You helped turn this tragedy around

Hi Dave,

You have been on our hearts during the first couple weeks of our current trip in Africa. I can tell you that adjusting to a 9 hour time shift, going 36 hours without sleep while traveling, being surprised by the ‘extra hot’ weather in Burundi, and the usual adjustment to the African environment is now mostly behind us!

As you travel as part of our team, you can celebrate with us:

• You have helped turn tragedy into new life for many women (see below). Also note that Brooks writes some compelling stories on these same women here.

• You played a part in this amazing story of two rebel soldiers who find new life.

Your prayers are so appreciated as we continue our journey through mid-December:

• DR Congo: training and empowering rural church planters, meeting with key leaders, and providing trainings with the Methodist denomination.
• Western Kenya: training with key leaders and time spent at Liberty School in Bikeke.
• Uganda: trainings and strategic meetings with leaders from all areas.

Your help turns tragedy into a whole new life

Bahizi was horrified as he saw the images of fire on TV that was destroying the downtown marketplace in his own city of Bujumbura. The fire destroyed thousands of businesses and left scores of families penniless.

He, and his wife Lillian, saw women in tears watching helplessly as their life savings literally went up in smoke.

As church planters in that area, Bahizi and Lillian knew they had to do something. As the fire receded, they made their way down to where the devastated families were looking for any remnant of their businesses.

Befriending several of the women who had lost everything, Bahizi and Lillian reached out to them and offered to help them start again with a loan from their own pockets. Amazed, these women began to open their hearts to the Gospel that they saw displayed in the compassion they saw in Bahizi and Lillian.

When we met several of these women, last week, their testimonies of God’s goodness overflowed from them. Their lives had become filled with a joy they had never known before. Their love for God was evident as they talked enthusiastically about reaching out to many others and starting churches in their homes.

NOTE: You helped provide training to Bahizi and his growing team of church planters that have now reached several provinces in Burundi and seen well over 100 new churches planted.

Blessings,
Roger & Brooks

P.S. You can stay connected with us through our un-edited, on-the-road travel blog.

Bill Hybels: What I'd Do Differently If I Planted a Church Today

Bill Hybels: "What I'd Do Differently If I Planted a Church Today"
By Bill Hybels

 The suburban Chicago church plant, launched by a 22-year-old Bill Hybels back in 1975, would dramatically impact the face of American Christianity. What later became one of the nation’s first megachurches, which now draws some 25,000 worshippers each week, Willow Creek Community Church began in a closed-on-Sunday-morning movie theater and was mostly staffed by teenaged volunteers passionate for Jesus Christ. As Willow grew, sharing what it learned with other churches became one of its highest priorities.

 In this interview featured in the new Exponential Resources Series eBook MOVE for Church Planters: What Willow Creek and 1,000 Churches Reveal About Spiritual Growth, Hybels shares what he has learned in 37 years of ministry; how his experience might impact his actions were he planting a church today; and what advice he would most like to share with those whose passion is to share the good news of Jesus Christ with unchurched people in a relevant, compelling and successful way.

Welcome to that conversation.

Before we start talking about what you might do the same and differently if you were planting a church today, let’s talk a little about our current environment. What societal factors have changed in the past 40 years that would impact your decisions today? 

Bill Hybels: I think that there's even more resistance/cynicism to the idea of the institutionalized church now than there was then. And I think that’s the result of all of the skepticism created as too many well-known pastors—and even some denominations—have broken trust. People who are starting a church today have to present an even stronger argument than we did in the mid-‘70s for Why another church?

So I would spend a lot of time coming up with the rationale for why would I be starting another church. What's going to be different? What's going to keep it from becoming like these others? That would be very important, because I think there's a general feeling that there are already enough churches.

In short, if you are going to launch a new church, you have to start with a white hot, differentiated, compelling vision, or why take up more real estate?

With this current environment in mind, can you give us an example of what worked well in your church plant 37 years ago that you would duplicate if you were planting a church today? 

