Exponential: Missional Church

C1: You - The beginning of a movement
"You can do it."

The story of Community Christian Church
The three-phased vision for Community Christian Church.
1) Be an impact Church
We were never interested in reaching people who were al;ready attending church. Our mission statement was 'helping people find their way back to God.'
2) Be a reproducing Church
3) Be a catalyst for a movement of reproducing churches

Our mission:
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:
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 community. They knocked on over 5000 doors.
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.
465 people came to their opening celebration service

Five reproducing principles we've learned
Reproducing small groups and services I cannot overstate the significance of insisting that every small group begin with a leader and an apprentice leader. Make sure that reproducing is at the very heart of everything you do, including the small groups. 
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.
1) Reproducing requires everyone to have an apprentice.
2) Reproducing is proactive, not reactive.
3) Reproducing is not about size; it's about leader readiness.
4) Reproducing isn't about our kingdom; it's about God's kingdom.
5) Reproducing happens on the edge and the centre.

C2: The leadership path

Movement = mass x velocity
If one person is moving in the right direction by the leading of the Holy Spirit, I call that 'spiritual velocity'. Everyone of us travels at a certain spiritual velocity, but to really gain momentum, you need to increase the mass. Movement is created when you influence other people to join you by inviting them to share life together and travel at a constant spiritual velocity... intentional leadership is required in order to influence the masses of people to live with any sort of spiritual velocity. 

Leadership pipelines: Individual - apprentice - leader - coach - director - planter
The goal of being an apprentice is that he would over time become a coach to others. Have I given thought to leadership progression or do I feel that 'leadership' is the end in itself?

It's a life-on-life relational process for apprenticing leaders in the Jesus mission.

stop right now and ask yourself who in your circle of influence you need to invite into the leadership path.

C3: Apprentice
The core competency of any movement is apprenticeship.  

Discipleship in the church today has more to do with consuming and absorbing cognitive content than it has anything to do with missional action. Being a disciple is more about an individual and his/her ability to get a passing grade on the subject matter,and less about being a follower of Jesus who lives in community with others for the sake of Christ's mission.

Ram Charan in his book 'Leaders at All Levels' - "Apprenticeship is at the heart of this new approach to leadership development. To understand why, you'll have to come to grips with a potentially controversial belief: leadership can only be developed through practice.

The word 'apprentice' says that you not only are a learner but also are willing and ready to take action that will demand greater leadership responsibility in order to further the movement of Jesus.

Big dreams change your questions
Big dreams change your prayers
If you don't have a dream that leads you to greater dependence on God, than you need to get a bigger dream!
"God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us." Eph 3:20
Big dreams change others
Big dreams are also contagious. They are infectious. They not only change you, but they can also slowly begin to change your friends and those around you! Big dreams generate excitement, and they attract those who want to follow your example and step out in faith.
Big dreams change you
...the biggest change agent in my life has been this dream of two hundred locations in Chicagoland and becoming a catalyst for a movement of reproducing churches. Because I have embraced this dream, I now have different questions that drive me. I discover I am constantly drawn back to develop greater dependence  on God.

The mission statement of the church was simple enough that it got into the conversation and prayers of the people. Often people are heard praying 'Lord, use me to help more and more people find their way back to you.'

Road signs that sum up their apprenticeship approach:
Give Way sign - Go sign - one lane becoming two sign
Holy Spirit led - Missional - Reproducing 

Three characteristics of a Jesus apprentice:
1. Spirit-led apprentice
Being spirit led is the most critical quality in the life of an apprentice of Jesus.
Perry Noble: 'Leadership is as easy as listening to God.'
Listening to God and teaching your people to listen to God is key.
Several years back I went to New Hope Honolulu and spent some time with Wayne Cordeiro at a pastors practicum. The single most important takeaway? How he had his people journalling every day. We stole the idea and made our own 3C journals.
2. Missional Apprentice
the story of Sher - Sher started befriending homeless people in Chicago. For her birthday instead of having a birthday party she got her small group to put on a party in the homeless area under the bridge .They struck up friendships and now have a mission group that spend time with those homeless people. read story on p55
I find that there are two common fears that keep us and our churches from taking risks for the sake of mission. The first is our fear of failure. We say to ourselves, 'I'm afraid it just won't work... and I can't accept the possibility of failure.' The second fear that keeps us from taking risks is closesly related - it's the fear of loss. We work for years to build a large church or successful career, and our 'success' can become the very thing that gets in the way of our taking more significant risks.
Faith is risky business; it's a refusal to play it safe!
3. Reproducing Apprentice

