Hero Maker

by Dave Ferguson

  3. You do. I help. We talk. Now Grace transitions from helping Eric to taking on most of the leadership responsibilities for the small group. Since Eric has had an exceptionally busy week, he takes the opportunity to ask Grace, “Could you lead most of the meeting this week? If you do, I will handle the icebreaker at the beginning and the prayer time at the end, plus I will be there with you the whole time.” Grace agrees, and since she has seen him lead the group enough times, she feels very comfortable and does great. Eric is gradually releasing responsibilities to his new, developing leader.

  4. You do. I watch. We talk. The apprentice process for Grace is almost complete as she grows increasingly more confident in her role as a leader. Eric has her lead the entire meeting each week while he watches her, and he gives her the responsibility of finding a service project for the group. At their debrief time, Eric says, “I think you are ready for leadership; do you think you are ready?” With a smile, Grace says, “I think I’m ready.” With both leader and apprentice feeling ready for the next step, they begin to plan whether Grace will take over the group or lead a new group, and what Eric will lead next.

  5. You do. Someone else watches. This is where the process of multiplication comes full circle. Eric says, “Grace, you have done great! Have you started to think about who you can mentor and repeat this process with?” Grace says, “I already have two people who have expressed interest, and I’m meeting with one this week.” Grace, the former apprentice, is now leading, and she begins developing new apprentices. Since Eric has developed and released several apprentices, he continues to work with Grace and other leaders in a coaching capacity.

  The five steps to apprenticeship are really that simple! If you will constantly use these five steps, you can develop other leaders who will in turn already know how to develop other leaders. This is the second of five simple tools I offer (one per chapter), and they’re all just as practical and accessible. My goal was to make each so easy that you’ll conclude, “I could do that right now.” And I hope you will.

  A World of Disciple Multipliers in One Generation?

  Let’s wrap up the challenge to be a disciple multiplier with the stirring words of Admiral William McRaven, who, in a commencement speech, provoked graduates from the University of Texas with this exhortation: “If every one of you changed the lives of just ten people, and each one of those folks changed the lives of another ten people—just ten—then in six generations this class will have changed the lives of the entire population of the world, eight billion people.”39

  The admiral’s words are a great challenge, not only for college graduates but for me, you, and the church! Since the church is far bigger than that graduating class, we’ve already got a running start. We’ve also got the Holy Spirit in us, and the God of the universe wanting it to happen. We can do it!

  To change the world, we need to not only change people but also mobilize those people as change agents. If your efforts to mobilize people have ever felt like slot filling or just trying to get a task done, turn the page. By the end of the next chapter, you will discover a better way, through the hero-making practice of gift activating. I promise the fourth practice will be a blessing to you and to the people you are leading.

  Hero Maker Discussion Questions

  OPEN

  • Who was a big spiritual influence in your life?

  • In what ways did this person’s influence involve ideas or practices of multiplication?

  • What idea in this chapter is something you’re doing well at?

  • What was the biggest “Aha!” or “I need to work on that” for you from this chapter?

  DIG

  • Read 2 Timothy 2:2. If Paul gave you those instructions, how would you feel? Motivated? Overwhelmed? Why?

  • Read John 3:22. In your ministry, how important is the idea of diatribo?

  • Which statement is more true for you: “I do it if I have time” or “It’s how I do ministry”? Explain.

  REFLECT

  • Who are some people you could mentor using the five steps of apprenticeship, starting today?

  • Can you name some people your apprentice might be able to mentor?

  • What’s the most important action you’ll take starting today, triggered by reading this chapter?

  CHAPTER 8

  Gift Activating

  Big Idea: The practice of gift activating is a shift from asking God to bless the use of my own gifts to asking God to bless leaders whom I am sending out. Gift activating requires that we not fill slots but instead develop people’s gifts and use simple tools like commissioning leaders to be sent out for ministry.

  Blessing Dreams

  “I dream of a different Chicago!” Duane Porter and his wife, Sauda, were being commissioned on a Sunday at a Community Christian location to plant a new church near where Duane grew up and around the corner from where Sauda worked as an elementary school principal. Duane said those words with the same conviction that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had voiced on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A recent Chicago Tribune headline had reported more than one hundred shootings and fifteen killed over a deadly holiday weekend. So when Duane shared his vision with such heartfelt passion, the auditorium erupted with applause.

  When Duane and Sauda finished, they handed the microphone to Kingsley, another leadership resident at Community Christian, who was being commissioned to plant a multiplying church in his home country of Ghana. He started with a slow build. “I have seen churches planted, but only by adding one at a time.” His enthusiasm grew. “But I’m going back to Ghana to help plant a reproducing church!” Then, with a full-throated shout, he yelled, “And I want to see my denomination begin to plant churches that reproduce churches. And I want to see reproducing churches all across the continent of Africa!” Again the auditorium was filled with applause.

