Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Articles

Why There’s No Church Planting Movement in the West

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A few years ago, Ed Stetzer and I co-wrote a resource to catalyze movemental church planting. It’s called “1,000 Churches: How Past Movements Did It—And How Your Church Can, Too.” Over the next few weeks, I will re-post a chapter at a time. The following is Chapter 2: Why There’s No Church Planting Movement in the West.

It’s unlikely there will be a Church Planting Movement in the West. However, we’re still working toward something that is movemental. Let us explain. Again, there are 34 Western industrialized democracies in the world; countries like the U.S., Germany, Canada, and so forth. Among those Western industrialized democracies there is no such thing as a Church Planting Movement, as defined by David Garrison.

You say, “But Ed and Daniel, I read in David Garrison’s book that there were Church Planting Movements, and he named several of them in North America.” He did. We talked and don’t think he would say that now. Garrison has since revised his claim that there were Church Planting Movements in North America. We (Ed) actually wrote a paper together that became a chapter in Viral Churches, which laid out this reality among majority peoples. Yes, there are hundreds of missionaries who have been influenced by the Church Planting Movement methodology and who are trying to engage majority world peoples in Western industrialized democracies. Yet none of them have been able to see a movement thus far, which is why I think we may be setting an unattainable goal.

God can do it. We are praying for it. We should keep working toward it.
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Now, don’t misunderstand. God can do it. We are praying for it. We should keep working toward it. But, we also need to know that there are movements that have happened in our lifetimes but not like what we’ve seen (also in our lifetime) in the non-Western world (think Asia, in particular).

Undermining Church Planting Movements

There are some Church Planting Movements in Western industrialized, or semi-industrialized, non- democracies. Those movements are in Cuba, where downward government pressure prohibits churches from building buildings, forcing them to meet in homes. Once the homes started multiplying, they got a Church Planting Movement.

Church Planting Movements are also found in Shanghai, which is a non-Western industrialized society. The fact is, Church Planting Movements exist around the world, just not here in the Western industrialized world. Here’s one reason why: anthropology is an evolutionary process that leads to a societal structure. This structure sustains certain expressions and does not sustain others. For example, we live in a post-labor segmented society. In other words, if my car breaks down, then I’m going to go to my mechanic. If I have legal problems, then I’m going to go to my lawyer. If I need accounting help, then I go to my accountant. And if I need religious help, then I go to a religious professional or someone who has written something on that topic.

There are two expectations that now pervade our society: a professionalization expectation and a segmentation one. These expectations undermine the Church Planting Movement methodology that David Garrison has written about and that we desire to see here and around the world.

We are not saying these are all good things, but they are real—and really powerful.

Let’s say you go to an island or valley in Papua New Guinea. There, all the men wake up in the morning and go out to gather durian fruit. Or perhaps some go hunting, while the women stay home and care for the children and the village. Now, let’s say a missionary came and preached the gospel in that village, a revival broke out, and half the village came to know Jesus.

At this point, the missionary translates the Bible into their language, and as the people begin to read their Bible, they see that in 1 Timothy 3 it talks about pastors. So they decide that they need a pastor. Well, who should be their pastor? Since all of them do the same thing, they decide that the godliest person should be their pastor—and they pick the godliest person, a 50-year-old man who they’ve seen transformed by the gospel. Now what happens? What should the godliest person, who is now the pastor, do? It’s simple. He should do what he’s always done: continue to gather durian fruit.

In this model, his vocation hasn’t changed. There really is no way for his vocation to change. There is no pathway for changed vocation in that culture. So this creates a remarkably easy, reproducible leadership pattern where you can then go to the neighboring valley, share the gospel, and empower the godliest person to become the pastor. Then, the other godliest person becomes the missionary and visits the neighboring village and goes and spreads the gospel there. By default, the cultural environment is positioned for movement.

You can go throughout the entire region planting churches without any hindrance because all you need is the gospel, someone who is godly that meets the qualifications for a pastor, and the leading and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. It just multiplies from there. There’s no labor segmentation in Papua New Guinea amongst the people who gather durian. Everybody does the same thing. No one has to read or not read. No one has to have education or not have education.

Yet, if you are reading this, you probably live in a world where all that has changed. When people have the economic ability and the religious liberty to do so, they now gather in increasingly larger groups under more professional or gifted leadership. That’s why churches are getting larger, not smaller. Now I know there are all kinds of exceptions, but the exceptions are that: exceptions.

The Research Journey

Viral Churches was based on a research project funded through Leadership Network. The sponsor wanted to know what was really going on with church planting in North America. So Dave Travis, who was the CEO at Leadership Network at the time, connected us with one another and I (Ed) was commissioned to figure it out. We read every book and dissertation on church planting in the English language published since 1954. We covered everything. We looked at all denominations. We then took the positive findings that we discovered from that report and wrote Viral Churches to provoke the church to love and good deeds.

In the research, we discovered that we were not able to validate all of the claims to Church Planting Movements in the West. At the time, I (Ed) was actually the missiologist at one of the largest domestic mission agencies in North America.

