part0011

Most of our early members were “off-the-street” converts, brand new to the church scene. However, several people had a history in other churches. They brought their spiritual culture and traditions along with them. As a result, we encountered substantial disunity in our very small church. Cliques and spiritual heritage groups emerged. Each had its own set of “power plays” designed to corral us into someone else’s ministry style.

These were nice people. They operated with good intent. Most of these agenda-bearers had a healthy spiritual background that they wanted to duplicate at Hope. However, they were wrong to force us into someone else’s mold.

We had a group from Calvary Chapel. Another cluster came to us from The Church on the Way. I was very open to the ways their godly pastors, Chuck Smith and Jack Hayford, functioned. They were my mentors. But I couldn’t substitute either man for the Holy Spirit.

The scene rounded out with a solid group of Christian bikers. They grew up under the influence of an organization called the Navigators. As a child I was deeply influenced by the Navigators and had good feelings toward their approach to ministry, but we weren’t Navigators, we were the seeds of something new and deeply colored by the Jesus Movement. Finally, there were the rest of the people, the ones who had only known me as their pastor. They had learned to trust the Lord and walk after the Spirit without a lot of formal teaching, but they weren’t yet strong in their faith.

These people pulled me in three directions beside the ministry style God was building into my own life.

The solution to our problem came from the pages of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian churches. In Corinth, one group said, “We are of Paul.” Another declared, “We are of Apollos.” Still another claimed Cephas. The rest claimed they were of Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:10-29). There was division in that church and Paul wasn’t having it. He would have disapproved of us as well.

It is of utmost importance that the whole church centers on Jesus rather than any man or ministry. The Christian church was not intended as a political platform or a place to wrestle for control, spiritual, political or otherwise. God’s power displays itself best in our weakness. We would never solve our differences by argument or citing the methods of some favored leader. It was urgent that we stop struggling and seek direction from the Holy Spirit. Hope Chapel had a word from the Lord. He said he was planning something new, that we didn’t yet see. We would never unearth his new plans in our state of disunity. If I gave in to any group and its identity, I would violate my mandate as pastor.

We studied Corinthians and caught the importance of unity. We realized that it was okay for each group to hold to the style that made them comfortable and to love their previous pastor. The important lesson was to accept each other . Rather than force any approach, we held out for the love of the brethren. Everyone broke down and offered the love that marks true Christians.

Their love immediately freed me to embrace the various leaders of the existent groups. I would allow them to pastor the people already in their charge. Virgil Hemrick oversaw the biker types. Richard Agozino was the leader of the Calvary folks, and so on. They were partnering as pastors of the church.

My role was to pastor these leaders. I began to relate to them as fellow-pastors and did whatever I could to further equip them. In a single day, I could easily telephone everybody, so communication was simple. We embraced our differences and celebrated the variety among ourselves. At the same time, we demanded love and respect for varying opinions. God taught us a lesson about discipleship and multiplication of leaders through that process. That lesson would serve us well in the future.

I learned to trust God enough to trust the leaders he assembled around me. Surrendering control of the church to the Lord of the church was crucial to our success. We could work together because we were all willing to submit to the new direction God had for this church. We were learning to walk by faith.

Hope Chapel became an invading army. All platoons united under a common purpose and identity, yet each was unique in approach. In a matter of weeks, though our Sunday attendance was still far smaller, we were touching more than 200 people on a weekly average. Our Bible studies spread all over the South Bay.

Some groups centered on prayer, others on inductive Bible study, while others majored in gifts of the Spirit. We came together on Sundays to celebrate mutual victories. In addition to the efforts of our members, I taught eight Bible studies each week. Our spiritual footprint was far larger than any crowd we would assemble on weekends. Those groups met in homes and hospital cafeterias, as well as on the lawn at UCLA campus. Once, I was even harassed while crossing a union picket line to lead a Bible study in a Vietnam-era missile factory.

God thoroughly blessed these little bands of Christians at a time when most churches viewed off-campus Bible studies as “a tool of the devil.” Our many Bible studies accomplished three things: (A) They caused spiritual growth in individuals. (B) They provided logistics to grow the number of people we could shepherd. (C) Finally, they gave the leaders a forum to develop pastoral abilities. Young leaders could test their skills and gifts without great risk. Several of those early leaders now pastor thriving churches. They learned the ministry by doing the ministry, much like the disciples of Jesus .

We never forgot those early prophecies the Lord sent to us. He had promised he was going to do something that we couldn’t anticipate.

We would sometimes question what in the world could the Lord do that we hadn’t already seen. After all, Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun. Solomon was right. God wasn’t attempting anything new at all. His plan was simply so old that everyone had forgotten it.

