When my wife and I started our ministry thirty-five years ago, we wanted to be among people who have never heard about Jesus Christ. I had prayed to be in a situation that’s challenging, where there’s not enough vision of evangelizing and where baptisms happen only rarely. So we started in a difficult area of central India, one where less than 1% of the inhabitants are Christians. We wanted to preach and demonstrate Jesus’ love and forgiveness.
Through those years, more than twenty-five hundred churches have been planted through the ministry of CICM, which now oversees a full-time staff of more than eleven hundred people serving more than five hundred thousand believers who are worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ all over India and the surrounding countries.
We have also started three regional centers in strategic areas, each offering full-time training to workers reaching out to the most unreached people groups. These church planters regularly risk their lives among terrorists and other violent extremists, where evangelists have been killed but people have not yet heard of Jesus.
In recent years, we’ve become a partner with NewThing. It’s a great encouragement to us because sometimes you feel lonely, like you are Timothy without Paul. Working together is like a filling station. It also gives us a feeling that we are helping each other on global goals of planting churches. It reminds us of the bigger picture—that we make sure that before we die, every person knows about Jesus. We want to make an eternal impact as we say, “Follow me as I follow the model of Jesus.”
India has the world’s fastest-growing number of people. We add one “Australia” to our population every year. With such a great task, and so many open doors even through the persecution, how could we not develop the kind of churches that multiply?
Ajai’s hero maker tip: To help people move toward multiplication, I encourage them to see things in light of eternity, to keep moving forward, and to never ever give up. I might have to sacrifice my life, and you might lose yours as well.
Your vision must go beyond what you can do to what God wants to do. We never looked into our resources; we never checked our pocketbook. God makes his presence known as you move forward. We must say, “It’s not my life but your life; it’s not about me but about you.”
One of our preachers was tied up, and his attackers made him watch as they raped his wife. Some while later, this pastor told me about their most recent baptisms, which included the people who had brutalized them. This pastor and his wife had visited their attackers, prayed for them, and forgiven them. Only the love of Christ could motivate their actions.
Likewise, if I want to see the multiplication of hero makers, I must preach not just from my lips but from my life. As I live out what I preach, I must be “extreme” in pouring my life into others.
If I can do it with the help of God, you can too, wherever you serve. We stand together. We serve a great God.
Whew! See why I wanted Ajai to be the profile in this chapter? He is a great example of a multiplication thinker (the first practice of a hero maker). He always thinks about how to multiply and has always pursued big dreams. You can imagine his dream napkin saying something like, “Tell everyone in India about Jesus while showing them extreme love and forgiveness.”
He also is a permission giver (the second practice). You can just hear him affirming those church planters with ICNU statements like, “If God is with you, then you can go anywhere and boldly proclaim Jesus without fear!”
Further, he models being a disciple multiplier (the third practice) with his emphasis on making disciples who make disciples. The level of commitment exhibited by the leaders he has multiplied is unlike anything I’ve seen in the West. They’re actually building the five steps of apprenticeship into their training curriculum.
He’s also a gift activator (the fourth practice) as he commissions most graduates of their centers to plant a church. And he excels as a kingdom builder (the fifth practice), putting all his efforts into developing leaders and church planters and advancing the kingdom. Can’t you feel his burden and passion for people who have never heard the gospel or seen it lived out? His scoreboard emphasizes how many people have become disciples of Jesus.
Simple Tool for Kingdom Building
SIMPLE SCOREBOARD
Now it’s your turn. Like Ajai’s scoreboard, yours will help you focus on being a hero maker and not the hero. You must also make sure you don’t confuse the many stats on a scorecard with the most important statistic of “runs scored” on a scoreboard that tell you whether you are winning. And a winning scoreboard for a hero maker must show that you are faithfully building the kingdom. It will focus not on who is coming to your thing but rather on who is doing God’s thing. For pastors and church leaders, it will shift priorities from counting how many you are seating in your church to counting how many you are sending out on mission.
I don’t want you to shoot at the wrong basket, so let me suggest that as a hero maker, you keep track of only two measurements: first, how many apprentices you have; second, how many total apprentices you and your apprentices have developed. This is a simple scoreboard that you can easily keep on your phone, your laptop, or even a scrap of paper. Let me explain these two kingdom-building stats.
FIGURE 9.3
1. Measure Current Apprentices
Ask yourself these questions: “How many people am I investing in?” “How many people am I mentoring to be commissioned to do great things?” “How many people am I taking through the hero-making process?” Apprenticing relationships are not hard to count. Usually leaders have only a handful of apprentices at a time. Jesus had twelve. I doubt I’ve ever had that many at any one time.
