I Feel the Sense of Possibilities... I Feel the Wrench of Hard Reality

Here is the hard truth:

Your church probably won’t make it to being a Level 5 multiplying church.

And you say, “Mansfield!  No!”

But all is not lost.

If you are starting a new church, you can definitely jump to Level 5!  Just go ahead and start there, bro!

But if you are an established church, maybe even a Level 3 growing church, the data suggest that the shift to Level 5 is traumatic.  Like dropping-a-bomb-on-your-church traumatic.  Why would that be?  Because multiplication takes such a different mindset that people feel like it is bait and switch. Francis Chan tried to get his church to make a huge shift, and a guy came up to him and said “when I got here, you said we were figure skating.  Now you want to put me on a hockey team.”

When multiplication gets tough or weird, it is way too easy for people to just leave for a pretty normal church down the road, and get them some good ol’ fashioned Level 3 action.  And a smart church takes the hint and says, we better go back to how it was, where we were comfortable.

So what is a church to do?

If you are a church that wants to really make some discipleshifts and grow the Kingdom, then you should take some funding, and look to support some multiplication efforts in your community, city, wherever.  Or maybe you can start some of them yourself, that won’t be something the larger church feels like it gets sucked into, but can still support… maybe start a satellite campus, or send out some people with a planter to start a new church. That will help you to move to being a Level 4 church… maybe not multiplying, but definitely reproducing and doing expansive Kingdom work!

But by now you know I am a little sneaky. I won’t give up on church multiplication.  I think—and Steve Cordle’s encouragement and experience has been key in this—I think that given enough time, a church can grow into being a Level 5 multiplying church even if it what it is, and what it wants to be, is a Level 3 Addition-Growth church.

How?

An example dear to my heart.  I am an Air Force brat.  I grew up on bases and around planes.  My 8^th grade science fair project was on cryogenics.  My dad took me to the fuels lab and I got to see how they made liquid oxygen for the pilots to breathe, and liquid nitrogen for fire suppression.  I used to be able to tell what planes were coming in by the sound of their engines.

My dad ended his career at Lockheed.  What a creative company. They built an amazing array of planes with military and commercial use. Most are run of the mill workhorses, like cargo airplanes. But the U2 was a pretty wild plane that flew higher than anyone thought you could.  When one got shot down anyway, they came up with the SR-71 that flew even higher and was the fastest plane ever produced. Never got shot down.  Then they got into the stealth game.  The F-117 was the first stealth aircraft, designed to be undetectable by radar, or at least very hard to detect.  But it was slow, hard to fly, and did not have a huge payload.  Someone said, “what if we could create a fighter that was undetectable by radar, faster than anything else out there, and had a weapons payload that would blow enemies out of the sky?”  Impossible, they said.  Until Lockheed made the F-22.  The best fighter in the world, luckily still one of ours, the F-15, can’t find the F-22 to fight it.  It just gets shot down over and over.

I think this is how we need to think about church multiplication in the established church.  You have to keep being a normal church all the while making sure you still work on crazy stuff.  Lockheed built two legendary planes that are cargo planes, so they will never be in Top Gun.  But the U.S. military does not fight without them.  The F-22s can’t operate if they don’t have the parts and weapons and fuel brought to them by the admittedly ugly and definitely slow cargo planes.  And one day, while you are working on cargo planes, but you make sure you are still dreaming crazy about undetectable supersonic fighter jets, it actually happens.

See, part of why staying focused on church multiplication is so important is because it drives innovation, such that what was considered crazy and not worth it suddenly becomes part of the life of the church!  Let’s say you focus on multiplying disciples and leaders in your church, but you don’t plant churches that plant churches.  What’s the worst that can happen?  You have more people living out their calling?  You started a satellite campus? Planted a church?  There are more people won for Christ in your town?  I’ll take it! Every time!

Let’s do it!  Keep being a church, doing church things.  But keep the crazy edge.  Go with the go-ers and run with the runners!  There will always be people who are hungering for a little more… send them out to multiply.  And when your people realize you are not there to blow up their church, they’re going to get behind the multiplication work.  And it might be in 15 years (not the three months you were hoping for) you will find out that your disciples made disciples who made disciples and a church plant you supported planted churches that planted churches, and you became a multiplier!

I am even ok if I don’t find this out until I am in that mass of people from every nation, tribe, language and race singing, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

But I think I will see it in my life on earth.  There are signs. More on that later.

Keep praying for us to multiply disciples, leaders, and churches!