Aircraft Carriers, Cruise Liners, and Battleships
Many people are bored in church. They are afflicted with a nagging sense that they ought to be doing something — that there is some meaningful mission they are supposed to be a part of. But they can’t quite get their mind around what that is, and so, in the meantime, they sit in church, try to pay attention, give their tithes, behave as best they can, and wonder if when they get to heaven they are going to be rebuked for failing to do whatever it was God wanted them to do.
They remind me of a California man named Larry Walters, whose story I heard many years ago.1 Larry went out to the Army-Navy surplus store, bought seventy-five used weather balloons, inflated them, and attached them to a lawn chair he had secured to the back of his pickup truck. With several friends watching, he climbed into the chair, settled in, and had a friend untie the rope.
“He was hoping,” a friend later said, “to observe the neighborhood from a slightly different angle, and gain a new perspective on his life.” He took nothing with him but a peanut butter sandwich, a six-pack of beer, and a fully loaded BB gun.
Two and a half hours later, the Los Angeles International Airport reported an “Unidentified Flying Object” in the skies above LAX at nearly 16,000 feet. “Lawnchair Larry,” the reclining cosmonaut, was now three miles into the sky and a hundred miles from his original launch site. The pilot of the 737 who first spotted Larry said, “Well . . . I see what looks like a perfectly still man sitting in a . . . is it a lawn chair? And I think he is holding a rifle.”
In a rescue stunt that would have made comedian Chuck Norris proud, SWAT teams lassoed Larry, who had passed out in the chair, and ferried him safely to the ground. (In case you are curious, his intention had been to lazily saunter up to the right altitude, then use his BB gun to pop the balloons to keep him there. However, when he untied himself from the pickup, friends said he shot up into the air as if he had been fired from a cannon. He panicked and did the only thing he knew how to do in a stressful situation: break open the six-pack. About 2,000 feet in the air, he passed out.)
On the ground, after being revived back to consciousness, Larry was promptly issued a $4,000 ticket by local police for “the obstruction of airport traffic.” (He later got it reduced to $1,500.) A local journalist then asked him three questions:
Larry, were you scared? Larry said, “Yes.” (Actually, he said more than that, but as this is a Christian book, we’ll leave it at “yes.”)
Larry, would you do it again? Larry said, “No.” At least he’s a quick learner.
Larry, why did you do it? Larry said, “I just got tired of always sitting around.”
I find that a lot of Christians in churches feel the same way as Larry. They’re tired of just sitting around. They feel like they are supposed to be doing something in the mission of God but don’t quite know what it is.
They go to churches where they hear that Jesus is building his church and that the gates of hell will not prevail against them. But they don’t see themselves, or their church, prevailing against the gates of hell. They seem to be just getting by. Many can’t remember when a single adult convert — one truly brought out of darkness into light — came to Jesus in their church. And they certainly can’t remember one whose story they were personally a part of.
Study after study shows that most Christians have never even shared their faith — most indicating that somewhere 90 percent of evangelicals have never shared their faith with anyone outside of their family. (Kind of makes you wonder how we get away with using the name “evangelical”!)
Most churches have a difficult time maintaining their ground, much less storming anything that belongs to Satan. Gates, after all, are defensive ramparts, not offensive weapons. “Prevailing against the gates of hell” does not mean keeping Satan out of our backyards, but plundering his kingdom. According to a recent Lifeway Research study, in the next seven years 55,000 churches in the United States will close their doors, and the number of those who attend a church on the weekend in the United States will drop from 17 percent to 14 percent. Only 20 percent of churches in the US are growing, and only 1 percent are growing by reaching lost people.2 So 95 percent of the church growth we celebrate merely shuffles existing Christians around.
Don’t you think these two problems — believers who don’t know how effectively to disciple others, and a gradually shrinking church in the West — have to be related in some way? Yet very few pastors and church leaders see raising up disciple-making leaders as their primary objective. We measure success by size. In so doing, however, we neglect the one thing that can propel the church forward into the next generation . . . and to the ends of the earth: Spirit-filled, disciple-making disciples.