Bill Hybels: One thing I really got right is that I started Willow with my friends. The founders are still with me today and we're still best of friends. I had an incredible team of proven people around me, and we had established a loving and joyful community before we held our first service. That I did right, by the grace of God. So if I were starting fresh, the minute I felt I had clarity on the vision for starting a new church, I would present that vision to close, trusted friends who I wanted to come along with me on this adventure.

Do you have an example of something you would do very differently? 

Bill Hybels: Something that I didn't do well—and this is a common problem all across the world—was to adequately capitalize our ministry. Therefore, the financial pressures were terribly destructive to the life of our church for the first five years. And it didn't have to be that way. Most church planters and church planting organizations these days say you’ve got to raise X amount of money, so you’re sure people can survive—like, making sure your rent payment can be made. That kind of information was not widely known because there weren't many church plants going on in our era. So I rather naively said, “God's leading us to do this, so God will provide. We're going to hold the first service and pass a plate around and it's all going to be good.” Well, we didn't have a big enough core. We didn't have people who had professional careers and resources to be able to invest, and we sank further and further into debt. All of us had to do things like take on part-time jobs and bring boarders into our homes, which led to a chaotic, unsustainable lifestyle.

Any other practical steps you’d recommend to church planters? 

Bill Hybels: I can think of two. The first is how to decide where to locate their church. When I talk with church planters, I always start by talking about vision. But quite quickly after the vision talk, I ask this question: “What demographic do you think calls the best out of you?” When you’re with a certain kind of people, do you get a sense of exuberance—that these are the kind of people I want to do life with? Some church planters actually think that's an illegal question. But let me give you an example. I was talking with a church planter who was on the verge of quitting. I knew his family background. These were very sophisticated people—grad school trained, excellent educational institutions and all that. And the church planting organization had put him in a blue collar, lower education level, semi-rural setting that was boring this guy to tears. These were lovely people. It's just that they didn't call the best out of him. He would want to discuss complex subject matters and things that are going to shape the future of the world. But they were not willing to engage in those conversations—the kind that gave him a lot of life and excitement. So I said, “Before you quit and go back into the business world, why don't you see if there's another plant that can be done in an area with a demographic that you actually feel fairly excited about?” And he said, “I couldn't ask for that because that would be arrogant.” I said, “I don't know that you ought to feel like that’s so bad, because a certain environment is going to call the best out of you and in another environment you're not going to feel like such a great fit.” And I think "fit" is key. God can always overrule it and call you to do anything. But if you have a choice in the matter, why don't you choose to locate where the demographics call the best out of you? I heard from him several years later. He had relocated. It was like talking to a different guy. And he said, “I wouldn't have stayed in ministry in that setting. But this is the group I'm supposed to be with.” It works the other way, too. Sometimes working with the poor and uneducated calls the best out of very sophisticated people. But they know that it does, so it works. The main thing is, find the fit. You have to have the self-awareness to know who calls the best out of you. A second practical issue is how to think about using volunteers vs. adding staff. In my opinion, the more a young church can get done through volunteers, the better. The fewer the staff, the better. As I said earlier, when we startedWillow, we were undercapitalized and one of the downsides of that was tremendous financial stress. One of the upsides was that every week I told everyone attending the church—we need you! And they knew it was true. We needed everybody to step up—to take care of kids, to help set up and take down chairs, and eventually, to help us find a piece of land. That brought people forward. At one point, I think we were dangerously close to having 100 percent of our attendees serving because we didn't have any paid staff.

What you describe sounds like a strategy to Create Ownership, which is one of the four best practices discovered by REVEAL. Can you elaborate on how REVEAL has influenced your thinking about how a church can best fulfill its mission to help people become fully devoted followers of Christ? 