While I was doing the research, I was told that there was a Church Planting Movement in Colorado. So I got on a plane, went to Colorado, and met with the people in the supposed Church Planting Movement. While talking to them, they said, “Yes, there are some God things that are being done here, but we don’t have a Church Planting Movement. You really have to go to Austin, though. That’s where you’ll definitely see a Church Planting Movement.”

So I went to Austin. When I was there, I met with them and they said, “Things are going really great here, but by no means do we have a Church Planting Movement. You have to check out Rhode Island though. That’s where you’ll definitely see a Church Planting Movement.”

I contacted the people in Rhode Island. And they said the same thing, “There’s no Church Planting Movement going on here, but there is one in Long Beach. You should check them out.” Then I went to Long Beach and they said, “No we’re not a Church Planting Movement yet, but we want to be and we’re trying to be.”

You get the point.

People kept referring to other places with talk of legendary movements.

I felt like I was on the search for the Holy Grail. And perhaps that’s what Church Planting Movements are kind of like. No one has personally seen them, but they know somebody who claims to have seen them, and it’s just a few villages over.

What Now?

So, we could not find a Church Planting Movement among the majority of peoples within the 34 Western industrialized democracies. And making people run after things they can never achieve can be demoralizing. Now you might say, “Ed and Daniel, God in His sovereignty can make it happen.” Yes, we know that, but we also know that God in His sovereignty works within the cultural containers that are human existence and relationships.

On the other hand, we have seen Church Multiplication Movements in our lifetime. As Warren Bird and I (Ed) described in Viral Churches, these are “a rapid reproduction of churches planting churches, measured by a reproduction rate of 50 percent through the third generation of churches, with new churches having 50 percent new converts.” We’ve seen this multiplication with Calvary Chapel in the late 70s and 80s. We’ve seen this multiplication also with the Vineyard in the 80s and into the 90s. This multiplication has happened with Pentecostalism in seasons in the 1900s. The Baptists and Methodists experienced this as well from 1795 through the early 1800s. But right now, there is no Church Multiplication Movement happening here in the West. We think it’s attainable (since many of us have seen it in our lifetimes), but it’s just not happening at the moment.

The church needs to move from an addition mindset to a reproduction one.
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If God wants to do a Church Planting Movement in the West and prove the research wrong, we will say to the Lord Jesus Christ, “Amen, and we’re excited!” But until that time, we need to call the Church to move from an addition mindset to a reproduction one so that churches will commit to planting churches that will plant churches that will plant churches to the third generation. We think at the third generation you can call something a movement.

Next week, we’ll unpack the characteristics of movements.

A Brief History of Movements

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A few years ago, Ed Stetzer and I co-wrote a resource to catalyze movemental church planting. It’s called “1,000 Churches: How Past Movements Did It—And How Your Church Can, Too.” Over the next few weeks, I will re-post a chapter at a time. Here is the Introduction. The following is Chapter 1: A Brief History of Recent Movements.

Join us on a short journey exploring the recent history of significant movements that have shaped what we’re seeing in the West today. This history is important to digest as we look forward to the possibilities that lie ahead—with God! Less than 50 years ago, a movement was birthed to reach a specific subculture in the United States: the hippies. At a time when America was infatuated with drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll, there was a great awakening of individuals who decided to reject that lifestyle and seek God instead. This was the Jesus People movement of the 1960s and 1970s. When Kenn Gulliksen was sent out by the Calvary Chapel in 1974 to start a church in West Los Angeles, no one would’ve guessed or even imagined that less than 50 years later, there would be over 2,400 churches in 95 countries that would share the same name: Vineyard.

Eight years after Gulliksen planted the first Vineyard church, there were at least seven Vineyard churches in this loosely defined network. It was at this point, in 1982, when John Wimber, who is one of my (Ed’s) heroes (I even named my WIFI network after him), became the first director of this growing Vineyard movement.

Sure, your church may not be Vineyard and may not affirm all they do, but you can’t deny the tangible, movemental impact they have had planting new churches. This impact is, without question, one of their greatest attributes. In fact, here are seven constants to church planting that John Wimber outlined and lived by as he led the Vineyard movement to plant over 1,000 churches in their lifetime:

1. Constantly Tell Your Story

When church planters were getting ready to launch, Wimber would commonly teach them to share why they were there.

“Tell everyone why you are there. And once you’ve told them ten times—tell them five hundred more…The problem is many pastors get bored of telling their own story—so they quit telling it. And then they wonder why their church quits growing. People thrive on narrative, that’s how God created us as humans, and a powerful narrative becomes the key factor of vision-casting and leadership. Not telling your story can be a contributing factor to lack of church growth, because people lose focus when you’re not consistently telling who you are and where you’re going. And they lose their reason for existence.”

2. Constantly Tell His Story

As important as your story is, the true priority is His story—Jesus’ story. Because people thrive on narratives, you need to consider how to share your story in a way that connects
with God’s grand narrative for the world. How does Jesus fit into why you are there? Wimber would teach church planters that, “Every occasion ought to have His story in it. Jesus is the Son of God. It’s always in there, always wrapped up in the midst of any exchange with people.”

3. Constantly Explain the Mysteries of Life

This point was twofold for Wimber. On the one hand, he emphasized the importance of calling people to a deeper commitment to Christ—not just to salvation but also to mission. Then he elaborated on the importance of metrics to help you know how you’re doing in ministry.

