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CHURCH ZERO

Patrick Bradley — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 10:00:01 +0000

by Peyton Jones: When Jesus ascended with His work unfinished, He knew that no one person was going to be able to follow in His wake. The five kitbags each represent a specific skillset necessary for a church leadership team, like a sapper, sniper, commando, Navy SEAL, and heavy weapons expert. A church planter is never a splinter cell who acts alone, but the leader of a platoon of daredevil pathfinders. Church planting resembles a covert commando operation that travels covertly in small teams, creates an opening for other special teams, and gets the heck out of Dodge when the mission is accomplished.

Wimps need not apply. Typically, church-planting teams have not been very specialized. If somebody plants a church, it’s assumed that he must be a pastor. What about the other four roles? Imagine Navy SEALs outfitted in full scuba gear getting ready to jump out of an airplane. They just don’t have the kit. Don’t get me wrong, a pastor may be called to plant, but he’s going to need to jump with an apostle. If a pastor isn’t particularly gifted on the evangelistic side of things, he’s going to need somebody on hand with the evangelism kitbag. What good would it be if we were all Navy SEALs? I need a sapper. I’m gonna probably need a sniper as well. If you’ve seen Stallone’s The Expendables, you’ll know that the individuals in that team of elite mercenaries were recruited because of their special skills. So were you. When Jesus recruits leaders, He equips them like a Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Couture, Austin, Crews, Rourke, or Willis to assemble a super-team of highly specialized talents. We may be a Dirty Dozen crew of specialized ex-convicts, but we have skills. The Dirty Dozen impacted cinematic history because it concentrated on special teams. If it had been called The Dirty One, it would have conveyed an entirely different meaning, or it would have blown as a film.

Nobody wants to watch one guy doing everything. Nobody buys it, and it doesn’t work in real life. Because the church has assumed that all you need for simple shake-and-bake church planting is a pastor, the church has not learned to knit bands of special teams together, and rather than becoming the Expendables, they’ve often become the Disposables in terms of expanding the kingdom. The church desperately needs to see the return of the A-Team. The pastor-only club is killing the leadership of the church. Guys are burning out, losing their families, sabotaging their marriages, or simply going back to selling used cars. It’s time those of you in ministry got your life back. There was only one guy who could shoulder all five jobs on His own, and He’s not physically camping out here anymore. Jesus was the Master Chief of those five roles. Master Chief is a cybernetic super-soldier who can use any weapon of any make, alien or otherwise, simply by picking it up. He possesses integrative software hardwired into his cyber-suit that immediately breaks down the operational component of any weapons system. You and I, unfortunately, do not possess such a suit. We’re grunts. Therefore, we specialize. A shepherd can’t concentrate on evangelism; a teacher has to hit the books and resist being bogged down with too many namby-pamby counseling sessions.

Jesus alone mastered all five roles: •Apostle: “Consider Jesus, the apostle” (Heb. 3: 1). Let’s face it, He is the ultimate pioneer, missionary, messenger, and sent one. •Prophet: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers— it is to him you shall listen” (Deut. 18: 15). After Jesus gave the people bread in the wilderness like Moses did, John did the math for us: “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!’” (John 6: 14). Good guess. •Evangelist: When Jesus took the scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth, He read Isaiah 61: 1, which says that He was anointed to “bring good news [gospel] to the poor” as well as liberty and the Lord’s favor. If John’s gospel presents Jesus as anything in His conversations, it presents Him as an evangelist. •Shepherd: “I am the good shepherd” (John 10: 11). Peter calls him our “chief Shepherd” (1 Peter 5: 4). •Teacher: “And he opened his mouth and taught them” (Matt. 5: 2). “Never man spake like this man” (John 7: 46 KJV). ’Nuff said. FIST leadership isn’t something we’ve made up; it’s what our Master Chief has distributed to the church so that He can “fill all things” (Eph. 4: 10). That means to spread out! Therefore, He calls some to be apostles, some evangelists … you get the picture. Facing a task unfinished, we seek to fill the hole that He’s left behind. When Bugs Bunny ran through a wall, he left a Bugs-shaped hole, rabbit ears and all. What does a Jesus-shaped hole look like? You got it: apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. Each of these leaders plays a vital role in equipping believers with a specialty so that they become a balance of the five roles. That’s why Paul said these leaders are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to … the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4: 12– 13). Last time I checked, the whole church hasn’t attained that fullness yet. These roles have been given until we attain it. Therefore, I think we’re gonna need these roles to stick around for a bit, until He comes back. If people see just the pastor-only model, they mistake Jesus’s leg for the whole body. But when all five roles operate, the church’s other three limbs will begin to be built up and attain Christ’s stature in the world.