Bill Hybels: I’d start by going back to something that was a miss in the early days ofWillow, and it's still a mystery to me why it was so much of a miss. It may be due to the fact I was still a fairly recent Christian when we started the church. In fact, I had only been a Christian five years. So when I startedWillow, I loved reading God's Word and I loved communicating with Him in prayer and reading good Christian books. I liked that just because of my relationship with God. But I dramatically underestimated how often my colleagues and the people in the church practiced the classic spiritual disciplines. I just thought everybody spent time with God and surrendered their spirits before Him every day. That everybody worked hard to receive promptings from God, quieting the ambient noise in their lives so they could hear Him. I misjudged that, and the few times that I preached on it, I remember seeing the semi-confused faces of the people in the crowd and thinking, “I must be doing a terrible job of teaching this because they are not getting it or they are not interested. I'm not getting the same kind of feedback that I get when I teach on other subject matters.” So, I wound up not teaching on the spiritual practices very often. It's hard to do, and I got mixed response. Decades later I found out, primarily through REVEAL, that I should have stuck with that. I should not have been dissuaded by the kind of feedback I was getting. I should have done a major series on the classic spiritual disciplines every single year, whether I saw confused faces or not. I should have just dug in and made that a regular part of the menu. We also had some feedback that went like this: “Yeah, well, interesting. But I'd really like to know something more practical than this, like how to be a better parent. Why don't you teach this other stuff at a seminar, not on Sunday morning?” Well, we didn't have the facilities or the teachers to hold those kinds of seminars. So, it wasn't until decades later when we found out—through REVEAL—that you can strip away almost every other thing the church does. But at the core of the core of the core, growing people into Christ followers is all about helping them engage in God's Word and inspiring them to invite God to be at the center of their lives. I did not emphasize that as much in the early days as I do now.

So you would do things differently today? 

Bill Hybels: Absolutely. Now at Willow we have what we call the Getting Started Classes. The second movement in the Getting Started Classes is the spiritual practices: how to read your Bible, how to pray, how to surrender, how to confess your sins. We get people on track with these very basic things that will help them walk with Christ as soon as they show any movement. In the early days of Willow, when someone showed spiritual movement we would congratulate them and point them toward a ministry where they could serve or a group where they could get to know other people. But we didn't instill a strong awareness that, more than anything, people need to know how to relate to God through His Word, and how to hear His prompting. How to navigate a day with Him in your head, in your heart, at your side—and all of that. It's a deep regret I carry.

Christ-Centered leadership is at the heart of REVEAL’s best-practice findings. How do you keep your passion for Jesus fired up? 

Bill Hybels: In Romans 12:11, Paul says: "Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord." He's saying don’t let your zeal burn low, but he’s also saying you're responsible for your zeal. I like to remind myself of that. It's my responsibility to keep my passion hot. It's no one else's. So if mine starts running low, I have to discern what cooled it off and then I’ve got to stop letting that happen. I have to figure out who the people are, what the books and the experiences are, that refresh my spirit—and then lean into whatever works to re-fire a passion for Jesus. For example, whenever I'm around certain people for any length of time, I feel my pulse rate increasing. They fire me up. I need to be around them a little more. And, besides the Bible, the book I’ve turned to more often than any other for inspiration and encouragement is Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines. If I need spiritual refueling, that book works for me. So, who I'm with, what I read, where I go—that’s what keeps me charged up. To close, do you have a final word of advice or encouragement for church planters? Bill Hybels: You're one of the luckiest people on the planet—because the most important thing happening on earth is the establishment and building of local churches. God selected you to be able to form a community where this incredibly important work is going to be going on under your direction for perhaps the next 40 years. You won the lottery! Enjoy it! Every day realize you don't have to stand at a drill press. You don't have to load and unload trucks. You get to traffic in kingdom ideas and work with great people who are pulling with you to try to form this Acts 2 dream of Christ's church. You should fall on your knees and say, “God, what an incredible privilege to be invited by your Holy Spirit to play a key role in the most important thing happening on planet Earth.” I tell pastors all the time that I've had a ball! We've taken our hits. There are bad days. But I've had an astonishingly blessed ride. And I think God would have that same heart toward every pastor. I think he wants every pastor to love His Word and love the adventure of His work. I don't even know what it's like to lay my head on the pillow and say that today was a waste. Every night, I feel like we moved the ball. We may have only moved it a foot, but we moved the kingdom ball ahead a little bit today. That's good enough for me. A high percentage of the human race hits the pillow at night feeling like their day was a waste. They didn't move anything eternal ahead. They didn't touch any lives. They didn't do anything that's going to outlive them. So my final word to church planters is this—you won the lottery! You get to lead the coolest endeavor on planet Earth, the only agency God said he was going to predictably bless and favor.

