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 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. 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.

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.

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.

Level	Title	Description of a Church at this Level
1	Subtracting	Struggling 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.
2	Plateauing	Living 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.
3	Adding	Increasing 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.
4	Reproducing	Living in tension between releasing/sending and accumulating/growing. Multiplication is more activity- based than values-based. Multiplication is more deliberate and planned than spontaneous.
5	Multiplying	More 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.