The church is a bit like Voltron: Defender of the Universe. Voltron featured a team of five young pilots who each controlled a giant lion vehicle that combined to form Voltron, a super robot as big as a skyscraper and nigh invulnerable. (Yeah, it’s an eighties thing.) On their own, each of these lion robots, cool as they were, got their metallic butts kicked by aliens. For some reason that only the modern church could relate to, the five pilots repeatedly tried taking on said aliens individually before finally uniting to form Super Robot Voltron. Now, I was only eight when I watched this, but every day I knew their modus operandi was doomed. So I just waited till they got their cans kicked enough till they decided it was time to press the red button, uniting them into (step back) Voltron, Defender of the Universe. Once Voltron took shape, alien mutants got cut down, massive energy swords flashed, some alien chick screamed, and the universe got saved. Thus endeth the lesson. It’s tough for an evangelist to strike out on his own when he doesn’t know how to shepherd the community of people who get saved under his ministry. The pastor shepherds the people in the church while praying that he doesn’t leak more out, but he struggles to get them to walk through the doors no matter how hard he tries. The pulpiteering teacher swashbuckles through the riggings of exegesis like Errol Flynn, but he has no clue how to care for his hearers when their lives fall apart. If we would take a lesson from an eighties Saturday-morning kids cartoon, we’d start to unite the five lions in order to create the image of Jesus, who would tower over our communities wielding the sword of the Spirit.

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.

Source: CHURCH ZERO

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He Blinded Me With Science

Patrick Bradley — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 10:00:52 +0000

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.

Source: HE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE

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7 Pivotal Shifts That Will Revolutionize The Church In 2018

Patrick Bradley — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 14:00:04 +0000

Something Apostolic.

Something that will break out of the mold.

Something that will possibly even break the mold.

Something that can recover what has been lost.

Something that can restore it.

Something that can be relearned.

And if it can be relearned, it can be retrained for future generations to pick up where Acts left off.

NINJA STRIKE TEAMS

When I was a kid, we used to jump all over the playground whining shrill hiiiii-ya-s like feral cats, and clumsily unleash our lumbering kicks through the air at anyone stupid enough to get in our way. In at the time I imagined myself like Bruce Lee, but to my middle-aged mind’s eye of memory, I shudder to think how ridiculous we must have looked to the girls on the monkey bars. Like my childhood antics of kicking in an arc, and calling it a roundhouse, what we call church planting is simply not planting like the apostles.

After 11 years of planting, Paul was able to pen these words “From Jerusalem to Illyricum, I have finished the task that God set for me.” (Romans 15: 19). In other words, Paul had planted a church in every major city on the Mediterranean Islands, Macedonia, and Asia Minor. Imagine that; just eleven years, and Paul had to push on to Spain because he ran out of new frontiers.

Ever wonder how Paul went so fast?

Because he didn’t go alone.

Paul specialized in teams that planted together. He created a local network that moved around together as seen after Paul leaves Ephesus. “Sopater the Berean, son of Pyrrhus, accompanied him; and of the Thessalonians, Aristarchus and Secundus; and Gaius of Derbe, and Timothy; and the Asians, Tychicus and Trophimus.

Know what’s more dangerous than a ninja?

A group of ninjas!

