11 Roy Moran | ThinkNEXT Session 5

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)

I have ⁓ put a lot of puzzle pieces on the table and I want to try in the next hour to maybe string those puzzle pieces together so that maybe you can make sense out of what I've been talking about. But this would be the process that we take people through in terms of from a totally unregenerate

neighbor would be invited into a group and this would be the process that that group goes through every time. These seven questions, that's the liturgy, that's the backbone, that's what happens every time. ⁓ And we encourage our facilitators, this is what you do, you don't...

deviate from that, that's just what you do. You let the Bible be the subject matter expert. And so there would be a passage that they would move through every time.

So that is the beginning of the disciple making process. ⁓ That is the end of the disciple making process in the sense is that the way we start is the way we want to end. And so people start with a posture of obedience toward God, hearing from him and doing what he says, sharing with other people. And that is the basic three movements that take place. Hear from God.

do what he says, identify where you're at, and then share it with other people. So that is the basic move, as simple as it is. And so people start there and then continue. They might start a group in their neighborhood. And as that group in their neighborhood starts, it might start to grow. And we are anti-growth, but we are pro-multiplication. And so what we try to get

to happen, again, it's not perfect by any stretch of imagination, but we try to get that group to multiply. And so someone else wants to join the group, instead of letting them join the group, we would prefer to start another group. Because the idea is not about, this is not a small group to socialize people or to build relationships. This is a small group to connect people to God. This is to get them with an,

ear toward their father to move from God as a creature, a creator to God as a father. So it's not about the relationships and the personal stuff and that kind of stuff, although that can come and be a part of it. So the group multiplies and it's easy because the leadership process is built in, not bolted on.

So when someone says, I could never lead a group, and we really try to not use the word lead, we try to use the word facilitate, because in an American context, the idea of leading and leadership, there's a bit of a...

⁓ an allergy toward that word. And so we just ask, can you ask seven questions? You've seen it happen. And one of the things we do in these groups ⁓ early on is we attempt to pass the facilitation of the group around. Very quickly, you might be the initiator of the group.

But in the second or third week, you're passing that facilitation off to someone and letting them ask the questions, letting them facilitate through the process. As a result of that, the leadership development happens within the group itself rather than have to come later. And you don't have to invite someone to a leadership training course to do this. As they're...

being discipled into the family of God, they're also being taught how to facilitate and disciple someone else.

The microphones are out there, I think. So I'm going to ask you to stop me at this point, because I know that you're going to have questions, objections, concerns, all that kind of stuff. I want you to engage here in this process. So don't hesitate to stand up, shout out, stop me at this point, all right?

All right Bill's gonna I'm just curious you you're running gasoline and electric your gasoline engine is the traditional on Sunday mornings and your electric could be the groups and you're not trying to mix them I'm a little bit curious about that as to in what's the rationale for Never in a sense trying to bring the group life into the gathered life or do they have their own gathering and I'm just curious and staff wise how many staff do you have running

for instance, the, or do you have staff? Yeah. Okay. And how large is that team? We have six people on staff. It helps us visualize what you're doing. Yeah, six people on staff. One person fully dedicated to the, what we would call the network or the electric engine side of things. All right. Their full-time job is that. Okay, just one. Okay, all right. And the rest are working with the Sunday morning. Okay. Does that help you guys visualize? Okay, what questions do you guys have?

I'm bringing you the mic so we can hear you. provides the salary for the person who runs the. It does. Okay, because that's my husband and I do this, but we don't have the Sunday morning portion. So yeah, it is. mean, in fact, you all know Chris Galanos, Megachurch of multiplication, Chris Galanos.

⁓ Great book, great friend, and Chris had a big church in Lubbock, Texas. And we engaged and he started going down this, and eLife as a big, large mega church no longer exists. ⁓ And there's a network, eLife network that exists, but not that. so.

Chris and I, through this process, I was like, look, you have a cash cow here. This thing will allow you to do a lot of things, know, keep it alive. And Chris is just not that kind of guy. He's just a single eye. I can handle ambiguity. And so both sides of that thing work well for me. It's like.

There are going to be a lot of tactics that are taken to use to reach the great commission. So I'm okay with that. yeah. So the funding comes from the gasoline side or the cum size we would call it there in that regard. So.

just to speak just a second field of this. So what we discover, again, I'm not in any way interested in you following in my path. ⁓

methodologically, you know, doing what I do, I am interested in you, for yourself, understanding why you do what you do. And you understand that you can take everything back to Matthew 28, and you have a reason for all of your actions. But we came out of Willow Creek. We have a Sunday morning church.

experience that is very unusual. Most of you would not attend Shoal Creek if you lived in the Northland because we have no musical worship on Sunday morning. is strictly, still is, amazingly enough, still is a seeker service. ⁓ And so,

What we've discovered in our experience is that because invitation, we want to create this culture of invitation, come, come, come, that the average person ⁓ only has so many people to invite.