“We have to have ways of measuring where we’re at in ministry. Most people play church like guys playing basketball without a ball and without a hoop. They play without the very things which provide a measurement, or standard, for who’s winning the game…So when it comes to church leadership, I keep putting in the ball and the hoops. I keep bringing out things that are concrete ways of measuring how you’re doing: Is the church growing numerically? Is there tangible fruit? Are people getting saved and assimilated into the church? How many of the poor are you caring for? How many new leaders have you developed? Is the quality of ministry and body life and love amongst people growing? Those kinds of questions make some people mad. They don’t want you introducing those kind of elements, because if you start actually measuring, things don’t look so good. Some would rather appear to play than actually play.”

4. Constantly Disciple

There are two types of family members in your church, those serving in the army and those healing in the hospital. Part of your church’s long-term plan for movemental growth involves consistently advancing the front line of the gospel into new territories. You need disciples to dig in the trenches and fight for ground with their friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Wimber taught that it was okay to be in the hospital temporarily to get healed, but it wasn’t okay to stay there permanently.

5. Constantly Expand the Infrastructure

At the beginning of a church plant, it’s okay to not have much infrastructure because you don’t need it. But as you grow, Wimber emphasized that you need to have the discipline to structure toward growth. Sustainable, repeatable, and scalable structure that allows people to connect and care for others is vital for the health of a church.

6. Constantly Live in Brokenness

The New Testament calls us to a high level of character, and the worst thing you can do is to put on a religious façade and pretend you have it all together. The mark of a maturing believer is self-awareness when you fail and transparency within community to cling to Jesus with others. Wimber regularly exhorted his church planters to “live constantly with the awareness that we just don’t measure up” so that we can rely on and trust Jesus to make up the difference.

7. Constantly Re-evaluate and Be Flexible in What You Are Doing

This isn’t a license to continually tweak things that aren’t broken, but the awareness that evaluation is critical for growth and the health of a movement. Wimber said it well: “But whatever you do, don’t hold onto things for their own sake. Programs are a means to an end. Evaluate their effectiveness. Keep what works; get rid of what doesn’t. Do whatever is necessary to help the church of Jesus Christ to advance.”

These seven constants are as applicable today as they were 30 years ago and represent two primary commitments. First, a commitment to perseverance in faith, believing
the promises of God that He will build the church. Second, a missional intentionality evident in the movement of people directed toward a kingdom of God objective.

Calvary Chapel and Hope Chapel

In 1965, when Chuck Smith came to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, he was disillusioned by the latest church growth strategies. With a resolve to preach the Scriptures, rather than compete with neighboring churches for the saints, he showed up that very first Sunday to a staggering 25 people. Though the hippie subculture was not one that he was comfortable relating to, he decided to focus on preaching the truth and let the Scriptures stand for themselves. Less than two years later, his church had grown to almost 2,000 members, and now, 50 years later, the Calvary Chapel movement finds itself with more than 1,700 churches around the world.

Hope Chapel, while similar to Calvary Chapel, is another example of a modern day movement that has planted in excess of 1,000 churches in their generation—actually, more than twice that number! Ralph Moore, starting with 12 people in 1971, now has over 2,300 churches globally that tie their roots back to this church. After reflecting upon their process to get there, Moore states, “Disciple-making is at the heart of Hope Chapel…I’d say that making disciples is 90 percent of this movement.”

Church Planting Movements

It is possible to plant 1,000 churches in our lifetime because in our lifetime we’ve seen movements that have planted more than 1,000 churches.

Their legacy reminds us of the possibilities that exist if we would step out in obedience and allow the Holy Spirit to use us to make disciples and multiply ministries of mercy. In other parts of the world, and with some different descriptions, these are technically called Church Planting Movements. David Garrison defines this as “a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.” While this may be common today outside of the West, here they are few and far between. As of this moment, there are no Church Planting Movements (as Garrison described them) among majority peoples in any of the 34 Western industrialized democracies in the world.

If you’re going to plant 1,000 churches in your lifetime, you’re either to accidentally stumble into it, or you’re going to intentionally work through it.
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If you’re going to plant 1,000 churches in your lifetime, you’re either going to do one of two things: you’re going to accidentally stumble into it, which is what happened in Calvary Chapel’s case; or you’re going to intentionally work through it, which is more of what happened with Hope Chapel. In either case, you’ll never plant 1,000 churches out of a single church. To get there, you need to plant churches that have a reproducing DNA so that when you plant them, they will plant other churches that will then plant others. It’s not rocket science; it’s kingdom multiplication.

Just think about Bob Roberts at Northwood Church in Keller, Texas. He has planted over 200 churches out of his church, a countless number of granddaughter churches, and many more in partnership with GlocalNet. What you may not be aware of, however, is that Northwood Church was planted out of North Richland Hills Baptist Church, which was planted out of Richland Hills Baptist Church, which was planted out of Lonesome Dove Church that was started by a man named John Freeman—a Texas Ranger and a Baptist pastor who planted hundreds of churches from Texas to California in the 1800s and early 1900s.