Don’t Miss the Boat
I believe we need a fundamental shift in how we think about the mission of the church. Let me illustrate, using three types of ships.
Some Christians see church as a cruise liner, offering Christian luxuries for the whole family, such as sports, entertainment, childcare services, and business networking. They show up at church asking only, “Can this church improve my religious quality of life? Does it have good family ministry facilities? Does the pastor preach funny, time-conscious messages that meet my felt needs? Do I like the music?”
If their church ever ceases to cater to their preferences . . . well, there are plenty of other cruise ships in the harbor. In fact, often they get involved with three or four of them at once. After all, the music is great on Cruise Liner A, and the kids enjoy the youth program at Cruise Liner B, and we do most of our fellowship and Bible study with friends at Cruise Liner C, and we occasionally listen to the podcast of the angry young pastor down the road who tells the funny stories.
Other Christians believe their church is more like a battleship. The church is made for mission, and its success should be seen in how loudly and dramatically it fights the mission. This is certainly better than the “cruise liner”; however, it implies that it is the church institution that does most of the fighting. The role of church members is to pay the pastors to find the targets and fire the guns each week as they gather to watch. They see the programs, services, and ministries of the church as the primary instruments of mission.
I would like to suggest a third metaphor for the church: aircraft carrier. Like battleships, aircraft carriers engage in battle, but not in the same way. Aircraft carriers equip planes to carry the battle elsewhere. My grandfather served on the USS Yorktown during World War II, and he explained to me that the last place an aircraft carrier ever wanted to find itself engaged in battle was on its own deck. In fact, nowhere near it. We used to watch old World War II movies together — the kind where they intersperse actual battle video clips — and my grandpa once paused a John Wayne movie to show me where he was standing on the deck when a plane crashed on it and broke in half. When you are on an aircraft carrier, he said, the goal is to keep the battle as far away from you as possible. You load up the planes to carry the battle to the enemy.
Churches that want to “prevail against the gates of hell” must learn to see themselves like aircraft carriers, not like battleships and certainly not like cruise liners. Members need to learn to share the gospel, without the help of the pastor, in the community, and start ministries and Bible studies — even churches — in places without them. Churches must become discipleship factories, “sending” agencies that equip their members to take the battle to the enemy.
We Need a New Metric for Success
We need a new metric for success beyond size. To evaluate something’s success, we first need to understand its function.
If you light a stick of dynamite and launch it 500 feet in the air and it explodes, was it successful? Well, in one sense, yes. The dynamite did exactly what it was designed to do. And it got a lot of people’s attention. People for five miles around looked up into the sky to see what happened. Three minutes after it detonates, however, there is hardly any evidence that the explosion ever even occurred, other than a whiff of gunpowder and a few confused bystanders still staring blankly into the sky.
Take that same piece of dynamite, however, burrow it into the side of a rock face and light it, and you will have a different kind of “success.” The bang will not be nearly as loud, but now you will have an opening where previously you had only a mountain.
Churches that want to penetrate their world with the gospel think less about the Sunday morning bang and more about equipping their members to blast a hole in the mountain of lostness.
Why the Future Belongs to Churches That Send
I want to suggest four reasons why the future of Christianity belongs to churches that send, and why those of us who want to see the world reached will be more committed to raising up and sending out than we are to gathering and counting. Those four reasons are:
1. Increasingly, in a “post-Christian” society, unbelievers will simply not make their way into our churches, no matter how “attractive” we make them.
2. Multiplication beats out addition, every time.
3. The presence of God accompanies those who send.
4. Jesus’ promises of “greatness” in the church are always related to sending.
Let’s consider these factors one by one.
1. Increasingly, in a “post-Christian” society, unbelievers will simply not make their way into our churches, no matter how “attractive” we make them.
For years, the Western church has enjoyed a common Christian language with the culture through which we could communicate the gospel. Not everyone went to church, of course, but the bedrock of the culture was Christian. Our primary focus has been calling “lapsed” or delinquent Christians back to the God of their fathers.