I mean, their relational network is not expanding. They're not a multi-level marketing person who's constantly just grabbing all kinds of contacts and everything. People just have a fixed number of people they can invite. And so in our context, about three years into the process, they run out of people to invite.

And so if we're up there in front and we're ⁓ doing mailers and cards and all kinds of things, invite your friends, invite your friends, invite your friends, they've run out of friends to invite. And so we see this S-curve thing that happens. And this idea like early on, man, they're inviting people like crazy and then it stalls. And all of sudden they're sitting there and just being a consumer.

And so in our culture, what we've done is we've exposed that and say, in this climb up, you're going to run out of friends to invite. And in fact, at some point, we would encourage you not to invite people simply because after you've invited them 20 times, an invitation becomes an irritation and it threatens the friendship. I mean, they're just not coming. There are some people who will never come. And so you need a different strategy to follow Jesus.

And that strategy is stop trying to get them to come to a space where they can hear professionals talk about Jesus and to take Jesus to where you live, learn, work, and play. And begin to plant the gospel there. And so that's where this process comes in to say, look, here, you can learn how to read the Bible for yourself. And they learn that early on. But you can take this to your workplace.

Working with a real estate agent right now who's got a real estate agency of 200 agents and they're beginning to invite people into discovery and figure out who's spiritually interested in that workspace and plant the gospel where these people work. And so that's what this process does is this, we realize there is a friction that comes with the invitational strategy.

And so we're trying to figure out how do we give people tools to continue to follow Jesus, make disciples where they live, learn, work and play. So I don't know if that scratches where you were trying to itch there for a moment, Phil, but. It helps me, I'm I'm wanting to create the platform for the guys to ask questions. I know you are too, so. Yes, got a question. Yeah, so with this, with what you do on Sunday morning, what's a typical Sunday morning look like?

at Shield Creek in your context. And I know it could be different all the time, but you know. A lot of music that most of you don't listen to. We'll do dramatic sketches. If any of you ever went to Willow back in the day, we kind of look like Willow in the modern day. So dramatic sketches, video, maybe.

know, funny videos like we had a, ⁓ you can go to vimeo.com ⁓ forward slash shoal creek and you can find all of our services there. ⁓ And we'll have music around a theme. So we're doing a theme right now called ⁓ Thriving in a Anxious Generation.

And it's built off of Jonathan Haidt's book, Anxious Generation, about social media and only we're expanding it to everyone and talking about loneliness and the impact of loneliness, the need to connect and all those kinds of things. We'll use a lot of different music that you hear on the radio and stuff like that. We'll use a lot of dramatic sketches and things that we write ourselves or video that we'll either create or we find that someone has created.

and then someone will have a 20 to 25 minute ⁓ talk that will be around a one or two biblical passages. So last week was Romans 12, one and two and Philippians four, six and seven. And then we'll come back and end with some type of call song that tends to be more Christian in orientation and then would be done.

I'd curious, what's ⁓ the reasons or the rationale for why ⁓ you're trying to draw a line between here's the Sunday morning expression through Shoal Creek and then here's the group life? Because if I'm understanding you right from the book, hybrid, and from what you've said, I'm hearing that these people are never, you're never really trying to encourage these people to cross over and do both. Yeah, I mean, just realization that,

What we do on Sunday morning is just basically a tickler. Okay, it's a Willow Creek entry point. it is a tickler. And so we're attempting to use that and we will use language like we want to make, we want to slant the floor toward the cross. Okay, all right. You know, we want them to engage Jesus in a personal way. And so they will hear the phrase, get your fingerprints on the Bible. If you come in a space of six weeks, three of those weeks,

one of the, whoever's speaking will use that terminology. And they are constantly bombarded by this idea that unless you can learn to hear from God by yourself, all this spiritual angst in you will never go away. Because God wants to talk to you, not through me, but he wants to speak directly to you. And I'm trusting you understand my questions are not intended to no, that's fine. I'm trying to understand. It's like, want...

You guys know, I'm not trying to get you to do what we do. No, but we want to learn from you. Yeah. Yeah. And paradigm, because I think the room is full of guys who are putting a lot of time, energy and effort into doing Sundays in a way that's attractive and seeker sensitive, but not seeker focused. want we want them to hear the gospel in a way they can possibly hear it best. And we don't mind offending them. We just don't want to do it accidentally. And so there's Sunday.

And then we have groups. And so you mentioned yesterday that if you don't provide some kind of a gathering, larger gathering for those groups, they're going to find it. Which I still think is true just in the North American context. At least in our regions, most of our regions, people know what church is. Even if they've never gone. Grandma went and they have a feel for what it is. So if they're doing a group.

but they're never being called into some kind of a groups gathering, they're gonna start going to other churches on Sundays to try to find something, is what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, Do you also then offer group gatherings? So you have a Sunday morning gathering, you have the groups and then you have the groups exclusive gatherings? We don't yet have any kind of gathering outside of that Sunday morning thing. I mean, we do have some periodic things that happen that we do. We have different groups

Like we have a group that calls themselves marriage community.