A vision for church multiplication and disciple making transcends generations and serves as an honoring legacy to the glory of God that stands the test of time.
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A vision for church multiplication and disciple making transcends generations and serves as an honoring legacy to the glory of God that stands the test of time. Before we get to the nuts and bolts of starting a movement and planting 1,000 churches in your lifetime, we need to first explore the reason why there are no Church Planting Movements in the West today. And that’s the topic for next week.

Mass Gatherings and Church Multiplication Movements

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A few years ago, Ed Stetzer and I co-wrote a resource to catalyze movemental church planting. It’s called “1,000 Churches: How Past Movements Did It—And How Your Church Can, Too.” Over the next few weeks, I will re-post a chapter at a time. The following is the Introduction: Mass Gatherings and Movements.

The year 2011 was the year of social media, mass gatherings, and movements, or as we now know it, The Arab Spring. It’s believed to have all started in Tunisia when a 26-year-old man, who was trying to sell fruits and vegetables in order to support his widowed mother and six siblings, had his cart confiscated and was slapped by a policewoman. Humiliated and full of rage, he set himself on fire in front of a government building.

This wasn’t the first time an instance like this had happened, but when it was captured by cellphone cameras and shared on the Internet, everything changed. This act of injustice, which led to the President of Tunisia fleeing the country a month later, awakened a sleeping giant across the Middle East. Just consider what else happened that year:

  • January 14, 2011: Government overthrown in Tunisia.
  • February 11, 2011: Government overthrown in Egypt; President Mubarak resigns facing charges of killing unarmed protestors.
  • February 15, 2011: Anti-government protests begin in Libya. On October 20, Gaddafi is killed.

And the list goes on and on with Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman.

Mass gatherings, riots, and movements are nothing new. Just consider when over 200,000 people gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1963. Or what about the L.A. Race Riots of 1992 and the Ferguson, Missouri, riots of 2014? Then there are the riots that I (Daniel) am personally most embarrassed of—not because I was there, but because this was my home city—when, in 2011, the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup 4-0 against the Boston Bruins. Fans went insane. Police cars were set on fire, shops were looted, glass was broken, and cars were overturned. It was chaos. And at the end of 2016, let’s not forget the massive movement where millions came out protesting and calling for the impeachment of Park Geun-Hye, then President of South Korea.

We remember moments like these because people gathered. And when they gathered, they did something together they wouldn’t have been able to do by themselves. They saw both the difficulties and possibilities so clearly that they were able to visualize a different reality. This vision for a golden tomorrow has fueled movements in the past and is what will spark a church multiplication movement today.

A Golden Tomorrow: Planting 1,000 Churches

Subtract your age from the number 80. Now take that number, and add it to this year’s number. What year do you get? 2050? 2070? 2090?

What if we told you that it’s possible to plant 1,000 churches before you get to that year? 1,000 churches in your lifetime? Would you believe us? In fact, before you move any further, in the space below, try reverse engineering what you would need to do in order to plant 1,000 churches in your lifetime.

It’s happened before, and it can happen again. We live in exciting times where we have the capability of reaching multitudes of people—more than any other generation before us. The world has grown smaller, and our capacity for knowledge transfer and multiplication has dramatically expanded.

Historically speaking, 1,000 churches have been planted in the average lifespan of an individual in China and Korea, as well as in the West with the Calvary Chapel, Vineyard, and Hope Chapel movements. Although this figure seems overwhelming, recent history has proven that when God is in the mix and the church is stirred to action, anything is possible! It is our prayer that this concise book will increase your optimism and vision for church planting possibilities in a way that becomes catalytic and contagious for the kingdom’s sake.

In chapter one of this book, we will take a closer look at each of these examples given as we explore movements and what’s taken place in recent history. This chapter’s aim is to inform so that reform and movement may be catalyzed. In chapter two, we’ll explore why there are no church planting movements currently in the West. Chapter three is where we’ll examine the characteristics of movements and their barriers with a view to greater impact and missional impetus. We’ll then conclude with an outline of the systems and principles required to plant 1,000 churches in your lifetime.

Let’s stop longing for the past, when things were better and when churches grew and expanded en masse in the West. Instead, let’s look forward and pray that God would do it again in a fresh way. Let’s lift our eyes above what we see and allow our vision of the glory of God to shape our present realities and direct our future paths.

Let’s stop longing for the past. Let’s lift our eyes above what we see and allow our vision of the glory of God to shape our present realities and direct our future paths.
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The Five Levels

LEVEL 1: SUBTRACTING // LEVEL 2: PLATEAUING // LEVEL 3: ADDING // LEVEL 4: REPRODUCING // LEVEL 5: MULTIPLYING

From the beginning, we’ve been working with our friends at Exponential to define, outline, and articulate clear language and levels to help the Church move toward multiplication. These five levels were first presented in Todd Wilson, Dave Ferguson, and Alan Hirsch’s Becoming a Level 5 Multiplying Church. Below, you’ll see the way we articulated these levels in Multiplication Today, Movements Tomorrow, our previous book detailing our State of Church Planting research on multiplication. In Dream Big, Plan Smart, Todd Wilson and Will Mancini continued the conversation by laying out ten characteristics of a level five culture, and the pathways to get there.

