“Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”
The two disciples who heard this question were as unprepared for it as most people usually are. They blurted out an answer that didn’t get to the deeper question that Jesus was asking.
Simply put, they haven’t given it much thought.
Everyone thinks they know what they want but when they get it they often realize it wasn’t what was needed.
Legendary rock star and singer of the band U2 Bono hit on this when he penned the lyrics:
“I gave you everything you ever wanted
It wasn’t what you wanted”
In today’s video, CEO and co-founder of Exponential, Todd Wilson explains how he found himself in a room full of leaders who had “arrived” in ministry.
Their churches were huge. Their names were known. Their speaking was much in demand.
They had found bucks and book contracts but lost the excitement for ministry along the way.
The problem was that they weren’t seeing the exciting multiplication that they had read about in the book of Acts.
Many people have never answered the question of what they truly want.
Maybe a better question to ask is what does God want for your church?
Watch the video below to find out what God wants for your church.
P.S. – You can check out the recording of this topic’s office hours below!
Welcome all to our very first ever HUB discussion!
Setting up a choice pitting “How do we grow this thing bigger?” against “How do we send and release more to see more multiplication happen?” is a false dichotomy. It’s NOT either/or! It’s BOTH/AND!
The ONLY difference between addition and multiplication is the timetable (or the multiplier).
10 + 10 = 20 AND 10 x 2 = 20. The only meaningful way to differentiate between these “operations” is to couch them within some sort of timetable.
Using the concepts being proposed in the video, you could also simultaneously have SUBTRACTION and MULTIPLICATION. You could take a church of 500 people and “multiply” it into three congregations with a combined participation of 450.
Concepts like these are fun to explore, but when you start confusing quantitative and qualitative objectives, your “progress” ends up looking more like a treadmill.
Ben, would love you to join the conversation today: Join by Zoom video here.
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Phone dial in: +1 253 215 8782
Meeting ID: 867 4618 6390
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86746186390
“We can PROGRAM ourselves to level 4 but to get to level 5, it’s a cultural issue–that it’s embedded in our DNA of who we are.” This sounds like another difference without a distinction. How does something get “embedded in our DNA”? By the PROGRAM that’s put in place, of course.
I like where your head is at. I think it only sounds this way until you go a little deeper. This statements speaks to our tendency to go through a program and then not apply what we’ve learned. In other words, it doesn’t truly transform us. Multiplication only happens when people have become multipliers.
I Loved this video. Such a eye opening way to look at the ways churches throughout the country are planting, or may even seem like they are planting.
After listening to a podcast the other day about setting and creating culture in youth ministries, it opened my mind much further than just youth ministries. I agree that if being a church that is wanting to strive to truly be at least a level4, and strive for a level 5, culture of your church, leadership, and congregation is key throughout the entirety of it.
I think as far as if God granted my wildest wish for our church, it would be for healthy and sustainable growth. Growth that would come only from Him and people bringing others in a healthy and genuine way, along with the congregation being stable and at home.
Great video, thank you!
Glad you liked it. First time I heard this it blew my mind
My wildest dreams for our church would be to send a new church plant every year. In the last two years we have gone from level 2 (plateauing) to level 3 (growing). Our leadership team is exploring residency programs and hoping to reproduce in the next year or two (level 4). From there, I would love to figure out how to continue growing while we keep sending. I’m sure we’ll make mistakes along the way, but I feel like multiplication is a winning strategy for the Kingdom. The real thing that we are talking about multiplying is leadership. When you are only focused on personal church growth, it’s easy focus on the few leadership spots that you need for your own programs & systems. When you are thinking about multiplication, it forces you to raise up new leaders to send out (or replace current leaders who go). It’s definitely a challenge, but I imagine that seeing the fruit that comes from more churches is worth it!
love this, Josh. WHere has it been hard to raise up leaders in your context? What are the sticking point?
My wildest dreams would be to see generations of disciple-making leaders sent around our city and around our world to multiply disciple making communities. We have 2 residents who are in the process of preparing to plant and I am excited to see where God takes them.