And they do marriage things and for couples and stuff. And they will do all kinds of ⁓ fun stuff, ⁓ some stuff that's focused in on repairing marriages, building marriages and that kind of stuff. And those kind of events provide that kind of thing for people as a gathering that Sunday morning doesn't. ⁓ But we haven't matured into on our network side yet to have a gathering that's separate from that. All right. So I'm going to throw this back to the guys again.

kinds of questions about technique, I'll come to you in a second, all kinds of questions ought to be exploding in your brains as to how does this works. And I'll just give context back in 1988 we started our first church and we were seeker focused. We did that for about two years and then I gave up on it.

because I didn't see growth. I saw people coming, but I didn't see actual maturity growth growing. Plus, frankly, it's really hard. It was really hard to write sermons on seven secrets of success or seven ways to have a better marriage and that kind of stuff. And I finally just, I remember one summer I decided I was preaching through the story of Abraham every verse, because I knew how to do that and it felt like I could do that easy. And they came alive and started grabbing Bibles and reading with me and talking. And then we really then tried to find a way to do discipleship.

And you yesterday dropped a bomb on me by pointing out that yes I've always interpreted the Great Commission as we evangelize the lost and then we disciple the saved when actually, you I should be discipling the lost. I've never, that's, thank you, that's gonna screw with me for a while. But we built us, I think the room is full of guys that are trying to do Sunday in a way where people can find Christ, but we're also not just wanting to have Sunday events. We're wanting to have disciple making going on. And I think that's where, you know,

the discovery method you're using, thank you. But this is what we need to be thinking through is, Jason, how are you going to have an event that would gather the bikers? But just gathering them is not enough. We've got to make disciples now. So, okay, what questions do we have? Yeah. My question would be, how do you know with the context of how you do Sundays, how do know if you're successful? What is your metric? I mean, because if I understand correctly, you're not necessarily trying to funnel these people into groups, is that correct? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Well, we're trying to funnel them into groups, not groups of strangers. Okay. We're trying to funnel them into natural networks.

So we want to push back into their neighborhood, their family, you know, like a phenomena that we have across the north of this city. There's a highway called Highway 152, and there's a ⁓ university about 80 miles north called Northwest State, Northwest Missouri State University, and we have about 8,000 graduates of Northwestern Missouri State along that corridor 152.

And so we have some people working in graduate clusters, because they were all fraternity brothers, sisters, all that kind of stuff, working to plant the gospel in those networks. So that's the kind of groups we're trying to drive people back into, not necessarily form groups of strangers and get them to socialize and learn to love one another. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's hard. Okay, I do have to ask though.

may have a question.

why would you not, you've got a membrane between what happens on Sunday mornings. So they have their gathering on Sunday morning in groups for those people, then you have a membrane that tries to keep people from crossing over. And then you have the groups over here, why would you have that membrane? If I were to tell you I wanna start a church somewhat like yours, I wanna do a Sunday morning gathering in such a way that it's friendly to seekers and they're finding Christ and they're taking next steps, but I really want them to get into groups that are doing these kinds of things because this allows them all to shine and play and grow.

Why would, if I told you I was gonna do that to where there's crossing over here, why would you tell me not to? Why would you tell me to put a membrane in the middle? Well, I would say that what you would experience, and it's funny, could use the word membrane because we use that word too. We talk about a two-way semi-permeable membrane between the two. Yeah, yeah. There is. I can talk about it in theory all day long. Okay. But in reality, ⁓

It crosses over. They're crossing over. it crosses over like crazy. People are people. going to. Yeah, they'll do what they want. They're Americans. OK. And by God, I'll do exactly what I want to do. And you're not going to say a thing about it. And if I've hired, well, I guys in the room that are saying we're going to do what we want to do. what God calls us to What is the typical?

longevity of someone in your church. Like I know some churches that are seeker sensitive are really good at getting people in the door, getting them take first steps, follow Jesus. But typically around your five, there's an exit of that person to a different model church. that do you guys see that? Yeah, we do. There's no doubt there's a revolving door that happens. And what we've discovered in just trying to measure

things is the reality is that the earlier we can get someone self-sustaining in their spiritual journey, the longer they will maintain their connection to the mission that we have. ⁓ They may not come on Sunday mornings. We're okay with that. We've got lots of people ⁓ who don't come on Sunday morning who would say that they're connected with the mission of Shoal Creek.

Self-sustaining spiritual journey is the telltale sign of what happens. Otherwise, they're going to chase dependency.

Life Church pops up in our neighborhood and Life Church has this incredible thing called Switch on Wednesday night. And if you have a middle school kid, I mean, it's like knock the socks off of things and everyone's going to Life Church because of their kid. We don't have that, and we never have. Our student ministry has always, in terms of church life stuff, sucked. It just has never been that thing.

