(upbeat music) - Years ago I heard Ed Stetzer ask the question, "What if instead of always judging churches by their seating capacity, we judge their success, earthly speaking, we judge them by their sending capacity? " What if the mark of a New Testament church was not how how big the auditorium was, but the real mark was how many leaders they had raised up and sent out? That statement by Ed and some other things that I was reading really set me through a journey studying the book of Acts to discover how God intended to complete the Great Commission.
We've spent the last hundred years of the United States with some of the biggest churches that have ever existed in history, some of the largest auditoriums, people who could gather audiences of sizes up until now that were unknown in the kingdom of God. Yet while you have all these megachurches and all these large ministries, the average number of Christians, church going Christians in America during the last a hundred years, has gone down and not up. What if the real strategy for success and seeing the Great Commission completed was not building larger auditoriums but instead multiplying?
What if that was the New Testament strategy? Ain't that what we see in the book of Acts? One quick historical thing.
If you look at Rodney Stark, the historian, says that at the end of the first century there were a grand total of 7,500 Christians. Sociological estimates say that's about all that we can account for, 7,500, which, I mean, that doesn't seem that big, right? Right, 7,500 after 70 years of work.
If you fast forward to 200 years from that point, now you've got so many Christians in the Roman Empire that the Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity because he thinks it's politically expedient. We're talking millions of Christians at that point. How did you go between those without all the auditoriums, without the distribution systems, without the the printing presses, and the the large auditoriums, or radio and TV?
Rodney stark says it's because the multiplication DNA was in at the lowest levels. Every believer understood it was their responsibility to multiply, every church understood it was their responsibility to plant. When Jesus was teaching His disciples in John 12 how the world was going to be reached, He said something that was very confusing to them.
He used a very odd analogy. He said, "Unless a seed goes into the ground and dies it abides alone. Only if it dies does it bring forth much fruit.
" In context He's talking about the reaching of the Gentiles. That's the life, that's the plant that's growing. The seed, He says, has to die.
Now, that's kind of an odd analogy because when I think of a seed going into the ground, I think of it not as dying, but just beginning to live. But there's a part of it that dies. It's self-contained life as a seed, that shell has to break.
It has to be given away. The farmer has to sew it, has to throw it away. And it's only then that really begins to live.
And Jesus said, "This is how you're going to reach the world," to the disciples. It's not by collecting seeds, and gathering more and more, and polishing your seeds, and making that seed bigger. It only happens as you sew it into the ground.
That is a picture of pastors and leaders who see their churches, both their best resources and their best people as things that God gave them the seeds to give away not as resources to hoard. So pastors here is my challenge to you. Don't just be a church that celebrates what happens on the weekend, and that's awesome, praise God.
Be a church that aims to send out your very best. To open your hands and just to say, "God what do you wanna take and what do you wanna scatter? " Only what's given away can be scattered.
Life in the world only happens through death in the church. It's only when we give it away. I remember one of the first years that we sent out church planting teams out of our church, we'd brought four guys under our staff.
Couple of 'em were actually from our staff. We got four guys under our staff just to let them get ready to plant a church and spend time head hunting some of our best volunteers. We told 'em just to take the very best that you can.
I remember they were going around the table and they were explaining all of the people, give me the names. And I started to panic 'cause I thought I was hearing the names of small group leaders and worship leaders and elders and lead volunteers and personal friends. And I just had this moment of panic.
And it was one of those moments where the Holy Spirit spoke to me and He said, "You know what? This is not your church. And if the way that the world is going to be reached means that the church that you pastor gets smaller and not bigger, you're gonna have to be okay with that.
" And while they're all given their names in their report I'm having this moment with the Holy Spirit where I had to die to surrender again and to say, Lord it's not my church, it's not my name. It's your church. And if you want to reach the world by taking every bit of what you've built here and scattering around the world, and that's okay with me.
In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when God, "When Jesus tells man to follow, He bids him come in. " Not come and shine, not come and grow. He bids him come and die.
As a pastor, we've got to die to our dreams of what a comfortable ministry looks like and open our hands and say, "God, let me be a part of multiplication. Let me give away some of my very best so that I can sew it into the kingdom of God and know that eternity will show the fruitfulness of that approach. " In the kingdom of God it's ironic, but we gain most by losing.
In the kingdom of God it's what you send and what you multiply that makes the biggest difference. It's what made the early church spread throughout the Roman Empire like wildfire. It's what will make the church in our day spread again around the world to complete the Great Commission.