C4: Reproducing Leaders

Everything rises and falls on leadership
Twelve indicators that leadership is lacking
1. I wait for someone to tell me what to do rather than taking the initiative myself.
2. I spend too much time talking about how things should be different.
3. I blame the context, surroundings, or other people for my current situation.
4. I am more concerned about being cool or accepted than doing the right thing.
5. I seek consensus rather than casting vision for a preferable future.
6. I am not taking any significant risks.
7. I accept the status quo as the way it's always been and always will be.
8. I start protecting my reputation instead of opening myself up to opposition.
9. I procrastinate to avoid making a tough call.
10. I talk to others about the problem rather than taking it to the person responsible.
11. I don't feel like my butt is on the line for anything significant.
12. I ask for way too many opinions before taking action.

Occasionally you will find a church that is able to launch new locations because of its size or because of significant financial resources. This is not a reproducing church. A reproducing church is a church that is repeatedly launching new small groups, teams, services, campuses, churches and even netwoks. And there are really no shortcuts to doing this. More than anything else, it demands the intentional and systematic reproduction of leaders.

Four relationships every leader needs:
1. A reproducing leader needs followers
There is a difference between attracting a crowd and developing a following. Crowds are temporary. They come and go. They're fickle and unpredictable. But followers are in it for the long haul.
We have found small groups to be the best place to put this principle to the test, because only a person who is capable of developing followers will be successful at leading a small group.

2. A reproducing leader needs apprentices 
We challenge every leader to have at least on apprentice - someone he or she is working with and devloping to become a leader as well.
2 Timothy 2:2 (the 2-2-2 principle)

"The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others."

In this passage Paul is speaking of reproducing leaders into the fourth generation:
First generation        :   Paul
Second generation   :   instructs Timothy
Third generation      :    to invest in 'reliable men'
Fourth generation    :    'who will also be qualified to teach others'

Apprenticeship is not about finding people who can help us to do tasks more effectively... At the heart of biblical apprenticeship is a mindset of reproduction: reproducing our leadership so the mission will be carried on to future generations. We love using the word apprentice, because it conveys the idea that the person in that role is aspiring to something more. They are in a temporary role, being trained for something else. An apprentice is not a co-leader or an assistant leader; an apprentice is someone who is being equipped and trained to become a leader who will then be responsible for leading others.

Reproducing strategy:
1. I do. You watch. We talk.
2. I do. You help. We talk.
3. You do. I help. We talk.
4. You do. I watch. We talk.
5. You do. Someone else watches.

3. A reproducing leader needs peers.
The best form of accountability is 'peer-to-peer' accountability.

Huddles are monthly gatherings of leaders in small groups that include four basic activities:
1) praying for each other
2) sharing wins
3) disclosing challenges
4) exchanging best practises

Even before we launched our first public celebration service at Comunity we held monthly gatherings for leaders called Leadership Community. The key elements are: vision, huddle and skill (p65)

Good leaders quickly learn that they need wise counsel from other leaders. Solomon was the wisest man in the world, and true wisdom recognizes that it doesn't know everything - it seeks counsel from others.

4. A reproducing leader needs a coach
Developing a leadership layer of non paid coaches (leaders of leaders) has long been a priority for us. Eventually though we came to the realization that in order for us to continue to grow, reproduce, and care for the number of people God continues to send us, we just couldn't afford to hire and pay enough staff to carry out the task.

