Did you ever attempt something really great only to have it drag on too slowly? I have…

In fact most everything I’ve ever attempted in ministry has gotten off to a slow start. At least slower than we anticipated it should or would.

Two years ago we launched a new service in a movie theater about 25 miles from our church campus. We did it, not necessarily to solve space problems though our service at that time is overflowing our auditorium into the church courtyard via video.

We could do it because we are in the midst of pastoral succession and I was no longer tied up at that time on Sunday morning. The reason we did it was to reach people we touch through other media but who live too many stoplights away from our church.

Some people get growth and they get it quickly. For some reason that isn’t my story…

You guessed it, we got off to a slower start than we thought. And it has grown slower than we anticipated but 18 months in we average around 140 in attendance and are probably touching 180 regulars each month.

Was it worth it? Of course. It is an extension service, but what if it were a separate church plant? Wouldn’t 180 people count for something? Of course they would.

Still don’t know why it hasn’t grown faster, and don’t really care. Slow and steady has been the story of my life and a dozen people gathered on a September Sunday in 1971 has turned into 700+ churches around the world.

I’ll take slow and steady any day.

Had a heart-wrenching conversation this week.

Met a man who lost his very young son to the H1N1 flu a couple of years ago. The boy had no symptoms, simply went to sleep and never woke up.

The father, who is a seriously Godly man has been barraged with the usual set of “answers” as to why this happened. None gave him much comfort. They range from God’s secret purpose in the loss of life to why God would “allow” something like this to happen.

A bunch of well meaning people tried to comfort a hurting family with thoughts that center on two things. One brings focus to the omnipotent side of our Lord. The other explanation centers on the promise that God will work all things together for good to those who love him.

Both God’s power and that promise are real–they are valid.

However, neither really brings comfort to hurting people. Nor do they offer an intellectually or spiritually satisfactory explanation for why bad things happen to Godly people.

Enter the concept of spiritual warfare–not a demon hiding behind a bush or even the reality of everyday struggles against the forces of darkness. Spiritual warfare operates on a larger scale and understanding that can pull us back from always blaming God for Satan’s work.

Jesus said he came to bring life and to make it abundant. In the same breath he said Satan comes to lie, kill and steal–from everyone at every level.

I advised that young father to stop blaming God and aggressively blame the devil for what happened to his boy. Think through this metaphor. The President of the United States is sending men into battle in Afghanistan every day. If someone gets shot no one asks, “Why did the President shoot this man?” or “Why did the President let the enemy shoot this man?”

Everyone understands that though the President has great authority it is the enemy (and all the authority behind him) that pulled the trigger.

We need to stop blaming God when things go south and call an enemy an enemy. If we do, we can see God as a constant and consistent friend. We’ll understand our world better–and probably be able to cope much better with the combat we call life.

Got involved in an interesting discussion the other day.

Heard about a resort where the developer did an unusual thing–he sold off parcels of land to various businesses within the resort. This is highly unusual because of the loss of control.

Most resorts are highly integrated and developer/owners want to control everything from signage to the products marketed. At first I thought this guy must be nuts.

But then I heard that he came through the recession with no problems–in fact he has no debt.

That changed my tune. I began to think how a lack of control can equate to less responsibility. In other words, he didn’t need to bail out those resort businesses since he didn’t own them. The losers couldn’t swallow up the winners.

This, of course, is the way healthy families treat their grown children–no control other than relationship.

Unhealthy parents, on the other hand, try to control their adult kids. Doing so requires them to also protect their adult children from whatever mistakes they make, often breaking the parents financially and emotionally.

Then I started thinking of churches. Healthy movements don’t own their church plants, they accept them as peers. Unhealthy movements institute controls, but also accept financial and other responsibilities that can break them.

This is food for thought when some church groups are dying over finances and others are struggling because people under their control broke laws of morality, etc.

You control ‘em, you own ‘em!

Think about this–you can trade space for time.

In the past few months I’ve spoken with several pastors frustrated because their churches were outgrowing their space. Each one seemed heaven-bent on spending more money to rent a bigger building.

But why waste money if you don’t have to?

I long ago learned that you can trade space for time by holding multiple meetings in the same location. This little insight can save millions of dollars.