What the apostle Paul formed in Acts 20:4, I call ninja strike teams. Paul leveraged strategic church planting strike teams of qualified church planters who team up for a special attack, and penetrate the darkness together. And we’re not talking one leader with a core team of underlings who specialize in doing church chores. We’re talking about a team of equally gifted, qualified, experienced church planters who banded together for impact, so that they could spread out quicker once the foundation was adequately laid. We’re talking planters like Titus, Silas, Barnabas, and Epaphriditus. Most of us couldn’t keep up with Paul’s fellow workers, not to mention the big man himself, who ran circles around young men, and ate hirelings for breakfast.

A NEW MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Contrast Paul’s team planting methodology with the modern approach to church planting. For too long, we’ve been sending planters out alone, as if we’re flinging them at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. As if we threw enough at it, some eventually would.

And guess what? Not many do.

Statistically, 70% of them don’t.

Instead of producing sustainable church plants at an ever increasing rate, such an approach results in wasted time, wasted resources, and worst of all, hurt people.

Besides that, we tend to train them in the classroom, then send them out into the field to try out their Kung fu. Why not spar together, getting out there and flinging some kicks, throwing some punches and actually doing some karate together?

Imagine how different a strike team might look to what we’ve been doing.

Instead of five churches launching this year in one city, why not use those five planters to launch together in one place? Paul usually moved on after appointing elders, and depositing one strike force team member (like Timothy, or Titus) to stay behind. Imagine that we banded together as a team of five fully qualified church planters. Then imagine that 6-12 months down the road, after the new church plant is stable, we break the team in half, recruit more young people from the existing church, and send out another church planting strike team. Then imagine that 6-12 months later, we break that team in half, repeat the process and strike out into even newer areas. Now we have three solid church plants in 3 years. Not only that, some of those original five have now had experience planting three churches in that short amount of time. What you’re doing is apostolic church planter training.

But here’s the catch. Each of the churches you’ve planted continues to designate strike team members to the local network in order to keep the ecclesiastical cell mitosis reproducing itself.

This sounds great, right? Surely everybody would jump on board of this 1^st century tactic and want to plant this way, right kids? Ironically, I was once taken aside by a short-sighted leader who chastised me for planting a network of churches out of my hub, rather than hording as many people as I could into one ginormous church. I told him that my measure of success was a network of churches that would continue to multiply with reproductive DNA. After all, one of the definitions of living things is that it reproduces. Dead things stop.

Perhaps the biggest litmus test is to ask what the Apostle Paul would think of the churches we plant, and the wider ministry we perform. Scholars estimate that Paul himself planted anywhere from 12-24 churches in the eleven-year period of his active ministry. Being able to build a team of super planters who could rapidly deploy in any given city, taking on various roles, increasing and decreasing according to their gifting and the need of the plant, would be a game changer. Even the girls on the monkey bars might be impressed.

Finally, if being so kingdom-minded that after laying a foundation, our planters were able to slip aside ninja-like into the shadows so that others could build on it, as Paul did (1 Cor 3:10), there’d be no stopping the church.

THE FRUITS

Besides how successful such ventures would be, the benefits would of a brotherhood team planting strategy would be:

Stronger launches.
Greater discipleship capacities.
More than one type of leader would be able to use their gifts (enter the APEST roles).
Shared responsibilities of mission and management in the beginning when desperately needed.
Leaders able to take a break when needed by calling on faces familiar to the congregation.
Local networks formed between multiple churches where leaders are known by one another, and have served together to accomplish kingdom work.
Kingdom work becomes the driving factor, and replaces competition and empire building.
We’d be able to continue to team up for special attacks or joint gospel ventures into our communities.
Faster Multiplication.
Greater support.

That would be what I would call success…and I’m pretty sure Paul would call it that too.

Again you can catch the introduction HERE and part 1 HERE if you want to go back and read the earlier posts in this series.

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.

Source: 7 Pivotal Shifts That Will Revolutionize The Church In 2018

The post 7 Pivotal Shifts That Will Revolutionize The Church In 2018 appeared first on Passion for Planting.