C5: Reproducing Artists
The crucial creative class.

If you asked me to give you the absolute essentials for spreading a missional movement of reproducing churches, I would narrow it down to two things:
    1. Reproduce more and better leaders
    2. Reproduce more and better artists

Richard Florida author of The Rise of the Creative Class, presents his ground breaking research to city planners and real estate developers, explaining that if they want to revitalize a region, they must begin by attracting the creative class. He writes:

The creative centers tend to be the economic winners of our age... in the form of innovations and high-tech industry growth. The creative centers also show strong signs of overall regional vitality, such as increase in regional employment and population.

Florida goes on to demonstrate that throughout North America there is a direct correlation between the size and concentration of the creative class and the vitality of the community.

There is a lesson here for the church: if we want to see vitality in our churches, we need to attract artists and others in the creative class... in other words we must become churches that make room for creative people to be creative!

Artists help sustain new communities
Wherever the creative class gravitates, there will be the creating of culture. These will be the physical and philosophical places where new communities of faith emerge.
Go for - Excellence in Execution and Excellence in Reprocuing
Seasons and standards:
1. Seasons. in every church there are peak seasons when you have an influx of newcomers. Typically, these seasons are around 'back to school', Christmas, Easter. During these seasons you want nothing to get in the way of people finding their way back to God, so you intentionally focus your time and energy on exdellence in execution. During other seasons of the year, you are free to focus more on the reproduction of artists.
2. Standards. It's a good idea to create a standard of excellence that you will never compromise. This standard is in place to make sure that poor execution doesn't distract people from the voice of God when celebrating. You should continue to hold up this standard while you are reproducing.

Creating culture that attracts artists
Cultural key 1: Take Risks
Eric Bramlett (coauthor of Big Ideas) 'Art by its very nature requires risk, the risk of expressing your most intimate creative thoughts and ideas on a canvas or dance floor or through music in front of large crowds. The crowds show up to watch the artist and can either cheer with raucous applause or boo and heckle with catcalls. Art is a risk!'
As I listened to Eric that day I began to see why most churches tend to repel artists. Many churches are not known as great risk-taking organisations. Some churches even pride themselves on being conservative.
X - One time we had a service where we took a creative risk using fire. The fire was so out of control we had to evacuate the room.
We are now at a place, in our church where we routinely take artistic risks. We have done musical theater, hip-hop, a full orchestra and even a kazoo band. We have done services where we tattoo everybody - and services where we anoint everyone. Many of these risks have worked marvelously - and some have been huge failures.

Cultural Key 2: Develop Relationships
artists with one another

Cultural Key 3: Give them a role
get people serving

Cultural Key 4: Plan To Reproduce
To esnure that you are attracting artists, make sure that you creat within your culture an expectation that every artist eproduces another artist. You may call it shadowing, understudy, second chari, or apprenticeship, but it is an understanding that we not only do art; we also bring other artists alongside us and help them develop their gifts.

Cultural Key 5: Rock it Out!
Give your artists freedom to express themselves with passion. Go all out!

Five Factors for reproducing artists:
Factor 1: Think 30 percent
That's the percentage of people in your church who could be engaged in the arts. Three out of every ten people who show up every weekend could be playing, performing or supporting the arts in your community. Does that percentage seem high to you?
...many church leaders have bought into a false standard of excellence. They tend to think that there are relatively few artists who can meet the acceptable standard for good quality. But it's just not true.
...Factor 5: Let pagans play (!)
Since we encourage people at all stages of spiritual growth to use their art for God, we have lots of artists who are recruited by other artists and begin doing their art at our church before they become Christ followers. We're not only okay with; we encourage it.

C7: Reproducing Groups

The power of community:
In the Alameda County Study a group of researchers tracked the lives of seven thousand people in Alameda County, California, over a nine-year period. What they found is pretty interesting:

• People with weak relational connections were three times more likely to die than those with strong relational connections.
• People who had bad health habits, like smoking and eating the wrong kinds of food, but had strong relational ties lived significantly longer than people who had great health habits but lived more isolated lives

John Ortberg was right when he said: "It's far better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli all alone!"

