How To Multiply Your Church
Ralph Moore
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Why 1943 Was a Very Good Year.
A. Lessons from WWII
1. The Germans had better technology but we out produced them.
Manufacturing and more boots on the ground won the day. Often times
the soldiers were farmers who were trained without a real weapon. P. 27
“Stop counting converts and start counting congregations.”
2. Wedding of Necessity. We won the war by partnering with Communist
Russia. We need to partner with other Christians even if they aren’t from
the right denomination in order to win.
3. New Paradigm. Until Pearl Harbor the war was over there and didn’t
concern us. We don’t plant churches fast enough to keep up with
population growth. P.25 “We need to overcome the peaceful isolation of
our comfortable church campuses. A missional church invades and
permeates. The operative word is ‘Go,’ not ‘Come.’ “ It’s a change from
seating people to sending people.
Kingdoms in Conflict:
A. Jesus said to disciple nations. The command suggests transformation of the
entire world.
1. While discipling nations is a spiritual issue, it also carries seeds of rescue
from poverty, racism and evil dictators. The needs find their place parallel
with the discipleship process. They seldom precede it. P.37
2. Positive world changes have usually followed large-scale disciplemaking.
B. Paul discipled the nations in 3 steps
1. He made converts
2. He made disciples of his converts
3. He quickly organized those converts into churches, appointing elders
whenever he left the city.
The Big Question: Will Another Church Really Help?
A. Biblical Metaphors: Mustard Seed (Mt 13), Vine (Jn 15), Vineyard (Mt 20)
B. Pruning: He talked about how in gardening you can rapidly grow plants with
cuttings and the result is that the mother plant is healthier. P.44
C. Churches are most fruitful when young. Evangelism is a necessity for
survival.
D. Ex. of culture of multiplication
1. Member was stationed in Antartica and planted a church using audio
sermons of Ralph Moore.
2. Surfer girl moved to Japan, led friends to the Lord and hooked up with a
new plant.
3. Soldiers from the church planted churches among fellow soldiers.
Hope: Imperfect People Moving in the Right Direction
A. There is multiplication happening in unlikely places: China, Nigeria, South
Korea, Nepal. US is 5th largest mission field.
B. Culture is changing. We live in a neo-pagan society.
V.
VI.
1. We cannot expect rising generation to “return to church” like the Baby
Boomers.
2. Good news: there are probably several culturally attuned church
planters in your church. They are usually young. Young people bring
about drastic changes to society.
C. Stop Adding and Start Multiplying
1. “Multiply your current goals by 100. If you don not have ministry structure
or systems to reach that new goal in a relatively short time, you are not set
up for rapid multiplication.” P.63
2. “Don’t even think of calling it multiplication unless you can identify the
fourth generation in a discipleship network! Any strong leader will attract
other leaders.” P. 63
Leverage: Making the Great Commission Doable
A. “You subtract by adding two entities together, and you multiply by dividing
them.” Joining two churches can result in less than the sum of its parts.
B. “Most churches think of equipping people so they can serve the organization.
They want to keep them. It’s more fun and far more productive to train
leaders and then release them to multiply the kingdom.” P.70
C. Enthusiasm and momentum are common returns of church multiplication.
1. Pew sitters get involved.
2. Leaders who leave grow and are invigorated.
D. Unhealthy churches can multiply. Some say don’t or you will reproduce the
unhealthy. Most church planters will choose the best parts of the
congregation to use as building blocks.
Confusion: Why Don’t Our Churches Multiply
A. Why it’s the exception
1. Overworked and overwhelmed pastors seeing it as another program.
2. Program orientation of the church. We are products of our culture. To get
out of the rut we need to look at our past. When the church has prevailed,
it has been on the heels of a church planting movement.
3. Discipling nations requires full blown spiritual awakening.
4. The West is good at evangelism and discipleship. We score very low in
rapid multiplication of churches and leaders.
