In this episode we chat with Jeff Christopherson who is a planter, author, speaker and a leading missiological voice from right here in Canada. In this interview we ask him to put on his "missiologist" hat and talk to us about what he sees are the changes we need to make in church multiplication strategies to be effective in reaching Canadians.
In this episode we chat with Jeff Christopherson who is a planter, author, speaker and a leading missiological voice from right here in Canada. In this interview we ask him to put on his "missiologist" hat and talk to us about what he sees are the changes we need to make in church multiplication strategies to be effective in reaching Canadians.
Transcript of Podcast by Multiply Network
Created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-
making communities across Canada
December 13, 2019 - Jeff Christopherson
Paul Fraser: Welcome to the Multiply Network Podcast, a podcast created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-making communities across Canada.
Hi there. Welcome to our podcast, the last one of 2019. I’m so glad you tuned in. I don’t know when you are listening to this. If you are listening to this before Christmas we want to wish you a Merry Christmas. And if you are listening to it after Christmas we want to wish you a Happy New Year.
Today on the podcast we have Jeff Christopherson. Some of you may not know who he is but he is a leading missiologist in Canada. He’s an author-speaker. He writes for many different blogs, including Christianity Today, the Send Institute and he has also led church multiplication at a local level, regional and national and he comes with tons of experience. So we get a chance to pick his brain on the future of church multiplication, what kind of models we need and how we all need to work together in the body of Christ to reach Canada with the gospel. You’re going to love it and here it is.
We are blessed and excited to have Jeff Christopherson with us on the podcast. Hi Jeff.
Jeff Christopherson: A. Hey Paul, how are you doing?
Q. Doing well and thanks for taking time to be with us today. Excited about this podcast for lots of reasons, certainly just the friendship we are developing, relationship, you’ve got lots of years of experience in church multiplication, you are a missiologist, a thoughtful thinker. But you are also a little bit of a futurist and that’s where we’re going to kind of lean into today.
You did a talk a couple of times – I’ve heard it now at different events – on the road ahead for future church planting. But maybe before we talk about that, I’m going to ask you to share just a little bit about your passion, maybe some of your history in church multiplication.
A. Yes. Well, Paul, I’m one of those guys that could never find a church to hire me so I had to start my own! And then they got tired of me so I would go start another one. But my life ---
I’ve been a serial church planter. The last one I planted a lot of church planting came out of it. We really just sensed God saying that the key for the evangelization of Canada isn’t going to be a mega-church; it was going to be a mother church that taught churches how to plant churches and God’s spirit would blow on that and we would give them some infrastructure and ideas and DNA on sacrificial kingdom living, giving themselves away so cool things could happen. So that has been my role.
Since 2010 I have been leading the North American Mission Board’s church planting idea. So we started something called The Send Network and so in that we plant between 700 and 800 churches a year across North America. More recently Ed Stetzer and I started The Send Institute which is a church planting theological think tank. We have seventy-five denominations-networks involved in that. It has been a ---
So I’ve been able to, by experience planting in the midst of secularity, figure out what works, what doesn’t work, been able to watch and see in a test tube sense of an array across North America, what is working and not working. So through intuition combined with inspiration, through some work I think we’ve kind of got a handle on why we should stop doing some of the things we’re doing and try some things we should begin to zone in on.
Q. That’s what I love about chatting with you. You’ve done it at a local level. You’ve done it at a regional level and now you’ve done it at a national level and you still, today, if we follow your story, you are still back in a local church and replanting so you’re not too far from it. You’re not pontificating from a holy mountain of church planting and saying here’s what you should be doing. You’re living it. I just so appreciate that perspective. I think, as we get to know you and as our Network gets to know you, we’re really going to come to appreciate some of the insights that you have as it relates to church plants.