  Patrick O’Connell, the global director of NewThing, stepped forward and gave them two checks as a gesture of support. Then he challenged the people listening. “Maybe you are supposed to do more than applaud; if God is sending Duane and Sauda to the South Side and Kingsley to Ghana, maybe some of you are supposed to go with them! I want you to pray about that.” Then he laid his hand on the shoulders of Duane and Kingsley while asking the rest of the church to reach out their hands as a sign of blessing. With every hand fully extended toward these three young people stepping into new leadership roles, we asked God to give them wisdom and provision. When Patrick finished his prayer and said amen, their apprenticeship as leadership residents was complete and their leadership gifts were fully activated.

  Hero Making and Gift Activation

  There is a direct connection between hero making and Duane, Sauda, and Kingsley being sent out to plant a church. It started with Community Christian’s God-size dream that forced us into multiplication thinking (the first practice). This new way of thinking caused us to see the people God had put around us differently; we began to see leaders everywhere and started giving them permission (the second practice) through ICNU conversations. Soon disciples were being multiplied (the third practice) through apprenticeships in every ministry and at every level. Some of these apprenticeships lasted two months, some lasted a year, like Duane, Sauda, and Kingsley’s leadership residency. What I described for you at the beginning of this chapter is the moment a leadership gift is fully activated (the fourth practice). It happens, in this case, with the laying on of hands and the blessing of leadership. (Figure 8.1 shows how all five practices fit together.)

  The gift activation and the commissioning of a new leader can be as formal as a Sunday morning worship service in front of hundreds or as informal as a small group leader at a kitchen table giving a prayer and blessing to an apprentice who agreed to move into small group leadership.

  I believe that gift activation occurs at a commissioning. What we have nicknamed the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19–20 was Jesus very specifically offering his authority and blessing to make more disciples, traini
ng them and baptizing them so they could join those who were already Christ followers.

  FIGURE 8.1

  In this case, Jesus commissioned eleven (his twelve apprentices minus Judas). I’ve seen gift activation occur with one person, two people, or thirty-one people at a time, as in my next story.

  Never Seen That Before!

  It was my first time at Nairobi Chapel, and I witnessed something I had never seen before. Their senior pastor, Oscar Muriu, and I had become good friends over the previous few years. He first contacted me after reading Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement, telling me that the contents of the book perfectly described what he was doing and wanted to do. When he got invited to speak at Willow Creek’s leadership summit in Chicago, he asked if I could meet him for lunch. I eagerly agreed, we totally hit it off, and that was the birth of a friendship. In time, he became a very important part of NewThing, providing us with apostolic leadership in Africa. I had him speak at Community Christian Church, and now at his request, I was in Nairobi to speak at his home church.

  Nairobi Chapel is a large church40 that does so many things well, but at the top of the list is mentoring and developing leaders and gift activation. Just prior to my teaching on that Sunday, Oscar invited to the stage thirty-one men and women who had just gone through the third and final track of their Kinara Leadership Program. As these graduates made their way up there, Oscar described their experience of apprenticing with experienced church leaders and spending time in the classroom learning from him and others. He went on to explain that the church was commissioning all thirty-one of these leaders to go and plant new churches in Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, located in Nairobi. He looked at the graduates, affirming his belief in their gifts and ability; then he looked at the congregation and asked them to join him in praying for them. As he prayed, he reached out his hand toward the new leaders to visibly express his blessing and great pleasure in what was happening. When the prayer concluded, the whole church sang out their approval and joy as thirty-one more church planters were commissioned for the Jesus mission.

  Amazing! I have never seen that many church planters commissioned by one church on one Sunday! Pastor Oscar is a hero maker, and Nairobi Chapel is a hero-making champion continually activating and deploying the gifts of young leaders.

  Gift Activation Gone Wrong

  Back when spiritual gift inventories were all the rage, my coauthor, Warren Bird, did some research about where the process went south.

  The sequence was fairly consistent. It typically started with the small groups or teaching team leading a church-wide emphasis on one of the New Testament passages that teaches that every believer has one or more spiritual gifts. Then everyone would be asked to complete a spiritual gift assessment, typically a survey that asks people how God has used them in the past, with a self-tally function that shows people which gift they’re evidencing most often. Self-assessments are always interesting, and they left everyone with a sense of their gifts and eagerness for an assignment. So far so good, but the problems began with one of the following scenarios.

  Scenario 1: “The Pile.” In this church, the surveys were all collected and taken to the church office. The surveys were stacked in a pile on a desk and sat there and sat there and sat there . . . and are still sitting there. Many gifts were starting to be discovered, but none were activated.

  Scenario 2: “Overwhelmed.” In another church, the pastor didn’t want the office to be the bottleneck, so after he preached a series on spiritual gifts, he asked everyone to take home a gift inventory and identify their gifts before the next Sunday. The following Sunday, the pastor asked for a show of hands and said, “Judging by what you learned, how many of you are not serving in your area of giftedness?” To his surprise, about 90% of the hands went up. He was instantly overwhelmed and couldn’t imagine how to administrate that much change at once. So he didn’t even try.