5. Most of what we do is curriculum oriented instead of relationship oriented.
B. What is our idea of church growth? It reveals our views toward a lost world.
1. Grow bigger or convert the entire world?
2. Transfer growth? Are we happiest living in a rapidly growing subdivision?
3. Is foreign missions money given to people in faraway places or does the
church multiply itself oversees?
C. Multiplication not Addition(Conversion Growth)
1. Acts 8:4. The believers who were scattered went everywhere preaching
about Jesus.
2. Before the church was scattered addition took place. Granted it was large
addition 3000, 5000. This never substantially changed the Roman culture.
It was when the church scattered throughout the empire that culture was
impacted.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
Roadblocks: What Stands in Our Way.
A. The limitations are in our head.
1. The Germans had a 400 mile long impregnable defense. The Allied
forces were innovative. They overwhelmed one spot and destroyed the
enemy fortress in a day. We too must be innovative and exploit the weak
spot.
2. Weak spot: Humanity’s quite credible search for meaning, purpose and
community. TV ads sell cars by attaching personal significance. Extreme
sports highlight the satisfaction from singleness of purpose. Online
communities are mushrooming to fill people’s need for touch.
3. How we address those human needs constitutes our perception of a
“proper” church and how to start one.
B. Buildings. Churches are held in warehouses and shopping centers. Take it a
step further. Launch where you have people, not wherever you can rent a
building. Start in a park if necessary.
C. Bucks. The salary of a FT pastor is a barrier.
1. Separate operational costs from opportunity costs. Why not spend all the
money you have drawing a crowd to the first week or so? Fund the
opportunity and let the results fund ongoing operations. Don’t squander
startup funds on overhead.
2. Bi-vocational pastors.
3. When money is less of a problem the new church can afford to do creative
things to serve its community.
D. Brains. Seminary is expensive in terms of money and time. We shouldn’t
ditch seminary but also shouldn’t rely on it to produce pastors. Learn on the
job through disciple making and coaching.
E. Impossible Structures. Pastors believe they must duplicate all the mother
church / large church organizational and technical hardware from their first
week.
1. No baby comes out of its water world understanding calculus. No baby
church should expect to operate a full-scale ministry out of the box.
2. If the bar is held too high you will only reproduce once in a blue moon.
3. “In a war, you need both artillery and foot soldiers with rifles. Our large
churches represent heavy artillery. But artillery is nearly useless without
infantry. Do you know what you call an artillery unit without infantry? It’s a
“defensive position.” It stays in one place trying to repel a mobile enemy.
Emotions: It Doesn’t Feel Quite Right
A. Told a story about the German ship the Bismarck. It was destroying the
English naval fleet. In a last ditch effort WWI biplanes were sent to air drop
torpedoes. One fighter flew “too close” risking his life and dropped a torpedo
that struck the ships rudder. All it could do was move in circles. It was sunk
two days later.
B. Moral of the chapter is don’t wait for your emotions to feel right. This is David
vs. Goliath stuff. Not just in terms of size, but impact. David beat Goliath and
enlivened a nation. See also Rom 8:31
Model: Jesus as a Church Planter
X.
XI.
XII.
A. The goal is a worldwide kingdom of God through individual conversions. If we
keep the kingdom of God uppermost, the NT read differently than if we
subjugate it to a manual for personal holiness. If we read it as a manual for
revolution, our own personal walk with God will accelerate.
B. “The call to discipleship is a call to mission. Personal piety is part of the
package. It was not, and is not, the end goal. Discipling the nations is.”
C. Jesus and Multiplication: Jesus modeled evangelism to the 12 (Lk 8:1-4). He
then deputizes the 12 to a similar mission (Lk 9:1-6). Finally, he commissions
72 to a ministry trip quite similar to that of the 12 (Luk10:1-16). Jesus began
with a small group and duplicated his knowledge, experience and power.
They did the same.
Possibility: Doing What Jesus Did
A. Jesus’ stated mission was, “I will build my church, and all the power of hell will
not conquer it” (Mt 16:18). His strategy was to empower a few people who
would empower others to change the world.
