SHIFT FNL-wb4khq

“With the savvy of a seasoned veteran, the wisdom of a sage, and the
creativity of a thinktank researcher Dietrich Schindler challenges us to

counterintuitively rethink our approach to church planting. Seasoned
with practical examples and vivid illustrations, Shift offers refreshing,
forward-looking insights that you’ll not find in the standard cookbook
recipes for evangelism and church planting.”
— Craig Ott, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, coauthor
Global Church Planting
“For years, Exponential has championed the Level 5 language for

multiplication. Many church leaders have found it inspiring but very
difficult to attain. Dietrich’s twelve shifts are designed to help you
think better and practically about what’s hindering multiplication
in your local church or movement. If we’re going to see new church
multiplication movements happen in North America and Europe, we’ll
have to take serious the shifts proposed in this book.”
— Ed Stetzer, Jeff Christopherson, and Daniel Yang, Send Institute
“Shift is a book that will challenge your assumptions of church and

church planting in good ways! If we apply even one of these shifts in
our thinking and practice, I believe it will lead to huge fruitfulness in
our kingdom work. May we pray for the courage to apply them wisely
and widely.”
— Ric Thorpe / Bishop of Islington, the Gregory Centre for
Church Multiplication
“Dr. Schindler aptly dismantles the old and increasingly failing

systems of western church planting and suggests a biblical framework
arising out of the book of Acts, as way forwards. With an emphasis on
evangelism, a proven track record and reproducible patterns, Schindler
breaks down a new process into small and easily accomplished steps.
Along the way he reminds us of the role of prayer, the necessity of
faith, and that God indeed continues to call and empower us to plant
churches and grown God’s kingdom.”
— Paul Lessard / Executive Minister, ECC Start &
Strengthen Churches
“It excites me to see how Dietrich Schindler combines knowledge,

experience, and practice. He is a man who has big goals and is faithful
in little areas. In this way he models church planting both on paper and
in life, thereby helping his readers implement what they read. What a
blessing!”
— Matthias Kuhn, G-Movement, Switzerland
“Whether you are a seasoned church planter, a beginner in this area or

just thinking about planting, this book will make you think. Dietrich’s
emphasis on conversion-based church planting makes this a book for
our times. This is not an approach that many of us are used to and so
Dietrich’s practical explanation and inspiring examples offer critical
insights into how one begins such an approach to church planting. It
takes some courage to launch out in this way and Dietrich’s experience,
which he offers to you, can help to strengthen your faith, your
imagination and your verve!”
— Martin Robinson, Ph.D. Principal & CEO
“Here are three things I most appreciate about Shift. First, it tackles the
biggest challenge up front: We in the West are failing to present the
gospel coherently, persuasively, and lovingly to our skeptical, secular
neighbors, and Dietrich points us in the right direction. Secondly,
I believe more church plants fail because of personal and relational
struggles than because of a flawed strategy or for the lack of resources.
Dietrich addresses the emotional side of church planting and shares
some of the deep waters he went through. Finally, he points out the
danger of excessive reliance on our personal strengths and gifts in
church planting. They will only take us so far, and we will quickly
reach the limits of our capacity to influence others. Rather we must
sink deeper roots in God’s resources and develop systems (like training,
coaching, networking) that support multiplication.”
— Gene Wilson, Director of Church Multiplication, ReachGlobal
Mission, Co-author Global Church Planting—Biblical Principles and
Best Practices for Church Multiplication
“This is an unusual book. Dietrich Schindler asks questions and

attempts answers you might rarely find in a book on church planting.
His honest and courageous perspective is both biblical and at the
same time post-modern. He aims for church planting among those
who have left the church behind, but yet seek spirituality. It is a great
encouragement for all who desire to develop a missional, evangelistic
and effective approach in church planting.”
— Johannes Reimer, Director of Public Engagement,
World Evangelical Alliance
“In Shift: The Road to Level 5 Church Planting Multiplication, Dietrich

