09 Roy Moran | ThinkNEXT Session 3

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 (01:05)

So in terms of, you someone just asked me, so I mentioned that a certain individual here with KC Underground was a disciple of mine for five years, is what did you do with him? And so this is kind of what we did. And when we think about helping people understand how to think with a vision,

⁓ for being a spiritual grandparent.

So I mentioned I have nine grandchildren. I'm assuming there's probably some other grandparents in here. We could compare pictures, you know, of all of our grandkids and that kind of stuff. And these slides can be available to you. You don't have to take pictures of the screens if you don't want. But you can if you want. ⁓ So.

The pervasive idea is how do we build a culture that has this dream for people who are following Jesus to believe that Jesus has called them to be spiritual grandparents, to have children who have children, who have children, who have children, who have children, children. How do we do that?

And I would submit that the cultures that I grew up in and we built wasn't like that. I mean, we might, as I said, I was able to build or to have a generation. I was able to have children, but I didn't do it in such a way that my children could have children.

And one of the big revelations for me was to come to grips with the fact that if I believe that the Great Commission was about having a vision or building a culture where people would have spiritual grandchildren, then it not only addressed my theology, but it also addressed my methodology. How I did it was just as important as what I was doing.

Because it had to multiply. It had to replicate.

And so my methodologies had to be there. As I mentioned, I have this background where I loved, you know, it's like, hey, you want to grow spiritually? Let's read Jad Packer's Knowing God. You know, that was a very influential book in my life. And if you read it, you let's read, you want to go deep, let's read Larry Crabb's ⁓ book, you know, and if you want, how about Adele's, let's do divine conspiracy together, you know, and all that kind of stuff.

And I mean it's good stuff. It's really good And it produces growth, but it doesn't necessarily produce people who can replicate that in other people's lives and so what happened for me was a distillation and This this none of this is original with me ⁓

I borrowed all of this or distilled it from other people and especially a lot of ⁓ brothers and sisters in Sub-Saharan Africa where I saw things happen in crazy ways. so ⁓ what we began to see, what I began to see is that the heart of the Father animates everything.

is that when you come to grips with the fact that there is a God in heaven who is heartsick to build a family, and he has called you to help him build that family, that animates the passion inside.

⁓ I often hear people talk about, and I think I heard John use the term DMM a few minutes ago, know, this disciple making movements. I hear people talk about disciple making movements start with prayer. ⁓ I just don't think that's true. ⁓ Prayer plays a huge part in the process because,

But I think what happens is it's more of a chemistry than it is an individual thing. And that chemistry is capturing the heart of the father for lost people. It's realizing that God is in the business of finding the lost and making them found. And he's in the business of wanting his children to be in that business.

And when that starts to come together with the idea of I can have a relationship with the creator god of the universe, something dynamic happens. on this, I believe that when you read the...

The disciples asked Jesus to teach us to pray. And when they did, ⁓ it wasn't like they were hearing Jesus talk to God.

Now, maybe I'm wrong and maybe we don't have enough data to go on it, but when I read the gospels, I don't see them seeing Jesus talk to God. And so, but what they did see him do is steal away and come back. And sometimes he took some of them with him. it's like, so this idea that they were discovering that,

that Jesus had this relationship with this God, and he told them that I only do what he tells me to do. And so this idea of, teach us to have this kind of relationship you have with God. And so that's why he gave them this model prayer to build around this idea of having some fundamental spiritual structures.

understanding that he is a holy God, that he forgives sin, that he provides daily for us, ⁓ that he is a kingdom builder, that he wants things to be on earth as it is now. So that the structure of that prayer that he gave us was this idea of this is the beginning of ⁓ what life should look like.

in this world and the world to come. And so the heart of the Father animates this idea of I begin to develop an intimate relationship with God and discover who I am before God. I'm a child of God. That is my core identity in life.

It's my core and I should not be working out of anything and when I am I'm in the flesh I am a child of the most high and my sexual identity my economic identity my physical identity Whatever identity I can have my ethnic identity whatever

is nothing compared to being a child of the most high. And so I get that as I move from the Father to prayer. that, just like Jesus taught his disciples, that moves us into this idea of understanding what it's like to ⁓ focus in on engaging the lost.