So I’m excited about the podcast because we’re going to talk about the road ahead for future church planters and it may not be what it has been. I thought you had some ---
A. It will be different.
Q. Yes, it’s not going to look the same. We can’t plant churches how we planted even ten or fifteen years ago. Culture has changed and the landscape has changed. So we’re going to lean a bit more on that missiologist side of you. Why don’t you walk us through maybe 3, 4, if we have time, 5 of those future ideas as it relates to church planting? So what would you say is maybe the first one, like maybe not the most important one but it’s the first one on your list?
A. Maybe I’ll just sort of outline 3 and break them apart and how they fit together.
Q. Sure.
A. So I think we may need a different kind of church planter, one that ---
Historically, traditionally church planting has been done by a church planter, usually a vocational guy. Most of the time he has been to Bible College somewhere or something like that. He goes out and in his mind he’s thinking he is going to plant a church and that could be translated into planting a worship service. Much of his work is centered around that idea. I think the future is going to be, needs to be, a far more dispersed methodology where churches are employing, they have a discipleship process that starts with a spiritually curious person and ends in a church planting team member and they are sending out ---
We had to invent a word. In 2016 I used the word for the first time: co-vocational. This is what I want to get at. We are familiar with bi-vocation. I’m a bi-vocational pastor.
Q. Yes.
A. Usually that means I want to be a full-time pastor but I can’t afford to be in this church. If it could grow enough I could get enough money to be a full-time pastor and that would be my preference.
Q. Right.
A. We had to give a new imagination for a co-vocational. The word “co” comes from the Latin “com”, means together, co-author, co-pilot, you know. The two together. So a church planting team comprised of people who have a call into a vocation and they have known that from the very beginning. But they also have a call into spreading the gospel in a community. So forming teams gathered around building the body of Christ, not necessarily a worship service but a worship service would be part of that. It would be one of the shifts that we want to talk about.
A second shift would be the church sees itself in a different way. We’re recovering from a church growth hangover and the idea has been ---
Q. I just want to stop you there. What do you mean by that? I’ve heard you say it a couple of times. I think I know what you mean but just the phrase “a church growth hangover”. Just unpack that a little bit more.
A. Yes. So, the operating system of the average evangelical church since the late 1960s, early 1970s, has been how many people can we gather in one spot. It becomes this competitive thing to gather people in a room for a worship service. We got to where there were actual physical limits to that, whether we hit some kind of saturation in our area so then we began to multi-site. But basically it was just more church growth. It was the same leveraging the gifts of a few people in more places. But that was taking more and more effort to get any results and more and more money to get any results from that. Many of these that were once mega-mega churches – if you look across – have just become hollow shells all over the place. And people weren’t necessarily looking for religious entertainment. That’s not ---
When there was a Christian memory in existence in culture, yes, if I have to go to church I guess I’m going to the fun one, you know! But that’s gone. So that’s what I’m talking about. We’re still trying to use the same operating system in church planting but it actually takes more and more money and more and more effort to get the same kind of results or even a fraction of the results we used to get with that. Because the landscape has changed so much. That’s what I meant.
Q. Okay. Good. So recovering a little bit from this church growth movement and ideology and philosophy and then you were going to say?
A. So the church has to see itself in a different way and that is the church plant is really trying to see itself as not necessarily a gathering institution but a sending institution.
Q. Okay.
A. That’s the biblical blueprint of what a church is. It sure gathers but that’s not its purpose. Its purpose is sending. That DNA has been lost in North America. It exists around the world. The future of the church you don’t find it in North America. You find it in most ---
I was in a Conference in Europe this fall and there were eighty-five different countries involved and it was just absolutely astounding to see how so many groups have figured out how to simplify and actually turn things into things that look like gospel movements that are just taking off.
