Speaker 2: [00:00:01] Howdy guys, so is today's church on the wrong mission? Check this out.
Speaker: [00:00:06] Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus ask us to build the church. Jesus says, "Make [00:00:11] disciples, sow into people, plant in people's lives, water, [00:00:16] souls." And Jesus says again and again, "I will build my [00:00:21] church and the gates of hell will not prevail. I will build [00:00:26] my church." We get this backwards. We live in a, a day [00:00:31] where, where many churches and many leaders and many disciples are trying to build the church [00:00:36] and the church ends up looking more like the empire than the kingdom.[00:00:41]
Speaker: What happens when, when we try to make the church great, we rarely get disciples. [00:00:46] But when we make disciples, we always get a great church.
Speaker 2: [00:00:51] All right, you might be listening to that and saying, "Amen." You know, it's like, we, we need to get on this mission [00:00:56] discipleship. Um, but look, if you guys were to be totally objective [00:01:01] and just investigate the current church today, [00:01:06] what would you conclude is the mission that we're on? If we see how [00:01:11] much of our effort goes towards building churches versus disciple making, I [00:01:16] think that it'd be very easy for someone who is just looking at what we're [00:01:21] doing to conclude that obviously the mission of the church is to build churches, to plant churches, to [00:01:26] grow churches.
Speaker 2: That is the point of the church. There's a tension there we really need to tease out. [00:01:31] Discipleship.org did a famous survey where they discovered that less than 1% of [00:01:36] pastors believe they are quote, currently doing a great job at disciple making. [00:01:41] Do you realize how strange that is?
Speaker 2: If you really believe this is the main mission, [00:01:46] to say 99% of pastors feel like we're not doing a great job at, at the one [00:01:51] primary mission that we're called to do, [00:01:56] we need to have a very clear thesis for why this is happening. [00:02:01] And there is a specific thing that we're not really facing, and I want to like kind of dive [00:02:06] into this for a minute here with you guys.
Speaker 2: And, and that is that we're not facing the fact that there is a [00:02:11] natural tension between these two efforts. The effort to grow, build, [00:02:16] plant churches, and the effort to multiply disciple makers. These, there's [00:02:21] a tension here, right? And that's why 99% of pastors feel they are not doing a great job.
Speaker 2: It's because [00:02:26] 99% of the time, when these two missions collide, [00:02:31] everything is designed around building the church as who has to win that [00:02:36] collision versus disciple making. We've designed a system that [00:02:41] systematically favors church building over disciple making. That is the reason why [00:02:46] this is happening.
Speaker 2: And if we continue to build this system and [00:02:51] invest in this system, when there is a tension, we're gonna go with church building, church growth, [00:02:56] then we're always gonna have this problem. We're never gonna get over this. We have to decide which [00:03:01] of these two missions is preeminent.
Speaker 2: Part of what we really try to do [00:03:06] at 1000 Houses is, is dive into this question.
Speaker 2: How do we get back on [00:03:11] mission? And isn't the church a natural byproduct of disciple [00:03:16] making? In other words, if we focused our attention on the mission that Jesus actually [00:03:21] created, Jesus came to create a movement of disciple makers. And as [00:03:26] these disciple makers are on mission together, the community that they form [00:03:31] is the church.
Speaker 2: Like that's the, Ekklesia the church is the [00:03:36] community that is the natural byproduct of disciple making. You guys, if you start with church building, you're not necessarily gonna get [00:03:41] to disciple making, but if you focus on disciple making, you will get the church. Like the church will [00:03:46] emerge.
Speaker 2: And there's ways in which we do need to structure the church and there's all, there's a huge [00:03:51] conversation around that, but there is a chicken and the egg problem here. And that is if you start with church building, you don't necessarily get [00:03:56] to disciple making. I'm gonna give you guys three quick examples for how [00:04:01] we could really shift this re- relatively quickly if we decided to put disciple making first.
Speaker 2: Okay? The [00:04:06] first is that most churches don't track disciple making at all. I mean, [00:04:11] they, they, they are very careful to track the money that comes in. They're very careful to track the [00:04:16] attendance. But if you were to go to most pastors and say, " what's your average attendance? What's your [00:04:21] annual budget?"
Speaker 2: Um, they would probably be able to quickly answer those questions. And then of course, if you ask the [00:04:26] question, "How many disciples were made this year? What [00:04:31] percentage of your church are actively annually making disciples? What [00:04:36] generation is your disciple making efforts, uh, routinely getting to? Is it getting to [00:04:41] the, just the second or third?
Speaker 2: Is it getting the fourth or fifth generation? In other words, if a disciple makes a disciple, does it multiply or [00:04:46] does it just sort of start ... Is it more of a, like a one, one generation kind of thing?" Those are really, [00:04:51] really basic questions, very easy to track. It would take very little effort, [00:04:56] but the vast majority of pastors and church leaders don't know the answer to those basic [00:05:01] questions.
Speaker 2: And it demonstrates you guys that they don't really believe that this is, this is the [00:05:06] mission. Uh, they're tracking the things they believe is, is the mission. And so I think if we [00:05:11] wanted to begin to see this, we would need to track this. Um, one of the things you've probably noticed on this [00:05:16] podcast is anytime I get people that are involved in disciple making movements on the [00:05:21] podcast, I will ask them to please tell me any movements currently in the [00:05:26] US or anywhere in the Western world that are routinely getting to the fourth generation.
Speaker 2: And I'm constantly getting the [00:05:31] answer, if you've been listening to this podcast, you've, you've heard me ask this question from people who, whose job it is [00:05:36] to research and understand disciple making movements. And often they'll almost always say, "I don't know [00:05:41] of ... I really can't tell you, Jeremy, any that are getting to the fourth generation."
