Hero Maker

by Dave Ferguson

  I remember one year looking down from the stage, and my good friends Troy and Janet McMahon had come forward to be commissioned. I knew the talk of church planting had come to an end, and it was time for his leadership gift to be fully activated. I got to pray for them and bless them. What a great moment!

  We have changed a lot of what we do at the Exponential conference, but the one experience that we have never changed is the commissioning moment to activate leadership gifts for planting new churches. Why? Because that is what hero makers do!

  What’s next? We’ve now covered four of the five essential practices of hero making: multiplication thinking, permission giving, disciple multiplying, and, in this chapter, gift activating. The next chapter, “Kingdom Building,” is the one that will help your church or ministry have the greatest impact in robbing hell and populating heaven. Don’t miss it.

  Hero Maker Discussion Questions

  OPEN

  • Who has encouraged you to use your gifts? Is there someone in your life who believed in you and your unique gifts more than you believed in yourself? If so, who and how?

  • Which of the people in the stories about gift activation in this chapter do you most identify with or look up to? Why?

  DIG

  • Read Matthew 28:19–20 and then, without pausing, Acts 1:1–8. Where do you see gift activation and the sending out of leaders?

  • Have you seen gift activation or commissioning practiced? If yes, how? If no, why not?

  REFLECT

  • Suppose you performed a commissioning, akin to what’s suggested in this chapter, for your group, class, team, ministry, or entire congregation. What would it look like? When would you do it? What message would it convey?

  CHAPTER 9

  Kingdom Building

  Big Idea: The practice of kingdom building is a shift from counting the people who show up at my thing to counting the leaders who go out and do God’s thing. Kingdom building requires that we reject old ways of measuring success and use simple tools like a scoreboard that measures the number of current apprentices and total apprentices.

  Unless you’re really into high school basketball, you probably didn’t hear the sad sports story that came out of Yukon, Oklahoma.42 Two high school teams were playing in the first round of the state basketball championship playoffs. Hugo High was leading Millwood High 37–36 with less than four seconds remaining in the game. Hugo had the ball, and all they had to do was hold it and let four seconds tick off the clock. Then they’d advance in the tournament.

  Hugo’s star forward caught a pass, but instead of holding it, he took a shot—and made it. He raised his hands in victory and started running around the court, looking for teammates to celebrate.

  Just one problem: he had just shot at the wrong basket and scored two points for the other team. He looked at the scoreboard and realized his team had just lost. The opponent, Millwood, had won 38–37.

  I’m someone who played high school and college basketball, and also a parent who has coached his sons in basketball, so my stomach sank and my heart broke for that star forward. It was painful to watch the replay of him shooting at the wrong basket—and losing the game.

  The application? Scoreboards never lie, even if the players get confused. Whether it’s high school, college, or professional sports, when the time is up, the scoreboard tells you the truth. The scoreboard tells you the game’s outcome.

  That star forward probably didn’t like what was on the scoreboard. It may not tell the whole story, but at least for basketball, it does tell you who won the game.

  Churches Have Scoreboards

  Hero makers and the churches they serve have scoreboards too, even if they’re not as obvious as the one at a ball game. Most pastors and volunteer leaders I meet work very hard. But too often we’re like that star forward. I sense confusion and disorientation in our efforts to win as we try to accomplish the mission of Jesus. Too many of us lack confidence and understanding of how we can put points on the scoreboard and know for sure that our church is winning and advancing the cause of Christ.

  Let’s narrow the focus for a moment to pastors. For too many, keeping score is a mystery. I hear more and more pastors questioning, “Is keeping track of attendance and the offering enough? How do we measure discipleship? What about community transformation? What about issues of justice? What about sending out missionaries? Should church planting count?”

  This observation about pastors and church leaders was substantiated when I interviewed Warren Bird the researcher, long before we decided to work on this book. Leadership Network had just sent him out to interview 104 lead pastors, most of them leading what Leadership Network had determined to be the most innovative churches on our continent.43

  When the study was done, I asked Warren what he took from those conversations. He told me, “Dave, the most significant takeaway is this: the leaders in those churches are looking for a new kind of scoreboard, a way to figure out what it means to win, especially in making disciple makers.”

  Did you hear that? Pastors and churches do want to win—and hero makers are no exception—but they’re not satisfied with their current system of metrics. They want to advance the cause of Christ, but they aren’t sure how to do it well, in terms of the most important scores to track.

  That’s what this chapter is about. As the graphics across this chapter show, after looking at the role of kingdom building in Jesus’ ministry, I want to help you create a new scoreboard grounded in solid theology and ministry practice, one that can tell your church whether God’s kingdom is winning and whether the mission of Jesus is being advanced. It’s about how to keep score of kingdom work. Clue: it’s more than just counting people, but neither is it acting like people don’t count!