Schindler has given a deeply thoughtful and helpful framework for
church planting that is deeply rooted in biblical ideals while responsive
to the real world in which people live. As a seasoned practitioner of
church planting in a post-modern context, Dietrich blends the learning
he has gained over many years with a careful analysis of what leads to
biblically faithful movements in which people are brought to Christ,
disciples are formed, and multiplication takes place. Dietrich has given
a wonderful gift to anyone interested in being used by God to see the
Gospel penetrate society and transform people for their good and His
glory. It’s a must read for anyone who senses a call to church planting
today.”
— Dave Hall, TEAM International Director/CEO
“In this practical and insightful book, Dietrich Schindler offers a gift
to aspiring or already-at-work church planters. After thirty-five years of
laboring in the post-Christian soil of Western Europe, Dietrich reflects
on the ministry of church planting, drawing from Scripture, church
history, and what he has experienced first-hand at the street level. His
insights offer hope and help for a new generation of church planters.”
— Edward L. Smither, PhD, Dean, Professor of Intercultural
Studies, Columbia International University,
College of Intercultural Studies
“Many of us in the church planting world have grown increasingly

uncomfortable over the last twenty years or so with some of the
trends in church development, which oddly actually work against
rather than for healthy church formation. Dietrich goes at some of the
more disturbing trends like organizing churches around “gathering
techniques” and marketing rather than seeing church development
arising out of evangelism and discipleship. Somehow, we got it
backwards over the last few decades. For all the good that came out of
the Church Growth Movement, statements like “Planting new churches
is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven.”
(Peter Wagner) actually took us in a wrong direction because it gets
the order wrong. The planting of churches should be a derivative of
evangelism rather than the reverse. Dietrich offers a series of correctives
to the most disturbing trends. “It is well worth the read!”
— Allan M. Barth, Vice President, Global Catalyst,
Redeemer City to City
“Dietrich Schindler is a contrarian. He looks at what’s considered

conventional and asks, ‘Why does it have to be that way?’ As a result,
his approach to church planting is entirely counter-intuitive and
unconventional. It might seem unnatural to plant the way Dietrich
suggests, but he’s defying the commonly held assumptions and inviting
you to think and act in uncommon ways to take your church planting
ministry to the level of movement.”
— Michael Frost, Author, Surprise the World and
The Shaping of Things to Come
Shift: The Road to Level 5 Church Multiplication
Copyright © 2021 by Dietrich Schindler
Exponential is a growing movement of activists committed to the multiplication

of healthy new churches. Exponential Resources spotlights actionable principles,
ideas and solutions for the accelerated multiplication of healthy, reproducing faith
communities. For more information, visit exponential.org.
All rights reserved. No part of this book, including icons and images, may be
reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from copyright holder,
except where noted in the text and in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
This book is manufactured in the United States.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible,
New International Version, copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International
Bible Society. All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.
Scriptures marked NLT are taken from the New Living Translation Copyright
©1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol
Stream, Illinois 60188.
Scriptures marked ESV are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®
(ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News
Publishers. All rights reserved.
ISBN 13-978-1-62424-054-6 (ebook)

ISBN 13- 978-1-62424-055-3 (print)
Foreword by Dave Ferguson

Edited by Lindy Lowry
Cover and interior design by Harrington Interactive Media
(harringtoninteractive.com)
Page intentionally left blank
This book is dedicated to
Øivind Augland
Passionate follower of Jesus
Visionary Kingdom-builder
Connector par excellence
Innovative greenhouse
Unconventional
Fun Friend
Inside
Introduction
1. Shift 1: From Organizational to Organic