And we have these two passages in Matthew 10 and Luke 10 where Jesus sends his disciples out to engage lost people. I'm gonna stop there for a second. again, if there are questions or comments and that kind of stuff, I'm gonna go back to something up here. ⁓ So.

I really believe that when I say regospiling, it's like this idea of a moonshot. You all know, you've heard of this terminology that comes out of Google about ⁓ using John F. Kennedy's famous speech in the 60s when he said, we're going to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade.

NASA had no clue what to do. When Kennedy said that, they all lost their teeth. You know, I was like, oh my gosh, what's going on? We can't do that,

And it was way beyond. And so what we're doing, we're thinking about fulfilling a great commission, whether you have a circle of accountability, it's a neighborhood or a school or a town or a city or whatever we're thinking about. Seeing lost people come to Jesus is a moonshot. I mean, it really is a big, big deal. And so in the moonshot world, one of the things they've learned is that you focus not on the problem, I mean, not on the solution, but on the problem.

And if you read any of the stories inside Google, you'll discover that that's how they came up with Waymo. And I don't know if you've been, anybody here from San Francisco? I was out in San Francisco earlier this year and I could not believe, I mean, it was just like living in another world. Driverless cars all over the place.

I mean, just passing me by, I even rode in one. I mean, crazy, driverless cars. And that was a moonshot for Google. And they have this thing, and now they're replicating all over the place. So the idea is that fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And I think what's happened, and this is important even for me to realize, and that's the reason I would use that.

term DMM a few minutes ago, there are a lot of people in the world that I live in are intoxicated on that idea that it's the answer to the Great Commission. And I would say that ⁓ it has gone a long way in seeing some amazing things, but it's not the answer. And it says, we need to stay in love with the problem and not stay in love with our solutions.

And a lot of our solutions are things that may have worked in the past or that kind of stuff. But the problem is that we have a lovesick father. And until his family is gathered, we serve a lovesick father. And so we fall in love with that, not in love with our solutions, our newest program to come down the pike or whatever. we're all addicted, unfortunately, to what we were one with is what we're one to.

So you see this all over the place, and in fact, there are people in the local fellowships that you serve that afflict you with this.

You know, they were one with, you ⁓ I went to Young Life Camp and I found Jesus. And so every year, you know, they wanna raise money and they want the church to give, to send kids to Young Life Camp because that's the way we do it, you know. Or they were won by, you know, a famous revival guy who came to town or they read this book or they got this podcast or whatever it is. What you're one with is what you're one too. And so ⁓ this is an antidote to that.

This is an antidote to say, okay, there are a lot of different ways people come to know Jesus. and you could do the Shoal Creek thing, you know, and you could do the music that we do, or you could have a symphony orchestra and do other music or whatever. There's a lot of different ways people are gonna come to Jesus. So just stay in love with the problem, not in love with the solution.

And we really hammer that down on people and try to build that in the culture and realize that it's the problem. It's a lovesick father that makes the difference in this world. ⁓ Second thing is, for those of you, when you come to a conference like this, one of reasons I don't like conferences is the fact that we come and we get a lot of stuff.

And maybe we've got an hour, maybe we've got five hours, maybe we've got 10 hours between now and when we get back home. But we take what we've gotten, and we've gotten it in a crock pot. It's slow cooking, and you are, ⁓ you're a crowd that has read more probably, heard more.

read more of the Bible, all that kind of, than most of the people that you're working with. And so you've been in a crock pot and the spirit of God has been slowly but surely needing that truth into you. And the mistake we make is we take our crock pot experiences and we think and we can distill it down and we come back and we put people in a microwave

and we give them 30 minutes and boom. And we try to get them to where we are in a very short time. And the reality is, is that this is really a crock pot experience for you and for everyone you touch. And so one of the reasons this thing has so much idea of around and around and around is that it takes time for people to get it.

And so what we do with this experience is this is where we live.

