BUILDING THE RIGHT CHURCH DEPENDS ON USING ALL THE WRONG PEOPLE.
I was sitting at a table with an old friend who leads a large and thriving church. “We try to make everything easy for the members of our church,” he said to me. “We encourage them to get to know people in our community, whether in their neighborhood or office or anywhere else. Then all they have to do is invite those people to church. At church, those people will hear relevant, gifted communicators in a warm, attractive, and appealing environment where their children can be a part of top-of-the-line programs.”
He concluded, “If our members will just invite their friends to the environment we create, then we can take care of the rest.”
Then he asked me what we do at Brook Hills.
Hesitantly I said, “We actually do the exact opposite.”
“Oh really,” he said. “What do you mean?”
“Well, when we gather as the church, our main focus is on the church. In other words, we organize our worship environment around believers, not unbelievers.”
He looked confused. “Why would you do that?” he asked. “If your worship environment on Sunday is not appealing to non-Christians, then how is your church going to intentionally lead unbelievers in Birmingham to Christ?”
“We’re going to equip our people every Sunday to lead unbelievers in Birmingham to Christ all week long,” I said.
“Your members are going to lead them to Christ?”
“That’s our plan.”
“Well,” he said, “once those unbelievers become believers, how are they going to grow in Christ?”
“Our people are going to be equipped to show new believers how to live as followers of Christ,” I said. “I want people in the church to be able to fulfill the purpose for which they were created without being dependent on gifted preachers, nice buildings, and great programs to do it for them.”
Looking puzzled, he said, “Well, that’s a new approach.”
Now, again, I am a young pastor, and I have a lot to learn, particularly from pastors like this one, whom I respect greatly. But I don’t think I’m coming up with something new here.
I believe in the people of God. Or more specifically, I believe in the work of God’s Spirit through God’s Word in God’s people. The last thing I want to do is rob Christians of the joy of making disciples by telling them that I or anyone or anything else can take care of that for them.
Someone might ask, “But if a church has a gifted communicator or a gifted leader, wouldn’t we want as many people as possible to hear that person?”
The answer is “not necessarily.” The goal of the church is never for one person to be equipped and empowered to lead as many people as possible to Christ. The goal is always for all of God’s people to be equipped and empowered to lead as many people as possible to Christ.
I also believe in the plan of God. In Jesus’ simple command to “make disciples,” he has invited every one of his followers to share the life of Christ with others in a sacrificial, intentional, global effort to multiply the gospel of Christ through others. He never intended to limit this invitation to the most effective communicators, the most brilliant organizers, or the most talented leaders and artists—all the allegedly right people that you and I are prone to exalt in the church. Instead, the Spirit of God has empowered every follower of Christ to accomplish the purpose of God for the glory of God in the world. This includes the so-called wrong people: those who are the least effective, least brilliant, or least talented in the church.
Building the right church, then, is dependent on using all the wrong people.
At one point in Radical, I described the various elements that we in America have manufactured for growing a church.1 I want to revisit the discussion I began there and take it further so we can better explore what a church might look like if it properly valued the wrong people.
It’s commonly assumed that if you and I want to be a part of a growing church today, we need a few simple elements.
First, we need a good performance. In an entertainment-driven culture, we need someone who can captivate the crowds. If we don’t have a charismatic communicator, we’re sunk from the start. Even if we have to show him on video, we get a good speaker. And for a bonus, we surround the speaker with quality music and arts.
Next, we need a place to hold the crowds who will come. This usually means investing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in a facility to house the performance. The more attractive the environment, the better.
Then once the crowds get there, we need something to keep them coming back. So we start programs—first-class, top-of-the-line programs—for kids, youth, and families, for every age and stage. And in order to have those programs, we need professionals to run them. That way parents can drop their kids off at the door, and the professionals can handle ministry for them. We don’t want people trying this at home.
There it is: a performance at a place filled with programs run by professionals. The problem, though, is the one p we have left out of the equation: the people of God.