If you are a small group leader and you are developing an apprentice, that is one. If you are a ministry leader and you have a team of four whom you are growing and meeting with regularly to expand their ministry, that would be four. If you are a lead pastor and you have an apprentice in your small group, a leadership resident who is going on to plant a church, and your executive staff team of five whom you hope grow beyond you, that would be a total of seven.
This is intentionally simple but ultimately important. The first measurement on a hero maker’s scoreboard is how many people you are mentoring.
2. Measure Cumulative Apprentices
The second measurement on a hero maker’s scoreboard is the total number of apprentices that you and your apprentices have ever developed and released. The most proficient of hero makers have a hard time keeping track of this second measurement. That should be your goal—you develop so many leaders who develop so many leaders who develop so many leaders that you have lost count after the fourth generation.
However, until you get past the fourth generation, I would encourage you to keep track. When we started Community Christian Church, each of us started a small group and used the simple graphic in Figure 9.4 to challenge ourselves with the vision of reproducing beyond the fourth generation.
It showed us how, through the hero-making process, we could build God’s kingdom to impact 320 people (ten per group) by mentoring a total of thirty-two leaders over a five-year period. For many of you who are type A and need to keep score of this kind of thing to know whether you are winning, this is exactly what I would encourage you to do.
FIGURE 9.4
Tracking Multiplication versus Addition
As you determine your scoreboard measures, be careful to pick values that lead to multiplication, not just addition. As Todd Wilson wisely observes in his Exponential ebook Dream Big, Plant Smart, “Possibly the single-largest obstacle to multiplication occurs when we position addition activities (new programs and ministries, new facilities, small groups, outreach events, church-wide campaigns) as our primary strategy for growth, rather than seeing these activities as a supporting element to healthy biblical multiplication.”47
The reason why I recommend apprentice counting as your primary kingdom-building scoreboard measure is that it so readily leads to multiplication, as Figure 9.3 shows. Sup
pose you accept my definition that apprentices do not graduate until they have their own apprentice. If so, then when that graduation happens, you’ve already moved from Level 3 growth (you working harder and longer) to Level 4 reproduction (you reproducing yourself in someone else).
But wait, there’s more! As soon as your former apprentice graduates his or her own apprentice, you have moved into Level 5 multiplication. Then, when all of you repeat the process (if next season or next year everyone takes on another apprentice) and a fourth generation emerges, you are solidly advancing God’s kingdom through Level 5 multiplication. You are birthing a hero-making family, and so are each of the heroes you make!
What’s Next?
You’ve now finished learning about the five practices of a hero maker, and for each one, you have a simple tool that you can put to work today. As you implement these practices, you will maximize your life and ministry, and God’s kingdom will advance. But understand, it won’t be easy. It will be hard. If it were easy and not hard, more leaders would have done it. The next chapters will help you anticipate what’s ahead and show you how to lead through it. They’ll also give some examples to motivate you, reminding you that the transition is worth it and that your new life as a hero maker is both manageable and enjoyable—and incredibly fruitful.
Take a breath, and then jump into your future by turning the page.
Hero Maker Discussion Questions
OPEN
• What was the first job you ever had?
• How did you know whether you were successful?
• Who do you know who has a kingdom-building scoreboard?
DIG
• Use a Bible app or Google to search for Bible verses using the word kingdom. Which verse with kingdom in it is the most meaningful to you and why?
• Read Matthew 6:33. How does Jesus’ admonition to “seek first the kingdom of God” (ESV) affect your understanding of success as a leader?
• What does it mean to you when you pray this line from the Lord’s Prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10)?
REFLECT
• Which do you celebrate more: people coming to your thing or people doing God’s thing?
• Tell about a time when you saw God’s kingdom win, but not your personal kingdom.
• What does your hero maker’s scoreboard look like today? How many apprentices do you currently have, and how many total apprentices do you have?
• What would you like on your scoreboard in one year and in five years?
CHAPTER 10
The Influence of Hero Making
Big Idea: Hero makers have the opportunity to be used by God to move the needle on the church-multiplication gauge from 4% to 10%, creating a tipping point in the impact and influence of the Jesus mission.
You never wake up thinking, Today something big will happen that changes everything. But this day would be different.
It was a warm fall morning, and I was working out of a Panera Bread restaurant, finishing writing the first talk I would ever give on the multisite church. Leadership Network had convened a group of leaders of innovative multisite churches at Community Christian Church who were to start meeting after lunch. It was September 11, 2001. Yeah, that day. I finished up my notes and got in the car to drive to our meeting site. By the time I got there, the entire world had changed.
Do you remember that day? It was an inflection point in history, a turning point, an event that would forever change how we think and act.
“Inflection point” is a term made popular by a couple of business guys named Andy Grove, of Intel, and Clayton Christensen, of Harvard. In business terms, an inflection point is when a new opportunity presents itself or a new market opens up or a disruptive innovation appears, like the internet, the personal computer, or the smartphone. It’s a turning point because customers from that point on will never think and behave the same.