2. Shift 2: From Big to Small
3. Shift 3: From Cognition to Emotion
4. Shift 4: From asking “What?” to “What if?”
5. Shift 5: From Membership to Discipleship
6. Shift 6: From the Old to the New Reality
7. Shift 7: From Go to Stop
8. Shift 8: From Direct to Indirect Influence
9. Shift 9: From Town to Region
10. Shift 10: From Addition to Multiplication
11. Shift 11: From Discouragement to Encouragement
12. Shift 12: From Mundane to Joy
Epilogue
Works Cited/Endnotes
About the Author
Foreword
T
here are few originals in the church-planting world—men and
women who speak with a unique voice and show us an original
perspective. In much of our efforts to multiply more churches,
we often end up with copies. My friend Dietrich Schindler is not a
copy and is definitely an original. Simply put, the voice of this thought
leader should be heard by every church planter who desires to multiply
disciples and catalyze a movement of new churches.
Shift is Dietrich’s effort to take our church-planting world, tilt it on
its axis, and then from a slightly different angle, ask us, “Have you ever
looked at how to plant churches this way?”
This is a rare church-planting book. Dietrich raises difficult
questions while not giving simple answers. In a time when it’s
convenient for us to “just do it the way it’s always been done,” Dietrich
offers a contrarian’s perspective: Our methodologies must change to
meet the changing times. As he tells us, “This is not another book
on how to plant churches. This is a book on how to plant churches
unconventionally.” Shift is brilliantly communicated wisdom by a gifted
writer. It takes off our blinders and focuses our vision on how churches
should be planted—opening our eyes to some strange new ways that
God is at work in the Western world.
Just as this is a rare book, Dietrich Schindler is a rare individual.
He is a thought leader and also a practitioner who has planted multiple
churches. He knows how to take something from zero and get it
started, but he also knows the responsibility of leading a church-
planting initiative for an entire denomination. As a German-American,
Dietrich can navigate in a post-Christian culture and also understands
the uniqueness of the American context. He is a mentor who allows us
13
Shift
to benefit from his successes but isn’t afraid to be vulnerable about his
struggles.
I can honestly say there are few people alive who have the authority,
experience and genius to pen this book. Cherish it. Give it to others.
Discuss it with friends. This is a refreshingly great guide for all of us
who love church planting but struggle with the tidy formulas of how to
get it done.
Dave Ferguson
Lead Visionary – NewThing
Author – Hero Maker: Five Essential Practices for Leaders to
Multiply Leaders
14
Acknowledgements
F
rom Spain to Russia, from Norway to Italy, all over Europe, - in
the past ten years I was privileged to give seventy talks on various
aspects related to church planting. Of these many presentations,
twelve of the most significant and important are encapsulated in these
pages. But these talks would have never made it into this book without
the help and generous support of people that have made these words
much better. I say thank you to these my friends:
Øivind Augland, Norway

Øivind, you are the most networked person I have ever met! Your
passion for Christ, enthusiasm for church planting, pared with your
leadership gifts are a rare gift to the body of Christ. (Aside. If one
were to go to St Peter’s square in Rome and the Pope were to appear
on his balcony to greet the crowd of one million people gathered there
and Øivind would appear along side the Pope, do you know what you
would hear? Someone standing next to you would shout out, “Hey,
who’s that standing next to Øivind?”). Thank you for your incessant
encouragement!
Dave Ferguson, Chicago

Dave, you are the real deal – unselfish, unassuming, off-the-stage as he
is on-the-stage, brilliance. Thank you for being so generous with your
words and influence. In an evangelical world that has been wounded
by Personas gone awry, your authentic self is the hope and refreshment
parched evangelical leaders need right now.
15
Shift
Nick Boring, Maryland

Nick, you were my answer to prayer as I was in search of viable
publishing contacts. We had not connected for almost forty years after
graduating together from Bible college, but when we did, you were
immediately interested and supportive. Successful in business, your
heart is in church planting and helping leaders thrive.
Terri Saliba, Carolina Beach

Terri, you are an organizational genius! From the first you heard of
this project you became my Aaron Rodgers. As the quarter back for
Exponential, you are skilled at passing the ball to the right people.
Thank you for helping me cross the goal line.
Peyton Jones, Carlsbad

Peyton, your radio voice and warm heart for church planting resonated
with me from the start. Because of your unique church planting
experience in Wales, you were most favorable to these, my thoughts on
church planting from a European context. Thank you for giving me
and us the breath of your wisdom, experience, and contextual prowess.
Lindy Lowry, San Diego

Lindy, you are a true hero-maker; taking my average wording and
structure and skillfully turning them into products of beauty and
winsomeness. You make me look good!
Jan Carla, Frankfurt, Germany