B. Keys to the Kingdom (These are strategy. How he empowered others)
1. Accept Your Calling. “Am I willing to accept the Great Commission as a
personal calling?”
2. Recruit by Revolution. After praying Jesus called those whom the Lord
revealed to Him. Are you looking for revelation when you call people to
serve? Or do you recruit just to manage the church?
3. Communicate Broadly with Holy Spirit Power. Lk 5:8 Peter experiences a
miracle that revealed to him his own sinful heart. After this he was called
to ministry. Luke 10, Jesus told the 72 to “heal the sick” before He told
them to announce the Kingdom. “It is the power of God in everyday
situations that rolls back darkness in a culture bent on killing anyone who
converts to Christ. We won’t establish Christ’s kingdom without the
supernatural.”
4. Make Disciples. Jesus invested attention that others longed for in just a
few well-chosen people (Mt 8:18)
5. Commission and Empower Your Disciples. We toss around words like
“empower” without much spiritual thought. We must find ways to bring
spiritual power into the lives of those we commission.
C. The goal never changes. The strategy is a constant. But the tactics can and
should change according to the situation.
Failure and Success: Multiplication in the Early Church.
A. The Apostles were reluctant. When the church scattered they stayed in
Jerusalem.
B. Acts 8:4 The unnamed Christians. They effectively spread the word similar to
Philip. “If the organized church wouldn’t get the job done, God would turn to
the disorganized church. That fleeing group of refugees was probably without
great financial resources, because most refugees are as tattered as they are
scattered. But they stayed on mission.”
Methods: What Would Paul Do?
A. Strategy vs. Tactics
XIII.
XIV.
1. The Allied goal was twofold: control Berlin and destroy the enemy’s will to
make war. The strategy was fairly straightforward: (1) deny the enemy the
resource of the Middle East, (2) destroy the industrial might of the Nazi
war machine by air raids, and (3) funnel enough men and material through
Normandy to win what had become a three-front war. The tactics included
construction of amphibious landing craft, the use of specially constructed
tanks to cut through the hedgerows of Northern France and inventing
plywood gliders to launch a first-strike team into key positions.
2. None of the tactics was absolutely necessary to the cause. Each would
bow to the strategy. Fall in love with tactics and you threaten strategy.
B. Paul’s Goal and Strategy
1. Goal: to bring the entire world into reverence of Christ, to make disciple of
whole nations.
2. Strategy: The same as Jesus.
C. Trust in the Lord Not Tactics. Do you think it is possible that we would
multiply churches, and disciples, faster if we trusted more in the Lord and less
in our tactics? We work our programs (tactics) with some degree of success.
That makes us feel good and gives us notoriety. But the Kingdom goal goes
unmet.
Slogans: Statements of Mission and Purpose
A. The misery index. Is our community more or less miserable because of how
we live our lives?
B. We are called to disciple nations, a task that will only be accomplished by
multiplying churches. It’s not enough to establish a beachhead; we must
control the field.
1. Bringing miracles to unchurched people is a first step. Bringing people to
Christ is taking back ground on the battlefield. But the big issue remains the
spiritual conquest of nations.
C. Purpose vs. Mission
1. Purpose submits to mission but is necessarily different form it. WWII the
mission was to break the will of the Germans. The purpose was to build a
military force capable of attaining the mission.
2. Eph 4:12. The word “for” delineates the purpose of leadership. Your
church exists to equip your members to do God’s work – both on and off
campus.
3. If I intend to evangelize, serve or entertain, the structures I build will
generally move people inward toward our church campus. As soon as I
redefine my purpose and that of our congregation in terms of equipping, I
point our people outward. If you don’t focus on equipping, you can still
have an impact through giving to missions and hiring church planters, but
you impact will be limited.
4. An equipping church, leads every member to live as a missionary, at
home and on the road.
Vision: What Shapes the New Church?
A. Luke 10 Model: “Person of Peace”. Whenever the field is ripe, the church
planter (apostle) hangs around long enough to disciple the person of peace,
leaving that person(s) to pastor the new congregations.