So the planter has to be different. The goal of what this church looks like and is about has to be different. And then collaboration has to be different. I think part of what we’re going to see, if we’re going to actually see gospel impact, is churches uniting around the Lord Jesus Christ in locality, in geography. So it’s not necessarily me trying to be the winner in the community and having more and more people come to my ---
But it is actually ---
The goal is gospel saturation. The goal is every man, woman, boy and girl getting to see and hear and taste and smell the good news of Jesus Christ. And so if that is the goal look at the lay of the land. It really should drive every pastor and every planter to say you’re not my competitor. You’re my comrade. How do we join forces, not become one local church, but how do we cooperate together, leverage our assets, our gifts, our strengths to be able to leverage your strengths and my weaknesses and back each other in order to get the gospel out in a great way, which I think it has a compelling testimony in community in Canada.
Q. How well do you think we’re doing at that? You work with multiple denominations. I feel like we’re getting better, like even ten or fifteen years ago I feel like we’re getting better but we’re not where we need to be. What are you noticing?
A. I would agree exactly with how you put it. We are getting better. I think there was generations ago almost an isolationist in denominations. It was almost like okay our denomination is really the right one. The rest of them, well, they’re okay but we’ve really got the truth and we don’t really want to, you know ---
That might be the most generous reading of that. (Laughter) But I see things ---
I think, you know, Pentecostals in Canada have helped Baptists, which I am, in Canada to understand worship and Holy Spirit, how the Holy Spirit impacts every part of our life. Maybe Baptists have helped Pentecostals in theology on, you know ---
There’s been a sense where neither of us are on our extremes any more. We’ve actually found more middle ground across denominations. And I think that has helped a different generation say you know, there’s two planters beside each other in geography and they think I’ve got more in common with you of a different denomination than I do with a lot of the churches in my own denomination, just because of our drive for winning the city and, you know, things like that. So I agree that we are getting better but it’s almost a congenial better. We’re saying we’re friends. I respect you. I appreciate what you’re doing. But there is no synergy locally. It is very rare to find churches in an area trying to figure out the percentage in our city that is in Christ is how many. And you go oh, it’s 5%, it’s whatever. It’s a low percent. And then you go what do we need to do together? Yes. I think we’re not there yet.
But I think we want to get there. I think it is going to take some leadership locally here and there because I think most people are bending in that direction and I think if we had some leadership there it would help.
Q. Yes. Do you think it needs to start at a leadership level nationally, regionally first, or locally? Because I feel like nationally, and even regionally, I felt collaboration ---
Actually, I’ll back up. I feel more collaboration at a national level with other national leaders than I did even at a regional level and even more than I did at a local level. Now, there’s obviously pockets of people and churches that work together in cities. But where do you think it needs to start? Should it start at a national level and trickle down or should it be at a local level trickling up or should it be both ends working to the middle?
A. Well when you talk about national or regional the power of that is permission giving. It’s like all right, these guys are doing it. They love each other and it seems to be okay. Because I think some people are afraid. Am I being a bad Pentecostal if I hang out with Baptists or whatever. Right?
Q. Yes.
A. And so the permission giving is the power I think. But there is no power until it hits the ground locally.
Q. Actually that’s a really great thought. I hope some people wrote that down. I did. I think you’re right. It starts with permission.
So let’s go back over those 3 because I know you went over them fairly quickly. This idea of a new planter, the church needs to see itself. Secondly as a new kind of entity that maybe looks a bit different than what it used to and then collaboration amongst the community. Why don’t we drill down a little bit more on the planter? What do you think some of the characteristics, some of the attributes, skill sets need to be resident in the planter or the team in the new kind of frontier that we see church planting going into?
A. So most church planting assessments which are a way of filtering to get to the result we’re looking for, most church planting assessments filter for a large church pastor who has an entrepreneurial bent.
Q. Yes.
A. So he’s got the skill sets that a large church pastor has plus he’s got this entrepreneurial thing. And if you can find that guy we think we’ve found gold. We get behind that guy, put most resources behind that leader and soon discover that there is very rarely anything approaching a movement coming from that person because he is still operating often from the old operating system which is come and hear me. So I think our filtering systems have to move from that entrepreneurial superman to a catalytic apostolic. When you think of the Apostle Paul who had this vision that he knows where he’s going and someone stones him and he gets back up and keeps going in that same direction. But he cannot un-see what he sees and he always sees it.