But our world in the West is changing. The number of people checking “none” for religious affiliation on censuses increases at an astounding rate each year.3 “Nones,” as they are called, do not casually make their way into churches — for any reason. We have to think of them as we would people of a completely different religion.
I lived in a Muslim country for several years, and I was friends with dozens of people who went to the mosque weekly. At no point did I consider going with them. I wouldn’t have gone for a special holiday. I wouldn’t have gone if I were facing hard times. I wouldn’t have gone if the imam were doing a really helpful series on relationships or if he told really funny stories that helped me see how Allah was relevant to my life. I wouldn’t have gone had they added percussion and a kickin’ electric guitar to the prayer chants. Islam was a completely foreign world, and one in which I knew I clearly didn’t belong. So I didn’t go.
I take that back. I did visit the mosque one time, because a Muslim friend invited me, and I wanted to honor him by learning more about his life and faith. It was an unmitigated disaster. First, we had to sit in weird, uncomfortable positions for extended periods of time. And everyone but me seemed to know what to say at various points of the service. They would all suddenly stand up, in unison, leaving me clamoring to get to my feet, which was hard when you couldn’t feel your legs anymore. They all dressed in the same outfit, and my Nike shirt and Levi jeans made me feel pretty out of place. At one point they sang out an “Amen.” At that point I thought I knew the drill, hearkening back to my days in a country Baptist church. So I hit the harmony note. No one else deviated from the primary note. Everyone turned to stare at me. I felt like a side of bacon at a bar mitzvah.
It was an awful experience, and although my friend invited me back several times, I always managed to find a reason to not be able to go. The mosque was a portal to a completely different world, and I didn’t have an Islamic faith that would compel me to put up with the discomfort required to learn the unfamiliar ways of that world.
This is a bit what it is like for people in the post-Christian West as they look into the Christian church. A British friend of mine, Steve Timmis cites a recent study in Great Britain in which 70 percent of Brits declare that they have no intention of ever attending a church service for any reason. Not at Easter. Not for marriages. Not for funerals or Christmas Eve services. For more than two-thirds of the people in Great Britain, nothing will carry them naturally into a church. In light of this, Steve comments:
That means new styles of worship will not reach them. Fresh expressions of church will not reach them. Alpha and Christianity Explored courses will not reach them. Great first impressions will not reach them. Churches meeting in pubs will not reach them. . . . The vast majority of un-churched and de-churched people would not turn to the church, even if faced with difficult personal circumstances or in the event of national tragedies. It is not a question of “improving the product” of church meetings and evangelistic events. It means reaching people apart from meetings and events.4
Great Britain is a few years ahead of the United States in secularization, but judging by the rapidly increasing percentage of those reporting “none” for religious affiliation, I believe we will be there before too long.
This means that if we don’t equip our people to carry the gospel outside of our meetings, our events, our gatherings and programs, we are going to lose all audience with them. A few flashier and flashier megachurches will likely keep fighting for larger pieces of a shrinking pie.
There is another alternative: we can grow the pie. But that means teaching our people to engage people outside the church.
2. Multiplication beats out addition, every time.
The second reason that churches that care about the Great Commission will devote themselves to sending is a mathematical one.
Perhaps you can remember this math conundrum from middle school:
If you have a choice between receiving $10,000 a day for 30 days, or getting $0.01 doubled each day, which would you choose?
Almost every middle school student chooses “$10,000 a day” — because . . . think about what you could buy by the end of the week! Sure, $70,000 is enough to buy ten PS4s gaming stations with accompanying widescreen TVs . . . and enough left over for a used BMW! And in thirty days, you’d have $300,000!
But your math teacher probably pointed out to you that choosing $10,000 a day instead of $0.01 doubled daily would leave about 10 million dollars on the table. Doubling your penny daily, however, would net you $10,737,418.23 in thirty days!5 In four months you’d have $13,292,279,957,849,158,729,038,070,602,803,364, compared to only $1.2 million if you had taken on the $10,000 a day.
