Church Multiplication and Movement

In a blog post on church planting movements, Ed Stetzer challenged his readers to compare the pregnancies of elephants and rabbits.

Elephants have the longest gestation period in nature. After getting pregnant, a female elephant will carry her calf inside of her for nearly two full years! It’s almost unheard of for more than one calf to be born at a time. Upon birth, the calf is able to immediately stand up on his or her feet and walk a few steps. This 260-pound “baby” will feed on his or her mother’s milk for about six months. At that point, the calf will begin transitioning to solid food, while continuing to nurse until age three. This whole cycle won’t start again for the mother until her calf is fully weaned. And for the calf, it will take 15 years before he or she begins his or her own reproductive life.

Let’s now take a look at the reproductive life-cycle of a rabbit. The gestation period for a rabbit is usually a month. At birth, a single female rabbit will typically expect not one, but up to 14 babies per litter. Within minutes after giving birth, it’s possible for a female rabbit to be impregnated again. That means a female rabbit can potentially have one litter per month! And as early as six months into their life, rabbits will begin reproducing.

Let’s just take a moment and do the math. If a rabbit has an average of three female babies per litter per month, then at the end of year one, there will be 37 female rabbits (including the mother). If all 37 reproduce at the same rate, then at the end of year two, there will be a total of 1,369 female rabbits (including the original 37). At the end of year three, it jumps to 50,653 and so on and so on.

Compare that to elephants. At the end of year one, there’s only one, as the calf is still in the mother. At the end of year two, there are now two elephants: the mother and the calf. At the end of year three, there are still two. If the female elephant gets impregnated after weaning her calf at the end of year three, then it wouldn’t be until year five that the number of elephants jumps to an astronomically high number—three.

While there is definitely still a place for lengthy, elephant-like approaches to church planting, if we want to see movements of churches that birth 1,000 each in their lifetime, then we need to “breed like rabbits." (1)

Movement Is a Mindset

Perhaps the first thing that should be said regarding church planting and movements is that it has to be a mindset. We have to have a “rabbit” kind of mentality that will not only change the way we think about church, mission and multiplication, but it will begin to shape the way we function as the church. Rather than an alternative model of doing church, it is a complete paradigm shift in the way we think.

Albert Einstein’s saying is correct as we apply it to the church in North America: We cannot solve the problems of the church by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created those problems in the first place. In other words, we can’t keep thinking and doing what we have already done and expect different results. We must thoroughly reimagine how we understand and live out the life of the church if we wish to see a movement.

Make it a discipline to think movements, not institutions. If you identify yourself as a movement, and take it seriously, you will eventually start acting like one.

The Makeup of a Movement

What are the tangible characteristics of multiplying churches that are attempting to live out a movement ethos? Here are four aspects that help to make up a movement culture.

1. God’s Mission Is Central

A church that is focused on real movement has a strong emphasis on the missio Dei, which means the "mission of God." It is God who has a mission to set things right in a broken, sinful world to redeem and restore it to what He has always intended. 

A movement church will understand that mission is not the invention, responsibility or program of the church. Instead, they will see that mission flows directly from the character and purposes of a missionary God. In the words of South African missiologist David Bosch, "It is not the church which undertakes mission; it is the missio Dei which constitutes the church." Or to state it in a slightly different way, "It is not so much that God has a mission for His church in the world, but that God has a church for His mission in the world."

A movement church will not only understand that the mission is God’s, but they will also recognize that His mission is larger than their particular church. They will live out the reality that God’s primary activity is in the world, and their responsibility is to be sent into the world to participate in what He is already doing. As a result, the church will not simply send missionaries, instead they view their church as the missionary.

2. All of God’s People Are Activated

Movements only succeed to the degree that they legitimize and activate the ministry of all of God’s people. Every believer carries within him or her the potential for world transformation. Consider this: In every seed is the potential for a tree, and in every tree, the potential for a forest, but all of this is contained in the initial seed. In every spark, there is a potential for a flame, and in every flame is the potential for a fire, but all of this is potentially contained in the originating spark. (2)

All of the potential for movement is already present in God’s people; our job as church leaders is to bring it out. In a movement church, everyone gets to play! No one sits on the bench.

