Hey Church, is God Trying to Tell Us Something?
For the last year, I have been really RESTLESS. Part of the problem is that for the last
two-and-a-half years I have either taken or lead the Kairos Course about 12 different times.
Over 100 people here in Las Vegas (Kairos is a 2.5-hour, 10-session course using the
Perspectives on the World Christian Movement material) have taken the course and it’s been
very meaningful to them. About 40 of those have trained to facilitate a future course. The
course is life-changing and probably the best discipleship tool I know of to help people
understand God’s purposes, His heart, and their place in His world. Unfortunately, the course
also highlights what the church SHOULD be doing in fulfilling the great commission of Jesus.
Max Chismon, the original developer of Kairos, a New Zealander, and highly respected in the
Global South has said, “The greatest impediment to fulfilling the great commission of Jesus is
the church itself.” What?!!
Then I made a HUGE mistake by reading Frank Viola & George Barna’s book, Pagan Christianity and Roy Moran’s Spent Matches. In all of this I kept asking myself- what should we be doing to make disciples who make disciples? How can we really impact our city? And honestly, church became more and more dull to me even though we were attending one of the best churches in town.
In late summer, I took the retiring business administrator of the church Sallie and I were attending out to breakfast and asked him some questions about the church. Believe me, I can ask 100 questions of any church...but this was OUR church and I had some basic questions: Do you feel like there is good financial accountability? Is there good reporting? Do you feel like salaries are fair and scaled? Some staff Pastors left rather abruptly and there was nothing ever said about it, any thoughts on that? He was gracious to me and gave me pretty good answers. I did not sense a problem. About three weeks later I was asked to meet at the church as the top two Pastors wanted to ask me some questions. Now, take note: I am not on staff at this church. This church does not support The Hastening, the mobilization ministry I lead. The church has introduced me as “one of the Pastors of the church” from time to time. If I had been on staff that day I am fairly certain I would have been fired….it certainly felt like I was fired. It became pretty obvious after this that the relationship between me and the church was going to be icy moving forward. I was deeply saddened by this and troubled.
I thought of one way to describe this situation: Have you ever bumped into someone in the middle of the night in the dark and then you both jumped? This happens to Sallie and I sometimes. I will get up to pee and then she’ll follow me and then wham, we run into each other in the dark. She screams, I shout...then we laugh. In our church situation, we ran into each other in the night and we both screamed...but unfortunately, we didn’t laugh. They were screaming because I, as a Pastor in the church, was asking questions. I was screaming because they called me into a meeting over a conference table. Late last year, Sallie and I left the church. The Senior Pastor (a good friend!) texted me once to see where we were going to church.
Is God trying to say something to us? I believe He is shouting at us - If we will but listen. During my journey over the last year, someone suggested I read Chris Galanos’ book From Megachurch to Multiplication. Chris is a 30-something Pastor in Lubbock, Texas. He’s lived the American church dream-- grew a church from twelve people in his living room to thousands in weekly attendance on several campuses. Then, after ten years, and after realizing the “Pastor dream,” he asked himself, “Well, what about the other million people in West Texas that we have access to?” He realized his strategy of building seats and creating programming wasn’t going to reach those people. Most of those people don’t even want to come to church!
Chris shared with me that through reading, conversations with field workers, and some research he discovered disciple-making ministry or DMM for short. In other parts of the world, very ordinary people have found a way to make disciples of others who repeat the same process. And the church is exploding there. Chris points out that there are presently a little over 1,000 identified movements in the world (some with one million people!) coming to faith in Christ in a multiplicative way. There are only a handful in the USA and all of those among ethnic groups that brought it here!
So how does this work? Simply, my small team leads a small group of people to faith, then this new group leads other small groups (families, clans, groups) to faith who keep the multiplication happening. We can see in our present world how fast something can spread when it’s contagious! Our world has literally4 shut down because of the multiplicative power of an unseen virus….that’s power!