Many churches still pursue success via the “$10,000 a day” model. Tell aspiring megachurch pastor Bob that you have a program by which he can add 1,000 people a month to his church for ten years straight, and he will likely faint with joy. Before the first year is done, he will be invited to speak at conferences all over the nation, and Christian magazines will have his face splashed across their front covers. Leaders would line up around the block to buy his books and have him sign their Bibles.
Yet if Pastor Bob trains up just one person each year to lead another to Christ, who in turn trains another person who leads another person, and they each do that for thirty years, by year 30 they will have won nearly a billion more people than he would have by adding 1,000 people every month.
But here’s the rub: Netting $10,000 a day feels much more gratifying — at least at first — than getting $0.01 doubled during that first week. If you choose the doubled $0.01 route, after a week you would only have about $2, whereas your friend who chose $10,000 would be bouncing about town with $70,000 in his pocket. He’d be placing a down payment on a new beach house, and you’d still be living in your parents’ basement.
In the same way, focusing on attendance growth — adding 1,000 people a year — feels much more gratifying to church leaders. The successes are immediate. You can brag about them. But this is not the road to long-term, kingdom growth.
Our church hit an important milestone this year. We grew by almost 1,000 people, which qualified us for Outreach Magazine’s one hundred fast-growing churches for the fifth year in a row. But that’s not the milestone I’m talking about. This year the attendance at the churches we have planted grew by more than 1,100 people. In other words, our plants added more to the kingdom than our church did. Just five years in, we are already seeing the power of multiplication kicking in. From here on out, by God’s grace, that gap will only widen. One day I’ll stand up in front of the Summit Church and the attendance at the churches we’ve planted will be 100 times what we have at our church each weekend.
My point in sharing this is not to suggest that we have to choose between growing the attendance of our church and sending out disciples from the church. As I will point out in chapter 5, you can and should do both. Rather, I am trying to make clear that if we take the long view of ministry, growing and sending out disciples will take priority.
3. The presence of God accompanies those who send.
If we want our people really to know Jesus, we will teach them to live “sent.” Our God is a sending God, and nearly every time he speaks to someone in Scripture he is sending them on a mission.
When God called Abraham to follow him, he made clear that the blessing he would bestow on Abraham was not only for him. Through him he would bless “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:1 – 3 ESV). The writer of Psalm 67, reflecting on that promise, prayed that God would bless Israel so that “your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations” (v. 2 NKJV).
The Old Testament book of Jonah presents the sad picture of a nation running away from this commission, seeking only its own blessing. Jonah, who is a picture of the whole nation of Israel, is more concerned with his own creature comforts and personal vengeances than the message of mercy and blessing that God had given him to share with the nations.
Jesus came as the new Israel, the joyfully sent prophet that Jonah refused to become. Jesus is described as “sent” more than forty-four times in the gospel of John, and “you are sent” is his one-sentence commission for every disciple:
“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20:21)
The church is now Jesus’ vehicle for the completion of his mission. Jesus finished the purchase of our salvation, paying the full price for our sin on the cross and shattering the powers of death in the resurrection, but the mission of salvation is not yet complete. As Martin Luther said, it wouldn’t matter if Jesus died a thousand times if no one heard about it. Through us Jesus continues the work of salvation that he commenced in his death and resurrection (Col. 1:24; Acts 1:1). In that sense, his work is not “finished.”
Christopher Wright says, “God’s mission is what fills the gap between the scattering of the nations in Genesis 12 and the healing of the nations in Revelation 22.”6 God’s worldwide mission, he says, defines every believer’s primary responsibility until Jesus returns.
Thus, you can’t really call yourself a follower of Jesus if you don’t see yourself as sent. He sends each of us somewhere, to some group, to make disciples of those who do not know him.
We think of missionaries as God’s “super servants,” Jesus’ Navy Seals. The word “missionary” is never used in the Bible, however, not even once. That’s because all of God’s people are sent; all of God’s people are commanded to go. There is no “special class” of sent ones.
So the question is no longer if we are sent, only where and how. Many of us are waiting on a voice from heaven to tell us what God has already told us in a verse: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). When you have the verse, you don’t need to wait for the voice.