  FIGURE 9.1

  Kingdom Winning

  Jesus was all about the kingdom of God. Not only did he speak of it constantly, but he told his followers to make it a priority. Our Lord and hero maker said, “Seek first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33 ESV). So how do we win at doing so?

  Part of the reason people like winning is because winning equals success. This is where it gets tricky, because kingdom winning is not necessarily the same as this world’s view of success. Jesus said that in his kingdom, the first will be last and the last will be first (Matt. 20:16). He also taught that whoever wants to be great has to be a servant (Matt. 20:26). The apostle Paul said that God chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things of the world to shame the strong (1 Cor. 1:27). You can probably think of additional verses that illustrate ways that Jesus’ kingdom “is not of this world” (John 18:36).

  There’s also a strong theme in Scripture of faithfulness to God as a pathway of winning. Hebrews 11 is nicknamed “the spiritual hall of fame.” It uses the word faith thirty-three times, showing that by faith people conquered kingdoms, administered justice, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of flames, escaped the edge of the sword, and more. Wow, almost anyone today would call that success. But the same chapter says that by faith people faced jeers and flogging, people were chained and put in prison, and people were stoned, sawn in two, or put to death by the sword. That’s not how most people picture winning, but to God it was. “These were all commended for their faith,” the chapter concludes (Heb. 11:39). To God, winning is faithfulness. Winning is a life that ends up with God saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” (Matt. 25:21)—words found in one of the parables telling us what the kingdom of God will be like.

  In short, the more you read the Bible and the better you get to know Jesus, the more you understand that kingdom winning is not synonymous with the achievement and accomplishment prioritized in the Western world. So take a deep breath and breathe in God’s grace. You don’t have to be successful, only faithful.

  If faithfulness is the sole measure of winning, that leaves the question, what must we be faithful in being and doing? Seeking first the kingdom of God, which I mentioned at the
beginning of this section. If we are faithful in doing that, everything else falls into place. Our seeking starts on a very personal level, as this passage specifically deals with God’s cure for our anxieties about daily provision. It reminds us that material provision is not unimportant, but our first motivation must be the will of God, which is to advance his kingdom. But the principle of this verse applies far beyond as we view all of life and ministry as seeing God’s kingdom—his rule and reign (Luke 17:20–21)—take captive every spiritual stronghold as people respond to the gospel.

  It is clear that Jesus’ scoreboard is solely focused on advancing the kingdom of God. Notice the priority of God’s kingdom in these verses:

  • “Your kingdom come . . . on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

  • “As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’ ” (Matt. 10:7).

  • “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent” (Luke 4:43).

  • “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade” (Mark 4:30–32).

  As I read the Gospels and compare them with leadership conversations today, I hear more about personal mission statements and churches’ visions and goals, while Jesus seems to talk more about faithfulness to building the kingdom.

  Counting Derrieres and Dollars

  In many churches today, we limit ourselves to just a couple of measures: attendance and offering (also known as nickels and noses, butts and bucks, crowds and cash, or derrieres and dollars).

  Beyond that it gets fuzzy. In fact, at a recent dinner I had with Todd Wilson and Warren Bird, Todd said to Warren, “Someone recently tweeted that you’ve done more large-church site visits than anyone alive, so here’s my question: If all churches count finances and attendance, what’s the third most popular metric?”

  It was fun to watch Warren stutter! He eventually affirmed that there’s no widespread agreement. We ultimately agreed, pooling all our experience, that the third most common scoreboard measure has something to do with measuring leadership development, often indirectly by how many people are involved in a church’s small group communities, which go by lots of different names.

  Jesus could never be accused of counting only crowd size and cash on hand. Instead his scoreboard—the measurement he spoke about most often—involved the gospel, the good news of the kingdom. This seems to be his way of measuring his mission “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

  Jesus could never be accused of counting only crowd size and cash on hand.

  Jesus had a full and powerful ministry. He healed the sick, showed compassion on those in need, proclaimed freedom to the oppressed, and otherwise modeled a perfect life of love for God and for people. But I believe that winning for him, according to Scripture, was measured most in multiplying God’s kingdom.

  In Need of a New Scoreboard

  I remember going to a little rural church with my grandparents in Farber, Missouri. It had a wooden plaque on the wall that was updated every week. It was titled something like “Register of Offering and Attendance,” and it gave the stats from the previous week and one year ago, enabling people to compare. No doubt, people felt that as long as the current numbers were increasing, then the church was winning. Many of us do the same thing today with spreadsheets.

  But there are potential problems if the two categories of cash and crowds alone are our primary scoreboard.