God called our church to “plant” new churches. This was the new thing on our horizon. It had been a long time since any congregation in our circles had sent pastors out to start new churches. It was even longer since they had worked with pastors trained in a local church by a disciplemaker. Our denomination had forgotten the biblical pattern for at least two generations. Because church culture and tradition had excluded aggressive disciplemaking and local churches planting churches we saw this as something entirely new. It is the story of the apostles. There is a reason why 21 of 28 chapters focus directly on the Barnabas and Paul--they made disciples and planted churches. But tradition is strong—my spiritual heritage straightjacketed me to the point that, though I had soaked in the book of Acts during college, I never applied the lessons to my own life. I suspect that is the case with many church leaders today.

The New Testament is an adventure story: A great King is rejected and murdered by his people. Three days after the murder, he secretively appears to his closest friends and colleagues. Forty days later, he sends them as envoys to the whole world. They are to spread news of his resurrection and message of eternal life. Christ-followers fanned out across the known world in one generation. Their accomplishment is the greatest success story of all time.

Their strategy bears analysis. A dozen men with a world to conquer. All but one was executed for their effort. The lone exception was imprisoned for life; yet, they succeeded.

The original 12 were slow to act but their followers took up the torch. In fact, the church moved across ethnic and national boundaries only after it was forced to change its tactics due to the persecution led by Saul of Tarsus. Even then, the original apostles remained in Jerusalem. The irony of this is that “all except the apostles fled…” The apostles were courageously disobedient to the Great Commission. It was only after these fleeing and un-named, ordinary people circled the Mediterranean that a church officially sent missionaries (Acts 13: 1-3). All in all, those early believers were so successful that an enemy described them as those men who had turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

How did they achieve so much? The key was trust, both in God and men.

Wherever they went, they preached to whoever would listen. Jesus had taught them to brush off those who rejected their message (Matthew 10:12-14). Among those who believed, they quickly found naturally gifted leaders, appointing them to watch over the rest (Acts 14:23). Even then, persecution seems to have generated a tipping point. It was after Saul/Paul was stoned and left for dead that he and Barnabas snuck back into the towns where they previously made disciples. When they did, they appointed elders from among those disciples. Appointing elders means that they planted churches. I love the thought that they “turned them over to the Holy Spirit in whom they had put their trust.” Oh, that we trusted the conjunction of disciple-making and the oversight of the Holy Spirit as much as they did.

The apostles mostly spent little time in a single location. Men without formal education caught enough of Jesus to shepherd a church in a few weeks or months. This seems a rash approach in a world filled with seminaries, libraries and denominational structures. But it worked!

Today, churches possess multimillion-dollar investments. Denominations control billions in real estate. The well-defined Christian establishment enjoys incredible training tools and business strategies. However, we still long for the success of those early believers. We have put too much trust in money and institutions and not enough in the Holy Spirit.

I grew up familiar with this simple approach to mission. It lay at the center of my own denominational heritage, but not its practice.

I grew up hearing the stories of the good old days in my larger church family. In the 1920s and ’30s a church called Angelus Temple flourished in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. This single congregation sent hundreds of men and women all over the world. Their task: Preach the gospel and plant churches. Their in-house Bible institute offered only a three-month study program. Later it became a formal Bible college. But, even then, the school was heavy on ministry skills with skimpy academic emphasis. The results were churches sprouting around the world through these lightly trained graduates .

Much of what we glean from institutions goes missing by the time we get to the field. Worldwide we’re discovering that structured education for planting should be both brief and closely associated with the point of need—you tie the teaching to the sending.

As time progressed, institutionalism crept into the movement. Leaders became maintainers, or perhaps, maintainers assumed leadership roles. The movement fell into an institutional holding pattern. The denomination expected to plant new churches through its district offices. Meanwhile, the local church (which should have been discipling and sending church-multipliers) complained that not enough was happening.

The group had misplaced the simple strategy of the New Testament. Do you remember how the Holy Spirit interrupted a local church prayer meeting to say, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them?” (Acts 13:1-3). By the late 1940s, church denominations, including ours, had usurped the Spirit’s role as the calling agent. Schools co-opted the local church as a training vehicle. Church-multiplication ground to a halt. This was the world we encountered when we planted our first daughter church. Sadly, not much has changed since then but that’s fodder for another book. I wrote an antidote in Your Church Can Multiply.

We discovered the Lord’s “new (old) work” almost by accident.

He was right when he indicated, “Don’t pray for it because you can’t even anticipate it.” Nothing in my background prepared me to think of ordinary people in our congregation as the means to launching new churches. We understood leadership development through discipleship but couldn’t conceive of pastors trained in the local church. In fact, when we birthed the first daughter church, we got into trouble. Other pastors complained that we were somehow in rebellion to our denomination. They stirred up conflict even though we had the support of our national leaders.