B. The Acts 2 Model: Gatherings, Both Great and Small. Displays strong lay
involvement. It displays a natural movement into leadership.
C. Luke 10 was a training mission. Acts 2 shows the results of the training; then
beginning in Acts 10, the gospel began its steady march across the world.
Philip, Peter and Paul did Luke 10 in Samaria, Caesarea and Europe.
D. What did the Church do?
1. the apostles teaching, fellowship, the Lord’s supper, prayer, shared meals,
miracles, praise, generous giving and evangelism.
2. Location and group dynamics are form issues. Form follows function.
3. 1 Cor. 14:26. The assumption behind this text is that the church meeting
was interactive. Everybody played.
4. Our churches are addicted to the weekend show. At least half are
doomed to a spectator role if we don’t persist in pressing for interactivity.
Remember the point is not interactivity itself but equipping people for
ministry.
XV. Tenacity: Faith in an Age of Fear
A. When you and I choose to trust in Jesus over obstacles we win.
B. Without the power of the spirit we are Christian humanists. Christian
humanism miscasts us as defenders of the faith. Worse yet, sometimes we
try to defend the Lord Himself. We forget the meaning of the word “savior.”
C. There are hundreds of stories about the Church in victory. Its important that
we in the US hear them.
XVI. Mission: Reaching People Where They Are.
A. Paul as a Risk Taker
1. Examine Paul’s methods in Acts 13-19 and the messy stuff in his letters.
Paul rapidly multiplied churches. He did so by betting on people he
couldn’t have known all that well.
2. Everywhere he went he appointed elders and established churches even
when he wasn’t there long.
3. His methods created problems. It required continued supervision. In most
cases, they were babes in Christ, yet they were elders in the sense that
they had been saved longer than others in their community.
4. “Elder” is a relative term. In a new church, you can trust leadership to
younger men more easily because the man is an elder compared to
others.
B. Look to the examples of the early Baptists and Methodists in America. They
took their leaders from the ranks of members. Most were bi-vocational. They
needed more boots on the ground in order to succeed.
XVII. Education: Learning from America’s Past
A. There was a measure of control in the early church. The apostles were
available to bail them out if their knowledge and gifts fell short, as in the case
of Philip (Acts 8:4-8).
B. Church Multiplication in Acts
1. The Original Cell Church Idea (Acts 2). The important thing to note is their
numbers swelled. They needed a lot of home leaders in a hurry.
C. God is flexible. We should follow His example. What would have happened
during the invasion of Europe in WWII if we had restricted the officer corps to
graduates of West Point or Annapolis?
D. Education should be an enhancer to ministry rather than a gateway to its
service.
E. We must challenge, even dare, our churches to reproduce pastors and stop
depending upon seminaries and colleges to do the whole job.
XVIII. A Second Look: Emerging Urban Opportunities.
A. Gang recruiters operate like Paul. They travel to a distant city and hang out
at basketball courts looking for kids who are natural leaders. They befriend
their potential disciples, offering them the chance of a better life.
B. He talked at length about city opportunities and the changing landscape of
cities through gentrification. It will take us thinking differently and coming up
with flexible models to expand the church to cities. He suggest some ideas
from house church, public schools or meeting halls, rundown properties and
old congregations.
XIX. Fun: Church Multiplication is Like Making Babies
A. We reproduce in kind. Bible study leader create apprentices in their likeness.
We understand reproduction well until it comes to pastors. A pastor who has
it in his/her job description to reproduce pastors will find it quite simple to turn
out leaders with a vision for church multiplication.
B. The ability to reproduce is a sign of maturity. We should empower pastors by
calling them to reproduce themselves in several young disciples. It should be
right up there with preaching. Only reproduction at a pastoral level will ensure
the future of the church.
C. We need to change the paradigm. Our problem isn’t resources.
XX. Hardware: Coloring Outside the Lines.
A. We need to multiply unorthodox churches
1. He talked about a group of hippies that came to their church and how he
befriended a leader of the group Richard. He had leader qualities but
didn’t fit the traditional seminary mode, so they didn’t release him to start a
church. Then the Navigators called him to pastor. He realized he needed
to change.