What if growing the church was never intended to depend on creating a good performance with all the right people on the stage? Where did we get the idea that this was necessary? Certainly Scripture instructs us to gather for worship.2 This is nonnegotiable but not necessarily in the way we usually think about it.
Imagine being in a church on the other side of the world where it is illegal for the church even to exist. You wait until midnight, when everyone else in the village is asleep, to quietly leave your house. Under the cover of darkness, you sneak down winding roads and past silent houses, looking around every corner to make sure no one is following you. You know that if you or anyone else from your church is caught, you may never see your home again. For that matter, you may never see the light of day again.
Yet you continue on until you round a bend, and there you see a small house with a faint light emanating from it. Checking one last time to make sure you have not been tailed, you slip inside. There you are greeted by a small band of brothers and sisters who have made the same long trek. As you look at their weary but expectant faces, you realize something: Not one of them has come because a great communicator has been scheduled to speak. Not one is present because a cool band is scheduled to play. No, all are there simply because they desire to gather with the people of God, and they are willing to risk their lives to be together.
Performance has nothing to do with it. People have everything to do with it.
Whenever I am in churches overseas like the one just depicted, I am reminded of how much we have filled our contemporary worship environments with performance elements such as elaborate stage sets, state-of-the-art sound systems, and high-definition video screens. I am also struck by our reliance upon having just the right speaker and just the right musician who can attract the most people to a worship service. But what if the church itself—the people of God gathered in one place—is intended to be the attraction, regardless of who is teaching or singing that day? This is enough for our brothers and sisters around the world.
But is it enough for us?
I am haunted by this question on Sundays as I stand in a nice auditorium with a quality sound system and large video screens on the wall, all designed to spotlight select people on stage. It’s not that everything in this scene is necessarily wrong, but I do wonder what in this scene is biblically best and practically healthy for the people of God. I have more questions than I have answers on this issue, and I am grateful for leaders in our worship ministry who are willing to ask the questions with me.
I mentioned earlier that we recently cut 83 percent of our worship budget. We did this not only to free up resources for urgent needs around the world but also to scale back our emphasis on nonessential elements of corporate worship. We want to focus on ways we can cultivate the best people: a people who love to pray together, fast together, confess sin together, sing together, and study together; a people who depend more on the Word that is spoken than on the one who speaks it; a people who are gripped in music more by the content of the song than by the appeal of the singer; and a people who define worship less by the quality of a slick performance and more by the commitment of a humble people who gather week after week simply to behold the glory of God as they surrender their lives to him.
When the church is fundamentally a gathering of committed people, the place where the church gathers hardly matters.
Over the last few years, I have had many conversations, both inside and outside Brook Hills, about church buildings. Admittedly, I pastor a church that gathers in and enjoys the luxuries of one of these multimillion-dollar edifices. Because we have this building, I want us to steward it well, whether that means maximizing it for ministry or selling it and spending our resources differently. Everything is on the table, and the Lord will lead us in what is best. I realize that a lot of people in our church have sacrificed greatly to make our facility a reality, and I am deeply grateful for God’s grace in them. At the same time, I am not convinced that large buildings are the best or only way to use God’s resources.
You may ask (as members of our church and leaders of other churches have asked me in countless conversations), “What’s wrong with constructing church buildings? Nowhere does the New Testament say we shouldn’t construct church buildings.”
But that’s just it. There’s also nothing in the New Testament that says we should construct church buildings. So whenever we plant a church or whenever a church starts to grow, why is the first thing we think, We need to spend masses of our resources on a building? Why would we spend an inordinate amount of our resources on something that is never prescribed or even encouraged in the New Testament? Why would we not instead use those resources on that which is explicitly promoted in the New Testament, such as sharing the gospel with the lost or helping the poor in the church?3 As I write this, more than seven hundred million people around the world live in slums. Many of them are our brothers and sisters in Christ. Should we really be prioritizing bigger buildings for ourselves?
I spoke recently with the pastor of an inner-city church plant in the southern United States. His congregation numbers around one hundred people, and recently twenty of them went on a short-term mission trip to a third-world country. As they traveled, they read and discussed Radical and the truths from God’s Word that the book presents. By the time the team came back, God had transformed their hearts and minds in surprising ways.