Looking for those kinds of leaders to lead new Movements and neither of us work in our systems with these words but I’ll use them anyway. We need priests and bishops. And the bishops are in a sense these apostolic leaders that are giving ---
You know, they’re starting a church but they understand that this church’s power is going to be when it releases an army of priests that come out from it and the multiplication happens there. They come and drive the beach head. They do the original idea and there’s a prophetic, usually, and an evangelistic part of that thrust. Then from there they begin to put together a way to assemble people they have won into church planting teams, co-vocational church planting teams, and encourage them as they go from there. That’s multiplication.
Q. Yes. And I think you answered the question but I just want to provide some clarity in case you want to add more to it. What do you think then the difference is between that entrepreneurial leader and kind of that apostolic catalyst leader, because you kind of made the contrast between the two. What do you think is the difference there?
A. Being entrepreneurial is not a bad thing.
Q. No.
A. It’s very similar. But it is not the same thing. Oftentimes the entrepreneurials are really entrepreneurial shepherd teachers.
Q. Yes.
A. They are trying to ---
They have a different end in mind that they are entrepreneurial for.
Q. Yes.
A. And an apostolic catalyst is really saying I don’t really want to be the center of this show. I want to be ---
A catalyst is usually invisible, often. Like I was sharing with my friend Ralph Moorewho is the most prolific church planter in the Western world, planting 2 churches that multiplied over twenty-five hundred and he can go 9 generations deep in his churches. Most of the people once you get past the second generation into the third have never heard of Ralph Moore. So that’s the difference. That is the contrasting difference.
Q. Yes. That’s good. Because when you were talking about the Apostle Paul, you know, having the vision. I’m thinking wow. If we have to find Apostle Pauls to plant churches, I mean it’s hard enough to find entrepreneurial leaders never mind Apostle Pauls. But I think that clarity is helpful.
A. So it’s not like the guy, the person is so rare, but our filtering systems aren’t designed to find that. They are designed to filter to a different direction.
Q. Right.
A. And so oftentimes that person will go oh, you know, there’s just no way in the world this person will stay in that city long enough to grow a church to two thousand people. They will keep moving.
Q. Yes.
A. And you are right. He won’t. But maybe something else is going to happen.
Q. Right. So let’s move on to the different kind of church because one of the things people ask me about is what is the future model of church. What is church going to look like twenty years from now? I’ve had back and forth conversations and different readings and different podcasts. I’m wondering where the attractional church will kind of all shake out in the end. My opinion is that it will always be around and it will always in a healthy way hopefully reach people far from God but it won’t be the only way or maybe even the predominant way twenty years from now. But I’m not a missiologist. What do you think and what are you seeing? What are the future models of church? How does it kind of get out of this church growth mindset to more of sending? Maybe help us understand what is rattling around in your head and heart as it relates to this.
A. So I think, I mean, I don’t have to go to the future, I’ll just go to the past I think to get a picture of what things might look like. Yes, there might have been some attractional kind of churches in the past perhaps ---
Maybe someone put you know Metropolitan Tabernacle, Charles Spurgeon, you know, a huge church in London and one that was, you know, published Charles Spurgeon’s sermons every week on newspapers all across the world, I think. But that would seem to be the exception to the rule. That has not been –-
When you see Movements you watch the First Awakening, Second Great Awakening, you see what is going on around the world, things become viral when they are highly reproducible. And we might be missing the ability to make things reproducible when we’re trying to be attractional. So I think, I know what the right answer is supposed to be. I have a friend who wrote a book called AND which talks about missional attractional. Maybe it’s not either or; it’s both and. That could be.
Q. Yes.
A. At least in this intermediate state that we’re in right now where there is still a little bit of Christian memory around, but as that evaporates I can’t see how attractional works. And so it really becomes then the church isn’t at all a worship service. The church is the local body of Christ and figure out how that body of Christ is actually in a community helping people who would never feel any guilt for not going to church. Encounter Christ in that way, in the normal rhythms of life.