As Charles Spurgeon used to say, “Every Christian is either a missionary or an impostor.”7
God, I’ve heard it said, is like a spiritual cyclone: If he pulls you in, soon he’ll be hurling you back out.8
4. Jesus’ promises of “greatness” in the church are always related to sending.
Jesus’ promises of help to those devoted to sending are truly astounding. To be honest, they are so astounding that sometimes I have a hard time taking them seriously. In the gospel of John, Jesus told his disciples that they should be excited that he was leaving them, because that meant he would send them “another Helper” who would make them more effective than even he could make them. “It is to your advantage that I go away,” he said, “because then you will get the Holy Spirit” (John 16:7 paraphrased).
Imagine how absurd that must have sounded to those disciples! It was to their advantage that Jesus leave? How awesome would it be to have Jesus as your personal pastor? Every sermon would be a “10,” every mission strategy “heaven sent,” and every decision “divine.” If you had a theological question, he could just answer it. And if offerings were low one month, he could send out a deacon to catch a fish with a $1,000 in its mouth (see Matthew 17:27).
Even those benefits would be inferior, Jesus tells us, to a church of “ordinary Christians” empowered with the Holy Spirit.
In Jesus Continued . . ., I argued that this is a promise the church has yet to take seriously. We still think that the world will be won by a few hyper-anointed super-Christians who gather large crowds in big buildings. But Jesus said that a Spirit-filled church would be infinitely more effective than that, even if that one hyper-anointed individual was Jesus himself (see John 14:12).
The book of Acts is a witness to the truth that having twelve men operating in the power of the Spirit and teaching others to do so as well is greater than having Jesus himself stay to lead the mission personally.
Jesus was not against building large crowds. He preached to crowds of upwards of 15,000, and both he and his disciples rejoiced in the size of those crowds. But when he ascended to heaven, he left only 120 disciples. Onto those 120 he placed his Holy Spirit, however, and they turned the world upside down within two generations.
Leaving behind a church of 120 after a lifetime of ministry would probably not be celebrated as a huge ministry success today. But Jesus took the long view of ministry. He understood the power of exponential multiplication, so he didn’t just gather a mega-audience; he built a sending community. He didn’t leave a throng of 10,000 congregants awestruck at his sermons; he commissioned 120 believers equipped to carry the gospel into the world.
The apostle Paul also took the long view of ministry, seeing long-term leadership development as an essential component of his ministry. He told his young protégé, Timothy,
The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will be qualified to teach others. (2 Tim. 2:2)
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul went so far as to say that God’s primary purpose for “church leaders” was developing other leaders in the congregation (Eph. 4:11 – 12). Pastors are given, he says, for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry. The saints (in Paul’s usage, ordinary Christians) are the primary ones to do the ministry. I often tell our congregation that based on Paul’s explanation, when I became a pastor I left the ministry! My job now is to equip them to do it.
How we build our churches today turns this principle on its head. We are excited when large crowds throng to hear a talented teacher. That’s simply not what Jesus was most excited about, and it’s not how he built his own ministry.
The problem, of course, is not those large crowds of growing attendance. It’s devoting most, if not all, of our energy into producing only that. Crowds won’t last, even when you gather them by doing miracles, as Jesus did. Can any of us hope to have more interesting or memorable sermons than he gave? Yet, when he died, where were the 5,000 he had fed? Surely they had seen and heard enough to stick around. Even Jesus’ preaching and miracles, by themselves, were not sufficient to produce enduring disciples.
Long-term movements are not built by swelling crowds, even when Jesus is the one doing the gathering. They come only as we take the time to replicate our faith in someone else’s heart.
We need, like Jesus, the discipline to devote our energy into those things that will have the greatest, long-term impact on the world, even if it means having to wait years — maybe a lifetime — to experience return on our investment.
