As our time came to a close, a member of their executive team said, “One of our core values is excellence; how can we focus on sending to start something new when we still haven’t gotten this church right yet?” I couldn’t help but think, How much more right can you get? But what that executive team member was feeling was the tension of priorities: growing or sending.
Someone who has managed this tension as well as any U.S. leader is J. D. Greear of Summit Church, in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. He believes God wants their church to plant one thousand churches by 2050. How could that happen? As he says, “If we plant fifteen churches a year, we won’t get there. But if we plant churches that plant churches that plant churches, it just multiplies all over the place.” Great plan, and J. D. and Summit Church consistently live in the tension of both wanting to grow and wanting to send.
He’s changed their church’s scoreboard from measuring seating capacity to measuring sending capacity. In fact, the joke at their church is, “If you’ve been on our staff a long time, it means you’re not that good, because if you were, we would have sent you already!”
Can you feel the tension as he talks further about this dream? “We’ve grown to have the sort of culture where sending is the very air we breathe. Being a disciple means being sent, so sending should pervade every aspect of what a church does. First-time guests should know from the moment they set foot on our campuses that sending and kingdom are in our blood.”50
The tension is real. The tension is challenging. But every time I lay hands on a new crop of church planters and bless their dream, or get to visit a church we planted, or hear a story of life change that happened there and not here, I know it is worth it. And you will too!
3. The Tension of Provision: Do We Fund Buildings or Church Planting?
Hero-making churches fund the planting of new churches, not just the construction of new buildings.
I remember our very first newcomers’ reception at Community Christian. We were only four weeks old, and we were meeting on Sundays in the cafeteria of the local high school and had our newcomers’ reception in the teachers’ lounge. I finished my presentation with a group of about twenty new folks and asked if anyone had any questions. A short, bald, and very enthusiastic guy named George raised his hand to ask a question. (I remember him because he went on to become the mayor of our town for twenty years.) George said, “When are we going to have a church building?” I thought, We can’t afford a building. It’s hard enough just trying to afford staying in this cafeteria! But I told him, “We will build a building when it helps us better accomplish God’s mission.” And we have tried to stick to that ever since.
Just as you feel the tensions of proximity and priority, you will also feel the tension of provision. And one of the biggest outlays of cash will be for facilities and buildings. So let’s have a candid conversation, because if you want your church to be a hero-making church, you will live in the tension of providing facilities but also funding new churches. And this is a very real tension.
On one hand, facilities can be a big help to the mission. I remember church growth and leadership consultant Lyle Schaller telling me, “The most overlooked aspect of new church development is the importance of space” and then reminding me how important spaces are to people. I also know that in many contexts, a permanent building brings credibility. When your church moves into a new space, a significant increase in attendance is often not far behind.
On the other hand, facilities are a huge expense. It costs lots of money and time spent raising the money. Once you get the building, it’s very costly to keep it looking good. And usually we build bigger spaces, so we have to invest lots of hours to make sure we have enough people to fill the space. Those buildings also create culture and bring with them a lot of unintended consequences (some good, many not good over time). And this is always true: the building you will build today is not the building you would build in ten years.
I have a love-hate relationship with church buildings.
So if you want to manage this tension of provision, do what I and other aspiring hero makers do, and remember the following three provision principles.
Provision principle 1: Tithe to church planting. In the same way that you would tell a young believer to start tithing and trust God to provide, I tell young church planters to tithe to church planting and trust God to provide. At Community Christian, we have set aside at least 10% for many years for multiplication. The discipline of tithing has allowed us to have the funds to start new sites, plant new churches (both locally and globally), start a new church-planting network, and invest in innovative church-planting strategies. As we look at the next three years, we see Community helping to start twenty-eight new churches and sites. That wouldn’t be possible if we were not setting aside a tithe to multiplying. If you really trust God, tithing to plant new churches is not an issue.
Provision principle 2: Plant before you build. Before we ever bought property or built a building, we had started a second and third site of Community Christian Church. We were sure that multiplying was the best way for us to accomplish the mission of Jesus. I believe that this decision moved us to becoming a Level 4 church, and now closer to a Level 5 church. Planting before we ever built was a clear signal to our people, leaders, and staff that we were not going to be about buildings; we were all about the mission of Jesus and advancing his kingdom!
Provision principle 3: Always ask, “What is the best way to accomplish the mission?” With every budget, spend some time prayerfully asking, “What is the best way to accomplish the mission of Jesus?” Once you’ve answered that prayer, you then know how to allocate the provisions with which God has resourced your church.