They began reevaluating how they had been spending their lives and resources, both personally and corporately. When they looked at the church budget, they realized that their little church was spending five thousand dollars a month to lease building space downtown. So some of the members asked the pastor, “Why don’t we take this sixty thousand dollars a year and use it for something more eternally valuable?”
“Then where are we going to meet as a church?” he asked.
They pointed to the parking deck next to the space they were leasing. “We can meet over there,” they said.
“Outside?” he asked.
“It’s covered, it’s empty on Sundays, and we already know that it’s available for our use.”
The pastor gave it some thought and then said, “Let’s do it.” The church is now meeting outside every Sunday on a parking deck.
This is the beauty of New Testament Christianity, and I wonder if too many of us are missing it. We definitely do not have to construct buildings as houses of worship. In the words of Stephen before he was martyred by the Sanhedrin, “The Most High does not live in houses made by men.”4
Stephen was speaking to resistant people who were undergoing a major shift in the redemptive plan of God. They were used to seeing the presence of God symbolized in the temple, a monumental edifice. But with Jesus’ death on the cross, the way had been opened for people to dwell in the presence of God in any place.5 No central building was necessary. And as a result, they no longer needed to focus on a building as a house of worship.
Well, what would the house of worship be, then?
You guessed it: people.
Paul says to the church at Corinth, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” He later tells them that their bodies are the temple of God.6 This is the astounding reality of New Testament religion: we as Christians are the house of worship.
So let’s gather wherever we can—in homes, in offices, in workspaces, in parks, in any facilities we can find. Let’s remember that many of our brothers and sisters around the world simply meet outside. And let’s at least consider not spending such a large portion of our resources on building places when the priority of the New Testament is decidedly on building people.
The challenge, though, is that we need our places to sustain our programs. How will we have thriving children and adult programs if we don’t have a place to host them? This is when we begin to realize that redefining place in ministry leads to rethinking the importance of programs in ministry.
Imagine that your church had no building or facilities whatsoever. Could you still make disciples? Certainly the answer is yes. Churches all around the world make do. So how would your church make disciples completely separate from a church building? This is the question we started asking at Brook Hills, and it has led us to some significant changes. I’ll share just one.
For years we had hosted a Vacation Bible School for one week every summer in our building. Members of the church would spend hours decorating rooms and preparing facilities for the time when kids in our community would come to our building for ministry. But then our children’s ministry leaders asked, “If we didn’t have a building, how could we teach the gospel to kids throughout our community?”
That’s when they began equipping parents, children’s ministry leaders, and small-group leaders in our faith family to host Bible clubs for kids in their homes. We already had homes spread all around our immediate community. Why not make our homes the place of ministry instead of the church building? Why not invite people from our neighborhoods, not to go to a church building with us, but to come across the street and into our homes with us? Home is where we could show the gospel to their children while we also shared life with them.
So during the summer, members of our church started hosting neighbors in their homes for Bible clubs. Crowds of kids came—far more than we could ever have hosted in our church building at one time. And all of it took place in diverse neighborhoods far away from our building.
The outcome? Scores of non-Christian neighbors are hearing a gospel-centered witness and seeing a gospel-centered family right next door, and the gospel is multiplying throughout our community.
One day I visited a home during a Bible club event. As kids played in the yard and parents visited, the host mom and dad hit me with a proposal. “We were thinking that we could invite these kids and their families to our home throughout the year. We’d be doing ministry here instead of trying to do it all at the church building on a Wednesday night. Would that be okay with you?”
Yes! That would be okay with me! I am okay when people discover that God has built into our everyday lives opportunities and platforms to spread the gospel. I am okay when people realize that we are not dependent on well-crafted programs at designated places to accomplish the mission God has created us for as his people.
This is just one small illustration in the area of children’s ministry. But imagine what could happen if this picture were multiplied across the church: men and women seeing that the most effective avenues for ministry are found not in programs created for them but amid the people who surround them where they live. God has given every follower of Christ natural avenues to spread the gospel and declare his glory. Which means that the last thing leaders should do is pull people away from those avenues in order to participate in our activities.