You know, we've got kids who are now serving as adults who've come through that, whose parents were self-sustaining in their own spiritual journey. Their family became self-sustaining in terms of being able to use the discovery process to disciple their family. And the kids fall out into ⁓ an adult that knows how to sustain their own spiritual journey.

Yeah, we've been using sermon based small groups since we started 12 years ago and shifted into the discovery Bible method maybe about eight to 10 years ago. Three of the challenges ⁓ that I've seen on a regular basis, ⁓ one would be the multiplication side of things. Like people just, they love the community and don't want to multiply or don't want to see that go away. The second thing would be like the fighting of the simplicity. Seems like we want to default to

a more complex model. And the third thing would be ⁓ just defeating the consumeristic mindset. You know, I'm going to go there, I'm going to consume the material, you know. ⁓

push my ⁓ paid in full stamp and move on to the next thing. And so that idea of like, what are you gonna do about this and what did you do about this? Those are super hard pieces to get the groups to identify with. So just hearing those ⁓ bigger challenges, I was wondering if you could just speak into those a little bit and some of the things that you've done to combat that. So.

We have always known from our very beginning that this idea of seeking the lost and building community oftentimes are enemies. Because the average Christ follower has not been impacted by the heartsick nature of the God that died for them on the cross.

And so they viewed the cross as a finish line, not as a starting point. And so it's always that.

that issue. for us, ⁓ the idea of seeking the lost and that being our mission and that being repeated in a culture, a piece of our culture that is ⁓ always held up becomes valuable. And it means that some of those people actually come through the front door, especially if they come with a Bible and well dressed and they're coming from another church, they come through the front door and they're quickly

out the back door because I came as a consumer and we don't actually, early on people say, well, where do I go to get fed? And it's like, well, ⁓ we don't feed people, but we teach you to feed yourself. And we constantly share a story about, I know when I said that immediately in your minds, the command of Jesus.

came to your mind when he said to what? Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep, right. That you feed them best by teaching them to feed themselves. Well, I mean, what did he mean by that? I mean, let's think about it for a moment. You guys are, you gals are exegetes, right? You handle the scriptures well, or do you? We hope. What did he mean by feed my sheep?

Does the shepherd go to the pasture, pull the grass up, put it in his mouth, chew it up into green little gruel and pull the sheep over and spit the gruel into the sheep's mouth? No. What does he do? He leads the sheep to the food and the sheep eat for themselves. Now, I would suggest that

What we do in our world is kind of like the former, not the latter. And so we tell people, we're going to teach you to feed yourself. So that's one of those things that deals with. But the fact that American culture ⁓ people are extremely lonely.

They are not connected. They have very few people that know how to carry, they don't know how to relate to one another so that there are other people who carry the weight of their life with them. And that's always gonna be a problem. And so if vision can't get above this personal need of community, this is always gonna be a struggle. So we use vision to fight that off, but it is always a struggle.

Yes, just a second. I knew you had three things there, I, ⁓ complexity, everyone adds complexity. I would just tell you that, you know, complexity confuses. Every time we add a person to something, you add complexity, complexity, complexity is Satan's greatest tool, you know, to keep people from following Jesus. So it's like simple.

is repeatable, repeatable is sustainable, sustainable leads to disciples making disciples, making disciples, the more complex it is, the less likely it is going to be replicating, so. ⁓ This may just be me, but.

It sure feels like I'd feel a little bipolar almost trying to lead your ministry with the two very different approaches that you're in a sense doing this here when you're doing this here and there's really the two never come together and meet.

is what I'm picking up if I'm hearing you correctly. Well, I mean, they do meet, but at the same time, that's like I said earlier, I wish I would called it Prius rather than, than hybrid because people think of this as two sides. They're each other. Competing things and they are competing in a sense, but they're only competing, they're focusing on the same thing. You know, it's like we are trying to reach the great commission and if you.

If you've got to come to grips with your own understanding, if I've got 50,000 people that live within 25 minutes of here, what percentage of those 50,000 people are ever going to come here? And if I come to a conviction that there is a serious percentage of those people that aren't coming here, what am I going to do? I'm going to tell those people to go to hell?

Or do I feel a responsibility to somehow get the gospel to them? I gotta have a different strategy. So now you're into that bipolar thing, and how do I do that? So from a logistical standpoint, does your one paid staff person actually physically touch each one of these groups when they get started, or do you hand the seven questions to the facilitator, and if you're...

one person is involved in the group, how long do you stay involved before handing it off? The answer to that question would be yes. Sometimes they do, like right now, ⁓ he's working in a northeast, northwest part of our city called ⁓ Parkville, and he's got a little biblically flourishing community starting there that he's hands on with.

We have another group of people that work around the jail, and he has very little to do with, just touches base and coaches the leader ⁓ on a monthly basis. ⁓ If someone came, like I'm working with this lady who's working in that ⁓ real estate agency, ⁓ I meet with her and another group of people on Thursday mornings, and we're focusing and building that mentality of what it would look like to plant the gospel in this real estate agency.