Q. Yes. And when I mean attractional I’m talking more about the philosophy. I don’t think we ever want a church that is not attractional, like to have a gathering that is repelling people, pushing them away. Right?
A. (Laughter)
Q. I’m talking about the philosophy where it’s maybe more Sunday-centric or worship gathering-centric. Do you think that some of those churches that are recognizing that are ---
Like I think there would be some in the States that I’ve heard at least podcasts about how they still have their worship gatherings but the focus has changed. It is about sending. It is about releasing. Gathering on weekends is still important. I think to gather together Biblically I think that is important. But do you see churches moving to be more missional, the bigger churches anyways, in the future?
A. Well, watching those ---
I can think of lots of examples of that happening, individual ones, one here and one there. I don’t think that is necessarily happening carte blanche everywhere as a Movement or anything.
Q. Right.
A. But it seems like there is still the predominant operating system is let’s keep doing what we used to do, maybe do it better and harder.
Q. Yes.
A. And in places like the south or the Midwest you can still get away with that.
Q. Right.
A. You can’t in the northeast. You can’t in the northwest. You can in the U.S. And maybe you can in some places, you know, in Alberta and a few places. But in Canada it is very rare that you can live off of that any more.
Q. Right.
A. I’ve got an example of a guy I know who planted – I won’t give any specifics because it might be too easy to figure this out – planted two large churches in California, very, very large churches. And then he came to a city in Canada and doubled his output on his marketing.
And for launch Sunday, not launch Sunday, his first preview was at Easter --- And he was doing a major social media campaign and a massive mailing campaign, fifty thousand pieces, and he had one person come from his marketing.
Q. Wow.
A. And that just seems to be the norm right now. And it’s not like this city had seen a lot of this in their mailbox offending. This would have been a weird thing and ---
Q. They were not interested.
A. Because marketing is just appealing to something that is already in you.
Q. Yes.
A. And if it is not in you, it’s tough.
Q. Certainly in the post-Christian culture like Canada it’s not in us the same way it used to be. Right?
So I just want to maybe hit on this maybe one more swing at the piñata here. When you look at some of those churches that are, you know, maybe transitioning to a point where yes, we still have the big gatherings, we still do church well on Sundays, but our focus is shifting more missionally, of those kind of hot spots here and there of those bigger churches doing it, what do you think they are doing that is successful? Because I know there are some people out there listening to this podcast. They are leading multi-sites. They are leading these bigger churches and their desire is to be a sending church. Nobody is saying that we want to keep the gospel to ourselves, us and no more. No, they want to reach out. But how are they transitioning to more of that missional model when they are already an existing pretty big church?
A. Yes. Like some of them have said ---
A lot of them have stopped being multi-site ideas and gone into a church planting idea.
Q. Okay.
A. They have released their multi-sites. I can think of a lot of big examples of that. Village Church is one of those in Texas that had like a dozen or so major multi-sites and said, you know, there’s a very definite end. Most can’t manage dozens just because there’s the maintenance in that. So they work hard in trying to put a reproductive capacity in those sites and then set them loose to sort of ---
And that’s a natural thing. When I think of, you know, extremes. On one extreme if I’m looking on my left hand and I’m saying okay, church planting as an entrepreneurial is risky, you go and do it as best as you can and figure it out and God is going to be with you, God bless you. And then on the other extreme ultimate safety, that is we’re going to multi-site, we’re going to move two hundred people over to there. We’re going to put a shepherd pastor over there giving leadership there. We’re going to do whatever.
You look at the one extreme and you go okay, I’m watching that guy make all kinds of mistakes and I know this area where he or she is planting it and it’s not ---
They’re doing the wrong thing. And yet it’s their thing. And the other example is like welfare and they are living off momma, like in momma’s basement forever. They are never going to really do anything you don’t get permission for from momma and they are like indeterminate kind of teenager in the basement. So to find the middle between those two you take where you take the thinking okay we understand this community, we’re going to help you start this thing.