Janny, you are indeed what your name means: “God’s gracious gift”!
How I cherish your love, honest correction, servant’s heart and hands,
life-giving encouragement. It has not just been this journey of almost
40 years that we have been on that has been marvelous but being with
you is the joy that exceeds all joy in projects completed.
16
Introduction
I
t happened many years ago in a suburb of Frankfurt, Germany.
I was driving with our four-year-old Erich in the back seat. I had
borrowed my co-worker’s car, a Fiat Panda.
Have you ever been around a chainsaw blasting at full throttle?
I kid you not, a 1980 Fiat Panda at high rpms is the brother to the
chainsaw running at full throttle. The noise is so loud you can’t carry
on a normal conversation. To make matters worse, the engine was in
the back of the car separated by a very thin firewall, with Erich on the
other side.
I must have been lost in thought when suddenly from the back of
the vehicle I heard Erich yell out, “Shift Papa shift!” One of the gears
had screeched to pitch velocity. It was too much for my son’s little ears.
He knew how to remedy the situation—Papa needed to shift to move
the car forward and to save his ears from the onerous noise.
Level 5 movement
In many ways, church planting is like driving a car with a manual
transmission. To move forward, leaders must shift gears. But healthy
and thriving church-planting leaders know how to shift in both
directions, up and down, as conditions dictate—before things begin to
screech.
After thirty-five years of church planting in Germany, I know a
thing or two about when and how to shift. Consider the twelve chapters
of this book akin to gears needing our attention.
What you’re about to read will take you into the shifts toward
Level 5 church multiplication our church adapted and used. Level 5
ministries are driven by multiplication on all levels. They’re focused
17
Shift
on the harvest, not on the barn. They eat and sleep movement above
monument. Exponential has shown us that Level 5 church-planting
ministries are extremely rare. Yet they and I believe that this degree of
multiplication is the future of the expansion of the kingdom of God.
Getting there will call for unconventional leadership, new paradigms of
praxis and a trajectory that has reaching people as its primary pull.
I set out to write this book to expose faulty thinking and present
shifts that would lead to planting better quality and quantity of
churches—toward Level 5 movement.
And now I’m inviting you to jump into the passenger seat with me.
Buckle up, and let’s head into the beautiful and risky venture of starting
Level 5 churches.
Enjoy the ride.
18
C H A P T ER O N E
Shift 1: From Organizational

to Organic
“We are trying to organize life into being instead
of being organisms imparting life.”
— E. Stanley Jones1
I
f church starts are generating large groups of people, all is well.
I wish with all my heart this weren’t true. I think it’s time for some
straight talk because this commonly held assumption about church
planting is deceiving us. And it’s depriving people of discovering the
hope of Christ at a time when we desperately need that hope.
You’ve probably heard of “bigger-is-better” church planting
strategies and organizations that won’t start new ministries without a
launch day of hundreds of people. In my 35 years of church planting,
I’ve realized that church planting that multiplies churches is not a
volume-based venture. Instead, church planting is radical, ontological
change. What matters most is not how many people show up for the
launch that counts, but rather how significantly they are transformed
by the gospel.
Many contemporary church-planting ministries are conceived
much like a business with a model that centers on administrative
leadership and a gifted leader who guides already committed
Christians to organize the birth of a new church. But can I be bold
1. E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of Every Road (New York: Abingdon Press, 1930), 248.
19
Shift
and say this isn’t a true “birth;” but rather a reorganization of believers
from one ecclesiological location to another? Therein lies the crisis
of contemporary church planting in the Western world: organizing
churches without birthing them.2
See if this sounds familiar. A called and gifted leader inspires other
Christians to start a new church. They meet regularly to pray, plan
and lay out a strategy they’ll use to plant the new church. Often, this
involves what the worship service will look like and what kinds of
programs the church will offer.
My guess is you’ve either been a part of or led that process at one
time or another. If so, you’ve probably realized that evangelism and
disciple making become the red-headed stepchildren of the project
because church planting teams will instinctively do what they know
how to do. In most cases, that relates to how the existing churches they
came from function. It’s how they succumb to organizational church
planting at the expense of organic church planting.
Unaware of what is happening, the leaders of the new venture
often reduce the meaning of church to an event. The church is thus
equated with a worship service. The worship service becomes the main
driving force of the ministry, which quickly translates into attention to
numbers, giving, staff, technology and image projection.
What are some of the other underlying assumptions in the way we
plant churches in the West? Let’s look at four major ones.
• The first assumption is control. We need to be high on organization

and low on risk in our approach. Nothing dare be left to chance.
The money, the staffing, the training, the music, the programs, the
advertising—all must align to guarantee success.
• The second assumption is high visibility: “the bigger the better.”
Thus, we launch our churches with a bang because we have “no
2. I am reminded of Vineyard founder John Wimber’s famous phrase, “You can grow
a gas station with church growth principles.”
20
Chapter One | Shift 1: From Organizational to Organic
second chance to make a good first impression.” And that first