Instead of championing an addition scorecard, let’s move toward multiplication by first figuring out how to reproduce ourselves 1,000 fold. Let’s begin by seeing how others have done it in the past.

LevelTitleDescription of a Church at this Level
1SubtractingStruggling to survive, tension in finances, congregants leaving, scarcity mentality, and there’s no plan for developing leaders. Multiplication is not happening in any form or fashion.
2PlateauingLiving in tension, since they are struggling in some areas and growing in others, while ultimately being constrained by their scarcity thinking. Multiplication is a distant hope rather than a current reality.
3AddingIncreasing attendance, focused on growing the church, lots of resources allocated towards the weekend service, program and event driven, and staff led. Multiplication is about adding services or sites.
4ReproducingLiving in tension between releasing/sending and accumulating/growing. Multiplication is more activity- based than values-based. Multiplication is more deliberate and planned than spontaneous.
5MultiplyingMore focused on multiplying new churches than growing their attendance. Intentional with finances, vision, and strategy towards church planting. Multiplication happens spontaneously and is not limited to paid staff. Every disciple is a potential church planter/team member.

Next week, we’ll continue by unpacking A Brief History of Movements.

How many sermons does it take to find your sound?

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“It takes 200 sermons, before you know how to preach one.”

I’ve been wrestling with this statement, ever since I heard this from a seasoned preacher who was a couple decades older than me.

He was essentially asserting that you need to preach approximately 200 sermons…

  • Before you can discover your voice
  • To understand how to preach the way that God designed you to speak
  • In order to know what sort of preacher (and pitcher) you are

This makes sense (more on the parallel to pitching down below). After all, sermons aren’t general evergreen content that can be re-used and re-preached exactly as-is, regardless of the context. Sermons aren’t lectures that can be honed and re-taught semester after semester either. Preaching a sermon is much more than that. Preaching is the humble act of discerning and communicating God’s timely message, to a specific people, in a particular place.

Preaching is the humble act of discerning and communicating God’s timely message, to a specific people, in a particular place.
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So it makes sense that you need enough reps—approximately 200—to truly understand how to prepare and preach God’s word to God’s people in a way that is true to you.

I’ve found this to be true

In my first four years of pastoral ministry, I preached approximately 48 times a year. This was way too many reps, and I got burned out.

So for the next five years, I went down to approximately 4-8 times a year. While this was nice for the first year or two, I eventually realized that this was too infrequent for me.

For the next four years after that, I preached approximately 20-26 times a year. This was the best rhythm by far, and essentially prepared me for my current role and load at 32-35 times a year.

While I’m still honing my voice and growing as a preacher (I never want to stop developing), I’ve noticed that after 200 sermons, I’ve finally learnt how to preach one. Steve Carter, my preaching coach, has helped me uncover my voice, my sound, and my style.

It takes 200 sermons, before you know how to preach one
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So, what does preaching have to do with pitching?

As I was wrestling with my voice/sound/style, I realized that there were a ton of parallels between preaching and pitching.

Just like pitchers have different types of pitches in baseball, like the fastball, curveball, slider, changeup, splitter, knuckleball, sinker, and cutter, so do preachers! An expository sermon is a type of pitch, as is a topical sermon, or a narrative one. Some preachers have more of a teaching style, others are more inspirational, and some are very extemporaneous and exuberant—all of these are like different types of pitches in baseball.

Not only are there different types of pitches in baseball (and styles of sermons for preachers), but there are also different types of pitchers (and preachers). Starters start the game, set the tone, and will play a few to several innings. Relievers specialize in short bursts of pitching, usually only facing a few batters or pitching for an inning or two. Closers are a type of Reliever that only appears in the final inning(s) to save the game. And then there are the Specialists: Long Relievers, Setup Man, Left-Handed Specialist, Knuckleball Pitcher, Spot Starter.

In addition to all of this fun baseball trivia, do you see the parallels between the different types of pitchers and preachers? Lead Pastors and Teaching Pastors are like the Starters. Youth Pastors, Associate Pastors, and Guest Preachers are like the Relievers, Closers, or Specialists.

What’s the point?

The point of this article is to point out the fact that just like there’s not one type of ideal sermon (or pitch), there’s not one type of ideal preacher (or pitcher) either! So instead of comparing yourself with your role-models—or trying to imitate them—focus on getting your reps in. As you preach more sermons, you’ll discover what sort of pitches get you strikes, and what sort of pitcher God’s created you to be.

It’s like that how that old Hebraic tale goes, “Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?”

Just like there’s not one type of ideal sermon, there’s not one type of ideal preacher.
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Working Genius vs. StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths)

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cliftonstrengths vs working genius

In the leadership world, there’s been a huge uptake of the Working Genius. Bravo to Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group for putting out an extraordinary assessment and tool to help leaders and organizations discover the six phases of work, and how to work better with each other!

Even though I’ve been a certified Gallup Strengths Performance Coach (Strengths Advisor) since 2008, that’s not the only assessment that I use in my leadership and coaching. In fact, when I find one that fills a unique role, I become as much of an advocate for that one as I am with the StrengthsFinder assessment (now known as CliftonStrengths).

Enter: The Working Genius.