We live in the heart of the Father. We live in Luke 15. We live in Hosea. We live in all these spaces. keep people coming back to this idea of the heart of the Father on a regular basis. This idea of prayer, we come back to what the Bible has to say about prayer, reading the prayers of scripture. What do they say? And like the Psalms that Phil talked to us about, understanding the prayers that are there.

engaging lost people. We keep coming back to what does it look like to engage lost people? Who are they? How do we learn more about them? How do we learn to talk with them about life in general and where they're headed? so, you know, one of the things we do in that space is we just realize that is that we have lost our ability to be curious.

I don't know if you've ever been in a more neutral setting, not in a Christian setting, a more neutral setting with people and realize how few people ask questions that engage conversation. And we're always looking for these short codes to make sure that do they know the language we know? You know, are they fans of the same

you know, sports teams or do they vote the same way we voted or do their kids go to the schools that our kids go to or, you know, we're looking for all these little cubby holes to fit the conversation. We just have an inability to be curious with total strangers. And so people oftentimes I hear them talking about, we just need to get people to have more spiritual conversations. And it's like, no, I don't think that's it. We seem to get people have more conversations.

Because we just don't know how to be curious with people. And so a part of this training is just helping people be curious. And we've got this document we built that's 700 questions in it. And we just give it to people and say, find five that work for you. And each day this week, ask one of those five questions, that question. Pick five.

a sign a day, and for the five days just at work, ask that question of someone and see what happens. And you know, it's like, if we're made in the image of God, if we have this sense of being built and made for community, then I'm convinced that there's reciprocity in every soul created. And so when I show interest in them at some point, they're gonna show interest in me.

And when I'm more human to them, they're more human to me. And we end up, and if I'm speaking of Jesus, if Jesus is a part of my life on a regular basis and making a difference, it's not hard for me to talk about Jesus. People often ask me, well, how soon should I talk about Jesus? I say, early and often. I mean, if your life is,

about Jesus, then why wouldn't you? You don't have to have casual conversations and this guy, know, work yourself up to it. And all of a surprise him, by the way, I'm a Jesus person. You know, it's like, no. Just be who you are. And if you are about Jesus and Jesus is making a difference in your weekly life in some small way.

Maybe in significant way, you can have those conversations. So we help people learn to be curious and learn to have these kind of conversations that are just human in nature, ⁓ that lead to people discovering who I am. if you cut me at some point, I will bleed Jesus. And if not, then we got a different problem here. ⁓

And so again, we think of each of these things as a toolbox, a toolkit. And so we've got different experiences in each one of them that you can keep coming back to. A team leader can keep coming back and having, a discovery study, doing, reading an article, watching a video, doing some things to be able to engage this kind of stuff. ⁓ As again, ⁓

the flywheel illustration, turning the crank. Just keep turning the crank and turning the crank and turning the crank. ⁓ And the third piece of that find is just looking for that person to peace, looking for someone who God's already working with. I mean, if our Father in heaven is in this world drawing people to himself, we should be able to trust that there are people in our world that he's working with.

And so this idea of trying to figure that out. Now, one of the things I would say in the Western world is that we made a mistake getting people's eyes turned outward, sort of looking for a person of peace, without asking the question, first, are you the person of peace? Do you have a reason to exist in a social network?

I had a lady out on the end of her driveway praying that God would show her a person of peace when she and her husband had built enormous equity in their neighborhood. And all they needed to do was just simply invite their neighbors to start reading the scriptures with them.

And so in the Western world, you might be the person of peace rather than having to look for that person of peace. And that's where you start. You start with people who God's working with and people who respond to the offer, hey, would you like to read the Bible with me and discover what God has to say about life? And all of sudden, you know, they say yes, then you're sitting down and you're taking that, you know, what I called liturgy a few minutes ago, seven, quite, let's just read, let's start.

Let's start and read. Now we typically start where the people are. The question about where do you tell them to read and stuff. We usually start where they are. So if I'm talking to someone and they've got marital problems and they're struggling, I'll start in Philippians 2, the most important marriage passage in the Bible.

You're all wondering, what's he talking about? But flipping suit three and four, to me, if someone gets that right, their marriage is gonna survive.

Quick, get your phones out, find out what I'm talking about. Do you want to it memorized? Why did someone quote it for me?

do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, with humility of mind, think of one another as more important than yourselves.