Q. Um-hmm.
A. We’re going to almost use a site mentality to say as we get this thing going we’re going to help. But our goal is to release you just like a parent would with children. Our goal is to start you. We’ll get you healthy and release you as a strong and thriving child and for you to be fruitful and multiply.
Q. Yes.
A. I think that is what is happening in some of these churches. They’ve gone beyond multi-site and come to the end of the multi-sites. I know there’s lots of ---
Leadership Networks put together a group that really started the multi-site thinking. Now they’ve sort of abandoned it, you know. It’s just more church growth and it doesn’t really take us where we need to go.
Q. Yes. When I’ve talked to some of our pastors that are multi-siting or thinking about multi-siting, my encouragement to them is either (a) figure out a way that you can stay in house but it multiplies. I remember asking Ed Stetzer at an event and just saying: “Ed, do multi-sites multiply?” And by and large they don’t, which means the mother church never gets grandkids. So I actually like that middle ground where it starts out like a site but maybe 3, 5 years or however long is decided upon, that it becomes its own self-governing church. Because those are what multiply.
And again I think it is the best of both worlds. It helps the new launch to get stable. It’s got covering. It’s got structure. And slowly releasing them. I actually think that’s a super healthy model for church planting.
A. It’s the difference between replication and multiplication.
Q. Right.
A. Replication is something that happens in laboratories. It’s not natural. And yet that’s kind of what multi-site is. It’s not an organic natural thing. There is nothing in nature that does anything that would be a parallel to multi-sites.
Q. Yes.
A. And multiplication is family. It is we’re going to parent you and we’re going to release you and you can cook that. I’m just urgent enough and maybe this makes me not a very good Canadian because a lot of times we as Canadians are way too un-urgent, way too conservative, way too let’s play it safe, let’s make sure we have all our bases covered.
Q. Yes.
A. In the kingdom of God I think that’s an oxymoron. I think there’s a sense where we don’t save ourselves. We parent and it costs us. When you’re a parent you never say when I’m old enough, when we’re rich enough to have kids or whatever. You did it when you were least equipped to do it.
Q. Yes.
A. Now, you know, I’m fifty-five years old and now I’m finally financially in a place where I should be having kids. (Laughter) But I’m done. My kids are all up and grown themselves.
Q. That’s true.
There’s not too many sticky statements that I’ve ever said that I’ve heard other people repeat but this was one of them. Years ago I said everything else in society safe is the preferred course of action except with faith. And when it comes to faith safe is the most dangerous thing you can do. And that courage and that call to walk by faith and not by safe is a pretty big deal as it relates to ---
A. With faith.
Q. Yes. Like to have our pastors and Boards go okay, you know, we’re swinging for the fence. We’ve got a couple of churches here in Edmonton that have a very bold vision of 1%, you know, reaching 1% of Edmonton and they are working towards it. It is not just something up on the wall. They are serious about doing it and they are trying to figure it out.
The last one I just want to ask about before we close is where does someone start for collaboration? I think it is true. I think wouldn’t it be great, and maybe it is happening somewhere that I haven’t heard of it, but wouldn’t it be great to have four or five churches from different denominations and networks all get together and say hey, there’s a new subdivision over here that doesn’t have any gospel witness. Let’s all work together and plant something there. Where do we start with that? That just doesn’t come up naturally because of territorialism or isolation over the years. So Jeff where do we start? How do local pastors and church planters and people that live in the cities and communities and regions, where do we start with that?
A. That’s a great question. Let me answer it and then maybe give more of a prescriptive answer and then give you a story of where it happens and how it happens.
So you start with asking different questions. Most of the time we ask ecclesio-centric questions that relate to how my church is doing. We have a lot of them. We even take courses: natural church development. Lots of these things. How is my church doing? And we have all of these internal metrics that are insular. They are not really talking about mission. They are talking about the internals of the church. The church growth movement is pretty well built on this idea. I think the question that pastors have to start asking is how is my city doing. Is my city getting more and more, you know, closer to being exposed to Jesus Christ and the gospel of Jesus Christ or is the average person further and further away every year because of how we have been behaving as churches.