I recently had my entire staff team at Beulah complete the Working Genius assessment. Since we also use the StrengthsFinder assessment in performance management, I wanted to outline how the two of them compare and contrast with each other. And since I couldn’t find a comparative chart online, I went ahead and drew one up.

I hope you find this helpful.

StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths) vs. Working Genius

STRENGTHSFINDER (CLIFTONSTRENGTHS)WORKING GENIUS
PURPOSE:To discover how you approach your work.To discover how you work.
WHAT:The assessment helps you identify your Top 5 themes out of 34.The assessment helps you identify your two Working Geniuses, two Working Competencies, and two Working Frustrations.
PHILOSOPHY:The best of the best focus on their strengths, while managing their weaknesses.You are at your best when you focus on your Working Genius, and manage your working frustrations.
CHARACTER/MORALS:There are no bad StrengthsFinder themes.There are no bad Working Geniuses.
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR WEAKNESSES:Use complimentary themes, or partner with others who are strong at what you’re weak in.Partner with others who have a Genius where your Frustration is, and vice versa.
CATEGORIES:There are four domains of strengths: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking.There are three phases of work: Ideation, Activation, and Implementation.
CREATOR:GallupThe Table Group

Great and Meaningful Work

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“I want this to be a place where you can do great and meaningful work with the people that you love.”

That’s what I shared with my staff team at Beulah when we were celebrating our certification as a Best Christian Workplace for 2022. It was our best year ever, as our overall score marked us as flourishing. Now according to Best Christian Workplaces, there are eight keys to a flourishing workplace culture, and I was excited to see that we grew in every single area compared to the previous year:

  • Fantastic Teams
  • Life-Giving Work
  • Outstanding Talent
  • Uplifting Growth
  • Rewarding Compensation
  • Inspirational Leadership
  • Sustainable Strategy
  • Healthy Communication

And while I am the primary preacher at Beulah Alliance Church, preaching to our church family isn’t the only thing I do. As Lead Pastor, I am responsible to lead, pastor, and lead our pastors and staff team. As a result, creating a workplace culture where our 50+ staff can do great and meaningful work with the people that they love is really important to me!

I see that as equally important as my calling to preach because that’s how we’re going to live out Ephesians 4—where it’s not the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers who are doing the work of ministry, but it’s the people of God! My role—and the role of our staff team—isn’t about doing. It’s about equipping. And when we equip our church family to do the work of ministry, we will see the body of Christ built up, move toward unity in the faith, and grow into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness. Instead of being tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, we will be firm, strong, and be able to stand against the schemes of the evil one (Ephesians 4:11-16; 6:10-12).

So to create and cultivate a culture where our staff team can do great and meaningful work with the people they love, we have three leadership virtues: healthy, humble, and hungry.

I want us to be a HEALTHY team by…

  • Praying for and with one another
  • Giving each other the benefit of the doubt
  • Refusing to hold grudges
  • Growing in our spiritual, emotional, and relational health

I want us to be a HUMBLE team by…

  • Sharing credit
  • Celebrating team over self
  • Helping each other get back up when we fail
  • Despising ego

I want us to be a HUNGRY team by…

  • Being self-motivated and hungry to grow ourselves, others, and Beulah
  • Being a place where you can continue to grow
  • Together—shoulder to shoulder—being a place where we are actively moving forward

In other words, I want Beulah to be a place where you can do great and meaningful work with the people that you love. I want us to be teammates who love Jesus, are for one another, and are passionately focused on seeing God’s Kingdom come and His will be done in Greater Edmonton.

Do you want this too?

We’re always looking for fantastic people who love Jesus and the Church to join our team. And we actually have a few mission critical roles open, such as campus pastor positions for our Southwest campus and our Faro de Luz campus, and a role for an Outreach Pastor. You can learn more about those roles (and the rest of our open roles) here.

“Judge not” is not about being blind

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We live in such an interesting point in time, don’t we?

On the one hand, we’re encouraged to rate and review everything—our favourite restaurants, businesses, workouts, books, podcasts, shows, and even professors and doctors! In fact, not only are we encouraged, but we’re even incentivized to do so! But at the same time, we’re also drowning in criticism, contempt, and a wildfire of seemingly knee-jerk reactions and poorly thought-out opinions to tweets, rumours, and news articles—both real and fake.

Hmm…I wonder if there’s a connection?

When Jesus said, “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged,” was this what he was referring to? Was he warning us about the perils of five-star ratings, and industries built upon crowd sourcing reviews? Or was he perhaps talking about all of the subtle—and also overt—ways that we pass judgement onto others? Like, “I can’t believe they parked like that! How inconsiderate.” Or, “What a show off. What is he trying to prove posting that on the internet?”

It’s the latter!

When Jesus said “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged,” he’s referring to all of the ways that we judge others through our thoughts, our ensuing facial reactions, or the words that come out of our mouths. He’s talking about the tendency that we have to often criticize, condemn, find fault with, or think that we’re higher or better than others—especially when we’re “hangry” or tired.

Let’s take a look at the whole passage,

Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use. Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye? Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5 CSB)

Now after reading this, it’s completely reasonable to think to yourself, “Alright so…to help me not judge, I’m just going to keep my head down and turn a blind eye to everything!”

