Inside the Movement Maker’s Dilemma
I was taught to be a hearer, not a doer. Mixing college lessons with peer reflection did a job on me.
Perhaps a story from my long lost youth best illustrates this. Toss together the Great Commission with a need-for-speed and you may relate.
As a youth pastor (told you it was long ago) we were well invested into programs. We’d take three times as many kids to camp as attended our weekly meetings. Big outreach events would inflate our numbers by as much as 1,000 percent.
And, we had hired a pastor to attend an outreach in Mexico where we launched a church on a garbage dump outside Mexicali. Our group supported the man for a year via car washes, “slave for a day” and other fund raisers.
Weekly meetings and ancillary programs were the products of an expensive curriculum complete with weird and funny games to attract kids.
The problem was that long-term results were scarce.
Then we met an “ill-advised” youth leader from a poorer part of L.A. across the county from where we lived. The poor guy barely understood what I meant when I asked about his “program.” His response, “Well, I spend a lot of time with a few leaders reading the Bible together. We pray a lot and witness about Jesus. Our leaders do the same.”
The problem was that he was reaching five times as many kids as we were and his neighborhood was gang-ridden, ours was not.
Back to being a hearer or doer. Jesus did say to make disciples not play zany games.
In my attempt to rush the process I had done one thing right—I discipled four young men. The rest of the plan was pretty much a mess. Maybe you could make that two right things—we did launch that church south of the border.
What was wrong was that like many would be movement makers I had skipped the most basic element—making disciples who make disciples. We built programs, classes and events in hopes that they would produce disciples.
Until I met that other youth pastor I overlooked the power of compound multiplication. You personally disciple others until/as they personally disciple others who continue the process.
Most people I meet who aspire to build church multiplication movements face the same struggle as I did. They look for short cuts to the process.
Good motives often miss the point due to that need for speed connected to shiny tools that fail to accomplish the task.
I guess it comes down to confusion. It’s so easy to believe in modernity and complexity rather than ancient and simple ways.
The problem is that in our rush to skip steps on the road to a movement we can discover the too true meaning of the words, “the last shall be first.” Sort of like the disciplemaking tortoise vs the fast and flashy rabbit. Or myself and that poor youth pastor who lacked a program like the one we offered.
BTW, I eventually understood what could be if we backed up and built the ministry around disciplemaking. Meeting that guy from the other side of town was one of those irritants that eventually get to you. Imitating Jesus as he had done turned me into a disciplemaker and that eventually led to a church multiplication movement of sorts.
Beware short cuts. If you can’t name three very close disciples without pondering the issue you probably aren’t really making disciples. If you can name three, can they?