You get to be a part of that! 

Bill Hybels, founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek, is well-known for his relevant and insightful Bible-based teaching. He is the author of 17 books, including Rediscovering Church and Fit to Be Tied (both co-authored with his wife Lynne), Too Busy Not to Pray, Becoming a Contagious Christian (with Mark Mittelberg), and The God You're Looking For. He is chairman of the Willow Creek Association's board of directors. Bill received a bachelor's degree in Biblical Studies and an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Trinity College. He and Lynne are the parents of two adult children & have one grandchild. 

Finding open doors comes as a result of knocking and seeking and finding.

Open Doors and God's Will

By Hendrik Vorster So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.  ~ Luke 11:9, 10
READING: Acts 16:6-10
Most of us, in our pursuits of God and His will for our lives and ministry, seek open doors, which God opens. Finding open doors comes as a result of knocking and seeking and finding. The secret is to have a door that God opens, opened to you, and not one forced open by human effort. May God open His doors of opportunity to you that will bring Favor, Grace and Provision.
I trust that the following verse will be a Rhema word of God to you today! Revelation 3:8: “I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”
The Apostle Paul operated only on the open doors God opened for him. He and his companions tested several possible options before Paul saw in a vision a man from Macedonia. They acted at once, “concluding God had called us to preach the gospel to them” (Acts 16:10).
May God help you and me to do God’s work where He has led the way and where He has opened a door for the preaching of the gospel. Act on the open doors which God opens in your life.
Father, Bless each who read these words today. Encourage our hearts to continue to ask and seek and knock on doors, and by Your power, open the doors that will empower us to do Your will. Amen.

THE EKKLESIA UNDERGROUND

"In due season we shall reap..."
GALATIANS 6:9

The good news is that even if the Ekklesia has been underground, it is still growing and developing. When the season is right it will burst forth and once again those who have eyes to see will indeed discern the blade, the head, and the full grain in the head. In fact the blades have already broken ground in several places and we are even beginning to see some grain taking shape. If you have traced the recovery of the Heavenly Order so far then you know there have been many obstacles and hindrances to God's Will over the last six thousand years or so of the history of mankind.

So far God has defeated everything that rose up to challenge His Purpose in Christ. Not only has He defeated it, but He has actually used evil to bring about good and further increase His Son. The Scriptures provide us with every expectation and assurance that God will continue to do the same with our generation. He is very much an active part of world affairs, whether they be secular or sacred.

Discipleship, Mission, and Church: A Plea to Learn Our History

Discipleship, Mission, and Church: A Plea to Learn Our History
By Frank Viola www.ptmin.org

“Discipleship” and “missional.”

These are the two big buzzwords on the Christian landscape today. Of course, there is also “simple church.” But that’s another discussion for another time.

As I speak in conferences throughout the world and meet people who have jumped on the discipleship bandwagon, or the missional bandwagon (or both), I make several observations.

Two Streams of Missional

There seems to be two different streams in the missional world:

1)Those who are stuck with D.L. Moody’s mindset. These are those who basically make the mission of God the salvation of lost souls. The church, then, is regarded as either a soul-saving station (the mechanism to save the lost), or it’s something that doesn’t appear on the radar screen as being anything terribly significant.

“Whatever church you attend, whatever form it takes, and whatever practices it observes is irrelevant. The church exists to save lost souls, end of story.” So the thinking goes.