Note that I said “reasonable to think to yourself,” and not “reasonable to do.” Going to an extreme like this is not the way to live out Jesus’ command to “Judge not.”

I love how the theologian and pastor, John Stott, explains this passage,

To sum up, the command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men (by suspending our critical powers which help to distinguish us from animals) but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God (by setting ourselves up as judges).

Oh how we often fall into this trap!

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve caught myself—mid-sentence—yelling at my kids to stop yelling at each other. When we judge others like this, we’re hypocrites. We’re near-sighted hypocrites who don’t realize that we’re pointing out the splinter in another’s eye, while we ourselves have a beam of wood in ours!

So the next time you find yourself tempted to pass judgement on another person…

…what do you think would happen if you paused and first asked yourself, “When have I been guilty of this myself?” And then went to the cross and spent time in prayer for yourself and for the other person, instead of judgement?

Friends, let’s judge not!

Keeping Short Accounts

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It’s been a little over three years since my family and I moved back to Canada for me to become the next Lead Pastor at Beulah Alliance Church.

Here are a couple of posts that I did on the succession journey:

I was recently interviewed by Sean Morgan about the transition, why humility must be the chief characteristic of the outgoing pastor, and why leaders must keep short accounts.

Here’s the episode on the Leaders in Living Rooms Podcast:

Our Focus for the Next 50 Years

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If you could focus on something for the next 50 years—and give all of your best thought, focus, resources, and energy toward that one thing—what would it be?

If, as a church, we could focus on something or some thing(s) for the next 50 years, what would make the greatest difference? And when Jesus taught us to pray, “May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” what efforts do you think he had in mind?

Recently, Timothy Keller wrote a series of four articles that are a must-read for every Christian pastor and leader on The Decline and Renewal of the American Church:

  1. The Decline of the Mainline
  2. The Decline of Evangelicalism
  3. The Path to Renewal
  4. The Strategy for Renewal

I urge you to take the time to read all four. It will probably take a good hour to read and process all of them, but it’ll be worth your time. Keller is a gift to the church.

Now when it comes to that something or those some thing(s) to focus on for the next 50 years, here are a list of eight projects that Keller is inviting us to consider. The following are his words, not mine from his fourth article:

The Projects of Renewal

This project list is not final. God will lead the leaders to his will for them. And this list which I put forward for consideration was given in the third article. For reader convenience here it is again with somewhat fuller descriptions.

  1. Church planting and renewal. We need to double the number of new church plants in the U.S. from the current 3-4,000 to 6-8,000 annually. Current models of church planting need to be changed. First, because they are both too under-resourced among poor and working-class populations and done too expensively in the more advantaged populations. Church planters, in general, will need (a) far more coaching and support, (b) far more training and education delivered to them as they minister, and (c) more institutional support for an evangelistic model that grows through conversion rather than a marketing model that grows through marketing and transfer.
  2. ‘Counter-Catechesis’ discipleship. Christian education, in general, needs to be massively redone. We must not merely explain Christian doctrine to children, youth, and adults, but use Christian doctrine to subvert the baseline cultural narratives to which believers are exposed in powerful ways every day. We should distribute this material widely to all, disrupting existing channels, flooding society, as it were, with the material as well as directly incorporating it into local churches.
  3. Post-Christian Evangelism. The Christian church in the West faces the first post-Christian, deeply secular culture in history. It has not yet developed a way to do evangelism with the secular and the “nones” that really gains traction and sees many people regularly coming to faith. This project is to develop both content and means for such evangelism. The means will entail a mobilization of lay people in evangelism, as in the early church. The content will show how to demonstrate to deeply skeptical people that Christianity is respectable, desirable, and believable (cf. Blaise Pascal’s Pensée 187).
  4. A Justice Network. We must create a network—at least one trans-denominational ministry or maybe a network of networks—that organizes Christians and churches in communities to both help various needy populations and also to work for a more just and fair social order at the local level. Only relatively large congregations can mount effective ministries to address social problems. A network will provide any church and every church in a locale multiple ways to be involved in visible-to-the-world ways and means for tackling the most acute and chronic injustices and social issues in a community or region.
  5. A Faith-work Network. We must create a network (or, again, a network of new and existing ministries) that organizes and equips Christians for ‘faithful presence’ in their vocations, [19] to help them serve the common good through integrating their faith with their work. The network will help churches disciple people for their public life so Christians neither seal their faith off from their work, nor infiltrate vocational fields for domination.
  6. The “Christian mind” project. Evangelicalism has a strongly anti-intellectual cast to it that must be overcome without losing its appeal to the majority of the population. The goals include increasing the number of Christians on faculties, forging a robust intellectual culture for orthodox Protestantism, and increasing the number of Christian public intellectuals. This will not only entail promoting believers into the existing intellectual and cultural economy of basically (a) largely progressive universities and (b) largely conservative think tanks. It will also mean creating some kind of alternate cultural economy for scholarship and intellectual work.
  7. A new leadership pipeline. We must not only renew, re-create, expand, and greatly strengthen youth ministry and campus ministries across the country, but we must link these (more tightly than in the past) with local churches and denominations, ministry/theological training centers, colleges, and seminaries—forming coherent yet highly diverse and flexible pathways for leadership development (e.g. conversion, then student leadership, then internships, then staff positions and other leadership positions). The purpose is to produce increasing numbers of well-equipped Christian leaders.
  8. Behind all these seven projects is an eighth ‘meta’ project. Call it Christian philanthropy. We cannot renew the church or be of any help to society without strong financial undergirding. That will require a change in how Christians give and steward their wealth such that it will release far more money for ministry than has been available.