Richard Agozino would change our understanding of New Testament tactics. That would later lead to a broad strategy. Rich is one of the most courageous men I’ve ever known. As a young man he rode freight trains across the Midwest. He worked for a while as a merchant seaman. He even dabbled in drugs. Later, on a tip, he invested his savings in gold stocks. That netted him enough money to buy a house.

He personified the term “radical” by living his convictions to their fullest. This guy attacked life with all he had. Then he met Jesus. He quickly shifted into high gear as a Christian. The man advertised his faith with a huge sign covering the back window of his Volkswagen van. It read, “I’m a fool for Christ, whose fool are you?” He had no problem with the biblical admonition to “love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength” (Mark 12:30). Rich was so turned on to the Lord that he was in church or teaching Bible studies nearly every night of the week.

Richard stormed into my life and our congregation. His prime Bible study group was looking for a church home. They had outgrown several houses and moved into a nearby church building. However, the other church wasn’t real interested in having them around. Some of the group scouted our church and felt that it would be a safe place them to attend on weekends .

Richard and I met one Wednesday afternoon so he could interview me. He put me on the hot seat with about a hundred questions regarding my past, and what we believed. When I passed muster, he decided to lodge his group of followers in our congregation.

We soon became close friends. Rich was talking of moving to New Zealand as a missionary. He taught Bible studies four nights a week, in addition to a full-time job as a finish carpenter, along his roles as husband and parent. The straw that broke the carpenter’s back was a fifth weekly Bible study.

Several young families struggled to attend our Sunday evening church service. It was difficult to get small children to bed after a long drive home from church. Their idea was for us to bring church to them. Rich Agozino soon led Sunday evening services in a home in Torrance while the rest of us met in Manhattan Beach. The preparation and teaching load eventually overwhelmed him. However, sometimes God must put a person in a tight spot to get their attention.

Preparation for New Zealand was still underway when the two of us heard a man named Don MacGregor talk about church multiplication. Don had served as one of two American missionaries to the Philippines from our denomination. Under his leadership, a movement driven by freelance pastors leading house churches netted more than 55,000 converts a year. These people lived the Book of Acts (you can read about this if you Google “New Testament Fire in the Philippines” by Jim Montgomery for a free pdf of the book) .

We met Don on a Sunday morning and it took about 15 minutes for Agozino’s people to decide his immediate future. New Zealand was out! South Torrance was in! That was in early October 1973. “Branch of Hope,” led by Pastor Richard Agozino, held its first morning service on the first Sunday of December.

Twenty-five members of our 125-person church left to begin the new congregation. We learned something about letting go of the ring that day. We “let go” of 25 brothers and sisters. God sent 50 to replace them on the very day they left. The new church hosted more than 50 people the same day. Do the math 125 minus 25 equaled 175 people that day. We got the message—God is pleased with church planting.

Rich eventually quit his job while our congregation gave what they could to help the new church financially. But funds were tight, and he eventually supplemented his income with some of the equity in his house. The church met in a home for several months, then moved to a park. A few weeks under a picnic shelter brought considerable growth. Forced out of the park, they rented a defunct nightclub. When the zoning laws put them out of the club, they returned to the park. This time, they had permission to meet in the recreation center.

Growth added pressure for more space. Rich would often lead me on outings, looking for possible meeting places. We visited bank buildings, supermarkets, schools and whatever. They settled into a Seventh Day Adventist Church building for three years. Later they rented school buildings and eventually leased a large church building from another denomination .

That first church plant grew more than 400 people. They built and operated a boy’s ranch and planted four more congregations. God birthed his “new thing” through Richard Agozino. He taught us to plant churches and we’ve done it repeatedly ever since. In fact, it was the Branch of Hope that first moved beyond simply reproducing the church to multiplying it. By this, I mean they planted churches that planted churches. As they did, we had moved beyond planting to multiplication. A small garden was on its way to becoming a farm.

Oddly, I never saw the significance of multi-generational multiplication at the time. Simple logic tells us that you wouldn’t be reading this book if someone hadn’t multiplied churches more than one level away from the folks in first-century Jerusalem, but I never got it at the time. I’d eventually learn to intentionally plant multiplying churches in Hawaii, but at that time our own church thrilled at simply launching “first-generation” congregations. We were the heroes in our own story.

One item of importance, as I update this book, is the fact that the Branch of Hope is going strong nearly five decades later. What God builds lasts! Richard Agozino helped fulfill the prophecy of a new thing by planting that first church. His actions birthed a movement.