templates to accomplish) because we want the effect.

There is no doubt about it — we want a movement. We want to know where we are, where we need to be, and what it will take to get us there. We want to see a movement that will transform societies similar to what has happened in the past and is happening in the East. However, churches that multiply in movements are far more than the Sunday event. This is just...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• PART 1: THE NEW MATH
• PART 2: THE PRIME NUMBERS
• PART 3: THE SUM TOTAL
• PART 4: APPENDIXES
• ENDNOTES
• ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
• SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS