07 Phil Claycomb & Roy Moran | ThinkNEXT Session 1

Andrew Estes (00:14)

Welcome back to the Nexus Church Planting Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Estes.

Twice a year, we gather leaders from across our network for an event we call ThinkNEXT It's a time to step back from the pace of ministry, connect with like-minded leaders, and refocus on the mission of making disciples who make

This episode comes from our most recent ThinkNEXT gathering. Our theme was From Maintenance to Multiplication, Reframing Your Mindset to Allow the Gospel to Replicate. Together, we explored how the gospel spreads not through complexity or control, but through simple reproducible practices that ordinary believers can pass on from day one. We hope this session encourages you and challenges you to help you lead your church toward multiplication.

Let's jump in to today's session.

Nexus: Church Planting & Leader Care (01:06)

All right, hey, take your Bibles and turn to the Psalms.

be in the Psalms for a few moments. Psalm 139. You got here, you just arrived, you've been driving on the interstate to get here, or you've been flying. I'd like to remind you that just because you can drive faster does not mean you shouldn't.

doesn't mean necessarily that you have to slow down. It may mean that you'll want to. There are certain places that we'd be advised to slow down, to take it in, to meander a little bit or cruise slowly. Maybe get out of the car and...

There are times we'd be glad, we'll be glad we stopped and savored the moment because some things can't be appreciated at 75 miles an hour.

Them that move too fast are usually the same as them that miss out. And you can miss out by trying to move too fast. In the Psalms, the prayers of the Bible, if you look at them carefully, you realize they're designed to actually slow us down. They're not written to speed us up. They always begin with the assumption that we're in trouble, we're behind. So the assumption is, Rob, you're already in trouble. Today's just begun, but you're already behind.

And going faster isn't a good solution when you're already lost or you're already behind. We've been created by God to walk three miles an hour and we've been trying to cheat ever since, much to our loss. And so the Psalms aren't just the word of God to us, but as Eugene Peterson puts it, the Psalms are a special part of the word of God. The Psalms are the words of God given to us to speak back to Him when we don't know what to say. We got the Holy Spirit speaking back on our behalf.

but the Psalms are also put together so that we can pray them back to God using his words. And rather than talking back to God fast, they demand we do it slowly. They slow us down intentionally, structurally, linguistically, the Psalms work to make us go slow because what they do is they say an idea, then they say it again in another way, and then again in another way, and then again in another.

Really, after 10 verses, you've maybe only said one idea, but you said it 10 different ways. What's the psalmist trying to do? Slow you down so that we can pray. Psalm 139 slowed me down recently. Go to 139. I was beginning a retreat there in Dallas. I was thinking some things through. I was clearing my mind. I was trying to let myself breathe and slow down so I could perhaps listen.

It usually requires I take a break from my routine and rhythms so God has a chance to repeat to me what he's been trying to say. He needs to do with me what Barb does. She'll look at me and say, repeat to me what I just said and I usually can't because I wasn't listening. I was trying to move too fast. So I arrived at the retreat center.

Got off the interstate, had to slow down and navigate small roads. Found myself on a road that you spend as much time driving sideways to avoid potholes as it seemed I was doing to get to the place. But I finally got there, checked in, unpacked my truck, settled into a small room. You simple bed, single bed, simple little desk, chair, a little bathroom. Not frilly, no fluff, no TV, laptop left at home, iPad turned off, phone turned off, my choice. Turned to my friends the Psalms and 139 did some work on me.

You ever watched the movie, The Hunt for Red October? Remember Sean Connery? Submarines chasing one another and the submarines when they're moving fast, can't hear very well. If they wanna hear, what do they have to do? Stop, drift. And after a moment or two of stopping and drifting, they can hear. So it's like I got to 139 there at the retreat center and it's like God found his voice or maybe I found my ears. And Psalm 139 became a conduit that started to help me calm down.

The psalmist could have said, Phil, God knows everything there is about you. He could have said that and been done and I'd be, okay, I'm done, we can move on. But that's not how the Psalms work. So read with me, Psalm 139. Let's just trace our way through it. Lord, you've searched me and you've known me. In biblical language, the word no does not refer to intellectual gathering of information, but to experiential encounter, back and forth, contact.

Adam knew Eve and a baby resulted, that's knowing. God, you've searched me, you've interacted with me, you've checked me out, I've checked you out, we've rubbed shoulders. You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from afar. Barb and I are going on 40 years of marriage this summer. I'd like to think that after 40 years I could read her mind, can't, but she can mine. Even when I'm out of state, somehow she knows what I'm up to.

We'd learned to discern, the psalmist says, you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down. If we were hunters, he's saying, you know where the game trails are and you know where they bed down at night. He says, I know everything about you. I'm acquainted with all the ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, ⁓ Lord, you know it all together.

Those of you who've ever sat through a meeting with me know that I can start a conversation, start a sentence pushing one idea and disagree with myself by the time I finish the sentence. I think out loud. The psalmist says I've already got all that figured out because God's got that figured out. God says I can read your thoughts. I'm acquainted with all your ways. Before words on your tongue, I've got it. You hem me in behind and before you lay your hand upon me. St. Patrick's prayer talks about Christ with me.

Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left. I'm surrounded by Christ, now may Christ be within me. He says, I'm all over you, I'm behind you, I'm before you. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high. I can't attain it. So where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you're there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you're there.

If I take the wings of the morning, the dawn on the east, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, which for them would be the Mediterranean, the west, the sundown, even there, your right hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. It was verse 10 that did it to me. Verse 10 was where God spoke. God jumped off the page at me. Verse nine says, if I start in the dawn, the wings of the morning,

and I even take it all the way to the dwelling of the uttermost parts of the sea. Not only was the sea the West, but for the Hebrew, especially the poets, the sea represented chaos. You have some chaos in your life. Any church planners here with chaos? Walking into the room with some chaos, yes. It's part of the job. It's part of the territory. But not just chaos, maybe the sea, the uttermost parts of the sea, or the Hebrew is the destiny.

of the sea, the destiny of the chaos. Think of your chaos and ask yourself, how bad could it get if it had a destiny? Got chaos going on? We have chaos going on. He says, even if you're facing the destiny of the chaos that possibly could happen in your life, and here's the word that spoke to me, even there, even there, Phil. I went on the retreat with some elephants in the room. You guys do that too. I had things I was praying about trying to work my way through.

You know, we've planted ⁓ six churches a year ago. This year, last year, we had five already in the field. This year, as we go into 2026, and four more lining up, it looks like. Well, maybe doing nine, possibly 10.

This will be our busiest year ever, which then puts pressure on me and the team to deliver, so I've been praying about that. I had that going on. We have a succession strategy we're working our way through so that we'll be handing this ministry off at some point over the next few years. I got that on my mind. And I also have part of the reason why we're doing the succession strategy aggressively. We've not hidden this from you, but two years ago in January is when the doctor told me you've got Parkinson's.

He had told me, you've got one of three things, and I made the mistake, although you do this, you have to at some point. I went home and Googled the three things. Not a wise idea sometimes. But after I Googled the three ideas, it's got to, I either have this, this, or Parkinson's. I wanted to be on Team Parkinson's really bad because the other two are not friendly. This one, Parkinson's bad enough. And I've got that going on in my life, but it was like the Lord said, Phil, Phil, Phil, even there. Anybody here have a?

thing you need to hear God say, even there, my right hand will hold you. My right hand will steady you, secure you, grasp you. My right hand will bolster you, support you, uphold you, shelter you, sustain you. I needed to hear, even there.

I could have stopped in verse 10, but I've discovered over the years that I need to keep reading, because verse 10 was for that day. I need sometimes something for tomorrow. So you never know when I'm going to come back to the psalm. So I kept reading. Verse 11, I say, surely the darkness will cover me. The light about me be night. Even the darkness is not dark to you. The night is as bright as the day. You notice we're 10, 11, 12 verses in, and he could have just said, God knows everything there is about you, but that's not good enough for the psalmist.

Because that's too fast. We gotta slow down and let the word work in us. You formed my inmost parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it well. My frame was not hidden from you.

when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me when as yet there were none of them. I've been studied, I've been documented, and I've been published. It's all there. And that's not necessarily bad news. So how precious to me are your thoughts, God? How vast is the sum of them if I could count them? They are more than the sand.

I awake and I'm still with you. I love this. I'm here. God, you're here too. We're good. What am I facing? This, this, this, yeah, even there. I awake, you're here, I'm here. We're good. This is personal knowledge. This is the result of walking with God. It's not theoretical, it's not analytical, it's not theological. This is about God and me or God and you.

I want you to note, if you want to go back later, read it and count it. I, or my occurs 50 times in this Psalm because this is not about something that's theoretical. We do malpractice as speakers and teachers of the word when we use words like omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence. We turn it into something that we try to study from afar as opposed to this is me and God and he's here, I'm here, because he's here, I'm here, we're good. We have a God who's up close with us.

even in trouble that we don't wanna face. that you'd slay the wicked, verse 19. David had people actually trying to kill him. I've never had that, but I've had problems I thought were gonna kill me, so I'd personalize it by turning it into my problems. men of blood, depart from me. They speak against you with malicious intent. These enemies take your name in vain. I hate those who hate you, Lord, don't I? Don't I loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them as my enemies. I've chosen team God.

It's like Psalm one, I'm either blessed or I'm cursed. You got a choice, one or two. I've either got God or I've got the other side. I think I'll take God. So he closes with a book end. He started out with search me and know me. Well, we close out verse 23, search me, God, know my heart, try me, know my thoughts and see if there's any grievous way in me and lead me in the way that's everlasting. I needed this.

I needed to hear even there. I needed to hear that I have an attentive God that can be entrusted the task of taking me all the way home. And we start to acclimate to an environment of this by facing the reality that God gives us today. I've shared with you in the past, I was brought to the Psalms reluctantly. I was brought up in this part of the country over near Topeka, Kansas and Joplin, Missouri. The only time I ever remember dealing with poetry was when I was being punished at school and they made you learn a poem.

to recite, that's the only poetry I knew. And then I get into the Bible and I really didn't like the Psalms until the year I committed myself to use a guide called a guide to prayer and it basically required that every week there was a Psalm for the week and wanted me, I had agreed to do this to myself. I will read that seven times this week. On Monday it was, ⁓ On Tuesday, ugh. By Wednesday, huh. Often by Friday, uh-huh.

Yes, Saturday, Sunday, okay. And then I started to find myself at a hospital with somebody that I was visiting or just in a meeting or just dealing with stuff on my own. And guess what would come to mind? Well, here, what comes to mind is even there. Phil, I see it, I see it, I see it. Yes, I see the new things. Even there, my right hand, I've got this. I'm here, you're here.

We're gonna be good.

No matter how far out there I find myself in the sea of chaos, even there. So just because we can drive faster doesn't mean we should. There are certain places we'd be advised to slow down and meander. Take it in, cruise a little more slowly, get out and look around. You'll be glad you stopped and savored the moment. Psalm 139 can't be appreciated at 75 miles an hour.

We need to slow down when we come in a room like this. We've got a guest speaker here today who's got something to share with us that I've been praying about and I want us to hear it. But we need to sometimes slow ourselves down so that the engine calms and it's not racing and we're able to discern and hear, not just when Roy's talking, but maybe the Lord will be talking at the same time.

I like to imagine sometimes when I'm in the Psalms or other passages of scripture, it's like God's just behind this page and if I could turn the page fast enough, I could catch him. But he's almost like he's peeking at me through the lines of the words and sometimes the words get bigger even though they don't, but they feel like they do. And here in Psalm 139, I was reminded, even there, the worst chaos you got going on right now, even there, my right hand has got you.

Who's at the right hand of God?

Jesus, who is the right hand of God? Jesus. So whatever we're facing as we carry it in and we're in new churches that are, some of you guys came in with chaos. Some of you got phone calls, I know one at least, I got a phone call from the airport to here that already screwed your day up. I hope you're still in the room. I hope you're not out there trying to figure out how to fix it right now. I know where you guys live. I know what's going on in your zip codes. Even there, if we're listening, even there.

His right hand has us. Would you pray with me? Father God, thank you for holding us, for steadying us, for securing us, bolstering us, supporting, upholding, sheltering, sustaining. We bring ourselves to you today. We're ready to learn, we're ready to listen. Keep reminding us, even there, whatever comes to mind, even there, your hand has got this. Amen?

Thrilled to have Roy with us today, having this back off to Andrew here. Good to have you guys make the trip here. We're glad you're here today. Thanks, Phil. For those of you who haven't met me, I'm Andrew Estes, the director of training with Nexus. Andrew 1.0. You guys probably know Andrew 2.0. He'll bribe you up here a little bit later. But ⁓ he calls me Andrew the Greater, which is not true.

We all know it's 1.0. 1.0, he's the more refined version. Anyway, so was so excited for this week and for the opportunity to hear from Roy. Most of you guys, or a lot of you guys are probably familiar with Roy and his book, Spent Matches. I remember some 10, 11 years ago when I first got introduced to Nexus and the whole culture, really early on heard from Phil that the book, Spent Matches, among a few others, were

beginning to be key in reshaping the way that we're thinking about disciple making, intentional church planting, not just to launch a church service, but to intentionally make disciples. The Bonhoeffer Project rode into that, and so I know that in session two we're gonna get into some interesting stuff on just our foundational understanding of what the gospel is and the paradigm by which we go about doing our ministry. But as we think through that, I'm excited to just look at our theme for

for this week from maintenance to multiplication, reframing a mindset to allow the gospel to reproduce and how oftentimes the way that we will typically do certain things, will unintentionally create a bottleneck, things like platforms, personalities, a ton of information, but instead of requiring more facts and knowledge and years of experience before someone can make a disciple, we'll reframe around simple, immediately reproducible practices of discovery and obedience.

that anyone can copy from day one. And when I dove into the spent matches material,

and it's been over 10 years now since that book came out, was incredibly formative for me, just even diving into chapter one of just the statistical reality of where we're at when it comes to the advancement of the kingdom and what happened early on in the history of the church versus where we're at now. And it really kind of set the stage for a lot of work that I had to do personally, moving from being all about worship ministry and the show on Sunday to actually getting into intentional disciple making.

One

of, I did a recent interview with a good friend, Corey Hartman.

on our Nexus podcast. And one of the things that he talked about in reframing this mindset was usually we have the pattern of lost people are found, found people are then formed and then formed people are sent. But in the disciple making movement, those last two things are switched. Lost people are found, found people are sent and it's in the sending that sent people are formed. And so I'm super glad for Roy. Roy's been doing a ton of work. He's here locally here in Kansas City doing

was planted Shoal Creek Church? Yeah, so we planted Shoal Creek Church here in the Kansas City area. Super excited to hear a little bit more of his story, but has been doing a lot of global ministry, interacting with a ton of global missionaries and disciple making movements, church planting movements all over the globe. And would you guys just welcome Roy as he kind of comes up.

Thank you, Andrew.

So, I just want to pick up on a couple of themes before I get started here this morning. 2014, right after I, or right before I started writing Spint Matches. I wrote it in six weeks. Basically, I carved six weeks out of my life and said, know, I'm not getting up from this table until I have 2,000 words on the paper. And I did that for six weeks and voila.

We got that book now. How many of you read the book, Spit Matches? Let me see your hands, okay. How many of you lost your job as a result of Spit Matches? At least one, I know already. And I can share with you stories of a few more. I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2014, just before I wrote Spit Matches. anybody been on the Camino or know the Camino?

know a little bit about Camino. It's a 500, I walked the northern route across Spain, so we walked 500 miles in about 30 days from extreme southern France across the Pyrenees into the coast of Spain, on the west coast of Spain. And before you walk to Camino, you do a lot of stuff. You're supposed to train, I didn't do a lot of that, but I...

I watched a lot of stuff and one of the videos reminded me of what Phil said about Psalm 139. And it says, this was a European, he says, we all live at 125 kilometers an hour. But the beauty of the Camino is that you will experience life at six kilometers an hour or about three miles an hour walking, you know.

And that was true, you know, I mean, we did about 15 miles a day and you walk past ⁓ stuff. what I realized is it wasn't true because every day I ate lunch ⁓ next to a building that was a thousand years old.

and it housed ⁓ a religious group of some sort at some time and that kind of stuff. But I ate lunch and moved on. A thousand year old building deserves wandering around in it, looking at it, smelling it, seeing all the stuff that's in it, but every day without question I had to move on, move on, move on, just move too fast. ⁓ In moments like this,

in conferences. ⁓ It challenges my theological foundations. It challenges my educational foundations. It challenges my psychological foundations. It challenges my physiological foundations. Because the only thing that brings a need into a moment like this is a student.

Phil spoke a little bit out of turn up here when he said I had something to say. I really don't. I have no need to speak here today. The only person that brings a need into this room is you. You come. I know your plight. 1993, for some crazy reason, I got this idea, actually my wife got it, that I should lead a

group of people into establishing a local fellowship of believers. So we began this idea of planting a church. So I know where you live, six people in my living room made that decision with all these grandiose ideas of what was going to happen and I've lived that for the last 30 years. I still actually go there, I speak there sometimes.

I attend staff meetings, I don't run them anymore and that kind of stuff. I know a little bit about where you live, what you do for those of you that are actively involved and you've got something out of the ground. ⁓ So I know you carry a weight with you. All of us carry a weight. So if you came in with backpacks and bags and stuff, and I'm not talking about that kind of weight, I'm talking about a soul kind of weight. I'm talking about

the weight that you carry through the day. ⁓ And so I want to pause before we get started here and just let you ⁓ express the authenticity that I think that this community enjoys and loves and practices. I saw a girl who came in here a few minutes ago and she was carrying a box. And on the box it said, fake flowers.

And I told her, said, I appreciate your authenticity.

You know, she was right up front and had fake flowers. I'm not sure she had anything to do with the box.

what's the weight that you carry that's most likely to get in the way of you experiencing these next two days at 100%.

What's the weight that you're bearing that is going to occupy your mind, your soul, ⁓ and maybe it's ministry stuff, maybe it's the fellowships that you're involved in, maybe it's your family, ⁓ maybe it's your own marital situation, maybe it's your job, ⁓ maybe it's the bombs that are dropping in

the Middle East right now. I'm not sure what it is, but all of us come in here weight bearing. And I just want to take a few minutes before we start here to acknowledge that with one another.

pray for each other ⁓ that somehow in some way we would invite the Spirit to come in and to bear that weight with us. To be the Psalm 139 experience that Phil just talked about. And I'll give you about 10 minutes to do that and then when we're done, we'll get started and I'll blather on with whatever I have to say, all right?

Thank you for those who followed the rules and for those who didn't, you know who you are.

How many of you know who John Gottman is? John Gottman, you ever done a message on the four horsemen of the apocalypse, not in Revelation, but in Marriage? He's written a lot of useful material. And he put couples in rooms in their own choice and filmed them.

for many hours and ⁓ observed what interaction went on between them. And he came up, he and his wife, or the researchers, they came up with these four horsemen and he could predict with 91 % certainty which couples would last and which couples would end up in divorce.

I mean, imagine that. you could, knowing the four horsemen, if you went out really quick and Googled it, or chat GPT did, or whatever you do these days, you could go to one of the websites that give you odds on things. And if you knew that, you you could see that a neighbor of yours had one of those four things.

You know, or there's one that's a pinnacle. This idea of disrespect. It's a pinnacle. It's like, it's a key. If that exists there, it's like 69 % certainty. You could bet on your neighbor's relationship. And you could fund the ministry that way.

What do you think? No?

There's certain, there's some things that are certain that are observable in human nature. They're absolutely certain. Like take for instance ⁓ tutoring. You know, you all look like you've got some age on you so you probably have children. I have four kids and nine grandchildren. ⁓ And I know what it's like for instance to be interrupted a lot.

because of those four children and nine grandchildren. That's why I put the mics out there. There are mics, I don't know if you kept both of them, Andrew, but ⁓ who's got the other mic here? Okay, we got two mics on each side. So if at some point, at some point you have something, you want to ask a question, I will absolutely enjoy being interrupted. It's not a problem.

just stop me in mid-sentence, that's okay. But because I know something that's absolutely certain, and that is who are the best tutors in the world?

You know, we've got all these places, I don't know you got, where you live, I've got one near me called Mathnasium. It's where you can take your kids and get tutored in math, you know, and these tutors, so it's like, I know who the best tutors are. There was a UCAL Berkeley professor who wanted to research that, and so she did the exact same thing that John Gottman did with couples. She got tutors.

and students and she filmed them hours on end of filming these tutors with students and then took the students and measured the student's success, the academic success as a result of that tutoring and she found out something that was absolutely mind boggling.

obvious. Who do you think the best tutors are?

Let's go the other way. Who do think the worst tutors are?

ones that haven't practiced out probably but

The worst tutors are explainers.

The men and women who sat with those students and tried to explain things to them. Who were the best tutors?

questions.

You and I serve in a segment.

of society and a line of historical Christianity that values explainers over questioners.

We organize ourselves in buildings and spaces like this where we put explainers up front and we give them the most time, effort and energy to explain. And yet scientifically we know that explainers are the worst, worst people at getting transformation into people's lives.

What's up with that?

That's what drove me. ⁓ Early on in my experience in working through ⁓ college and graduate school, I did a lot of work in education. And I did a lot of work in moral development of children and families and a lot of people like Kohlberg and ⁓ Piaget and people like that. And I began to understand

that very idea of the science of tutoring. If you want the paper, it's an 80 page paper, Google it, it's available on the internet, the science of tutoring.

And so as I got through my schooling, because I early on at 16, I was confronted with Jesus. I grew up in a home that took me to church every Sunday. My father was in the Air Force and I traveled a lot throughout my life. Graduated from high school and read for high school in Honolulu, Hawaii. John, don't know where you are, but you know, hey.

John and I are Ohana back here. I grew up moving a lot, but I always attended church. In fact, I had perfect attendance through 12 years old. don't know if you guys still do that, but it's like I these little things, these little things that I said I was in. My mother made sure we were driving down Route 66 from one place to another. We pulled into some God forsaken place and.

I went into that place and she gave me a way to whatever children's ministry they had and I make sure I attended church. So I grew up with a lot of religious stuff. And as I got to 16, I realized that I didn't know squat about Jesus. And I was like in church and involved in church and stuff like that and was confronted with the person of Jesus and what he had done. And I realized I'd grown up.

all my life around this thing, but I'd never really tasted it. It never really was anything other than a ritual to me. And so I was grabbed by Jesus at that point, and he grabbed a hold of my life in ways that were incredible. And not long after that, I was introduced to ⁓ an athletic ministry that's headquartered right here in Kansas City. In fact, it's why I live in Kansas City now.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I'm not sure what the direction is in this here, but if it's on the east side of the city, is it that way? Is it that way? Yeah. That's how church splits start. It's like, which way is north? And half the congregation points that way, and half points that way, and the next week we have two churches.

But I went to a camp, at that camp, I was a brand new follower of Jesus. I didn't know the book of Genesis from the book of Concordance. I mean, I was that new and green. But I got put in a small group, and we're reading the Bible together. And.

I was in a group with a guy who was 40 years old. And I don't know if you're familiar with FCA camps, but they put a college athlete in there. Someone in a high school kid could look up to and say, I want to be that guy, or I want to be that girl. But I had this 40-year-old guy. And he was kind of one of those volunteers that brought a bunch of people to camp. And he hung around at the registration table too long. And they didn't have enough college kids. And so they grabbed him and said, you do this.

And I mean, looking back, I understand what was going on. This guy was lost as a beach whale. He had no clue about anything. He just volunteered to drive a bunch of kids to camp. He didn't know Jesus, he didn't know the Bible. I don't even think he had any spiritual interests. But in this first group together, we're going around this group and it's easy to see that he doesn't know anything and so I'm...

I'm taking a little initiative and they've given you these little booklets you're supposed to go through and so we're reading it and we're going around and I'm encouraging guys to read, know, that kind of stuff because I'm new to this thing. Jesus is alive and real in my life and I'm eager that my other group mates, we call them huddles back then, it's like I was eager that they would know who I was, I know who Jesus was or I don't think we need an alarm. then the group was over.

And he pulled me aside and I thought, Lord, I did something wrong. know, I talked too much or whatever. And he said to me, hey, you seem to have a real knack for this. And I, this what? I don't know. I said, well, lead in this group. I mean, you seem to have a real knack for it. He said, you just want to do it? No, I'll just watch. And I was eager and I said, yes. I never saw him again.

He was gone. And he left it up to me. When I got back from that camp, I went to a very traditional church. My parents did. And so the pastor was a bit suspicious of the camp that I'd went to. So he called me in to sort of grill me, to make sure that I hadn't gotten any heresy or I hadn't gotten off track or anything from that. And so he kind of gave me this inquisition.

And so he said to me ⁓ along the way, he said, so what did you enjoy about it? And I said, whatever I did there, I would like to do for the rest of my life. Because I got a taste of what it was like to watch spiritual transformation. It was like you got a front row seat to eternity and watch people engage in Jesus for the very first time. And I just went, I want to do that.

for the rest of my life. And that moment marked me, took me off to ⁓ a college in Waco, Texas, Baylor University. Any bears here, sick of bears? All right, here we go, sick of bears. Yeah, we're struggling this year, but we'll be back. And ⁓ I went off, left Baylor after four years and went to Dallas Theological Seminary. ⁓

Don't hold that against me. They don't own me, they disown me. ⁓ But I got a ⁓ thorough theological education there and all that time, the spirit of entrepreneurship sit in me and I went off and I just took a traditional course. There was a church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that was looking for a staff member and I went there. And it didn't take me long to discover that

that I was really not church broke, that involved in this kind of, it's a very good space, very good church as churches go. And I found myself relating to a running crowd. I got into long distance running and I was relating to this running crowd and spending a lot of time with them. And until I got called in by the elders,

and they told me that I was spending way too much time with people who didn't go to church.

that I needed to spend more time with people who paid my salary than people who are going to hell.

And I was not, maybe I'm still not, I had a hard time ⁓ not engaging theologically with that. And so I just quoted Luke 19 10 back to this group of supposedly spiritual men. I thought Jesus came to seek and save the lost. And I watched them wipe away that passage and just go, well that's.

That's for Jesus, not for you. You need to pay more attention to people who go to this church. And so I had a rough time in the local fellowship. ⁓ And so it came to a point of ending that experience there, which was I was the interim senior leader for the last year. The senior leader had left and. ⁓

I mean, it was a good space, still have friends there. I think they love me, I love them, that kind of stuff. But it was clear that our paths were not made for one another for the future. So I went off and they made it very financially feasible for me to go find someplace else. And as I went to find someplace else, ⁓ I moved to Georgia ⁓ mistaken. For those of from Georgia, I don't mean to misalign the whole state, but I moved to.

to Western Georgia, where the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hadn't gotten there yet. And it was difficult, difficult to live in that world for me. And I discovered that I just don't think God made me for that space. so ⁓ not long after that, ⁓ a friend who had been involved in that high school experience I had early on.

became the president of the Fellowship of Athletes. And he drew me to Kansas City. And I was at FCA in their headquarters for four years. And that's why I was here. But after that four year stint was up, I left. And I was looking to move to Colorado Springs. I really wanted to live out in the mountains with Andrew, know, and Andrew the Greater. And...

My wife and I have always wanted to live there and God said no. Then brought a group of people together who were attempting to plant a ⁓ local fellowship and they needed a leader. And we went off to Willow Creek together. And we met a group from down here on the south side of town, Heartland Community Church, and they took us to Willow Creek. And it was at Willow Creek that Bill Hybels gave this impassioned speech.

that they often gave at those conferences about building a church for the unchurched. And it was in the left field bleachers at the old Willow auditorium that my wife turned to me after that moment and she looked at me and said, I think you could do this.

Now, I won't repeat what I thought inside my brain ⁓ because it wasn't real holy and righteous and I just didn't really want to go back into the local church. It wasn't a place of freedom, it wasn't a place of real mission. It was more caring for the bleeding sheep ⁓ who wanted attention and I just struggle with that.

God was speaking through her. It took me about six weeks to come along and I decided that I wasn't moving Colorado Springs. I was gonna stay right here in Kansas City. I live on the north side of town. That's a north side. I live up in Liberty, Missouri. So I'm on the Missouri side as well. ⁓

This group of people had no idea what they're doing. I had no idea what we were doing. Now this is in the early 90s, all right? So you all are existing in a church planting world where there's so many resources, but there was nothing back then, literally nothing back then except a set of tapes by Carl George ⁓ that became the Bible of what I was doing. And we began to gather people together, but

we had a kind of unique way of doing things. If you've read Spent Matches, you know that that Shoal Creek is still, it might be the only secret church left in the universe. Because we still don't do any musical worship on Sunday mornings. ⁓ And I know that some of you are thinking, well, what do you do? know, so we were a bunch of people who had come out of ⁓

Organizations like Campus Crusade and Navigators, Young Life Youth for Christ, InterVarsity. And we really wanted that campus vibe that we had of reaching lost people to be the vibe that we had for this local fellowship we were building. And Willow Creek gave us that model. And so we started. And for seven years, we had the best facilities we ever had and ever will have. We opened up.

our services in the Liberty Performing Arts Theater, which was a 750-seat state-of-the-art facility built by the city and the school district for the high school performing arts. And we were the first ones to be able to rent it. Now, you can imagine. Now, I know some of you, you're gonna go if you're already in a Sunday morning service and you're brand new, and you're gonna have 50 people there.

Now 50 people, even in a room like this is not bad, but 50 people in a 750 seat theatrical auditorium, it was painful. I mean, it was painful. In fact, the first December, the last Sunday in the first year, 1995, we had nobody show up. We call it Black Sunday, we still celebrate it. I mean, literally all we had were the volunteers.

The kids ministry people, the people that were in the band, the guest relations people, nobody came through the doors that Sunday. And talk about defeating. I mean, it's like, are we doing the wrong thing here? You know, it's like, gosh. And now we gather together and we prayed and we cried and we, you know, begged to God to help us and all this kind of stuff. But slowly but surely in those first seven years, I mean, when we purchased a facility,

We had about 135 adults. We clawed and scratched all the way up to the surface. But we bought a facility, moved into an old church building that we renovated. And it helped us a lot. It was right on the freeway. In fact, if you head out of here, you're going back to.

to Iowa or someplace like that, you know, on I-35, you pass right by it, you see Shoal Creek there, it's a big sign, beautiful sign, and it helped us, a lot of people came. And we began to see some of our mission of reaching lost people begin to move faster. And we began to baptize more people, and it was exciting, and seeing things happen along that way. But we also discovered something along the way is that

It wasn't that hard to reach lost people. mean, I know that may sound bizarre in some ways, but it wasn't that difficult. If you were genuine, authentic, if you had a posture, ⁓ humble posture toward people who were far from God, it was easy to engage them in conversation and easy for you to share the narrative of your life, your story with them as they shared the narrative of their story with you. And so we were...

able to see lots of people acknowledging Jesus and stuff. ⁓

What wasn't happening is this idea of a ⁓ collectional strategy wasn't really making disciples who made disciples. And if you've read Spent Matches, I'm sorry I'm going to tell that story again. And I had to tell you I'm from Dallas Seminary because it fits here. I had a dream. Now, I didn't have any classes on dreams at Dallas Seminary.

In fact, I think the word, we didn't even mention the word at Dallas Seminary. We were very allergic to dreams. But I had a dream, and the dream was around the prayer. So I had begun praying. I took a pen and put it in the map, did a little demographic work, you know. Had 300,000 people that lived within a 30-minute radius. And Carl George had told me that Americans would drive 30 minutes to go to church.

And so I prayed on a regular basis. encouraged lots of people to pray that God would allow us to make it hard for those 300,000 people to go to hell.