Speaker 2: I think [00:05:46] 100% of churches that are faithful should have a disciple making effort that is routinely getting to the fourth [00:05:51] generation. And I cannot find any. Like it's, it's, I think it's really, it, it's really, I know [00:05:56] this is like, I'm putting a lot of explanation points here, but it's, it's like you gotta [00:06:01] understand how strange this is.
Speaker 2: Jesus came to start a mo- a disciple making movement [00:06:06] and the people, we, we, we are an incredibly wealthy, um, [00:06:11] powerful movement in, in America and in the Western world of Christians. There is so [00:06:16] much money, so much effort, so many incredible, incredibly well-trained, [00:06:21] uh, and well-intentioned followers of Jesus.
Speaker 2: And this is just, this is such a [00:06:26] bizarre problem to say that we can't find any movements that are routinely getting to the fourth generation. If you know of [00:06:31] any, please reach out to me, talk to me, I wanna get them on the podcast. Okay, that's the first thing is we don't track. We do [00:06:36] not track, we don't keep track of this.
Speaker 2: If you don't keep track of it, you know, what you measure is what gets the [00:06:41] focus and, and we gotta start measuring this. Second thing is we need to, we don't celebrate it. And we, you can, you can [00:06:46] do this. One of the things that we try to do annually is to do a big, uh, disciple making [00:06:51] celebration where we actually put all this, the stats up there, where we highlight what's going [00:06:56] on with disciple making within our church, uh, community.
Speaker 2: And it's important to [00:07:01] understand that this particular ministry is, is hidden. And so when you walk into a church building and you [00:07:06] see, you know, hundreds of people, there's a sense of, of movement. There's a [00:07:11] sense of accomplishment. There's a sense that I'm a part of something that's important. [00:07:16] And so you get that naturally from the, uh, attendance to a worship [00:07:21] service.
Speaker 2: Or if you go to a conference or you go into a Sunday school class or you're part of a small group ministry, [00:07:26] there, there's a sense of how large this is. I get a sense of the scale of it. And [00:07:31] for Western people today, we are obsessed with this question. We wanna see things that are big and successful. [00:07:36] Um, and I think we're way too wired that way.
Speaker 2: But one of the things that we need to be really careful of [00:07:41] is disciple making efforts are hidden. And you might be, you might have [00:07:46] somebody in your church, for example, who is responsible for hundreds of people getting [00:07:51] discipled in your city. It's just, it's, uh, it's actually smashed through the, the whole [00:07:56] boundaries of the church because it's multiplying just naturally.
Speaker 2: You know, they make three or four disciples a year who are [00:08:01] making three or four disciples and all of a sudden it gets, you've got 50, 100, 200, 500, a thousand people being [00:08:06] discipled. If we don't ever talk about that, if we're not tracking and then we're not celebrating what's happening [00:08:11] there, if we just let it be hidden, then we're not going to be drawing the [00:08:16] newer believers who are training into this ministry.
Speaker 2: They're going to gravitate naturally towards [00:08:21] the ministries they can see and they want to be a part of something that actually feels like it's got momentum [00:08:26] and it's having an impact. And so you, because disciple making is small and [00:08:31] it multiplies kind of in a hidden way, you have to make that stuff explicit.
Speaker 2: [00:08:36] You have to show those numbers, you have to share those testimonies, you have to [00:08:41] create some kind of annual tradition of celebration if you want to [00:08:46] see this done. And the third thing is we often don't know how. So sometimes [00:08:51] you don't have a willingness problem. Sometimes people are like, "I, I want to make disciples.
Speaker 2: I'm going to carve out [00:08:56] time. I'm going to like five hours a month, 10 hours a month, 20 hours a month I'm going to [00:09:01] put towards disciple making. I feel so convicted." But are you convinced that the [00:09:06] method you're using is effective at both transformation and [00:09:11] multiplication? That if you decide to invest in this ministry, you're going to see people's lives [00:09:16] change and you're going to begin to see a movement that's going to expand beyond [00:09:21] the fourth generation.
Speaker 2: And if you cannot say yes to that answer, then you don't have an effective [00:09:26] disciple making blueprint that you currently are operating with.
Speaker 2: That is a problem that's very, very [00:09:31] solvable. And so one of the things we do at 1000 Houses is we have a blueprint called Life on Life Discipleship.[00:09:36]
Speaker 2: We take you through a three month cohort. We get together twice a month, uh, [00:09:41] for calls. We take you straight through an entire blueprint, and by the time it's done, you will [00:09:46] have, uh, in your possession, an effective blueprint for how to [00:09:51] create disciples that multiply. So it both is focused on balancing [00:09:56] transformation and multiplication.
Speaker 2: And we've thought about this a lot. We spent years and years iterating on the [00:10:01] blueprints. There's great blueprints out there. We're not saying we're, ours is the best or the only one. I couldn't find [00:10:06] one that I felt like was properly balancing transformation and multiplication. And so now [00:10:11] that we've watched people that have used this blueprint, it is, is reliably [00:10:16] getting to the fourth generation within a couple of years.
Speaker 2: We wanna be a part of this mission.
Speaker 2: Just [00:10:21] going back to what this pastor in this clip was saying, we all need to be a [00:10:26] part of the mission that Jesus has called us to. Let's not participate in what we often call the [00:10:31] great reversal, you know, where we have, we have exchanged the mission of [00:10:36] disciple making for the mission of church building.
Speaker 2: Like, we need to get this right. We need to get [00:10:41] this in the right order. Don't reverse the order of those two things. Start with disciple making [00:10:46] and you will give rise to a healthy, amazing church [00:10:51] expression. Start with church building, and you will almost inevitably be focused so much on [00:10:56] that effort that you will sacrifice disciple making.
Speaker 2: We gotta put first things first.