At one point at Brook Hills, we were trying to organize and centralize all the types of ministry in which people were involved. For example, we created community ministry programs so people could participate in outreach efforts in our city. We encouraged every small group to get involved in one of the programs we had organized. The only problem was that the more Christ compelled the members of our faith family to see the opportunities he had built into their lives for the spread of the gospel, the less time they had to participate in our programs. I have to admit: when people started giving themselves to ministries we had not organized, we didn’t know what to do about it.
That’s when we woke up and said to ourselves, “Why are we trying to organize how and where and when our people minister? God has already given them opportunities for ministry where they live and work and play.” So we decided to stop planning, creating, and managing outreach programs and to start unleashing people to maximize the ministry opportunities God had already planned and created for them.
From that point the impact of our church in the community changed radically. Now our people are busy leading Bible studies in their workplaces and neighborhoods, helping addicts in rehabilitation centers, supplying food in homeless shelters, loving orphans in learning centers, caring for widows in retirement homes, providing hospice care for the elderly, training men and women in job skills, tutoring men and women in reading, helping patients in AIDS clinics, teaching English to internationals, and serving in a variety of other ways. And now our leadership team understands that it’s good when people are so involved in ministry where they live that they don’t have time to participate in the programs we create.
If you are a leader in the church, think about the individuals in your care. See their faces, hear their names, and picture their lives. Consider how God has written a different story in each of their lives, filled with varied circumstances and challenges, trials and temptations, experiences and encounters. He has sovereignly led them to the life stage and situation where they now find themselves, surrounded by people you will never meet and opportunities you will never have. And you have been called by God to serve them in the accomplishment of God’s purpose for their lives. If you’re like me, the last thing you want to do is sideline them to sit during a performance while you do the work or to participate in a program you have created. Instead, you want to equip them, train them, support them, and set them free to use everything God has given them to make his glory known in ways you could never design or imagine.
And if you are a member of the church, start dreaming and strategizing. Consider where God has placed you, who God has put around you, and how God desires to use you for his glory where you live and work. If you are single, how can you make the most of your singleness for ministry?7 If you are married, how can you serve together with your spouse in your community? If you have kids, how can you make your home a ministry to children in your neighborhood? If you work outside the home, how can you share Christ in your workplace? Be careful not to let programs in the church keep you from engaging people in the world with the gospel. Make the most of the opportunities for ministry that God has built into your life.
I think of Darren and Julia, a married couple in our church. Darren works in automobile service, and he intentionally uses his work as an avenue for sharing the gospel. He often tells me stories about guys he works with who have come to Christ and whom he is now personally teaching to follow Christ. Meanwhile, he and Julia serve together in a residential facility that provides shelter and rehabilitation for women. Christ is transforming numerous people’s lives in our city through this one couple.
Imagine the spread of the gospel for the glory of God if every follower of Christ were involved in ministry like this. Who can fathom the potential of the church when we stop programming ministry for people and start propelling people into ministry?
That question leads to a right understanding of leaders in the church.
Unfortunately, we have a tendency to overlook God’s plan for people when we organize churches around professionals. We single out people who seem especially gifted, and we craft the community of faith around them. Everything we do is dependent on their speaking ability, organizational aptitude, and creative skill. But the ministry of making disciples was not intended for professionals alone; it was intended for the whole people of God.
All men and women who have placed their faith in Christ have the Spirit in them so they might be witnesses for Christ to the ends of the earth. When you read Acts 2, you realize that the giving of the Spirit was never to be a special anointing on a select few. This is about a supernatural anointing on every single one of God’s people.8
Think about the time Jesus was talking with his disciples about the coming of the Holy Spirit. “I tell you the truth,” he said, “anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”9
What did Jesus mean? Was he saying that the anointing of the Holy Spirit on us would be stronger than it was on him? Yes. But the key is why it would be stronger.
