Exponential: Quotable!

Here are my favorite quotations from the week.

• "Christianity started as a Jewish movement, it will end as a Muslim movement." Bob Roberts
• "We use the gospels to tame our children into well-adjusted middle-class individuals. But these are revolutionary texts!" Alan Hirsch
• "In the spark is the pontential of flame. In the flame is the potential of the conflagration that overtakes the forest." Alan Hirsch
• "The barn has been spruced up for the last 30 years and the wheat is still not harvesting itself." Ed Stetzer
• "Too many church planters plant a church in their head, not their community." Ed Stetzer
• "Most churches choose their traditions over their children/communities." Ed Stetzer
• "Jesus never told us to plant a church, he said to make disciples." Neil Cole
• "You've learned how to lead from business leaders and you lead businesses!" Neil Cole
• "See the lost as the leaders of the future." Neil Cole
• "The reason God uses me is because I volunteered." Rick Warren

Exponential: Rick Warren

Growing a Reproducing Church
Rick Warren

How to grow a reproducing church:

1. Keep growing personally.
2. Take care of your family.
3. Develop a kingdom mindset.
4. Focus on building people, not the church.

He wants this on his tombstone, "He served God's purpose in his generation and then he died."

Let all the church planters in an incredible prayer of commitment and then prayed for God's blessing on everyone.

Exponential: Tim Keller

The Gospel
Tim Keller

• The DNA of a reproducing church has to be the gospel.
• In the Christian world, no one's really sure what the gospel is anymore.
• The cross confronts and fulfills cultural longings.

The Gospel Tripod

1. In Jesus Christ, God emptied himself.
2. In Jesus Christ, God atoned for our sins.
3. In Jesus Christ, God will return and restore all things.

Many have focused on only one of the three, which results in an incomplete gospel.

Exponential: Neil Cole 2

Chaordic Leadership
Neil Cole

How do you know if your strategy for disciple-making is exponential or incremental? Here's the forumla he gave to help.

Your baptism goal (number your church would hope to baptize in a year) x 1 million=

If what you're doing doesn't have the potential to reach that many people, then the strategy is incremental, not exponential.

You can't use an addition system and slowly evolve into multiplication.

A church multiplication movement is not...

• a movement without multiple generations (of churches)
• gathering Christians from other churches
• big revival meetings (you reproduce what you are)
• a centralized leadership development institution that sends out leaders

A church multiplication movement is self-perpetuating and self-propagating.

96% of churches don't multiply/reproduce. If this happened with women we'd be worried!

The DNA of the church

• Divine Truth
• Nurturing Relationships
• Apostolic Mission
• You cannot supplement, subtract from, or seperate the DNA without bad things happening.

Can we have order in chaos? (referring mostly to leadership and decentralized churches)

• You can't control spontaneous multiplication. If you're controlling it, it won't spontaneously reproduce.
• We've confused order with control.
• Who is better at control, you or the Holy Spirit?
• If the DNA remains consistent, the whole will be consistent.
• An exoskeletal structure limits growth.
• An endoskeleton grows with an organism and isn't seen.
• Fractals are an example of consistent order in design at every level.

All reproduction happens on a cellular level (in other words, even the smallest units reproduce in living things)

• We all began as a zygote.
• Development happens naturally from micro to macro
• Disciples-->Leaders-->Churches-->Movements
• Multiply the simple enough times and it becomes complex.

Exponential: Neil Cole

Cultivating Kingdom-Focused Lives
Neil Cole

• You cannot control multiplication.
• Spiritual Breathing: Exhaling
  confession/cleansing of sin (2 Tim. 2:19-22)
  The Bible's clear we should confess to each other.
• Spiritual Breathing: Inhaling
  The consumption of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16-17)
  Part of the problem is our churches aren't reading the Bible. They're not learning to
  hear God's voice, they're learning to hear it through their pastor.
  Read the Bible like a love letter--all the way through and over and over.
• Spiritual Breathing: Sharing (2 Tim. 4:1-5)
  This will flow out of breathing.
  We'll only know what to say in the moment if we're breathing.
• Life Transformation Groups
  No leader, equally disciples.
  Three activities: read Scripture, confess sin, pray for the lost.
• In disciple making we have to work with people who will be faithful to the process. Some will try to consume your life with their problems and you can't let them. You're not their Savior.
  

Exponential: Ed Stetzer 2

Leading Apostolic Movements

Ed Stetzer

Apostolic Movements must be...

Sacrificial
nothing comes without giving something up.
Reproducible
movements don't occur through large things
million dollar church plants don't survive at a higher rate than thousand dollar ones
we'll never see a movement until any Christian can do it
what you celebrate you become
resist the grandiose in favor of the reproducible
(have) Theological Integrity
Incarnational
we've created a Christian colony while the world changed around us
Empowering
movements occur when disempowered people are given freedom
the "clergyization" of the church has disempowered God's people
for many pastors their identity is tied up in the affirmation that comes from a disempowered church (wow!)
Charitable
Sealable
Wholistic

Exponential: Ed Stetzer

Missional Manifestations
Ed Stetzer

• When you move beyond a single cell you need systems to help a church live.
• There are numerous shifts taking place in church planting movements in the West.

from demographics to discernments
from models to missions
from attractional to incarnational
from uniformity to diversity (of church forms)
from professional to passionate
from seating to sending
from decisions to disciples
from additional to exponential

• Church needs to be biblically faithful, culturally relative, counter-cultural community for the gospel and the kingdom of God.