You know, that passage is like radical for a couple in marital trouble. And then you can stop right there, but people don't typically stop. their momentum just works in your favor. Because you know where it goes, right? It goes right into Jesus.

It goes right into the perfect example of what it's like to not think of someone, not to think of yourself as more important than someone else. so that opportunity happens. So as we begin to work with those persons at peace, we move into discovery. And it's our way of evangelizing people. It's our way of helping them.

Consume the truth in such ways they digested and it transforms them and so they begin to read through the Bible and again ⁓ If you want to go out to a space like disciple making movements calm You can find a lot of reading A lot of scripture lists there that would work for you, but I would simply say that you typically start where people are

And then you begin to get them on a path that would help them understand the redemptive narrative of Scripture. And we use the seven journeys or the journeys of the disciple life that you can find in spent matches. You can go out to ⁓ sevenjourneys.org and find them there as well. If I have any questions or comments or thoughts here, please stop me here.

late in the day and I know that you've, even though we started at one, you're probably at 120 % capacity right now and you're already thinking, okay, is there barbecue for dinner? I'm in Kansas City, I'm just hoping. I don't know.

But as people began to follow Jesus, they read the scriptures, they wanna be baptized, they began to understand that this...

the supper thing that Jesus talks about is a part of it, as often as you eat and drink, do so in remembrance of me, and they begin to craft their own communion experiences and that kind of stuff. And they begin to become assemblies. So we use the word assemble here rather than the word church, just because in the Western world, the word church conjures up so much difficulty. But people began to assemble and...

build these redemptive platforms. And so we help them read the scriptures and discover what God has in store for them, learning to grow in their relationship with one another, loving relationships with one another. ⁓

And then the last piece of this habit is simply the idea of this grows into building a culture of replication. And what we have discovered is that out of this typically grow some structures, an apostolic team of people who really.

begin to feel and look like what we would call an elder team or a leadership team in a ecclesia. They grow up, but it tends to be for more than just one. And so there's this apostolic team that grows up. There's also a gathering that begins to happen. And the gathering typically looks a lot like Sunday morning. ⁓

People have a desire to come together and to celebrate. And so there's this gathering that takes place. I would just say that in the Western world, a part of that...

need to have that gathering is a bit of ⁓ a defensive move. If you're building a culture of replication and you're building these people who have this mentality of disciples make disciples make disciples and the gathering doesn't happen, they will go find it. And they will find it in local fellowships that exist in the community that don't have the DNA of replication.

And you will find decay happened there if that happened. So the need to have this gathering. And the gathering can just be a small family house church type thing, or it can be a bunch of people together. It doesn't really matter. It's functional by nature. You don't build the form first and then build the function. You let the function drive the form.

And so we typically will do them not regularly, like not weekly, but we'll do them periodically. We will move the day and time around. ⁓ It frustrates a lot of people, but when you get fixated on a day and a time and you do it weekly, you have the real nature of dependency start to build.

And so we like to keep it flexible. We like to move it around and really help people understand that what's most important here is not this gathering, but your connection with the Father. And when you get the connection with the Father right, then you, in fact, have the ability to have people who can be a priesthood of believers in their workspace, their neighborhoods, and all those kinds of things.

And then the third structure that's always there is the discovery. There's always this penetration into lostness. And that has to be a part of it. And I would say if I could go back then and just go to the beginning, ⁓ what animates this is the heart of the father for the lost. And when that's not there,

All this looks formal and functional, but it doesn't have the kind of ethos that I think Jesus had with his early followers. And that was this idea that the lost are regularly being found. And we're building this community out of lostness. We're not building this community out of foundness.

So thoughts, questions? What time are we supposed to be done? We got 15 minutes. Okay, all right.

So it's not barbecue tonight, so I'll apologize for that. OK. Let me see if I can find something here.

So just ⁓ maybe a word of caution. It's like you all seen the Diffusions of Innovation curve? I'm sure Phil and Andrew have waxed eloquent about that and others of you. ⁓ So you got on one side of it over here in the beginning, you've got, thank you, thank you. See if I can not screw this up.