2)The other camp, which I joyfully throw my hat in with, are those who do not see the mission of God as being the salvation of individual souls. While that’s a slice of it, it’s not the whole pie. Nor is it the goal. God’s intention actually began before the fall and it stands outside the reaches of redemption. God has a non-redemptive purpose—an “eternal purpose” as Paul calls it—that was in His heart before the fall ever occurred. And He’s never let go of it.

T. Austin-Sparks used to point out that you can think of the eternal purpose as a straight line that moves from eternity past to eternity future.

But somewhere in the middle of that line, there’s a dip. That dip represents the fall of humanity. At the very bottom of the dip is a cross. The cross is designed to bring us back onto the straight line.

Regrettably, many Christians have forgotten the rest of the line. In fact, they’ve forgotten the beginning of the line and the end of the line. Instead, they are stuck in the dip. We can’t seem to get past salvation and redemption. Our starting point is Genesis 3 (the fall of humankind) instead of Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1 (God’s purpose before time)

Consequently, serving God, helping others, trying to improve the world, saving souls from hell, worshipping God, etc. are routinely stated as being God’s grand mission.

I contend that God’s purpose goes beyond all of that. And it has something to do with a burning intent that is for God Himself, rather than something that simply benefits humans. The eternal purpose is immense, but it’s beyond the scope of this article to unpack. (I’ve done so elsewhere.)

Two Streams of Discipleship

I also observe that there are two streams of discipleship:

1)There are those who say, “What’s important is discipleship; the church is irrelevant. Let’s not discuss the church; let’s instead discuss how to make disciples.”

When people talk that way, it shouts one fact: That our understanding of church has gotten far afield from what it was in the New Testament.

When people make such statements, they are really talking about how church has been done traditionally (and that can include “churches” that gather in homes, parks, and pubs).

Whenever people think of “church” through a traditional lens, it’s not hard to see the pressing need for discipleship.

2)The other camp rightly understands that you cannot separate disciple-making from the ekklesia. You cannot separate the forming of people into full-pledged followers of Jesus and a living, breathing, vibrant community that gathers under His headship.

To put it another way, you can’t separate discipleship from the ekklesia anymore than you can separate child-rearing from the family. And you can’t separate the ekklesia from Jesus Himself, for it’s His very body.

I want you to imagine a saltwater fish. The fish can only survive in his natural habitat, which is the ocean. Why? Because the ocean surrounds the fish with everything it needs to live, breathe, and have its being.

The fish is also a dependent creature. Fish swim in schools.

Now consider a different image. Imagine that this fish is removed from the ocean and from its school and is thrown in someone’s backyard. People take turns spraying the fish with a water hose every 15 minutes. They also sprinkle salt on its body.

That’s an apt picture of modern discipleship.

Discipleship has been separated from the Christian’s native habitat (ekklesia) and it’s become a highly individualistic event. An individual discipler “disciples” an individual disciplee to become a better individual disciple.

And we have not so learned Jesus Christ.

Christianity has and always will be a collective, corporate life and pursuit.

The issue, therefore, is not discipleship. The issue is restoring the ekklesia as God intended it to be, for the ekklesia is the Christian’s native habitat. And out of it flows everything else.

How Did the Twelve Make Disciples

The fish metaphor brings us face-to-face with a question that’s rarely asked today: How did the apostles who received the original commission of Jesus to “make disciples of all nations” carry out this commission?

If you read the New Testament chronologically from Acts to Revelation, there’s only one answer you can come up with. They did so by planting ekklesias all over the known world.

I invite anyone to challenge me on that point.

Converts were made and sustained into full-pledged followers of the Messiah, naturally and organically, simply by being part of the local ekklesia in their city.

The Twelve knew ekklesia themselves. They lived in an embryonic expression of it in Galilee with Jesus Himself. For 3 ½ years the Twelve and some women lived in community with one another where Jesus was both the center and the head of their life together.

When a Christian lives in a living expression of the Body of Christ today, he or she is being discipled just by being part of that expression. Just as a saltwater fish grows, is nurtured, and is sustained simply by living in the ocean and swimming with its school.

