the Glocal Trekker Blog

You don’t want to miss this. I speak at conferences but don’t do a lot of personal promotion for them--I am this. BECAUSE to a large degree, planters, if not careful, can be driven to start a church sometimes for less than noble reasons. Planters, who are entrepreneurial, can also be focused just on their own thing. When this happens, you may grow a church, but miss the Kingdom. Todd Wilson and Dave Ferguson have asked me to help at the point of multiplication and movements. Though this will not set the DNA, it’s still good at the very beginning of the church planting process to get a vision for multiplication.

The other night our church planting interns meet at my home. We talked, at length, about what it would look like if a brand new church started out adopting a city or people group in a hard place in the world and what would be expected of them in terms of helping a new church. I want our guys to realize that they can grow a church to 100 or 10,000, or they can grow God’s church to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, if they think multiplication.

If the tracks are not merged in our way of thinking--planting is one thing and multiplication another--we will never have any shot at all of seeing a church planting movement. Give me Mark Harris, a guy whose church is 100 yet has started 17 churches with a total attendance of around 4,000 over against any single pastor who grew a single church to 4,000, but never planted. We need cockroaches, not dinosaurs. Ten years after both guys are gone, one guy has a single church he hopes succeeds, another guy has, as of today, 17 other churches, each of which could be a mega-church--or not--and continue planting other churches. We need new heroes.