There will be occasions when you will need to invest dollars in facilities, but even then, look for creative ways to maximize facilities’ use for the mission of multiplication. When we added a twelve-hundred-seat auditorium to our location, known as the Yellow Box, we also built our Leadership Training Center for training emerging leaders and church-planting leadership residents. So when I cast vision for this new space, I told our people, “This auditorium will help us reach thousands, but the Leadership Training Center will allow us to reach tens of thousands.” And we are already seeing this happen.
We will never be able to build buildings big enough or fast enough to keep up with what God wants to do.
Remember, if the church is a multiplication movement, we will never be able to build buildings big enough or fast enough to keep up with what God wants to do. So always ask, “What is the best way to accomplish the mission?”
An Unexpected Team of Hero Makers
In the movies and comic books, there are times when the challenge is so daunting that one hero is not enough and you have to call for a whole team of superheroes. So you call on the Avengers or the Justice League or the Guardians of the Galaxy. The challenge before us is not something made up in the movies or in the pages of a comic book; it is real, it is eternal, and it requires more than a team of heroes. It requires a team of hero makers!
I recently met such a team. They didn’t look like hero makers. And I certainly didn’t expect hero making from a board of elders who were mostly in their seventies and who, together with their pastor, provided leadership for a declining church that was started fifty-four years ago.
This elderly group of men had asked me to meet with them, and I anticipated they would want to hear strategies for survival. I thought their goal was to be a Level 2 church, to just hold their own. I was wrong. Really wrong.
One of the elders, Ken, started the meeting by saying, “We believe God has a bigger vision for us than what we have been able to accomplish for the past few years. We believe God wants us to multiply.” Inside I was shaking my head; this church had never reproduced anything that I recalled. He went on to explain the vision God had given him in prayer. Then another elder chimed in. “We believe it’s possible to see an Acts 2 kind of church; we haven’t given up on that dr
eam.” I was embarrassingly shocked and humbled. One other elder spoke up. “My home church has twenty people who show up every week in a huge auditorium. They should have sold their building thirty years ago. I don’t want us to just survive; I want to be a part of something that thrives.”
And what I heard next was stunning. “We think we can get two and a half million dollars for our building. We want to sell our building, close down this church, and invest all that money in the next generation of church planting.” This group of older leaders understood that the goal of their leadership was not longevity but legacy. With great admiration, I spent the rest of that evening helping them figure out a strategy for multiplying their impact, as I watched a group of unlikely hero makers change history! Clearly they understood the importance of passing the baton well.
But How Do I Make It Stick?
I don’t want to leave you here. What comes next will help you see the greatest possible results from your hero-making efforts. It shows you very practical ways to instill hero making as part of the culture of your ministry. The five practices are not a fad for this year, to be replaced next year by something different. Instead you want them to go deep and last, and the next chapter will walk you through what to do, step-by-step.
Hero Maker Discussion Questions
OPEN
• Biology teaches us that physical tension is necessary for the body to grow and become strong. Tell about a time when you grew in your leadership as a result of tension.
DIG
• Read Mark 6:6–13, 30–46, which describes many tensions Jesus had to live with. Which one do you most identify with, and why?
• Read Acts 1:8. What’s one tension that church leaders in the book of Acts had to manage?
REFLECT
• What leader or which church do you know that has been a good example of living in the tensions described in this chapter? Why?
• What did you learn from them that you will apply to your ministry or leadership?
CHAPTER 12
A Culture of Hero Making
Big Idea: Hero makers strive to create hero-making cultures so that the practices of hero making continue without them and after them.
Only one leadership move ensures a longer-lasting legacy than hero making does, and that is creating a hero-making culture. A hero-making culture empowers leaders to multiply their impact well beyond their sphere of influence and well beyond the life of any single leader. The very best hero makers do not just make heroes; they create a culture in which everyone around them implements the five essential practices of hero making. And these practices become so common that they are widely adopted over and over again without a second thought.
The first time I heard someone talk about culture and the power of culture, it was Erwin McManus, a Los Angeles pastor leading a church named Mosaic. I was at a conference he was hosting, and I was hanging on to his every word as he talked about creating a movement-making culture. Erwin defined culture this way: “Culture is spontaneous repeated patterns of behavior.”
Ever since I heard Erwin’s definition, I have worked to create leaders, teams, churches, and organizations that repeatedly produce hero makers. Culture is a leader’s greatest asset. Culture is at work 24/7. Culture never rests and is always influencing. Culture is reinforcing over and over again what is really important, through spontaneous repeated patterns of behavior.
Culture is spontaneous repeated patterns of behavior.
—ERWIN MCMANUS
FIGURE 12.1
Seven-Step Process for Creating a Hero-Making Culture
“I think this is the best part of your Hero Maker book.”
