The Wayback Machine: August
Just because a post isn’t on the front page doesn’t mean it’s not important. The “Wayback Machine” posts occur at the end of every month and reference the best posts of that month in years past. My hope is to provide a good jumping on point for readers who have never been to Pursuing Glory.
2009
Joel’s Birthday and the Outpouring of the Spirit
My son’s birth was a prophetic sign to us about the outpouring of the Spirit at the end of the age. On my son’s one-year birthday I reflect on the significance of this promise in Scripture.
Stuff I’m Reading….Err…Listening To
I love to review books that I’ve read in order to point people to good material. This is my review of Francis Chan’s groundbreaking book, Crazy Love.
2008
Appropriately, this is the blog announcement of the birth of Joel. No prophetic significance mentioned here, just some insight into my thinking at the time of his birth.
2006
This post describes an encounter I had at the Midwest Prayer Center shortly before we began our house church. A number of things happened during this month that were signs the Lord was leading us to start a house church. This was foremost among them.
A Random Meeting with a House Church Planter and Another of My 50,000 Coaches
This post describes a sit-down I had with a house church planter in our area shortly before we started our house church. What I love about this post, though, is the fleshing out of the 50,000 Coaches philosophy. If you want to understand 50,000 coaches or you want to hear about some initial encouragement I received about viral house churches, check out this post.
This is probably the most convicting post of my own that I’ve read in some time. It deals with the need to make God’s rest our priority, especially in the lives of leaders.
You Were Made To Reproduce (Why Are Multiplying Churches Necessary? Part 2)
You can check out Part 1 of “Why Are Multiplying Churches Necessary?” here.
“Jesus lives on in an apostolic Mission that advances by Church multiplication.” – Wolfgang Simson
While there a lot of reasons that multiplying churches are necessary, the fact that it’s necessary because it’s in your DNA isn’t probably the first thing you think of. But if you stop for a moment and consider it, one of the most horrible things that can happen to a couple is that they are unable to have children. A couple can be healthy, popular, wealthy and successful, and yet miserable because they are unable to have children. They show us a fact the Bible already tells us: We were born to reproduce.
This reality goes all the way back to the very beginning of creation: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:27-28).
There are two powerful concepts that are at play here, I’ll start with the most obvious one and then move the more subtle one. First, when God created a man and a woman in the Garden, He did not put them there just to enjoy Paradise. His commission to Adam and Eve was to carry the very life of the Garden to the furthest reaches of the planet. This wasn’t to be done by them living forever and trekking across the entire planet (though they did live for almost a thousand years). God’s plan for Adam and Eve to subdue the Earth was really quite simple: be fruitful and multiply. It was that easy.
The second principle is just as powerful. These two humans were to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the Earth, not because it was just the easiest way. In reality, this reproduction that God called Adam and Eve to was a facet of God’s nature. It is like God to reproduce Himself. And because it is like God to reproduce and He has put His likeness in us, we must reproduce because we are patterned after Him.
This is why Paul, the church multiplying king could write about the nature of Christ and say things like, “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all,” (Ephesians 1:22-23) Notice that it’s the nature of Christ to fill all things with Himself and He manifests that nature through us, His church.
How does this apply to us? Multiplying isn’t something foreign to us as a church. It’s part of our natural and spiritual DNA. Just like the barren couple we started talking about, we will be frustrated in our lives and callings until we see successive generations of believers walk in the things Jesus called us to. But if we multiply ourselves, if we multiply leaders, and if we multiply churches, we become true to the very DNA Jesus sowed into us from the very beginning.
Photo Credit: Mountain view with sheep by Julie_Berlin.
Why Are Multiplying Churches Necessary?
If you look around, you can see multiple reasons in the earth to be discouraged. It seems no matter how many good stories happen in the news, there is a larger number of bad ones. This is especially true when you look at the church. It’s easier and grabs more headlines to believe that the best days of the church are behind us.
However, if you study Scripture or have your ears tuned to what the Spirit is saying to the churches, then you have a great cause for hope. The Word and the Spirit tell us that we are on the verge of one of the greatest harvests of lost souls in human history. Events (and the God behind them) are conspiring together to bring forth this harvest in a short period of time.
It’s with this context in mind that I want to present to you the need for multiplying churches. When we talk about multiplying churches, usually I sense a collective yawn in the room from people who haven’t really considered the implications of the world we live in. But we live in a unique time of history where the need for mutliplying churches is greater than ever before.
At this point it would be good for me to define what is a multiplying church. A church that I would consider a multiplying church has taken seriously Paul’s admonition to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2 and applied it at every level. Paul says, “what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” Paul was concerned about what Christ has done in him being reproduced in another three generations of believers. This wasn’t just a selfish concern, it was a concern for the dynamic elements that made him apostolic be reproduced in everyone that was touched by Timothy and those he mentored.
This plays out in a number of different ways, but one of the most concrete ways we see this play out is in church planting. If every member of the body is reproducing itself, the inevitable result is more churches come into existence. When we plant churches, that’s good. When those churches that we’ve planted plant churches that’s better. It’s even exciting when those second generation churches plant more churches. But we’re dealing with multiplying churches when the third generation of churches start planting churches themselves. If you’re lost, it may be because by this time, like a virus, its hard to know which church was the first church at all.
This is what we need for this hour: a church that carries the Gospel and spreads like a virus across the face of the planet. Over the next few weeks, I’ll look at the “Why’s” of multiplying churches, because before we can make them happen, we need to understand why we need them. I’ll leave the “How’s” of multiplying churches to those who are actually seeing this accomplished. Before I close, I want to quote Wolfgang Simson’s Starfish Vision. He shares an equation that I believe is important for us to understand because it stresses the importance of multiplying churches. The equation is this: J=MC2.
“Jesus lives on in an apostolic Mission that advances by Church multiplication.”
Photo Credit: Studying Till The Sun Goes Down by Jakert Gwapo
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 