Chris decided to do the almost unthinkable. He announced to his church that they were going to turn into a disciple-making ministry (a DMM). The focus would be on going out and finding ways to serve people, then finding a “person of peace” (Luke 10:6) and then entering into that person’s world (as Jesus instructed in Luke 10 and Matthew 10). These present-day servants of Jesus should pray for healing and blessing upon the people they meet. They would begin reading the Bible with these people and asking them to obey what they read. After all, this was Jesus’ strategy. And the command of Jesus to go into all the world and make disciples who will actually obey the teaching of Jesus has not changed. I am sure you can imagine what happened? Yep, tons of people left which made the other churches in Lubbock, Texas probably very joyful-- until you can no longer meet in million-dollar buildings on a weekend anymore. Now, who looks like a genius? Chris has said “Hey, we were crazy to think ten years ago with 12 people in our living room that we would become a church of 10,000. But now we are just crazy enough to think that we can be a movement of 1,000,000….maybe more” If the western world is going to be won to faith in Jesus, it is going to be outside of church buildings. It is going to require followers of Jesus to re-orient their ministry patterns to going (instead of asking people to come to church, which they don’t want to anyway) out among people, finding ways to serve, finding persons of peace and initiating ministry in that person’s home, family and connections. Just like Jesus told us to do.
Then I made a HUGE mistake by reading Frank Viola & George Barna’s book, Pagan Christianity and Roy Moran’s Spent Matches. In all of this I kept asking myself- what should we be doing to make disciples who make disciples? How can we really impact our city? And honestly, church became more and more dull to me even though we were attending one of the best churches in town.
In late summer, I took the retiring business administrator of the church Sallie and I were attending out to breakfast and asked him some questions about the church. Believe me, I can ask 100 questions of any church...but this was OUR church and I had some basic questions: Do you feel like there is good financial accountability? Is there good reporting? Do you feel like salaries are fair and scaled? Some staff Pastors left rather abruptly and there was nothing ever said about it, any thoughts on that? He was gracious to me and gave me pretty good answers. I did not sense a problem. About three weeks later I was asked to meet at the church as the top two Pastors wanted to ask me some questions. Now, take note: I am not on staff at this church. This church does not support The Hastening, the mobilization ministry I lead. The church has introduced me as “one of the Pastors of the church” from time to time. If I had been on staff that day I am fairly certain I would have been fired….it certainly felt like I was fired. It became pretty obvious after this that the relationship between me and the church was going to be icy moving forward. I was deeply saddened by this and troubled.
I thought of one way to describe this situation: Have you ever bumped into someone in the middle of the night in the dark and then you both jumped? This happens to Sallie and I sometimes. I will get up to pee and then she’ll follow me and then wham, we run into each other in the dark. She screams, I shout...then we laugh. In our church situation, we ran into each other in the night and we both screamed...but unfortunately, we didn’t laugh. They were screaming because I, as a Pastor in the church, was asking questions. I was screaming because they called me into a meeting over a conference table. Late last year, Sallie and I left the church. The Senior Pastor (a good friend!) texted me once to see where we were going to church.
The church above is a GREAT church as legacy churches go. It was wrong of me to walk around with all this stuff going on in my head and not expressing it better. I was trying to walk and chew gum at the same time, spiritually speaking.
On top of all this, some highly effective and super knowledgeable field workers were home in the summer of 2019 and I got to both watch and listen to them. Their loving but firm critique of the American church was difficult to hear. The things that God is doing through simple people in places like China, India, Iran, Afghanistan is astonishing. And yet here we are in the USA with ALL this enormous wealth, and Christianity is not even growing by 1% each year. And we spend an ENORMOUS amount of money on ourselves. The average Christian in America gives only 2% of their income to the Lord’s work mostly through their local church. But that local church spends more than 90% on itself-- it’s buildings, staff, and programs. Seemingly, the American church strategy right now is to build ever bigger, nicer and more comfortable buildings for people to come and sit in 2-3 times a month. Astonishing!
I mentioned Roy Moran’s book Spent Matches previously. Listen to this: “In 2001, two researchers calculated the cost of baptizing one person in the United States at $1.5 million.”3
And three billion people in the world today have no one to tell them the good news of Jesus and they will live and die and never even hear the name of Jesus. We are heartless if we do not weep over some of this.
So now we find ourselves in the middle of a global viral pandemic. And things could not be more strange. My dear 88-year old Pastor friend, Dr. Chris Lyons who I have known and worked with for thirty years just told me: “This is the biggest event of our lives.” And he was born in the Depression!