And we prayed and we prayed and we prayed. And one night, and this was before marijuana was legal in Missouri, ⁓ so I wasn't taking gummies to go to sleep or anything like that. Not that I do, not that I do, but anyway. ⁓

God allowed all 300,000 people to come to Shoal Creek one Sunday morning. I don't know if you can imagine with me what that would have been like in a sleepy stupor dreaming this idea and all of a sudden seeing your prayers being answered and all of a sudden as your prayers are being answered, you discover that the strategy that you had will not actually fit the prayers you're praying.

We had 425 parking spots. We could probably fit 2,400 people if we packed them in to that auditorium. I don't know how many services we would have had to have back to back, over and over to get these 300,000 people who are coming. And I was at the same time reading a book, ⁓ Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and Its Hinderances.

a book written in the 1900s. And in it, he says this, it's not exact quote, but this is almost, he says, you know, if you ever discover that your strategies and your prayers don't fit, you might start with questioning your strategies, because your prayers might be more spirit oriented than your strategy.

And so with that in mind and I looked at it and I just started questioning my strategy and realizing that I'm praying for 300,000 people to come to Jesus. And I am not willing to cooperate or have even thought about how I could cooperate with God, with Jesus, with spirit to allow that to happen. I just don't.

have any clue about it. It it rocked my world. It absolutely rocked my world. And so I set out to figure out what would it look like?

to be able to have a strategy and a prayer that met one another. That was in 2005, two years into that facility. And we've probably had 300 people at that point. And things were headed up. And our growth curve, we made it all the way to 1,000.

in the 2014, 15 time. We were, you know, it was like, it was booming and we were the bell of the ball and, you know, everybody was talking about us because we were the thing.

But even at that.

In that 10 years, there was a holy dissatisfaction. And so I got on an airplane and started going every place I could to figure out who could help me understand how the gospel can scale. There were lots of people that could teach me how it can grow. Rick Warren can teach me how it can grow. ⁓ Bill Hybels could teach me how it could grow. ⁓

And there were other people that at that point, the whole ⁓ campus idea or having these satellite spaces were just starting and stuff. so Craig Gauchel wasn't around quite back then, but he could help me how to plop down all of these little franchises all over the place that I could be my messages to and that kind of stuff.

But the reality is all of that is growth. If you read the first chapter of spent matches, that's 10 years old. All of that statistic is probably 15, maybe 17, 18 years old. It is astronomically worse now than it was then when I wrote it.

And I would even say that even with the little sort of bumps that we hear about, know, Gen Z, you know, Gen Z guys going back to church and all this kind of stuff, ⁓ the overall statistics are not good.

Our team is not winning.

And so as I began to go around and ask, help me understand, where can I find a scalable model of gospeling that's not dependent on heavy things like buildings, ⁓ highly trained staff? Where can I find something that smells a little bit more like what I see in the four gospels? And everywhere I went, I found no one.

until I ran across this story that was starting in Sub-Saharan Africa. And it was a ⁓ group called City Team out of California that had run across this iconic crazy guy by the name of David Watson who had had experience in northern Africa, mean, in northern India amongst the Bushpuri. And I just began to lean into them. And as I leaned into them, ⁓

I discovered that there was something pretty real there. was simply amazing to me, but it challenged the very tenets of everything that I had ever really thought about the kinds of Christianity that had been given me. So as I said, I went to Dallas Seminary. I have a degree in Greek from Bagler University.

I have a master's degree in theology from Dallas. And so when I made disciples, I gathered men around tables. And we read really heavy duty books. And I ask really hard questions, because I love to get deep fast. And I love to cut hard. I love to be cut and to cut people, because that's the transformation that can take place. And I did. I made disciples. And if you head north, then you could find a lot of them.

Lou Warner, Chaz Peckham, Dan Caneeley, Jason Perry, John Hoeflinger. They'll all, if I die today, and they'll all come to my funeral and they'll say great things about me. I had an incredible investment in their lives. But I discovered that one thing that was not happening is that I made disciples, but they were not making disciples.

They couldn't use my methodologies and reproduce them in the lives of other people. And so I had one generation of disciples. And one day I asked myself the question, what does the Great Commission mean to them?

If it means for me to make disciples, what does it mean to them?

I mean, it's kind of obvious, right? It means that they should be making disciples.

And they weren't. They were growing. They were becoming better husbands, better fathers. They were becoming better givers. Yeah. They were becoming, ⁓ all kinds of beautiful things happened, but they were not making disciples.

And I realized that all of my life I had not understood the difference between growth and scale. And I think Jesus' command was about scale and not growth. It was just exactly what Andrew talked about in terms of understanding when the loss gets found and the found gets sent.

and the sin get transformed. You see, I miss the fact that the sending part, that the journey, the life that Jesus promised, the fullness of life came not in filling up, but in pouring out.

And I was confronted with biblical passages like Jesus healing the demoniac. Here is this guy, you know, full of demons, lots of demons, and Jesus heals them. And what does he want to do? He wants to do what every new follower of Jesus wants to do. He wants more of Jesus, right? He wants more of Jesus. And so he wants to get in the boat, he wants to go across the

So you can ally with Jesus so he can get more of Jesus, but what does Jesus do? Jesus says, you've got enough of Jesus. What you need is to tell that story to where you came from. And so he sends him back. It was totally contrary to my thinking and my understanding. It was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I mean, he needs to understand justification and sanctification and.

He needs to memorize Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, and maybe Titus 3, 4, and 5, and maybe understand what happened at the cross and all that kind of stuff. The kind of stuff that I would do with that person, but Jesus sends him away. And then as we follow the history of Decapolis, we discover that there's an outbreak of this good news in that space.

