How can a movement go viral?

In the early days, I often operated under the following principle:

“Never do anything that the newest person cannot do.”

For example, when starting a Bible study, it was more important to transfer a value and a process for Bible study than it was to share my knowledge about the Bible. Sure, sharing my knowledge was personally rewarding and often helpful to others. It was like giving a hungry man a fish. But it was not reproducible. But, if I led the Bible study in such a way the centered the Bible and not the Bible teacher, a person or group could be taught to “learn” to fish.

In order to teach people to “learn to fish”, at the prior incarnation of Mosaic known as the Church on Brady in East Los Angeles, we used an inductive Bible study method with which anyone, even the newest visitor, could lead a Bible study. The process was to ask a set of predetermined questions of the text and have each member of the group answer. What do like best? What do you like least? etc. The genius of this is that while few dare to answer questions, almost anyone can ask a question of the Bible and of the group. That’s reproducible.

If someone had a question or a challenge in a new Bible study, a well trained Bible student can often give an answer. That’s not rapidly reproducible. But you can train anyone in a “yellow pad” skill. When someone asks a question or issues a challenge anyone can say, let’s write that one down, pray, and see if the Bible answers it as we read each week. That’s reproducible.

Today, many Church Planters start churches and build them on their communication gifts and reservoir of Bible knowledge. How much more reproducible might leadership be if it modeled more listening and question asking than it does speaking and answer giving?

I grant that in my early days, a lot of my thinking centered on developing disciples in underdeveloped neighborhoods and countries, and the example of inductive Bible study above may feel less than sexy enough for today’s “edgy missional vibe”. I’ll accept that. But even when working with educated and affluent westerners, we still need to think about reproducible leadership, structures, and methods.

For example, today church planting movements strategically plant “Million Dollar Churches”. Sums of $250,000.00, $500,000.00 or more are granted in order to start a church. That’s not reproducible. (Before anyone misses my point, I favor this. I favor dedicating resources –lots of resources– to start churches). It’s good, but it is not reproducible nor is it the stuff of movements.

A have a story to share that I think will illuminate this issue.

A decade or so back, the President of a Church Planting organization visited me in order to raise money for his group. He told me his story. He was a convert to the Christ following faith during his college years in Latin America. He began to preach on the campus and the number of converts grew. After graduation he stayed with the work and his following grew into a church of mega church status.

Now, he explained, he wanted to raise the money necessary to repeat his experience in the lives of other church planters. He explained the costs of relocating and supporting a campus missionary and his team, and the costs of church plant in major cities, etc. Without the funding, it would be impossible to create the necessary movement and critical mass they needed to get a high impact church off the ground.

Of course, I loved his enthusiasm and shared his vision of reaching the world for Christ. “How many did you have on your team when you planted your church as a young believer?” I asked.

He explained that he began his work alone under the leadership of the Spirit.

“And who funded you?” I asked him. “When you were a new believer and you began to preach?”

He laughed. “No one,” he said. He then began to describe how the Spirit moved among them and the new congregation had emerged.

As we continued our conversation we began to talk about the obvious truth that we cannot create via funds what was created without them. Jesus’ movement is already viral. This Church Planting leader wanted to recreate his own success, only he wanted to do it via funds rather than the spontaneous work of the Spirit. Don’t get me wrong. I favor the delegation of funds to accomplish this work. But I do not favor missing the lesson. The lesson is that there is no way to simulate the moving of the Spirit with a budget. And, until we fix this truth as a landmark on our mental maps, we shouldn’t worry about the funding.

Jesus, when he sent out teams to take villages, sent them with nothing except a strategy and in the power of the coming Kingdom. We’ll talk about that strategy in another post, but for now, if you’re a church planter or church planting leader, as we raise the funds needed to complete our task, let’s put our communal “ideative” spirit to work and think about how to create reproducible leadership, structures, and methods.