I think in Canada it would be easy to say across the board without a single exception at least in a major urban area it is the opposite. Churches have not worked together to say how well is Jesus Christ known in our city. And so every once in a while little ideas, someone will put an event together and invite everybody to the event or something. But not as a sustained idea.
Let me give you a story of where it happened. There was a single church in Buffalo, New York, one of the larger churches. The pastor came and actually went on what he called the Apology Tour. (Laughter) He went church to church to church to church. I don’t know if he hit them all but he went to a lot of them. He apologized, saying we acted as if we didn’t need you and we probably have benefitted from you in all kinds of ways and you have seen no benefit from us. You have reached people and they have ended up in our church and he was just very transparent, very honest with them.
He built a lot of credibility, a lot of trust. A lot of times a large church in the city is not the church that anybody trusts because they’ve been hurt by that church. So I think in his very godly honest way he brought the temperature down and brought the sort of collaborative genome up. And then they began to say, all right, if we didn’t care who got the credit but we wanted every man, woman, boy and girl to hear, see, taste and smell the good news of Jesus Christ what would we do. They said we would do two things. One we would plant churches in the city where we could reach pockets of the city that none of our churches ever would. Two, we would take churches that should be doing well and aren’t doing well and partner together to strengthen those churches in our own city.
So they brought out a big o’l map and they began to pray over the map and say what do we do. They saw an area where they could plant a church and someone said well, there actually is a good church there. It is pastor so-and-so. They are not doing real well but it’s a godly leader. So some of them said let’s go help them. So they started praying for that pastor, started asking families in their churches if you live in that area, why don’t you go and be a part of that church. All of a sudden that church was healthy and they said let’s go plant a church there. And three churches together would work out on how to plant a church there.
You fast forward that story just ten years, not a long time, and if you look across its population, Buffalo in ten years the population is decreased. Like most cities in North America are increasing. Buffalo is decreasing. But in that same ten-year period attendance in church went up 30%!
Q. Wow.
A. And that is not happening anywhere in North America other than in that one city.
Q. Wow.
A. So there is a real time example of what could happen if real spiritual leaders act spiritually and not fleshly and say the kingdom of God is the goal and the church of Jesus Christ is the vehicle to advance that goal and we are not going to make an idol of the church of Jesus Christ – then it is powerless. But we are going to release the church of Jesus Christ for the kingdom of God and behave in ways like that. I think Buffalo is a sweet example of what we could see across North America but it’s going to take some leadership locally to make that happen for sure.
Q. And just as I’m hearing you talk about that story, we all know this to be true that organizations, churches, families, relationships all move at the speed of trust and there has to be a trust not only in each other but a trust in God that he’s leading it and he’s going to bring people together.
What a great story that is.
A. Yes. I think that Pastor Gerry he created a culture by example. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were just gathering and praying and loving each other until it got to a point where they said let’s do this together.
Q. That’s beautiful. Well Jeff, you have challenged us today. You’ve encouraged us today. Maybe disrupted some plans in our hearts. We want to thank you for what you are doing and thanks for being a friend of the Multiply Network and certainly to me. You have given great counsel and advice. I so appreciate you jumping in today.
A. Yes. For whatever it’s worth, I’m grateful for PAOC. I’m grateful for what you have brought our nation and I know the great days ahead of PAOC are directly linked to the ideas that we’ve been talking about, about churches giving themselves away for the gospel. So I know Paul you have a lot to do with leading that charge across PAOC as well. I just pray that the ears who hear the voice that you have will allow the Holy Spirit to do whatever renovation is needed because Canada needs the PAOC full on in a multiplying Movement. We’re desperate for you.
Q. Thank you. I appreciate it Jeff. Thanks so much.
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