So it's yes and yes and yes in a sense. If someone comes and says, want to go do this, we are a permission giving space. And we just say, hey, go for it. We would love to be in contact with you. We would love to stay connected. We would love to believe that no one stands alone and that if Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer in the history of the world, needs coaches, then we think you might need a coach as well.

So we would love to have a coaching conversation, you know, regularly with you to find out what's going on. So we try to make sure that everyone's connected and no one's out there doing their cowboy thing. But I'm sure they do their cowboy thing and I don't know about it. you know, people will be people. Questions? I have a question. Logistically, you have a building that you meet with your gathering on Sunday.

Is that correct? How do you facilitate that building through the rest of the week or do you? Do you have use it for other things? Because for a lot of us that are starting or have facilities like you, you just say you just do that one gathering on Sunday. What do you do with the building the rest of week? We have a relationship with an organization that runs a co-working space out of our building.

And so we have eight.

⁓ tenants that rent office space in our building on a weekly basis. This co-working space operates a number of civic events out of our buildings. ⁓ have NA, ⁓ AA, ⁓ Al-Anon, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, ⁓ training for, well, therapy sessions for parents with ⁓ kids who

suffer from autism. ⁓ We have ⁓ adoptive parents training that takes place there. it's just, it's like, we think of it as a community center. Got it. And people are in and out. And it's a little strange for me, you know, I'm the founding guy. I was there at the beginning. I can walk into that building and feel like a stranger.

And people have no idea who I'm at, who I am, you know, and stuff. And so it's like that's just fine with me, but, you know, it's just the way it is. So is that what you're asking there? I mean, some of our groups meet there. We sit at I-35 and 435 in the city on the northeast side of town. And that ⁓ other major fairway, 152, we sit right there. So we're easily accessible.

The Ford plant, if you drive at Ford F-150, it was probably made a stone's throw from where we are. So we got 5,000 Ford employees over there, and the groups that come from there meet there. People have access to our building 24-7 if they need it. And so it's just this constant thing.

I a question. So I'm thinking about discovery almost like this discovery group format almost in the same way that a lot of churches do alpha. Do you know, are you familiar with alpha? Very much so. Yeah. So can you compare those? And I know that there's differences, but I keep thinking about discovery groups, fitting it, integrating it into maybe the model of churches that most of us are running with.

Why wouldn't it work for that to be our local missions strategy? ⁓ I'll just stop there. Yeah, Alpha is a wonderful program. You know, I mean, it's great. ⁓

We have experimented with ⁓ another version of Alpha called Christianity Explored that comes out of England as well. ⁓ that's been very, we've taken pieces parts of it and used it sort of as a precursor to getting people involved in a discovery group. ⁓ I would just say that.

If you're looking for a compass, know, it's like a lot of you want a roadmap, you you want to go here, but it's more of a compass. One of the issues, if you're going to make disciples who make disciples, like back on that sign back there, you have got to radically eradicate dependency.

and whatever people become dependent on that's not their father in heaven will neuter any ability to see the viral nature of the gospel. So.

Programs like Christianity Explored, like Alpha, have a very upfront type thing, even though they have a group process. You're very dependent in some ways, can be very dependent on stuff. if you're not catalytic, so I think of catalytic as okay, a catalyst starts something. You have to be there, you have to be present. So if you're catalytic, it cannot start without you.

But if you're catalytic, it cannot depend on you. You've got to be able to start things that don't depend on you. My whole education, my training and everything was about drawing people to myself.

And learning to then, how do I get the gospel to move away from me was my journey and is my journey in that process. And you're talking there, one of our core values that we try to train the guys in is learning to lead without having to be in the room. If you're in the room and you have to be in the room, you're not leading. But if you can leave and they know what to do without you, they can keep going. Several years ago, another question here. Several years ago, we got in.

Several years ago, we brought in Ralph Moore.

to try to unpack because again, they were looking for a level five church exponential was somewhere in the Western Hemisphere and basically he's the only guy they could find that had created a multiplication movement. And John Hottel ended up coming with him to be his interpreter and stayed with us to continue to interpret amongst us. And I really appreciate what you're doing because you're doing something nobody else has done. We were looking for a both hand approach because we still see the value of doing Sundays because I think at least here in this region, people expect to go someplace on a Sunday.

if they start following Christ. But I don't want them to be caught up in that. We want them to be caught up in more, which is what you're also doing. for my rationale, someone said, well, why don't you do that Sunday morning thing? And I was like, I live in a community that's 24 % Catholic, just in terms of how people represent themselves. 24 % Catholic, 21 % Lutheran.

So I've got this very strong liturgical type mentality. And as we're leaning into that, we discover that that crowd in many ways needs formality to approach God.

They don't come to God with this loosey-goosey, come to my house, read the Bible thing, and know, kind of sounds like a hippie thing to them, you know? And that part of our crowd is not into that. They need this formality. so we, Sunday morning offers that. And they show up every Sunday. People walk through the door that are lost as beach whales.

Family's coming in, and I always tell people, even talking to Chris when he was thinking about as he was moving down in eLife, he's like, hey, where are you gonna find a place, even if it's two or three families a week, where are you gonna find a place where you come into legitimate contact with that kind of stuff? And.

I don't know, I could spend a year trying to do that on my own, going to coffee shops and whatever I would be doing, joining pickleball clubs and all kinds of stuff. But they're coming to me. And so it's like, it just doesn't make sense to not do it. And I got a lot of people who love doing it. They find it fun. They're artists and that kind of stuff. And so let's keep doing it. We enjoy it.

Exactly. It allows me to be here, you know, and I would you know allows me to travel like crazy all around the world

That's a great lead into my question, because I know you do a ton of global work and a ton of different locations all over the place. I'd love to hear about how some of the fruit that you're seeing over there, even though you mentioned yesterday, know, ⁓ that's over there, it's not in the West. I'd love to hear what you are seeing over there. then maybe also other churches, because know that Shulker is super unique church. there other kind of prevailing model churches in the states that are adopting

some DMM principles that you're actually seeing some really incredible work, maybe a couple of churches that you might recommend looking into. So first part, overseas fruit, and then second part, are there churches here locally that you look up to? So globally, ⁓ South Asia right now is just exploding. ⁓ You see the New Generations logo up there as an organization that I helped found. ⁓

and it came out of City Team, and it's the Miraculous Movements organization, and our South Asian team, I think, in the fourth quarter of 2025, saw 12,000 churches planted. ⁓ Now, it sounds like a lot in many ways, but at the same time, you're talking about 1.6 billion people, and the largest country in the world. ⁓ But it just, just,

growing in some ways. ⁓

rapidly, arithmetically, I wouldn't say it's exponential at this point, but it's growing fast ⁓ through just a lot of ordinary people and non-funded type activities. We think of our work in new generations as both catalytic and commissioned. So commissioned is when we're paying people to go out and open new spaces. Because when you've got an unreached people group,

Somebody's got to go in there because by nature they don't have anybody inside to reach them. So you've to pay to go in. So that's a commission. But the catalytic work, which is mostly what I'm talking about in South Asia, is happening through ordinary people. Happening through the visual I showed you of a guy like Behizi in Burundi.

Just people happening. And so they start, and I wanted to start with this, I didn't. it's passage in Zechariah that says God challenges the Jews to not despise small beginnings. And I think every one of these stories has this really tiny, tiny small beginning.

And it has this messy.

start to it and stuff. And sometimes we get engaged in that and we're in it, and man, it's difficult, but every one of those things has a small beginning. ⁓ East Africa, ⁓ things moving rapidly amongst the unreached people groups in Northern Kenya. ⁓ Radical Muslim groups that are seeing the gospel planted among them. And it's just happening because these folks are sitting down and learning to read the Bible or hear the Bible for themselves.

they hear the Bible in their own language and begin to both hear from God and do it and share it and all of a sudden, you find this space that used to have an Islamic center that now turns into a Christian center because the Imam has started following Jesus.

And when you visit these places, it just blows your mind to think that they could have this radical turn from, you know, once I was this and now I'm this. So.

Those kinds of things happening in Sub-Saharan Africa all over the place from west to east. ⁓ Now moving south in Africa, just amazing stuff happening in Zimbabwe and ⁓ Zambia and Namibia and places like that that you kind of just never hear about in Africa unless you watch national geographic TV shows.

implanted and seeing this impetus, these fires start, these people learning to lead catalytically. So just like you talked about, Phil, it's like learning to facilitate in such a way that it moves away from them.

And they provided the kind of tools for people to let the Bible be the subject matter expert. And they're listening not to know, but to obey. And it changes the perspective of people. And they begin to operate ⁓ in Jesus' ways because they're leaning into the Jesus' truth. And all of a sudden now they're leading the Jesus' life that he promised. ⁓ So it's happening in so many different

different places. Iran, for instance. Many of you, I don't know if you've seen, ever watched the video. Come on, help me here, I'm old. Sheep Among Wolves, part two. Anybody here seen that? Sheep, if you want a perspective over on it, it's a bit of an older story, but it's still happening right now. Sheep Among Wolves, part two on YouTube.

about the gospel being planted in Iran and the church in Iran being one of the fastest growing churches of any country in the world. And I just got word yesterday that some of these folks have started moving out into the mountains of Armenia and retreating in the mountains of Armenia to be able to strategically think about how can they work in their country right now

with bombs dropping and their own personal safeties being ⁓ threatened. so hundreds of these leaders have been smuggled across the Armenian border to meet and begin to strategically think about, what do we do in light of this? How do we leverage this for the kingdom?