2. He talked about a drug dealer who came to Christ and started a church in
the park reaching out to prostitutes and addicts.
3. Brain Game: Get 3 innovative people together. Read Acts 16. Then read
the letter to the Philippians. Ask yourself, What did this church look like
when Paul met with them upon release from prison? Who would have led
the church? Where did they meet? What would they have done in their
marriages? How did they become so generous?
B. He talked about house churches and the analogy of rabbits and elephants.
House churches being the rabbits who multiply rapidly. He said we need to
plant both. In reality, we should plant churches that look like a zoo. We need
lots of different kinds of churches to reach lots of different kinds of people.
XXI.
Equipping: How to Ready Your Church to Multiply
A. Teach multiplication values before implementing multiplication strategies.
1. Teach while you preach. Too often missional teaching is limited to the
hardcore of the church.
2. Gently leak your intent and the values into your preaching for a year or so.
3. Build the paradigm from the pulpit before you build it into your structures.
B. On the Job Training
1. Does your church culture suggest organic movement all the way from
being a convert to being a pastor?
2. Can you coach people to the next level from within?
3. Do you believe in discipleship as a viable tool for preparing someone for
pastoral ministry?
C. Every Christian must produce disciples.
1. A single mother straining to raise two young children should see them as
her disciples.
2. First the lead disciples the staff, the staff disciples the MiniChurch (small
group) leaders, the MiniChurch leaders all have apprentice leaders they
disciple. Together the MiniChurch leader and apprentice disciple the
members of the MiniChurch.
D. Failsafe method for identifying leaders: They have followers.
XXII. Costs: Multiplication When Resources are Limited.
A. If you believe Jesus, money is not necessary to the Great Commission. Luke
10:4 “Don’t take along any money, or a traveler’s bag, or even an extra pair of
sandals.”
1. Ed Stetzer. There is no correlation between cash investment and the
survival rate of new churches.
2. Think this way, “If I don’t have conventional resources, God must be
providing what I need in a way that I can’t yet see.”
B. The answer to limited resources is churches started in homes.
1. We ask a leader to gather a few fired-up friends and start in a home.
2. If they never outgrow the home, little harm is done. A healthy church in a
home is a success. If they long for the comfort of a larger congregation,
they can simply integrate into the life of our church. Nearly half of those
“chunked off” in the past have returned.
3. Raise the leader from within – no cost. The pastor is bi-vocational during
the early years. If the church grows out of the house, they can afford to
pay their pastor.
4. If the church outgrows the home, front-load the spending to draw a crowd
and let that crowd fund the day-to-day needs of the church.
5. Don’t spend money on a pastor’s salary if you can help it. Don’t rent office
space. Save the money and make a splash.
XXIII. Momentum: Managing that Most Important Management Factor
A. Four Costs of Planting Churches: People, cash flow, part of the leadership
base and passion. For passion: the transfer members always stay with you.
You are gradually turning your congregation into a church of dispassionate
transplants and long-term Christians who have lost some of the fire of their
faith. The fired up on mission Christians leave to plant the churches.
B. Lowering the Cost of Planting. He met with other leaders to discuss
1. Limiting the number of people you send. Average is 20 – 30. In the early
years they sent about 20%.
2. Limiting the loss of leadership. Don’t let the planter hand pick only from
leaders.
3. Limiting a financial burden. Negotiate the number of strong givers that go
with the new church.
4. Limiting the loss of passion. Leave the gleaning of new converts to church
announcements. Don’t intentionally target them to go with the new
church. Blitz the mother church two weeks prior to the team leaving.
Don’t recruit new converts to team meetings before this.
Great quote from the end of the book, “My job as a trainer of leaders is to spot the
potential of a person….It doesn’t matter if he is doing anything now or not. I must see
where he is capable of going. Then I must encourage him along that line.” P.250