  It is entirely possible for a church’s attendance to be growing, while the kingdom of God is shrinking. Today there are more people attending church on any given weekend in the United States than ever before. We could conclude that U.S. church attendance is growing, and therefore we must be winning, right? Wrong! While more people are attending church than ever before, it’s a smaller percentage of the total population, a population that continues to grow with people who need Jesus. If we become content with that scoreboard measure, we’ll never accomplish the mission of Jesus.

  Also, it’s entirely possible for a church’s attendance to be growing, but the impact of the church is shrinking. I believe God is interested in a neighborhood’s crime rate, the percentage of people living below the poverty level, the high school graduation rate, and more. Won’t people who love God and love their neighbors—people whom Jesus calls the light of the world and the salt of the earth (Matt. 5:13–16)—make their community a better place?

  It is entirely possible for a church’s attendance to be growing, while the kingdom of God is shrinking.

  In addition, church attendance says nothing qualitative about personal spiritual transformation. A church’s growing attendance does not promise that people are growing spiritually. Attendance graphs that are up and to the right don’t guarantee that people are faithful in following Jesus.

  I’m not saying we should stop counting. Jesus and the New Testament writers counted people. I believe numbers simply represent people without showing their faces. Even references like those in Acts that say the church grew imply someone was counting, because otherwise eyewitness-dependent Dr. Luke, who penned Acts, couldn’t make such statements.

  My friend Reggie McNeal wrote the Leadership Network Series book Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church.44 I love the three shifts he suggests churches need to make.

  1. Shift from an internal focus to an external focus. This means the church does not exist for itself. We exist primarily to do ministry beyond ourselves.

  One of our sites at Community Christian Church is on the north side of Chicago, in a very diverse neighborhood. This new location understands what it means to be externally focused. For more than a year before ever having a celebration service, the campus pastor and his team volunteered every week in the local elementary school and at the alderman’s office. When we had the first celebration service at a local elementary school, the place was packed not only with people who were part of Community but also with people who were part of several other nonprofits that we honored. During that prior year, we had built relationships with the school, the alderman’s office, a garden project group, an environmental group, and others. Each of those partnerships was part of our grand opening, with booths set up in the hospitality area for volunteer recruitment. This new site of Community was both in and for the neighborhood from the very beginning.

  2. Shift from program development to people development. Reggie rightly observes that over time, the North American church has largely become a collection of programs run by staff or lay leaders. The downside is that this emphasis has led to a scoreboard assessment of how well the programs are doing, not how well the people are doing. As Reggie says, “If instead you start with people, the programs then serve the people, not the other way around.”

  It’s my conviction that the best kind of people development happens through apprenticeship, because that’s a life-on-life relationship in which one person invests in another. That’s why I devoted an entire chapter (chapter 7) to the kind of disciple multiplication that resulted in the five-step tool for apprentice multiplication.

  At Community Christian Church, we track and report every month how many apprenticeships are taking place and what percentage of our leaders have apprentices. That speaks to our commitment to people development and leadership development.

  3. Shift from church-based leadership to kingdom-based leadership. Leading a movement is very different from leading an organization. Christianity was largely a street movement in its early days, when it turned the world on its head. Once we institutionalized it and put it largely into the hands of the clergy, we lost the virility of that movement.

  At Community Christian Church, we try to measure kingdom-based leaders by what we call the family tree. Annually, each campus is asked to
account for the attendance of not just their campus but all the campuses and churches they have helped plant and reproduce.

  A great example comes from our Montgomery campus. It has a 1960s church building that was given to us and seats almost 200 people. Every weekend, they have two Sunday services and average about 350 in attendance. But if you look at their family tree, that metric reveals that they average a weekly outreach of more than 1,400 because of two campuses they have launched locally, as well as a church they planted in Boston.

  Confusing the Scorecard with the Scoreboard

  I remember the first Major League Baseball game I ever saw in person. My dad took me to Wrigley Field in Chicago, where the hometown Cubs played the St. Louis Cardinals. He bought me a scorecard and a pencil and showed me how to score the game. You could track dozens of stats on that scorecard: AB (at bats), 1B (single), 2B (double), 3B (triple), BB (base on balls), HR (home run), RBI (runs batted in), and lots more.

  My love for baseball and stats might be why the movie Moneyball instantly became one of my favorites. In it Brad Pitt plays the part of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team. The Oakland A’s were a team in a small market with few resources, competing against big-market, big-budget teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

  It seemed that Beane and his team of underpaid overachievers could never become winners, but Beane knew there had to be a way. Beane meets young, Yale-educated brainiac Peter Brand, whom he hires to help him run his baseball team. Through statistical analysis, Brand offers Beane a brand-new strategy to win. “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players but to buy wins,” Brand explains, “and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.”