And so, and I know it's gonna be leveraged in significant ways because they don't wanna be a part of an armed rebellion. They have the gospel at the forefront of their motivation and their posture. So they don't wanna pick up arms, but they want to see Jesus move in that way. So.

some of those type things, locally or globally, I mean, in the US, I see a lot of churches leaning into things. I would say that, like, eLife,

Chris Galanos and what's happened there is a great story that you guys ought to read his book and come to grips with that. Again, don't do what I did, don't do what Chris did, do what God's calling you to do and you know why you're doing what you're doing. You have a biblical foundation for why you're doing what you're doing. But the eLife ⁓ network,

across is really developing a lot of cool things that are happening around the country. I don't know really that many churches I could call by name that have, I know a lot of discussions going on. I mean a lot of senior.

big churches having discussions about how do we pivot in this time. But I don't know anybody that's gotten traction yet that I could say, I would feel confident saying in public that, hey, look at this person or look at that person. ⁓

So I don't, sorry to disappoint there, but yeah.

I think, you know, because one of the tensions that I know that I would feel as a young church planner is that you're starting your church and you're leaving everything and we don't know how to talk about this without saying I'm not a good Christian, but there's a financial component to all of this. And it's the elephant in the room.

And it's the thing that we're dealing with across the country as we're looking at the fact that we have a model that we've been raised at for centuries, which is Sunday centered. And I'm someone who believes in Sunday. But at the same time, we're doing something that what happens, so you know, I'm a young couple.

I've got a couple of kids, I've went out in faith, I felt like God's called me to start a church and I'm just right at 70. And what is this gonna do to me financially if I go this way? And this is the kind of dialogue that we need to have as we look at this because there's something really radical that people like Roy, this Holy Spirit is stirring. It's the idea that we need to have a greater heart for the lost.

And it's not rebuking us. It's not correcting us or putting us down. But the idea is that we want to experience God in a radical way. We want to grow people up and create those Acts 2.42 communities where they're, you know, we're not negating spiritual disciplines, but how do we have a greater heart for the loss? And I think at times what we do is we feel like we've got to abandon certain things. Well, I've got to be totally evangelistic.

or I've got to be totally, you know, Acts 2 42, or I've got to, okay, I've got to be uber Pentecostal. And the thing is where we need to dialogue and we're not going to answer today is we need to find a way to say that we're pretty good at what we do here at Nexus. We plant churches. But what is the spirit of Lord saying that we need to add to our quiver to be even better at what we do? But I wanted to assure you, you know, you young.

planters and everything else, we need to talk about the reality that you've put your all out there and we have a certain model that says I'm getting to a place where I can raise, get a church going that can support my family. So we have to dialogue about all these things and you're not unspiritual to talk about those kinds of things. You hear what I'm saying? But that's part of what we're dealing with. And so at times when we feel that,

We find a spiritual reason not to engage these kinds of topics because we have a fear. Let's be a family that talks about our fears and figures out a way through our fears. Okay, so that's what I wanna just tell you. I'm excited about this and I'm scared to death as I talk about this. But you know, if God is for us, who can be against us?

Yeah, just maybe to put a period at the end of that sentence, I would like to just say your work is your worship. All right? Your work is your worship. ⁓ Now my friend Shabu down here came to visit me. He lives down here and we've known each other for a ton of years, but he just left ⁓ a great church here in the south of Kansas City to work in the insurance business.

I would say that his work is his worship. He has not stepped down. He's not doing less. His work is his worship. So if you're bivocational, convocational, and the space that you're working in can't support you, then maybe that's good thing. Your work. Because you'll never get closer to lost people than when you have a real job.

Those of us who serve on the staff of a church, we just fish in stained glass aquariums. We don't have time to relate to lost people. Although we'll stand up on Sunday morning and talk about a lovesick God and then our own personal lives, we have no lost people in it. But if you have a real job, man, you have a great opportunity to go to work with people who don't know Jesus.

Now some of us actually go to church with people who don't know Jesus too. That's okay, that's fine. But your work is your worship. I don't care where you are, what you're doing, ground to put the cross is level. There's no less or more here. Your work is your worship.

So if, I'll hang around for lunch here, but if you need to get a hold of me, that QR code will take you there. ⁓ The whole curriculum for the habits, if you were interested in looking at it, is available and yours for free. The overheads, the...

Student everything you can have will give you everything you need you can jump into a Habits dialogue would be online, but but there is regularly a habits of replicating Disciples learning adventure that happens online and you can go through it yourself and see how it works It is stupid simple All right, just stupid simple. There's no

no ⁓ wow to it at all. It's just simply get your fingerprints on the Bible, hear what God has to say, and then do it, all right? So I would like to end with an exercise if I could. If that's okay. If I can find this. ⁓ geez, I just messed myself up. save me. Save me, Brother Ben. One more time.

All right, let me see if I can do this right. Here's one of the problems that we all have. Remember I mentioned that we all have short codes? People have, ⁓ so anybody read that for me?

So remember, as you're communicating, casting vision with people, ⁓ you're using words and they're filling in the blanks with their own meanings. And so you have to be really painfully simple, really painfully repetitious to make sure that the words you use and what they understand by the words you use, there is a shared meaning here because they will fill in the blanks.

and you don't know what they're filling in the blanks with. ⁓ Same thing here.

