When you combine these specialists together, you get a complete house.  Separate them, and as the Babelites found, your building goes from Babel to rabble.  When a team comes together under the leading of the Holy Spirit a chemical reaction results.

As a firefighter of 3.5 years, I learned about the combustion triangle.  Combine fuel, heat, and oxygen and there’s an explosive chemical reaction!  In the spiritual realm, when the 5 roles of Ephesians 4 came together in the 1st century to build God’s house, there was a spiritual housing boom and Paul was the contractor. If I didn’t suck so bad at chemistry, I’d be able to scrawl a formula that demonstrated when these 5 elements were put together, something powerful happens.

In the world of therapeutic drugs, a synergistic effect is what happens when you mix two drugs together and they produce a greater outcome combined that far excels their individual capacity.  In other words, if I take Motrin (+ 3 pain relief) and Tylenol (+2 pain relief) the combined effect of taking them together wouldn’t equal +5 pain relief, but +8.  Synergism.  Big word.  Big effect.

Ponder this:“A study of horses revealed that a single horse could pull an average of 2,500 pounds.  The test was repeated with two horses.  You’d expect the weight pulled to double – to about 5,000 pounds.  Not so.  Two horses working together pulled 12,500 pounds!  That’s five times the amount one could pull alone.  Would the numbers hold if instead of horses researchers had use Vespas or Volkswagens? We doubt it.  There’s something inside a living being that rises to accomplish exponentially greater things when part of a team.”  (Harris bros – do hard things p.111)

This is exactly what happened in the 1st Century, when Christianity swept like wildfire throughout Rome’s Pagan Empire as the chemical combination of A-teams were in full swing.  It created spiritual detonations leaving the fallout of spiritual mushroom clouds that spread throughout Asia Minor.  You will be serving as a spiritual contractor and every foreman needs to lay the foundation so that the other team members can build on it. When statistics demonstrate that 70% of church plants fail, I’m convinced that they fail at this level.  They didn’t have a strong shepherd, or evangelist, or visionary prophet, or radical apostolic church planter type.  Simply put, it’s because church planters ignore the way it was done by the wise Master craftsmen of the 1st century.


Buy Peyton’s newest book “Reaching The Unreached: Becoming Raiders of the Lost Art” over on Amazon.com. You can also download a free chapter and watch a cool trailer for the book HERE or click the image below.

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