Is God calling you to focus on one of these eight? If you could focus on something for the next 50 years—and give all of your best thought, focus, resources, and energy toward that one thing—what would it be?

Living and Drifting when in Transition

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Have you heard about The World’s Toughest Race?

It was a 671 km race over 11 days in Fiji that involved paddling, sailing, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, rappelling, climbing, and canyoneering. That’s the equivalent to 16 marathons, but multiplied exponentially in difficulty! When you watch the first episode, everyone is absolutely stoked, excited, and revved up to compete. Of the 60 teams from 30 countries, some have been training for months, and others for years.

During the race, the top teams slept only a few hours a day, if even. In fact, one team who dropped out in the middle only slept four hours in four days. Others stopped in the middle because of hypothermia or infections. Some just couldn’t go on because of pure exhaustion, others dropped out because of physical, mental, and emotional fatigue. And for most, it all happened in the middle.

What is it about the middle?

Don’t you find that we often quit in the middle? We get scared, and then we quit. We run out of money, and then we quit. We run out of time, we’re not serious enough, we lose interest, we settle for being mediocre, or we just focus on the short term instead of the long term…and then we quit. And doesn’t all of that usually happen when we’re in the middle?

If there’s anyone who knows anything about living in the middle, it’s the Israelites! For 40 years, they lived in between their life of captivity and the Promised Land—that’s 40 years in the middle. As time passed—and as they got used to living in the middle—something interesting happened. They began to drift.

Their longing for the familiar led to a longing to quit because they began forgetting all the ways that God had miraculously rescued them from their former life of slavery. And eventually, their gratitude drifted into mumbling, their thanksgiving drifted into grumbling, and their hope drifted into despair. In other words, when the Israelites were living in the middle, they forgot the past, began turning inward, and eventually drifted off course.

Has this ever happened to you?

As the Israelites slowly started forgetting their past and taking their eyes off of God, their God-worship was replaced with idol-worship. And even though they boldly declared that they would never have any other god beside the one True God (Exodus 24:3), they still bowed down to an idol—all because they drifted.

As we see all throughout the Scriptures, and in fact, all throughout the news as well, our natural tendency is to drift because our hearts are full of idols. With the Israelites, I know that Aaron made a golden calf (Exodus 32:1-6)—which is kind of why Moses flipped out—but that was simply a physical expression of what the people had already fashioned in their hearts and were already bowing down to. Even before they asked Aaron to make an idol for them, the Israelites had already started living for and worshipping the idol of comfort, the idol of comparison, and the golden calf of me, myself, and I.

When we’re in the middle, our natural tendency is to drift because our hearts are full of idols.
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When they were in the middle of leaving behind a life of slavery and moving toward a life of freedom, their hearts wandered and they drifted. They forgot what God had done and how he had miraculously rescued them through signs and wonders. And as a result, they began turning inward, and they eventually drifted off course.

Do you find yourself in the middle of something right now? In transition? Or living in between?

If so, then beware because you will most likely end up drifting when you’re in the middle—just like the current that will take you down a river, or the tide that will take you back to shore, or push you further out. When we’re in the middle, our natural tendency is to drift, unless we are proactive and intentional to paddle the other way! And these days, while you might not necessarily create and bow down to a golden calf while you’re in the middle, your heart will often drift to an idol that you’ve previously secured yourself to, or bowed down to in the past.

When we’re in the middle, our natural tendency is to drift, unless we are proactive and intentional to paddle the other way!
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What is that for you?

Is it work? When you are in the middle, do you have a tendency to just bury yourself in work to distract yourself? Or is it perhaps leisure and trying to have fun and fill yourself with experiences? Or maybe it’s alcohol or drugs to help you relax and forget? Or perhaps it’s pornography because it makes you feel like you’re in control?

Instead of letting yourself fall into a tried, tested, and true tactic of the evil one, I urge you to do what some of the Israelites did once they recognized that they drifted—repent. Lay down your pride, confess your mistakes, and come humbly before Jesus because he cares for you.

If you’ve drifted and find yourself bowing down to an idol from your past, my prayer is that you would be overwhelmed by the unchanging compassion and grace of Jesus. And that the guilt or shame that you are experiencing would be replaced with the abounding faithful love and truth of Jesus as he washes over and forgives your iniquity, rebellion, and sin. Because here’s the truth: there’s nothing you can ever do to make Jesus love you less, and there’s nothing you can ever do to make Jesus love you more. His love is ever constant, ever present, and forever unchanging—even when we drift off course.

There’s nothing you can ever do to make Jesus love you less, and there’s nothing you can ever do to make Jesus love you more.
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*My article here was originally published on February 11, 2021 on Impactus.