  Scenario 3: “It Just Got Weird.” In still another church, because of the emphasis on spiritual gifts, people began experimenting with their gifts, and some abuses occurred, such as disruptive worship and a preoccupation with gifts rather than a focus on the Giver—just as happened in some New Testament churches. The pastors and elders responded by shutting down the conversation on gift activation, saying, “We didn’t realize that by inviting the Holy Spirit to show up, we were inviting chaos and weirdness too!”

  Scenario 4: “Filling Slots.” In yet another church, the staff eagerly grabbed all the surveys and held a draft. One after another, they took turns picking the name of the person who had filled out an assessment, not to help them activate their gifts but so they could contact them to ask them to fill a slot in their program. If you asked them why, they would tell you, “Without more volunteers, we can’t continue our children’s ministry (or first impressions team or fill-in-the-blank).” When they talked to volunteers, they would say, “It takes only a couple hours a week, and we really need your help.” And if they got really desperate to fill a slot, they would add, “If you really love Jesus, you’ll take your turn at volunteering for such-and-such ministry.” It was all focused on running a successful program; that was the goal.

  How Gifts Are Activated

  What if we shift to an emphasis on people development? What if somehow running the existing program becomes secondary to helping people discover and activate their unique, God-given gifts? While assessments are good and helpful, they are not how spiritual gifts are activated. Hero makers understand that people are propelled into ministry, and gifts are activated, with a four-phase approach.

  Assessments are good and helpful, but they are not how spiritual gifts are activated.

  Phase 1: Dreaming big envisions gift activation. When we let God’s Spirit inspire our imagination about doing greater things through others, we begin to envision the gifts of 100x more people being mobilized for mission.

  Phase 2: ICNU initiates gift activation. It is in the moment of permission giving, when a leader says to someone, “I see in you . . .” and describes a preferable future, that the switch is flipped on for gift-based serving.

  Phase 3: The five steps develop gift activation. It is in apprenticeship that gifts are tried and tested. Sometimes successfully, other times not so successfully, but this is a time of personal growth and discovery.

  Phase 4: Commissioning fully activates gifts. When an apprentice thinks he or she is ready and the leader also thinks the person is ready, the new leader is ready to be released and have his or her leadership gifts fully activated. A commissioning, not unlike an ordination, happens when the leader lays on hands, prays, and asks God to bless the new leader’s future ministry.

  I will offer a few examples, and then at the end of this chapter, I’ll give you a church-wide example of a commissioning service to help you become a stronger gift activator.

  Start Them Young: Mentored and Commissioned

  As a seventeen-year-old senior in high school, Obe Arellano found his way back to God and began taking his faith seriously. “I was so thirsty and hungry for more,” he says. “As I focused on following God, I had big dreams. I knew that God wanted to do something big.”

  Obe (pronounced Oh-bee) recalls, “All I heard was no. I always felt like I was limited. I had no role model, no affirmation, and I got the strong message I was not experienced enough and not old enough. My pastor didn’t mean to, but he kept shutting me down; I felt like I had no real gifts to be used.”

  A mentor from outside his church, Jose Cheng, would constantly say, “Obe, you have potential for more.” He not only mentored Obe but also took him along on ministry events. On the way home one time, he told Obe, “You have the leadership gifts and capacity to be a great pastor, and even to be a church planter.” (Did you notice that both of these statements are examples of ICNU affirmations, which I introduced in chapter 6?)

  Obe almost cried. “That rocked my world,” he says. “I was only eighteen years old. I had felt like I
didn’t have permission to dream that big, being so young.” Those words about his gifting were God’s confirmation to Obe that he should pursue vocational ministry.

  Obe continued to grow, he met and married a lovely woman, and together they dreamed of planting a church. When they thought the time was right, Obe left his job and they moved to the city of Aurora, Illinois, where they sensed God’s calling. “We didn’t know anyone there, and we didn’t have any family there, but we sensed God wanted us there,” he says. So he began meeting people, wanting to come alongside whatever God was already doing in that city.

  At a pastors’ prayer gathering, he met Kirsten Strand from Community Christian Church. She says, “I had a sense that Obe was the answer to our years of praying for the right person with the right gifts to help us launch a new location in Aurora.”

  Kirsten saw that Obe and his wife, Jack, were incredibly relational and connected equally well with first-generation undocumented immigrants and those who were more affluent. “Obe was sharp, articulate, passionate, and confident in a good way,” she says. “Obe and Jack were incredible faith-filled risk takers and entrepreneurs.” Using the ICNU approach that’s second nature for many of our people at Community Christian Church, Kirsten gave permission for Obe and Jack to activate their gifting.

  Obe and Jack began to explore a relationship with Community Christian Church, going through some of the training opportunities and ministry options that NewThing offered. When Obe came to understand the multisite church, he and Jack concluded, “That’s what we’ve been dreaming about.” Obe says that through a leadership residency, “a lot of people spoke confidence into my dreams, affirming my gifts and what God had shown me when I was eighteen!” Recalling the moment I approached him with the simple invitation to consider planting a location with Community, Obe says, “That blew my mind again.”