Our church is currently overdriving and underutilizing space at the same time. We preach the same message in seven services each weekend, using three worship spaces–an auditorium, a youth area and a movie theater. But we are still jamming a couple of services while ministering to smaller crowds at other times.

One service is often “standing room only.” For us the easiest answer would be for some of our folks to make a “missionary-move” to another service in order to make room for others in the busier services.

We’ll eventually build a larger auditorium, but in the meantime it is much easier to trade time for space.

ust had a harrowing experience. And, it is all about passports.

My friend, his wife and I were to travel from Athens, Greece to Kiev, Ukraine together. There would be someone at the airport (who knew him, not me) to pick us up.

The day before we were to leave his wife’s passport was stolen on a subway in Athens along with her wallet and credit cards. You know the routine when it comes to cancelling credit cards. The thief had already charged a bunch of stuff. But the passport was an entirely different issue…

Not having a passport in a foreign country can become one very serious problem.

I was fearing traveling to a country where I knew no one, am unfamiliar with the phone system and no one knew what I look like–all to do a seminar that wouldn’t happen if we didn’t connect. Serious anxiety time.

Fortunately, she had a photocopy of her passport in her luggage. The US Embassy in Athens provided a short-term substitute passport (just enough to complete the trip). She’ll have to get a new passport when she gets home, but we made the trip safely. But, we also learned something…

The embassy suggested that we should all carry photocopies (I knew that but somehow fail to do so). But they also said you should scan it to your computer, even to a thumb-drive so you have a backup in several places in case of stolen or lost luggage, etc. This is wisdom I’ll be taking very seriously.

Now off to my seminar in Kiev.

Just spent three days teaching a seminar with some wonderful people in Paris.

The seminar, which I like to limit to around 30 people had 95 show up. I was delighted to find a very mixed race group of pastors.

Seems the immigration “problem” that has so disturbed much of Europe is presenting mostly blessings to the French church community. The immigrants from Africa are doing much to re-introduce the gospel to the country. And they are doing it with ease and grace.

For all you hear about European nervousness over immigration, the love of Jesus seems to overcome these issues. I’ve seldom been in a more ethnically diverse group of people–many nations were present. Also seldom been with such a loving group of people. There wasn’t a single word spoken that even hinted of cultural superiority from anyone. This seems like what heaven will be.

Beyond that, they really bought into a “second look” at discipleship through the eyes of Acts and the gospels. The hardest thing for me is to get people to look to the scriptures for “how-to”s rather than to simply accept things the way they’ve always been done or to imitate the last conference leader they heard. We had some wonderful discussions.

Also, exciting to me, was that everyone got off on my new book, “How To Multiply Your Church.” I believe it is truly a “cross-cultural” tool having met success in the US, Japan, Australia and now France. It is too easy to wrap the gospel in an American package–I pray that I somehow escaped that trap with this book.

I’m thrilled for the French Christians. There is a solid sense of hope for a greater harvest. We experienced several very direct prophecies to that effect. I’m blessed…

During 1939, as the world burned, America reduced her army from 156,000 to 49,000 men.

Twenty years after “the war to end all wars,” the United States fielded only the thirteenth largest army in the world.

It was larger than that of Portugal but smaller than the fighting force of Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial Army could boast of 6,000,000 men under arms in partnership with a navy larger than the combined strength of the United States and Britain. In Europe, Germany had invested six times as much as the United States on arms between 1935 and-1940.

But, the United States had the capacity to produce soldiers and equipment in a hurry.

Barely a year after Pearl Harbor we were fighting in North Africa and busily preparing for the invasion of Europe and the battle that would take the fight all the way to Berlin.

It’s important to note that early in the war our planes were not as maneuverable or as fast as the Japanese Zero. And that the Germans had better planes, tanks and heavy guns throughout the entire duration of hostilities.

Even as late as the invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1944 seasoned German soldiers wrote letters home describing the poor fighting quality of the American and British soldiers, most of whom had never seen battle before D-Day.

Our lack of preparation was more dangerous than it seems on the surface—during the war, Germany developed jet aircraft and medium range ballistic missiles; two technologies the allies only perfected after capturing German technology at war’s end. Had German technology proceeded at a faster clip, we would surely have lost the world to the forces of evil.

Victory came through a combination of high productivity on one side and attrition on the other. The attrition could not have happened without the great increase in productivity. We compensated for our lack of technological prowess by the sheer force of numbers.