Many of the greatest gospel movements in history took this kind of time, and quite often the movement leaders never really got to experience the full measure of their success. For example, Adoniram Judson, America’s first and perhaps most famous missionary, labored in Burma for seven years without a single convert, and then another six years before he had enough believers to form a church.9 Yet, by his last year of ministry he could identify 7,000 believers in Burma — a place where hitherto no one had even heard the name of Jesus! A study done less than ten years after his death revealed 210,000 confessing believers in Burma. That’s the multiplying power of God’s Spirit at work, taking the seeds that Judson planted with his life and watered with his tears and turning them into a movement that impacted a nation.
Acclaimed historian Rodney Stark notes that the church has always grown this way. We often talk about the “rapid growth” of the early church in Acts, he says, but the best estimates indicate that by the end of the first century there were only about 50,000 believers. Most of these 50,000 were genuine disciples, however, and they were devoted to raising up a new generation of leaders after them. Soon the powers of kingdom multiplication kicked in, and by AD 400, 34 million people had professed faith in Christ. (Some estimates say over half of the Roman Empire had become believers!)10
Are you willing to take the “long view” of ministry and do those things that build long-term movements, even if they don’t “feel” as gratifying or make you look as good in the short-term? If so, you will devote yourself to building leaders, not inflating audiences.
For me, this isn’t just a ministry insight I’m trying to push in a book. It’s intensely personal. In 1975, Lynn and Carol Greear moved to the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, so my dad could take a new job. They were cultural Christians, but not yet devoted followers of Jesus. Someone at my dad’s workplace invited them to attend an exciting, growing church in town, one with an electrifying pastor who could preach the paint off the walls. My parents went, and there they were gripped by the gospel. They began to attend regularly, and soon God brought them to renewed faith in Christ.
This church was as devoted to discipleship as it was to growing its audience, however. The pastor took a personal interest in my dad and began to include him in times of prayer or when he went out on evangelistic visits. My dad said that none of Dr. E. C. Sheehan’s sermons had as big an impact on him as simply observing him in those things. Dr. Sheehan taught my parents how to read the Bible and how to organize their new home around the gospel.
Because of that, I grew up in a home with two thriving spiritual giants. They, in turn, taught my sister and me to love the gospel. Now we are teaching our children to do the same.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like had this church been focused only on swelling its weekend attendance. The church at that time may have had great attendance numbers to brag about at the annual convention, but my father’s grandchildren would not be growing up to follow Jesus.
Discipleship multiplies the number of people engaged in the mission, and multiplication has exponential impact for years to come.
Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is a Church
As Pastor Pat Hood has said, it’s time to go old-school Vince Lombardi on the body of Christ.11 Vince Lombardi, renowned coach of the Green Bay Packers, held up a football in front of his team at the start of each season and said to them, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” His professional coaching started with the basics.
We need a Vince Lombardi to stand up in front of us and say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a church.”
The church exists for mission. As Christopher Wright says, “Jesus did not give a mission to his church; he formed a church for his mission.”12 Without the mission, a church is not a church; it’s just a group of disobedient Christians hanging out.
The church is a movement before it is an institution. And the number one characteristic of a movement is . . . movement. If something is not moving, it can’t be called a movement. And people who are not moving are not part of the movement, even if they are members of the institution.
Are you moving in mission? Are you moving outward into the world with the gospel? Is your church moving that way? Or is it only drawing people inward, adding them to the rolls, providing religious services to “complete” their lives?
I can’t think of anything more important for the church to recover than its missional essence. As I explained at the beginning of this chapter, the church, which Jesus said was unstoppable (Matt. 16:18), not only is failing to advance, but is losing ground in the West. So, it’s time for us to take some drastic measures. And that means getting back to the basics.
We need to learn from our brothers and sisters in the African and Asian parts of the Global South, where the church is growing at exponential rates. There the church seems to understand it exists for mission. I once heard a pastor from a large church in Korea say that if one of their small groups went more than a year without adding a new convert, they were brought before the elders for questioning and possible church discipline!
In this book I would like to explore with you what it looks like to get serious about sending. I want you to understand how you are sent, personally, and then how you can foster a sending culture in your church or ministry.
But before we get there, I want to share with you how our church came to this conviction ourselves. It was pretty painful. And a little humiliating.