The Spirit’s anointing on us is not stronger in quality than it was on Jesus. After all, he was sinless. And as a result, his relationship with the Spirit of God was totally unhindered. So how will the Spirit’s anointing on our lives enable us to do greater things than Jesus could do?
We will do greater things, not because of the quality of the Spirit in select ones among us, but because of the quantity of the Spirit spread throughout all of us. The Spirit of God does not rest on just one individual, as we observe in Jesus. No, the Spirit of God rests on every disciple of Jesus, and because of the filling of the Spirit all across the community of faith, we can see greater things than anyone ever saw in the ministry of Jesus.
At this moment, while you read this sentence, men and women around the world are being saved from their sins through the proclamation of the gospel. At this moment, people are being delivered from addictions and healed of diseases. At this moment, brothers and sisters are advancing the gospel in power amid unreached people groups. All of this is happening right now because the Spirit of God has been poured out on all his people all over the world.
Let us not, then, be so foolish as to confine the work of the Spirit to one professional, speaking in one place, at one time of the week. Let us not be so unwise as to bank the spread of the gospel on a certain person at a certain place when all week long the Spirit of God is living in every single man and woman of God, empowering each of us to advance the kingdom of God for his glory.
I was having a conversation the other day with a seminary buddy who jokingly accused me of campaigning to end paid leadership in the church, his salary (and mine) included. You might be wondering the same thing. Is there a place for paid leaders—that is, professionals—in the church?
Absolutely. And I don’t think I’m saying this out of self-interest. When we look in the New Testament, we clearly see a warrant, even a command, to provide financially for certain teachers and leaders in the church. Paul says it is good for leaders who sow spiritual blessings among God’s people to reap material blessings from God’s people. Of course, leaders in the church must be careful to honor God by their use of money.10
What, then, is the responsibility of such leaders in the church? Paul answers this question in Ephesians 4. God has given leaders to the church to equip God’s people for ministry and “prepare God’s people for works of service.”11 The church has been entrusted by God with stewards of God’s Word to equip God’s people to be servants with God’s Word. This goes to the essence of being radical together, and it changes everything about how we view leaders in the church.
There is clearly no way that I as a pastor can minister to all the needs in our church, much less in our city. Realizing this, some people might say, “Well, that’s what the rest of the church staff is for.” But that can’t be true either. We will never have enough staff members to meet all the needs in our church or our city. If we want to multiply the gospel from our faith family to all the families of the earth, it will require not just a pastor or church staff but the entire body of Christ built up in love “as each part does its work.”12
What this means, then, is that church leaders are intended by God not to plan events but to equip people. Leaders do not exist to provide services; they exist to serve people. Realizing this, we who are leaders in our faith family have made a concentrated effort to take resources (most notably our time) away from organizing ministry for people and to invest them more in mobilizing people for ministry.
As I write this, an overseas church leader I’ll call Dominic comes to mind. I met him once while visiting a communist nation.
Dominic is now in his sixties, and he has been the pastor of a relatively small house church for most of his life. Dominic’s passion is telling people about Christ. He was once brought before the communist council in his community to be questioned about his evangelistic work. He walked into the interrogation room with a large rock in his hands and set it down on the table in front of the men who were about to question him.
Surprised, one of the men asked Dominic, “Why did you bring this rock with you?”
Dominic replied, “Before we begin my questioning today, I want you to know something. If you try to stop me from telling people about the greatness of Jesus Christ, then this rock is going to start speaking for me.” Dominic was alluding to Luke 19:40, where Jesus says that if the disciples didn’t proclaim his glory, the stones would cry out instead. The communist leaders, of course, had no idea what Dominic was talking about. They conferred and decided he was out of his mind, so they released him without further questioning!
Dominic’s passion to tell people about Christ translates into a commitment to train people in the church. When he leads someone to Christ, Dominic takes personal responsibility for helping that person grow in Christ. His goal is for that person to become a leader in the church and then eventually to leave and plant another church somewhere else. (Almost all church planters in that part of the world are bivocational.) Dominic’s church has now planted more than sixty other churches in his country, with nearly every one of the pastors trained by Dominic. His life and leadership are a picture of what it means, not to organize ministry for people, but to mobilize people for ministry.