impression—the wow factor—is what counts.
• The third assumption is professionalism. In this kind of church
plant, dilettantes need not apply. After all, this is serious work and
can only be handled by theologically well-trained, adrenaline-
addicted, highly gifted people.
• Fourth is persona. The image that those on stage convey is what will
draw people in and keep them coming back. Rhetorical brilliance,
musical excellence, technical savviness—these are what people
want. And what people want is what people get.
The issue I’m trying to raise here is one of substance. Pragmatism

is magnetism. But if we commit our church planting efforts into the
hands of the god-of-what-works, we shouldn’t be surprised when the
wheels come off and the whole thing crashes. For many church planting
leaders, the addiction of choice becomes the power of attraction (more
people equal more money and resources). Of course, the antidote
to pragmatism is prayer. And by that, I mean total surrender and
dependence upon God to be in charge.
Truly, we need the Holy Spirit in our church planting! When the
Holy Spirit is in the driver’s seat, radical and beautiful things happen.
We give up control, we’re humbled. We seek the face of the Father
above success and invest in less-than-perfect people. And with the
Holy Spirit in control, we can also better deal with less than amicable
situations.
In contemporary church planting, we tend to neglect calling people
outside the church to follow Jesus in the initial stages in favor, instead,
of gathering a core group of believers. Only after having convened a
team of highly committed people does the church planting leader begin
to evangelize. I firmly believe that the need for today is to return to an
emphasis on conversion-based church planting that produces organically
grown churches.
21
Shift
How do we make this 180-degree turn?

Let’s look at a model. In the early church, all church starts were
conversion-based in nature. The apostle Paul began his church planting
ministry in Europe after an initial conversion to Jesus Christ—a
woman named Lydia (Acts 16:11-15). Conversion preceded church
planting.
Churches that are started organically won’t neglect organization. All
healthy and growing things, whether they be plants, animals, people or
churches, need structure to develop. With conversion-based churches,
organic development dictates the structure that allows for more growth.
Essentially, structure becomes subservient to new birth.
BIBLICAL EVIDENCE FOR CONVERSION-BASED

CHURCH PLANTING
When we read through the Book of Acts, we see the phrase “. . . and
they were added to their number” (v. 2:41). On five different occasions
in Luke’s account, we come across the Greek term prostithymi (meaning
“to add to” or “to grow”). The term described conversion growth that
grew the church.
Scripture repeatedly shows us that the church in Jerusalem was a
church that was started by means of conversion growth through Peter`s
preaching in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Consider the following summation statements describing the early
church from Acts:
• “Those who accepted his (Peter’s) message were baptized, and about
three thousand were added to their number that day” (2:41).
• “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being
saved” (2:47).
• “But many who heard the message believed, and the number of
men grew to about five thousand” (4:4).
22
• “So the Word of God spread. The numbers of disciples in Jerusalem

increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to
the faith” (6:7).
• “Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed
a time of peace. It was strengthened; and encouraged by the Holy
Spirit, it grew in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord” (9:31).
The church in Antioch started with the newly converted as well.

Check out Acts 11:19-21:
Now, those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection

with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling
the message only to the Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus
and Cyrene, when to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling
them the good news about the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s hand was with
them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord
(11:19-21).
The first church in Europe was in Philippi, and it was started on

conversion growth:
On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we
expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak
to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was
a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of
Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to
respond to Paul’s message (Acts 16:13-14).
Thus, the church in Philippi—the focus of Paul’s great epistle to the

Philippians—was born.
In Jerusalem, Antioch and Philippi, churches were all started based
upon the conversion of non-believing Jews and Gentiles to salvation
in Jesus Christ. What do we learn from these passages? We see that
conversion growth is a gift from God. When people come to faith in
Jesus Christ, it’s because of the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of
23
Shift
the hearers. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul summarizes
this, saying, “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything,
but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Cor. 3:7). God uses a human
messenger with a gospel message to bring conversion.
What was normative in the New Testament era is considered a
church planting anomaly today. Why?
5 BARRIERS TO CONVERSION-BASED CHURCH PLANTING