We beat both the Germans and Japanese back home on the farm.

We turned automotive factories to the production of tanks and warplanes, ramping the output of war material from near zero in 1940 to 50 percent of total American factory output by mid-1942. The United States went from the weakling on the beach to a hoard of 12 million men and women in uniform by 1945.

Our factories produced over seventy thousand naval vessels and nearly 73,000 aircraft during the conflict. And we changed the world forever when we broke tradition by sending our young women into the factories and munitions plants. It is important to note that these amazing feats were paralleled in the Soviet Union, but we’ll get to that later.

The allies, Great Britain, Russia, the United States (and France) united to beat the axis powers with often inferior equipment and after suffering unimaginable losses at the outset of conflict.

Allied forces, a collection of inexperienced citizen-soldiers, destroyed battle-hardened armies.

Many American troops were farmers who had never traveled a hundred miles from home before being shipped off to fight on another continent. The Allies waged war by tsunami. They simply overwhelmed the enemy with superior numbers on every front.

Sons of the great depression learned to march, with broomsticks for rifles. Automotive factories became arsenals of war. Hope grew proportionately.

Describing his feelings upon learning that the Americans had been dragged into the conflict, Winston Churchill wrote, “…now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!” He said that in 1941, four years prior to the last shot fired. Churchill, perhaps better than any other, understood the power of overwhelming numbers even in the face of a technically superior foe…

So what does all this war talk have to do with church multiplication…?

(This is an excerpt from the first chapter of “How To Multiply Your Church”)

Every wonder why the gospel is growing so fast in developing nations?

A conversation in staff meeting gave me a new insight. We were discussing the loss of a couple of families who find our church not “scholarly” enough in its teaching.

Granted we aren’t very scholarly—used to be but gave it up for a more relational approach. I quit teaching “expository” sermons and now take a “textual” approach. That is I let the text speak for itself, supplying lots of stories but parsing few Greek verbs.

Our discussion was sad in that we genuinely liked the families that left. But it was positive in that we talk to so many people who have moved to the mainland only to have trouble finding a satisfying church.

The problem with people who move away from our church is that they often can’t find a fellowship that is as warm and relational as the one they left—on both the horizontal and vertical plane. We hear complaints that churches “feel more like school than family.”

I think a church should feel more like a family than anything else. Which gets me to the core of all this.

The Bible was written to be digested by semi-literate people several thousand years ago. Much of it appears as letters. Whoever spent 40 minutes discussing a single verb in a letter from a friend?

I think you catch my drift as to scholarship. We need scholars, but we need them to back up preachers talking to common folk. And, this pretty well describes what goes on in countries where the gospel is growing the fastest. Scholarship exists, but not at the front line.

On the front lines of evangelism and church growth around the world there are lots of parables drawn from local culture.

“Out there,” the Bible is cherished as a book of promises made by a loving God, promises that will get you through a drought or help you survive a violent world. It contains instructions for restoring lost relationships and it presents the power to get over your drinking problem. It is a book of healing and a family album to the new family you met when you were born again.

All in all, the Word of God is presented in far simpler terms in places where church is growing fastest. That could be a clue for the rest of us.

Who is this carpenter Joseph?

Today we joke about our friends being nail-benders and wood-butchers, but who was Joseph of Nazareth? And, why was he entrusted with the care and discipling of the Messiah?

Some suspect he died at a young age after fathering several other children through Mary. Other than that, we’ll never know the answers to most of our questions. But we do know one thing–he was entrusted with the job of discipling Jesus of Nazareth during his most formative years on earth.

Consider that Jesus had the capacity to sin else his sacrifice would have been meaningless. A robot’s death on a cross wouldn’t have meant much.

That capacity to sin made Joseph’s job terribly important.

What we do know is that the man carried the task well. Everything turned out as it should have.

I know that Carl and Ruth Moore were called to disciple a little boy named Ralph. Because they did their job I sit writing this to you. I can’t think of disciplemaking without remembering my parents. I know my job is to be a father-figure to younger people as they seek God’s plans.

Jesus would have been thinking of Joseph when he said to “Make disciples of the nations…”

I guess this all leaves me with a single question, “Can you name two or three people you are actively discipling as of this moment?” Doing so is the central issue of the New Testament.