Ekklesia, therefore, is the birth right of every child of God. By living in it, God’s people naturally absorb Christ. To wit, they are “discipled” by Christ and into Christ through the community of the believers.

We Don’t Know Our History

Another observation I make is that people who are jazzed about discipleship (usually males in their mid-to-late 20s and early 30s – their leaders being in their 40s and 50s), seem to have no knowledge of the history of modern discipleship, where it came from, and why it even exists.

The story harkens back to John Nelson Darby’s teachings in the early 19th century. Darby used the art of proof-texting the New Testament to separate conversion from following Jesus.

The gulf between conversion and followership further widened with the emergence of Dallas Theological Seminary and the early teachers there. They perpetuated Darby’s doctrine which separated faith in Jesus as Savior from following Jesus as Lord.

What happened as a result should look familiar to you. The Christian landscape became peppered with many converts to Christianity who possessed fire-insurance policies, but few of them were actually following Jesus as this world’s true Lord.

The antidote was discipleship as a method and a program. Para-church organizations took the helm on this and ran with it. They created the first discipleship “programs.” Denominational churches began picking it up as well.

What did it look like? The “disciple” would meet with their “discipler” at least once a week. They would memorize Scripture together or study a Biblical text, go over sins committed (this is called “holding each other accountable”), pray together, discuss witnessing to the lost, and set a date for the next “discipleship” meeting.

Young Christians were excited about it at first, but in time, they began to see the roteness of it all. This left the door wide open for a strong reaction against the routine, the drudgery, and the staleness of discipleship as a method.

Walking through that door was the greasy grace movement. This was an overamplified version of Darby’s teachings taken to the extreme. “Do whatever you please because you are under grace” was the mantra. While this was going on, the Lord hit America with a huge revival, and many young people in the counter-culture were coming to Christ.

Some very gifted ministers took the wheel of that revival and spawned a new movement that became known as the “discipleship” movement (also called the “shepherding” movement). They reinstated all the old methods of discipleship, but they introduced a new theology and vocabulary to go with it. It was the theology of “submission to delegated authority.”

When the dust finally cleared, the discipleship movement left a trail of bruised and battered souls, some of whom have never recovered to this good day. In the minds of many Christians, “discipleship” became a four-letter word. So the pendulum against legalism and authoritarianism swung hard again.

The Christian landscape became quickly populated with nominal Christians and lukewarm believers who simply “prayed the prayer” (i.e., the “sinner’s prayer”).

As a reaction to the growing lukewarmness and nominal professions, “discipleship” has returned. It’s back in vogue again to try and repair the damage. Yet the advocates of modern discipleship are largely ignorant of the history behind it. So we are back to spraying fish on the lawn again.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

What history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it.

—G. W. F. Hegel

Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When I think of the practice of the church and modern discipleship, that quote comes to mind.

Would to God that we learned our history.

In a word, you cannot raise the bar on discipleship without raising the bar on the ekklesia—the living experience of the body of Christ—the native habitat in which true disciple-making and transformation take place.

Closing Challenges

So what’s my point? It’s quite simple. The problem is not with discipleship; the problem lies in our practice of the church.

Permit me to share my heart.

You who emphasize mission, where is your vision of God’s eternal purpose?

You who emphasize discipleship, where is your understanding that you cannot separate the ekklesia of God from producing serious followers of Jesus Christ who are mature, tempered, balanced, and free from religious bondage?

What God has joined together, let us no longer put asunder.

I welcome disagreement and even correction on the above. (If you can show me where I’m off using Scripture, then we both get to be right.) J

At the same time, please entertain the possibility that those of us who are raising this particular flag just may be on to something. And if we are, what do you plan to do about it?

I’d much rather have fair and rigorous disagreement over this matter than I would a theological head nod. For the latter changes nothing. We Christians are good at bulbously saying “amen” and then going back to business as usual.

May that not be the case here, as this issue is far too important.