Exponential: Alan Hirsch 3

The Missional Magnet
Alan Hirsch

• In the context of persecution the people distill the message to "Jesus is Lord." (which assumes Savior)
• If you list the good qualities of the Pharisees, it's us!
• Jesus was theologically a Pharisee, but it's how you inhabit the doctrine.
• Ecclesiology is taking over and Jesus becomes a subset of the church.
• If you ask most people where you go to find Jesus they'd say a church. That's heresy! Jesus is everywhere, not contained by a building.
• The measure of success is not size, it's multiplication.
• We are polytheists. In politics, family, economics, career, etc. we don't let Jesus rule very easily. We serve different gods or philosophies in each.

Exponential: Alan Hirsch 2

Missionary Movement
Alan Hirsch

• The church is in decline in every Western setting.

4 Areas We Need to Recover

1. The Centrality of Jesus

• Christology lies at the heart of the renewal of the church.
• Jesus sets the template for what it means to be a Christian.
• Jesus' harshest criticism is for the religious people.
• It's easy to take Jesus out of the church because it's hard to live with a Lord.
• Christianity minus Christ equals religion.

2. Discipleship

• Becoming like Jesus.
• Embodiment is critical to transmission.
• Movements only grow in proportion to their ability to make disciples.
• Consumerism is killing us from within. It is an alternative religion and we've wedded ourselves to it.

3. Ethos/Structure of Apostolic Movements

• missionally responsive
• culturally adaptive
• organizationally agile
• mobilize the whole people of God
• every believer a church planter
• reproducible
• structurally networked

4. Missional-Incarnational Impulse

Exponential: Alan Hirsch

Lord Jesus...It All Begins Here
Alan Hirsch

• Missio Dei--as a missionary, God is a redeemer.
• Every Christian is a missionary, we're all sent ones.
• The church doesn't have a mission, God's mission has a church.
• Most people have "God experiences," they just don't know how to interpret them in and through Jesus.
• God is in the places we normally don't go.
• If you organize around ministry you never get around to mission, even if you have good intentions.
• Your budget says what you believe in.
• Worship is offering the whole world up to God.
• Communion should be happeningg whenever we eat and drink.
• We can change the world by regularly inviting the poor to our table.
• Our offer to others is to "come die with us" for the sake of others.

Exponential: Bob Roberts

A Vision for Apostolic Movements Glocally (no, I didn't misspell that)
Bob Roberts

5 Things that are different about Christianity than any other religion

1. Covenant

• The grid for God's operation is not the church, it's society.
• God said Abraham would be the father of many nations, which means he is about all peoples.
• We're called to transform the world, not to put on a show.
• It's a whole lot easier to do a Sunday event than to start a church that changes the world.

2. The Cross

• Reconciles all things.
• Christ is for all nations.

3. The Commission

• Focus on Jesus--the disciple and the church emerge.
• Christianity is the first church to ever shift ethnicity (but didn't abandon Jews).

4. Community

• Christianity started as a Jewish movement, it will end as a Muslim movement.

5. Connectedness

• We've never been able to engage the world like we can today.

Exponential: Andy Stanley

Apostolic Vision
Andy Stanley

• Vision is a mental picture of what could be, fueled by a passion for what should be.
• A vision begins as a burden
• Our vision has to be clear to people so they know how to follow us.
• A vision needs to be portable.
• Leaders often know so much about their vision that they expect everyone else to know just as much.
• Barak Obama is winning because he's the only candidate who's vision we know. "Change." We may not even know what that means, but at least we know something.
• Cast your vision convincingly. Define the problem your vision addresses, state the solution, and explain why and why now.
• What would go undone if we ceased to exist?
• Repeat the vision regularly.
• Celebrate systematically.
• Embrace it personally.

Exponential: Ed Stetzer

Ed Stetzer is a church planting guru who spoke on the state of church planting in the U.S. and then interviewed a panel of pastors who lead reproducing churches.

• Churches of less than 200 are four times more likely to plant new churches than churches of more than 1000.
• Church planting is hard work and is made easier if you're part of a community of church planters.
• Church planting is the most effective form of evangelism.
• If you want to build multiplication into your DNA you have to put resources toward that.
• Bob Roberts--If you want to be effective at making reproducing churches you have to learn from the other side of the world where it's happening.
• Neil Cole--Complex things break down, simple things multiply. Your church is only as good as your disciples.
• Great preaching is one of the major obstacles to church planting because is makes church mostly about Sunday.
• Another obstacle to church planting is focusing on church instead of society and letting church grow out of that.

Orlando Tuesday Morning

I got up at 2:45 this morning after going to bed around 11:30, but I made it to Orlando and even got some sleep on the plane. I'm really excited for how God will use these few days in my life and the life of Infuse. I've already connected with some people, and I'm especially excited about one in particular (the last one below).

1. Jeff Nichols: A friend from seminary and fellow church planter who lives in Denver. We bumped into each other in the registration line and got to catch up a little bit.
2. Hugh Halter and Matt Smay: The leaders of the MCAP training I'm doing are here for the conference and to promote their new book, The Tangible Kingdom.
3. Scott Whiting: I was next in line for the registration and was making small talk with one of the volunteers. He asked me where I was from, so I told him I was from Aurora. The guy behind me in line said, "No way, me too! Where in Aurora?" So after we both got our bag of advertising flyers we talked for a few minutes. He used to be a pastor at Calvary Church in Naperville, but five years ago he left to plant a church. They are now in the process of morphing into a network of groups, something similar to Infuse. I'm pumped to get to know him better over the next few days and to have found another kindred spirit in Aurora!

Praise God that some great things are happening before the conference even starts.