3. Adaptive Leadership and Adaptive Structures

A movement church has the kind of leadership that knows how to move a church and keep it moving. This type of leadership highlights the apostolic and prophetic roles. The prophetic person will tend to call the status quo into question, while the apostolic leads with a positive vision of what can be.

What Western Christianity desperately needs at the moment is adaptive leadership: people who can help the church transition to a different, nimbler mode of church. Such leaders don’t necessarily have to be highly creative innovators themselves, but they must be people who can move the church into adaptive modes—people who can create the conditions for change and innovation. 

Adaptive challenges include the kind of work more typical of church planting. Things like creating, growing, and reproducing healthy communities, the work of racial reconciliation in a given neighborhood, and the leadership development of younger Christians are all adaptive challenges. These types of challenges are rarely accomplished with a linear, step-by-step approach. Though they might include some technical components, the larger adaptive challenge is only solved through a process undertaken by a group of people with various roles.

In movement-focused churches, the effectiveness of the leaders is not measured by what they do or do not accomplish, but by how the people of God are equipped, enabled, organized, and inspired to participate in God’s mission in the world. The church today needs leaders who can model a kind of spirituality that doesn't reject the rebels and risk-takers in the church, but instead listens, discerns, and validates their legitimate and important perspectives and then releases them into their calling.

Further, in a movement church, the leadership and structure are geared toward disciple-making. In the makeup of a movement, discipleship is the engine for everything. Without it, the church will drift away from its core calling.

Movement occurs when the making of mission-shaped disciples—who live in the world for the sake of the world, in the way of Christ—goes viral. Movement is about developing structures and systems that catapult people into mission, where reproducing discipleship groups, missional communities, churches and networks of churches is a natural part of its DNA. It’s the ripple effect: throwing a rock into a pond creates one ripple and then another and another, till ripples cover the whole pond. (3)

4. APEST with an Emphasis on the A

While all five APEST ministries have a role that is vital and nonnegotiable, the apostolic in particular is the key to a movement—the kind we see on the pages of the New Testament. This is not an emphasis of importance or priority; it is one of purpose and design. By nature and calling, the apostolic person (the sent one) follows the innate impulses of his or her sentness and pushes the system to the edges to establish Christianity onto new ground. The pattern is clear: Remove apostolic influences, and you won’t get apostolic movement. (4)

Movement Heroes

One last thought on creating a movement culture. Our heroes are those people in our world who demonstrate through their lives what we think is truly valuable. They live out what we all hope to be. Heroes and their stories inspire us because they reach into, and embody, the vision of what we want to be and become.

For example, if your church’s hero is a brilliant scholar or preacher, then everyone gets the message that it is scholarship and preaching that are most prized. If, on the other hand, the church’s hero is the church planter or pioneer who is leading the charge to start new things to impact society, then people get the message that missional-incarnational mission is highly valued. The same is true for advocates of racial reconciliation, justice, and so on. The heroes we champion are living examples of what we are seeking to achieve. Don’t underestimate the importance of everyday heroes—they are embodiments of change. (5)

Footnotes:

1. Ed Stetzer, “Planting 1000 Churches In Your Lifetime” (May 30, 2017): http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2017/may/1000-churches-in-your-lifetime.html?mc_cid=42c7791e01&mc_eid=d61bdeb45b.

2. Timothy Keller, Center Church: Serving a Movement: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Zondervan, 2012), p. 459.

3. JR Woodward and Dan White Jr., The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities, Kindle Edition (InterVarsity Press), p. 23.

4. Keller, Center Church, p. 462.

5. Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson, On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church (Zondervan, 2011), p. 32.

For more on multiplication watch these three interviews I did with Daniel Yang.