Maybe if I went past here.

going backwards.

No wonder. ⁓

not unusual that I don't know what the heck I'm doing.

So this is that curve, diffusions of innovation. You've got 2.5 % of the population that are innovators, and you've got 13.5 % of the people who are early adopters. They all respond to a language of scarcity.

All right? So language of scarcity would be this.

every two seconds.

Every two seconds, someone dies, never ever hearing the name of Jesus.

Now for some of us, that animates us. I mean, that's like, that shouldn't be. We feel emotion, we feel sorrow, we feel pain, we feel agony over that. That's a kind of scarcity language. The entire first chapter of Spent Matches is scarcity language.

There are more than one person I've received an email from telling me that they stopped reading that book at that point because Jesus cannot fail and his church is not failing. So what you're saying is not true.

Okay? ⁓ That is a person on the other side of that that responds to social proof language. Social proof language is how does it work? Tell me a story.

And since many of you haven't read the book, Miraculous Movements, in my experience over time, so many people have read the book, Miraculous Movements, they're tired of hearing what happened in sub-Saharan Africa. Don't tell me about sub-Saharan Africa. Tell me about Kansas City, Missouri. Tell me about someplace in the West. That's not social proof. The Bush-Pori story is not social proof to me.

And so on that side of it, social proof. So one of the reasons this is so hard is that about 13 % or 16 % of the people that you're attempting to recruit into this change equation and to move is the only audience you have. The 84%, when you stand up on Sunday morning and you try to speak, 84 % of those people can't hear what you're saying.

because all they hear is social proof. Tell me a story of how it's happening. Don't tell me the theory of it ought to happen. And so for us, there's a need to understand that we need to stop creating fights. Stop creating.

the consternation in the lives of different people that don't need it. Just build strategies that attract the visionary type folks that respond to the language of scarcity and leave the other folks alone. Let them be. Because they're not coming until you can show them social proof.

And that's hard. That is why I'm a both-and type of guy. There are a lot of people who sit in that stained glass aquarium on Sunday morning and cook in that crock pot, and it takes them 10 years before they actually light up and come to understand what we're talking about. And that...

creates a great place for them to do that. But there are other people that are ready to charge hell with a water pistol on day one. And that's who you want to be around. That's who you want to spend breakfasts and coffee. And those are the people that light you up. recruit them and work with them and leave everybody else alone. Because you're just making those other people mad. And you might.

If you're a vocational person, might lose your job. For those of that buy vocational, make them mad. That's OK. They don't have the golden handcuffs on you. That's the beauty of that. That's the beauty of ⁓ making your own wage. anyway, I wanted to throw that out there before we. All right. Any questions or thoughts before we?

That's a picture of a friend of mine named Behizi. Behizi was a normal guy. He's not normal, he's a massive man, huge man, but he has a real job. He's a traffic manager in the South African embassy ⁓ in Burundi.

He learned how to do discovery. He was doing with his family and that kind of stuff. But he also noticed that he had a lobby full of truck drivers waiting on their currency packages to be able to drive back. if any of you've been to Africa, you might know that things don't always work fast there. They work, but they just don't work as fast as we're used to. So these people had a lot of time.

He got a crazy idea, he started gathering these guys together and asking if they wanted to read the Bible with them. And so slowly but surely, this is an eight year story, all right, it didn't happen overnight. Eight year story of that central group there beginning to hive off and watching the gospel spread slowly but surely throughout those spaces.

And each one of those names on that list is ⁓ either a group or a church now that exists. And it's about 24,000 people it represents. And it happens just to this normal, average, everyday guy. When they went to do their first baptism, he was fearful that people were gonna call him pastor. Because he never in his life wanted to be a pastor.

furthest thing from his imagination, and he didn't want to be labeled with it. And so he didn't even walk with the people that were going over to the water. He walked behind them, way behind them, so no one would think that he was, quote, their pastor. But God has used him to do amazing things, just a humble guy with an everyday job, and just.

in an environment that allowed the opportunity in the work environment for that to happen. So that's the beauty of what can happen in this.

Nexus: Church Planting & Le... (38:26)

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.