Isn’t this the model of Jesus? During his ministry on earth, he spent more time with twelve men than with everyone else put together. In John 17, where he recounts his ministry before going to the cross, he doesn’t mention the multitudes he preached to or the miracles he performed. As spectacular as those events were, they were not his primary focus. Instead, forty times Jesus speaks to and about the men in whom he had invested his life. They were his focus.
When he came to his ascension, Jesus had no buildings or programs to point to and no crowds to boast of. Indeed, most of the crowds had walked away. Just 120 unschooled, ordinary people were gathered—a small group with a small band of leaders.
And he had given them one command as their commission: make disciples. Do with others what I have done with you, Jesus had said. Don’t sit in a classroom; share your lives. Don’t build extravagant places; build extraordinary people. Make disciples who will make disciples who will make disciples, and together multiply this gospel to all peoples. This is the simple command that was to drive the church. And this is the simple command that is to drive each of our lives.
I don’t want this command to be treated as optional in my life or in anyone else’s life in the church I pastor. Personally, I have an intentional disciple-making plan that involves sharing life with and multiplying the gospel through my family, a small group of men within our church, and church planters we are sending out from our church. I don’t want to imply that this plan is always smooth in practice or easy to implement. Like you, I am constantly beset by the busyness of life and the responsibilities of leadership, and if I am not careful, disciple making fades into the background. As a result, I want to act intentionally, for if I forsake the priority of people, then I will miss the purpose of God.
Every one of our pastors and church staff has designed similar disciple-making plans. In addition, we help all new members in our church to outline their plans for how they will be involved in making disciples of all nations.13 The key for all of us is an intense desire and intentional effort to make every one of our lives count for the multiplication of the gospel in the world.
Regardless of your place in the church, remember that you are not intended to be sidelined in the kingdom of God. You may at times feel like the wrong person, thinking you are not gifted enough, smart enough, talented enough, or qualified enough to engage in effective ministry. This is simply not true. You have the Word of God before you, the Spirit of God in you, and the command of God to you: make disciples of all nations. So whether you are a businessman or a businesswoman, a lawyer or a doctor, a consultant or a construction worker, a teacher or a student, an on-the-go professional or an on-the-go stay-at-home mom, I implore you to ask God to make your life count where you live for the spread of the gospel and the declaration of his glory to the ends of the earth.
A house church leader in Asia once wrote how persecution in his country had stripped his church of its resources. Yet, in his mind, this had been a good thing. “We soon found that rather than being weakened by the removal of all external props, we were actually much stronger because our faith in God was purer,” he wrote. “We didn’t have any opportunity to love the ‘things’ of God, so we just learned to love God! We had no plans or programs to keep running, so we just sought the face of Jesus! … We don’t believe the world needs another single church building. They need Jesus, and they need to worship and grow in God’s grace with other believers … according to the pattern of the first church in the New Testament.” Then this house church leader concluded, “When we finally reach the end of all our useless programs and give up in desperation, Jesus will always be there to show us a better way—his way.”14
This is the beauty of the plan of God, particularly when we contrast it with the plans we create that are dependent on performances, places, programs, and professionals. If the spread of the gospel is dependent on these things, we will never reach the ends of the earth. We will never have enough resources, staff, buildings, events, or activities to reach all the people in our community, much less all the peoples in the world.
But we will always have enough people. Even if they seem like the wrong people.
If eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee were enough to launch the gospel to the ends of the earth, then a church with a handful of members can spread the gospel in and beyond a community, regardless of the amount of material resources it has. The plan of God is certainly not confined to large churches or gifted leaders. The plan of God is for every person among the people of God to count for the advancement of the kingdom of God.
What if each of us were actually making disciples who were making disciples who were making disciples? Is it too idealistic to dream that the church of God, unleashed for the purpose of God, might actually reach the ends of the earth with the gospel? Is that realistic? You bet it is. In fact, it’s guaranteed. Jesus has promised that every nation, tribe, tongue, and people are going to hear the gospel, and it is going to happen through all of us.15