And then all of a sudden the pieces parts started to fit together for me. And not easily, not quick, but it's like, you know, I grew up with a robust theological education, so I knew that John Calvin had said that the word has purpose-cuity. I can't spell it, but I can pronounce it. It's sufficient.

And so it's like all of a sudden the human element, the subject matter expert that I was, was getting devalued. And the supernatural idea that there is a mysticism in this thing, that the spirit does exist, that the power of the word is untouchable in a sense, and it works mightily in people's lives, and it can do it without me.

I just need to set the table and let people engage with God rather than being the chef that comes out there and tells you how he fixed the meal. And all of this stuff started really evolving in my mind like crazy as I undergo these mindset shifts. And I lay them out in spent matches, this idea of moving from knowledge to obedience.

and discovering that Jesus' first call to his followers was not knowledge, not know me, but follow me. It was obedience. And I began to have to struggle with this idea because all of a sudden my theological education wanted to make me, push me back into this idea of justification by faith and this idea of obedience being works.

And I had to work through that thing. And we could talk about that at some point if you'd like. But all of a sudden I realized that, you know, I have a degree in Greek, I should know this, but the word pistis, you know, it's translated faith. It's trust as well. And I began to realize that we've made some decisions in our translations that have

Let us astray. I mean, what would happen if every place that the word faith put your faith in Jesus, and we translate it in the English, put your trust in Jesus, what would happen? Trust is a much more active word. It's acting as if it's true. Faith is kind of very passive mental assent. And so these mindset shifts sort of take place in me, and I began to...

be exposed to a way of gospeling that was radically different. Instead of challenging people with what they believed, instead of trying to tell them they're wrong and they need to be right, that I could invite them into my story. I could invite them into a narrative.

I'd grown up all my life and I'd been taught to talk about Jesus.

And all of sudden I discovered that the reality is I needed to talk of Jesus.

It's a subtle shift in propositions. But the fact is is that if these songs we sang earlier about Jesus being alive is true, how is he alive in my life today? What story am I telling? Not when I was 16 and I found Jesus and he radically changed my life, but what story am I telling today about Jesus? How is he alive now? And I had failed to disciple men and women.

with the ability to talk of Jesus. They could talk about him historically. They could refer to the things in scripture, but experiencing Jesus on a regular basis was not something.

that I had built into my disciple making process. And so the scriptures being readily available to them on a weekly basis, kneading the scriptures down, teaching them how to get their fingerprints on the Bible on a regular basis, how to actually put it into practice by regularly acknowledging if this is God speaking, this is, and acknowledging out loud or on paper to themselves, this is what I'm gonna do this week in regards to this truth I found.

And then being held accountable for those kinds of things. Being held accountable in such a way that they come back to a small community of people who say, how did you do with what you learned last week?

Well, they weren't passive.

They were actually becoming producers of gospel lives rather than just consuming of gospel truth.

And it led to a revolution in my own world of understanding. so I had a collision. I came up with this idea of hybrid church, or this idea of, and I really wish I would have used Prius Church rather than hybrid church, ⁓ because people think of it as in competition. But the reality is, if anybody here ever owned a Prius?

Owned a Prius. Did you ever get in your Prius and think that the two engines were arguing against one another?

You did? I mean, you just put your foot on the gas and it goes, right? And when it starts out, it's the electric engine, you get up to speed, it's gonna be the gas engine and that kind of stuff. Because it's just this like, there's one thing that God left behind. And that was this redemptive platform called Ecclesia. This group of people who...

were putting the kingdom first and being the outpost for the kingdom to be able to spread it in their world. That's what he left behind.

And that's all there is. Now there are different tactics to get there. I still think there's a space for the collectional tactic. I spoke last Sunday at Shoal Creek, and there are brand new people coming all the time. And I'm not anti whatever happens there. Some good things can happen.

But I will tell you, I do not believe that what we know of is spaces like this are going to be what God uses to see the Great Commission fulfilled in my lifetime or anybody else's. We've topped out with this tactic. This tactic is not biblical. It's not our biblical, you know, in that sense. It's not anti-biblical by any stretch of the imagination. But Jesus did not tell us how to do it. He told us what to do.

And one of the reasons I would accept an opportunity to come here would be that I think that you all have a ⁓ kingdom imagination.

You are men and women who are thinking beyond these kinds of structures. And you're realizing that for this truth to move into the marketplace, for instance, we're gonna have to dream about what it's like to plant a biblically flourishing community in an office space where people come and have genuine relationships. What's it gonna look like?

to plant an ecclesia around an elementary school where parents actually gather and have their, envision their kids flourishing. What's it gonna look like to have these kinds of social structures?

that imagine the kingdom coming to earth.

And so I'm excited to hear what you're thinking because I think this room is filled with that kind of imagination, kind of a holy ambition to do something that hasn't been done before.

Nexus: Church Planting & Le... (1:10:15)

Thank you for checking out the Nexus Church Planting Podcast. We hope this conversation was helpful and inspires you to lean deeper into your calling. If you want to learn more about Nexus, visit us at nexus.us. There you'll find church planting resources, upcoming trainings, events, and more. We also want to encourage you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Leave a review or rating to help others find us.

And please share this episode with someone you know, a pastor, a leader, a friend, somebody who needs to hear this conversation. And until next time, move with vision, lead with courage, and multiply the kingdom.