In another study from the Journal of the American Medical Association 276 peropla volunteered to be exposed to the common cold virus. The researchers discovered that:

• People who had strong relational connections were four times better at fighting off illness than those who didn't.
• People with strong relational connections were significantly less susceptible to catching cole, had fewer viruses in their system, and produced less mucous(!)

Our small group strategy has been built around three core values:

Connecting the unconnected, developing 3C Christ followers, and reproducing groups and leaders.

Value #1: Connecting the unconnected:

Dallas Willard: "God's aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant."

It is only through small groups that we are able to facilitate the kind of community that God wants you, your friends, and your church to experience.

If you were to start a small group today, and within a year start another groups, and each new group you started would start a new group of its own every year, at the end of five years, how many people do you think would be directly or indirectly impacted in a life-changing way by your actions? At the end of five years you would have thirty-two groups impacting somewhere around 320 people. Now that's a plan!

Value #2: Developing 3C Christ followers

We expect anyone who wants to deepen their relationship with Christ to continually grow in these three C experiences:

• Celebrate
• Connect
• Contribute

Celebrate: Small groups need to be centers of celebration. We can celebrate the simplest of blessings, like a job promotion or a birthday. We can also celebrate the more significant wins in life, like a renewal of wedding vows or the adoption of a child.

Connect: In our fast-paced fragmented lifestyles the very thought of connecting daily seems absurd. Most people in our communities and churches would think, "you've got to be nuts! A celebration service once a week and a small group gathering once a week or every week is already a stretch. You want us to connect every day? Not a chance. But this kind of regular, daily interaction was one of the dominant characteristics of this attractive community.

Jospeh Myers in Organic Community - Four patterns of belonging: public, social, personal and intimate. Myers concludes that the healthy community occurs when our connections or 'belongings' are greatest in the public realm and decrease in each succeeding realm as we discern those with whom we can experience a significant level of intimacy relationally. Myers suggests that connections in all four of these spaces contribute to our health and connectedness. I would agree with him and add that an increase in the frequency of time spent with the same people in these spaces will result in the greatest depth of community. 

Experience: We find that groups who come together without an external 'contribute' component or missional focus often fail to experience the same depth of community as do the groups who seek out opportunities to contribute to a particular cause and work together.

Michael Stewart says that 'At Austin Stone (church) we have realized that when you aim for Acts 2 community, you will get neither community nor mission. But if you aim to pursue Jesus and his mission, you'll get both mission and community.

Value #3: Reproducing Groups & Leaders

Just as healthy organisms will reproduce - one cell at a time - healthy churches can reproduce one small group at a time.

Small group reproduction is really all about leader development.

Why Small Groups are the best place to reproduce leaders:

#2 Small groups are a great place to receive honest feedback.

Receiving the kind of honest feedback a developing leader needs can be extremely difficult. And this is increasingly true as your influence grows. When you are responsible for larger numbers of people and are perceived to have more authority, you are less likely to receive constructive criticism. This is one reason why so many leaders in positions of great influence fail. Few people have the courage to speak the truth to them.

I encourage leaders to ask their group members to complete this sentence on a regular basis: 'If I were the leader of this group, I would...'

#3 Small groups are a great place to 'get church'

two key leadership principles: 1) real leadership involves serving others and 2) real leaders take responsibility for the actions of their followers.

We've coached hundreds of churches that want to reproduce new sites. Without question, the churches that are most successful are those that have in place a culture of reproducing small groups.

Myths about reproducing small groups:
Joel Comiskey in his book Home Cell Group Explosion has researched the fastest growing small group churches in the world. More than seven hundred small group leaders completed his twenty-nine question survey designed to determine why some small group leaders succeed and others do not...

Factors that do not affect small group reproduction:
1. the leader's gender, social class, age, marital status, and education were not factors.
2. the leader's personality type was not a factor.
3. the leader's spiritual gifting was not a factor.