So think we need some Nexus t-shirts like that. here's an assignment that comes out of the prayer time, ⁓ the prayer habit, all right? So ⁓ there are different prayer tools you can use, and ⁓ Raleigh talked about prayer walking. And so if you wanna go out ⁓ to Mercy Alliance.

We've got a ⁓ couple of different prayer walking tools that you can use there. Just teaching people how to prayer walk, how to go through your neighborhood and notice what's happening and how to pray house to house for people. And how to do it on regular basis so you show up. And how to make yourself obvious to your friends or your neighbors when they say, hey, I see you're out for a walk. It's like, yeah, I actually do this on regular basis and use it as an opportunity to pray for my neighbors. Anything I could pray for you about?

And maybe your neighbor's like, oh my God, I got a Jesus freak for an hour, or maybe they'll engage you, you never know. I find that they're more engaging than running from it. I rarely have had anybody run from an offer for prayer. So prayer walking, maybe you're familiar with the 10-2.

where you set your watch at 10-2 and you use Luke 10-2 as a reminder to pray on a daily basis. You can do that, know, pray before you eat and that kind of stuff. But I want to challenge you to use a prayer calendar. I would like to challenge you to think about taking a sheet of paper, do it on a phone, laptop, whatever, and put 30 names of people down.

And each of those people, you're pray for them on that day of the month. 30 names of people. And you're gonna pray for them. you're gonna text them, so you really need to think about, do I have their mobile number? All right, you're gonna text them on that day that you're praying for them. And you're gonna say, I'm instituting a new.

Prayer habit. I'm praying for people I care about. Is there anything I can pray for you about today? And you just send that out and see what happens. Now, I would like to challenge you that you got 30 people. I would like to say let's take 10 of them and let's make 10 of them people that you don't know their eternal destination.

that you're unsure about their Jesus stuff. And you're gonna take a relational risk here by inserting yourself into their life, and they're gonna get a text offering to be prayed for by you. We have found profound success in reaching into lostness with this tool.

as we challenge people in their neighborhood, for instance. ⁓ Tim Backs, they have this little neighborhood thing going on and Tim puts this guy, the single guy in his neighborhood on his deal and says, hey, he didn't know anything about the guy's spiritual history at all and come to find out the guy was a young single guy, 35 years old and struggling with huge medical issues and needing help.

You're needing help to get spaces, to get to things he couldn't get to and stuff. so Tim was able to organize his neighbors to be able to roll in and start loving, showing some compassionate love to this guy. And the guy's asking, why are you doing this, And Jim's saying, I wish I could say I was doing it of the goodness of my heart, but the only good in me is that Jesus.

and invaded my life, and that's why I'm doing it. And a spiritual discussion starts out of that. So this prayer calendar can be a great way to make a polite intrusion into the non-believing world and start a spiritual discussion. So I would love for you to take that. If you go out to mercyalliance.org.

and you're looking for a written explanation of that, or if you go to movementprayer.org, both places have a tool there that deal with the movement calendar. All right, well let me pray, or do we, let me pray and then I'll bring Andrew the greater up. All right, Father.

We live in a world that is in desperate need of your grace, of the kind of irrational love that you showed in that story in Luke 15.

And many people are fighting you and they're fighting you because of us and we apologize. We're so sorry that we have misrepresented Jesus, that we have misrepresented what it means to be Jesus-like in this world. I pray that you would,

settle in the hearts of these men and women, that you would settle on their hearts in such a way that their favor in your eyes is certain.

that Romans 8, 38 and 39 is absolutely true. What can separate us from the love of Jesus?

Father, no irredeemable harm can come to us because we're your children. There is nothing that you cannot redeem. So I pray in that security and that identity that you would allow us to reach out to our lost friends and neighbors.

Father, if I think about a map right now and I put all of these people on a map, the footprint, the kingdom footprint is represented in this room has so much potential.

And I pray that you would give us the courage to follow that potential, not because we possess all kinds of cool stuff and technology and giftedness and knowledge and stuff, but simply because we're your children. And we do what you say, because we know that you love us in ways that we can't even love ourselves.

and you want what's best for us. So help us Father to have that courage to dream and to believe and to trust that what you say is true and to act on it. Thank you for. ⁓

the leaders here and for them organizing this time together. And I just thank you for what comes this afternoon as we gather around this idea of what would it be like to be an Antioch Church. Father, just continue to give us the ability to dream and act in the Spirit.

So thank you for Jesus, thank you for his life, his death and his resurrection. Thank you for dragging us into your family and for making us your sons and daughters. We are grateful and we are mindful that we have nothing to merit it, that it comes simply at your choosing. We don't understand that father, but we will accept it and we will live in it.

because you are king and we wanna help you build your kingdom in this world. So thank you for Jesus, we pray in his name.

Nexus: Church Planting & Le... (1:04:48)

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.