I’m hoping that’s what you’ll say after you work through this section. It already has a good track record. I have taught and coached the following51 seven-step process for creating a hero-making culture to hundreds of church leaders and consistently received good feedback, and I’m confident it can work across many different sizes and types of churches.
DECLARE IT.
A hero-making culture starts with declaring it. There needs to be a pivotal moment. It can be public or private, but the important thing is the seriousness of the commitment and that you know this is the hill you are willing to die on and there is no turning back.
Jeff Pessina leads a NewThing church-planting effort in the Philippines through Frontline Christian Mission, which he started more than thirty years ago. After the first two decades, they had helped countless hurting people and seen millions make decisions at their crusades. But as Jeff began to evaluate their work, he felt they didn’t have enough of a lasting impact to show for all their efforts. So he pulled his team together and declared that they were going to focus on multiplying churches and equipping Filipino leaders who would lead those churches. It was then that Frontline began to partner with NewThing. Jeff’s declaration was a clear statement that a new day had come to Frontline. Since he made that declaration, they have planted thirty-four churches and are dreaming of more than a thousand new churches.
If you are ready to lead a hero-making group, ministry, or church, start with a solemn declaration. On your computer, in your journal, or on the back of a napkin, write out your declaration. I would encourage you to focus on the problem you are trying to solve and how a hero-making culture will solve it. Your declaration doesn’t have to be eloquent or ready for publication; it just needs to be personal. Then keep it somewhere you will see it several times a week. Once you have done that, a new day will begin!
DO IT.
After you declare it, the next step is to do it! Because many leaders in the church are also teachers, you will be tempted to teach it. Please resist. Before you teach it, you need to do it yourself. Culture is more caught than taught.
This second step in culture creation is recognizing that you are the primary culture creator. As a leader, you need to go first. You will reproduce what you do—not what you teach but what you do!
As I mentioned earlier, everyone on our original staff team had apprentice small group leaders before we started our church. This did more for creating the hero-making culture of Community Christian Church and NewThing than anything else. While I was the first person on our team to have an intern, all of us immediately started helping people move along the leadership path. When you do that, it creates culture. I may have supervised the first leadership resident, but it wasn’t long before we were asking all our locations to have a leadership resident. As the leader, you need to go first.
BRAND IT.
Once you declare it and do it, you may be thinking, Okay, now can I teach it? Please hold off just a little longer. The next step will help you with that. Your next step in creating a hero-making culture is to brand it.
The larger the scope of your leadership, the more important this third step will be. If you are leading a small group, this can easily be accomplished through conversation and a change in language and storytelling. If you are leading a ministry or church(es), it may require a memorable slogan and a communication strategy. “Hero Maker” is a memorable slogan. We created it as a brand for our Exponential conference, to help leaders understand what it means to be a kingdom-minded leader who multiplies generations of leaders. You should strongly consider using the phrase hero maker to help brand the new culture in your ministry or church! And use this book. Or think of something even better.
Some of the new language you will use to establish your brand will come from the pages of this book, terms like apprentice, intern, leadership resident, leadership path, ICNU, and more. And tell stories. Feel free to use the stories I’ve told you, but in short time you will need to tell your own stories. And the best stories are the ones you tell of other people who are being hero makers.
TEACH IT.
Now you are ready to teach it. Did I mention that one of the biggest mistakes church leaders make is teaching too soon? We get excited about new ideas, and we regularly need content to deliver to listening people, so we end up teaching about her
o making before we are doing it ourselves and have the language and our own stories to explain it. I applaud you for having the discipline to wait till you declare it, do it, and brand it before you teach it.
In teaching hero making, remember that the endgame is a new culture. With that in mind and with the branding work you have done, teach the concept of hero making to your leaders first, before you teach the rest of your group, ministry, or church. I have found that the best way to teach other leaders is to use a process referred to as “heart, head, and hands.”
Heart. Leaders often need to feel it in their hearts before they will ever live it out in their lives. This is why it is important that other leaders feel and see the passion in your life. You can help them feel it by telling stories or by having other leaders tell stories of people who were hero makers for them. This can be accomplished in person or by video.
Head. Leaders also need to get it in their heads. They need to understand how hero making is grounded in biblical truth and know why this is so important. Change is always composed of both emotion (heart) and understanding (head), and that is how leaders are best taught.
Hands. Leaders need to receive permission and encouragement to live it out for themselves. Part of equipping leaders has to be your approval and confidence that they can be hero makers. Don’t teach just for others to feel it in their hearts or get it in their heads; teach for them to live it with their hands. That is how you create culture.
Remember, leaders are culture creators, and once you get other leaders beginning to implement the practices of hero making, that dramatically influences everyone else. After you teach and equip your leaders and see they are doing it, you are ready to teach the rest of your group, ministry, or church. That is how culture is created.
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