Is God trying to say something to us? I believe He is shouting at us - If we will but listen. During my journey over the last year, someone suggested I read Chris Galanos’ book From Megachurch to Multiplication. Chris is a 30-something Pastor in Lubbock, Texas. He’s lived the American church dream-- grew a church from twelve people in his living room to thousands in weekly attendance on several campuses. Then, after ten years, and after realizing the “Pastor dream,” he asked himself, “Well, what about the other million people in West Texas that we have access to?” He realized his strategy of building seats and creating programming wasn’t going to reach those people. Most of those people don’t even want to come to church!
Chris shared with me that through reading, conversations with field workers, and some research he discovered disciple-making ministry or DMM for short. In other parts of the world, very ordinary people have found a way to make disciples of others who repeat the same process. And the church is exploding there. Chris points out that there are presently a little over 1,000 identified movements in the world (some with one million people!) coming to faith in Christ in a multiplicative way. There are only a handful in the USA and all of those among ethnic groups that brought it here!
So how does this work? Simply, my small team leads a small group of people to faith, then this new group leads other small groups (families, clans, groups) to faith who keep the multiplication happening. We can see in our present world how fast something can spread when it’s contagious! Our world has literally4 shut down because of the multiplicative power of an unseen virus….that’s power!
Chris decided to do the almost unthinkable. He announced to his church that they were going to turn into a disciple-making ministry (a DMM). The focus would be on going out and finding ways to serve people, then finding a “person of peace” (Luke 10:6) and then entering into that person’s world (as Jesus instructed in Luke 10 and Matthew 10). These present-day servants of Jesus should pray for healing and blessing upon the people they meet. They would begin reading the Bible with these people and asking them to obey what they read. After all, this was Jesus’ strategy. And the command of Jesus to go into all the world and make disciples who will actually obey the teaching of Jesus has not changed. I am sure you can imagine what happened? Yep, tons of people left which made the other churches in Lubbock, Texas probably very joyful-- until you can no longer meet in million-dollar buildings on a weekend anymore. Now, who looks like a genius? Chris has said “Hey, we were crazy to think ten years ago with 12 people in our living room that we would become a church of 10,000. But now we are just crazy enough to think that we can be a movement of 1,000,000….maybe more” If the western world is going to be won to faith in Jesus, it is going to be outside of church buildings. It is going to require followers of Jesus to re-orient their ministry patterns to going (instead of asking people to come to church, which they don’t want to anyway) out among people, finding ways to serve, finding persons of peace and initiating ministry in that person’s home, family and connections. Just like Jesus told us to do.
1 Those working in disciple-making movements refer to the typical western church which revolves mostly around worship “services” and discipleship through programming as “legacy churches.”
2 “Field worker” is the new preferred term for long-term, on-the-field “missionaries.” Words, over time, can take on baggage and the word “missionary” has a boatload of baggage.
3 Moran, Roy. Spent Matches (p. 11). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. Moran quotes David Barrett and Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2001), 841.
4 The Covid-19 virus has an R-Factor (R stands for Reproduction) of 2-3. So R2.6 is how you would write it, for example. Standard
influenza has an R0 of .1. The average person with Covid-19 will infect 2-3 others-- it is VERY infectious.
5 My observation over the last year is that this will be next to impossible for churched people today. We
have created zombie attenders-- they walk in, find a seat, sit for an hour, put a little money in the offering
and move on. The preaching I hear in almost every church is not application-oriented or more
importantly, obedience-based, in fact, the preaching isn’t often biblical.
Bret Johnson is the Founder and President of The Hastening, a missions mobilization
ministry based in the Las Vegas valley. Bret has been a Youth Pastor, Associate Pastor,
Church Planter and Lead Pastor. He has an M.Div. from Talbot School of Theology
at Biola University. He and his wife Sallie have four grown children-
three biological and one daughter-in-law...and a grand-dog.
ministry based in the Las Vegas valley. Bret has been a Youth Pastor, Associate Pastor,
Church Planter and Lead Pastor. He has an M.Div. from Talbot School of Theology
at Biola University. He and his wife Sallie have four grown children-
three biological and one daughter-in-law...and a grand-dog.
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