Factors that do affect small group reproduction:

1. The leader's prayer life. The one factor in the survey that seemed to have the greatest effect on whether a group reproduces is how much time the leader spends praying for group members. The leader's devotional life consistently appears among the three most important variables in the study.
2. The leaders setting goals to multiply. 
3. The leaders receiving effective training. 
4. The groupps evangelistic efforts. If you have lots of newcomers, you're more likely to reproduce your groups.

Page 102 - great story about the life-changing impact a small group had on an older guy in the church.

C7: Reproducing Missional Teams
Communities with a cause

"I think I accidentally planted a church." Brilliant story about Shawn, a surfer, who started meeting with other surfers on a Sunday morning and gradually grew his group to the size of a church. page 104

When Jesus told his followrs, 'Go and made disciples of all nations.' he was not saying anything radically new. He was simply reminding them, once again that the mission of a Christ follower is to go.

Be honest. Isn't there something inside of you that knows you are supposed to be out there beyond the walls of the church facility  Isn't it a bit unrealistic to insist that the world should come to us and fit inside our church buildings? If you believe that Jesus told you and me to go because he really meant for us to go - and not just invite people to church - why don't you and your friends start a 3C community and begin reproducing missional teams? Well, why not?

What makes a missional team distinct is that it has a cause-related focus. In the previous chapter I gave you a small group model that includes the three Cs but has a greater initial emphasis on connecting than on celebrating or contributing. By contrast, a missional team will be comprised of the three Cs but will ultimately have a greater emphasis on contributing.

Kirsten Strand's story page 108 - great story about a lady who started a ministry to reach poor people.
"Through this informal training, I learned that one of they key principles of Christian community development is 'relocation'. If you are going to serve in a community you really need to live there and be a part of it.

How to reproduce 3C communities:
1.Believe that Acts 1:8 was meant to be accomplished. We need every follower of Christ engaged and mobilised in the movement.
2. Ordain every Christ follower to start a church. I said to our people 'as your pastor, I give you permission to go and plant churches.' At that moment, I felt an overwhelming sense of God's approval.
3. Teach people to 'go' and not just 'bring'. Donna began her own weekly rides where she invites anyone who likes motorcycles to meet her for breakfast and a ride. The group meets every Sunday morning at a local restaurant called Elmer's Doghouse. Over the last year more than two hundred different riders started their engines and hit the road with Donna. her simple goal is to love them, help them love each other, and look for opportunities to pray for her friends.
4. Plant the gospel before planting a church or starting a group.
Missional teams will go and live among the people with a readiness to serve them from that context, they will ask two important questions (in this order):
           i. What is good news (gospel) for these people?
           ii. What is church for this people group?
A missional team does not presume to know the answers to these questions before they live as Christ among them.
Churches should grow out of mission, not the other way around.
5. Recognise that Missional Teams must be both incarnational and apostolic.
If missional teams do not think in terms of apprenticeships and reproducing leaders, their work will always be limited to one place for one period of time. However if a missional team will think apostolically and emphasise reproduction, their impact will grow exponentially  All successful movements are both incarnational and apostolic. 
6. Provide Missional Teams with coaching and training.
Missional teams like every other kind of group or team, need two types of support: coaching and training. The kind of training missional teams need beofre they start is primarily in developing a missional imagination - helping people to see the possibilities that God has already put before them.
7. Get comfortable with chaos and failure.
Here are the brutal facts: if we give our leaders permission to go out and start missional communities and churches that will reach people for Jesus, it will not be perfectly organised and it will certainly not be on hundred percent successful. 
Montgomery Campus - In spite of what we believed were our best efforts, eight months after the launch, this new campus was closed... we now recognise several strategic mistakes we made in launching this campus. Our launch team was too small, we did not have enough small groups in place before we launched, and we failed to recognise the cultural differences in this community.
As hard as this decision was for me personally I know it was much more painful for our campus pastor and launch team who gave every last ounce of energy and prayer they could to make it work.