An inflection point is a turning point, an event that forever changes how we think and act.
The business world borrowed the term inflection point from the math world because when you put an inflection point on a graph, it looks like Figure 10.1.
FIGURE 10.1
I believe that the church in North America could be at a very important inflection point. I want to unpack this inflection point by explaining “what is” and then “what could be.”
What Is . . .
Let me start by reminding you what is currently happening with the church in North America. Back in chapter 2, we told you how every church can be placed into five different levels of church multiplication capacity.
Level 1: Subtracting—churches that are declining in attendance
Level 2: Plateauing—churches that are holding steady
Level 3: Adding—churches that are growing
Level 4: Reproducing—churches that have reproduced one or more new sites or churches
Level 5: Multiplying—churches that multiply generations of sites or churches, showing movement behaviors
About 80% of all churches fall into the Level 1 (subtracting) and Level 2 (plateauing) categories. Our research at Exponential tells us that about 16% of all churches fall into the Level 3 (growing by addition) category. That leaves only the Level 4 (reproducing) and Level 5 (multiplying) categories. About 4% of all churches fall into Level 4, while there are only a couple examples of Level 5 churches in all of North America—like Ralph Moore and the more than twenty-three hundred churches planted through Hope Chapel (see chapter 5). Our hunch is that of the 4% of churches (roughly fifteen thousand) in Level 4, only about half reproduced with joyful intention. Many of those new churches were actually church spats or splits! Ugh. I hate that “what is” reality.
What Could Be . . .
Now let’s take a look at what could be.
In our first ten years of the Exponential conference, we’ve been laser focused on multiplication, church planting, and movement making. During that decade, we have seen the annual number of conference participants grow from a few hundred to more than ten thousand, with another thirty thousand participants joining us online annually. Most people don’t make it every year, and typically at least half are present for the first time. When I think of Exponential, I don’t think of a conference as much as I think of a community with a cause that represents more than one hundred thousand leaders across every network and denomination. My point is this: there is a growing critical mass of church leaders who are committed to becoming hero makers!
There is a growing critical mass of church leaders who are committed to becoming hero makers!
During that same decade, we’ve seen church multiplication slowly start to gain momentum. The number of new churches planted in the United States is increasing. Just over ten years ago, we were closing more churches than we were starting. The most recent statistics on this show that every year, we’re seeing a net gain of more than five hundred new churches! Not enough yet, but we are gaining momentum. The church in the U.S. is starting to multiply, at least in a few places!
We’re also gaining momentum over the past ten to twenty years with the innovation of the multisite church. On that fateful day of September 11, 2001, we convened with a dozen other multisite churches for the first time. At that time, there were fewer than one hundred multisite churches in the country. Today there are more than eight thousand multisite churches, and they make up the largest segment of growing churches in the United States. The faster you’re growing or the larger your total attendance, the more likely you are to go multisite. Churches are starting to reproduce rapidly, at least among many high-visibility pacesetters!
Not only that, but I sense a subtle shift in what success looks like in the local church.
“Grow big.” During the last couple decades of the twentieth century, many churches aspired to grow bigger. They defined their success by the size of their budget, attendance, and buildings. The church growth era ushered in a time when the church leaders wh
o wrote the bestselling books spoke at conferences; leaders looked up to leaders who had grown very large ministries.
“Grow big and reproduce.” At about the turn of the millennium, a new measure of success arrived with the multisite movement. The unstated measure of success had slightly shifted; now it was not just to grow something large but also to reproduce it at multiple sites. Again, the leaders who could achieve this drew the admiration and attention of other church leaders, who wanted to know how they could do the same.
“Grow and multiply.” Now I sense that young leaders are rejecting the idea that success equals growing something big on their own. They are also not content with just growing their own ministry and then reproducing it in other places. There is an emerging strain of young leaders who understand that the mission of Jesus is accomplished through movement. They are also grasping parts of the secret that God’s mission expands when you have aspirations for the kingdom and not just for your church. One research note that affirmed this last observation: Warren Bird ran a major survey through Leadership Network and found that 83% of pastors under age forty “have a future vision to plant/launch new sites or churches.”48 They may not yet know or understand the hero maker language I’m introducing in this book. But these young leaders are aspiring hero makers. I’m greatly encouraged by what I see in the next generation of church leadership.
I say all this to draw your attention to what could be. We have a growing critical mass of church leaders who have bought into the Jesus mission, the vision of multiplication, and the desire to be hero makers. We also have a growing momentum in which leaders see their role as hero makers and more and more church leaders want to lead Level 4 and 5 churches.
If all this is true—and I’m strongly suggesting it is—then we’re looking at what could be an inflection point in the church and mission of Jesus Christ in the United States!
Hero Maker Page 17