In my experience, I’ve identified five reasons why we are not seeing
people coming to Christ as the foundation for forming new churches.
Let’s look at each one.
1. The people we‘re trying to reach have already been

discipled.
The thinking and behavior of those we’re trying to reach have already
been shaped by popular culture. In my context in Europe, this
translates to freedom from religion and instead, to personal preference.
Expediency—what works best for me based upon my enlightened
opinion—rules. Generally, this leads to benevolent narcissism; being a
kind person whose true interest is self-advancement. Ultimate truth is
a panacea, relegated to the Middle Ages when the church was its sole
authority.
Today, there are many truths based upon personal preference. Truth
has, thus, been privatized. We shop today in what sociologist Bryan
Wilson has called a “random supermarket of knowledge.”3 The greatest
sin in secular European culture is intolerance: daring to tell another
person they are wrong to hold to their “truth.”
All secular people possess spirituality (just look at the popularity
of icons like Oprah Winfrey). Secular spirituality is a kind of
individualized, consumer spirituality. Sociologist Christian Smith
describes this as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD): “moralistic” =
3. Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (Baltimore: Penguin Books,

1969), 106.
24
God wants me to be a good person and not a jerk; “therapeutic” = God

or religion should help me feel good; “deism” = God is a concept with
which to decorate our lives but not an agent who really does anything.4
We live in an age in which most people believe that life can be lived
well without God. In neglecting Him, they insert the conviction that
human agency is enough for humans to flourish. Sociologist Adam
Seligman has coined the term “modernity’s wager” to describe striving
after that good life (the blessed life) without God at its foundation.5
Capitalism becomes the context in which the self (social life) is
enriched—without God being the source of prosperity and goodness.
2. Our expectations of what God can do have been

domesticated
The common assumption of how we start churches reflects how God
has become too small to many of us. Traditionally, churches are
generated by starter teams, a core group of Christians. The starter team
is usually a group of believers who have banded together to begin the
journey of planting a new church. Part of the group’s deliberations
concerns the new church’s philosophy of ministry, its structural
makeup, its ministry assignments, and the way it will conduct worship
services. Only after the church is up and running will it turn its
attention to evangelism and disciple making. This is, I believe, a grave
error.
Instead of allowing the New Testament to influence how we go
about planting churches, we bow to the dictates of commonly held
assumptions. Conversion-based church planting was normative in the
life of the early church. But it’s rare in contemporary church planting
expectations.
4. Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s

Obsession with Youthfulness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), xvi.
5. For a full discussion see, Adam Seligman, Modernity’s Wager (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
25
Shift
Think about a circus elephant. At a very young age, the elephant is

chained to a stake in the ground. Try as he might, the little creature is
no match against the strength of the stake and the chain. As it grows
older, it gets stronger. Yet the elephant, although physically easily able
to free himself from the confines of the stake, is not able to do so. He
has been domesticated. He has been trained to believe that the chain
and the stake will dominate his life. And it does.
We have been trained that there is only one way to go about church
planting, and that way is to organize it instead of expecting God to
pneumatize it. We have become the elephant chained to the stake,
unable to conceive that God might have a better way.
3. We lack role models of conversion-based church planting.

Have you ever seen or been a part of a church that started with new
believers? Most of us haven’t witnessed, nor have we been a part of
conversion-based church planting. In Germany, we’re seeing pockets of
hope.
The Evangelical Free Church in Lueneburg in northern Germany
started as conversion-based. About thirty years ago, a tent campaign
was held in the city. The Holy Spirit was mightily at work. The harvest
was so overwhelming that the full-time evangelist relinquished his
ministry and became a church planter. The church thrived and started a
daughter church, all while emphasizing evangelism.
By God’s awesome grace, my wife Jan and I saw the same happen
in the church we planted in Mannheim about forty miles outside of
Frankfurt. In seven years, that Evangelical Free Church experienced a
sixty percent conversion rate! Evangelism was always in our prayers, on
our lips, guiding our steps. And the Lord blessed abundantly.
In Berlin, Marcus Rose and his organization called “Hoffnung
Deutschland” (translated Hope Germany) have planted hundreds
of conversion-based mini-churches, mostly in urban areas similar in
demographics to Berlin. Marcus and his co-workers frequent bars and
26
night clubs, share the gospel with patrons and see some of them come
to faith in Christ.
What they do next is brilliant. Rather than take new Christians
out of their context (bars and clubs) and relocate them to another one,
Marcus and his friends keep them where they found them. New mini-
churches are birthed in solidly secular environments, and new believers
are shepherded to grow up in Christ in those environments. Now,
many of their new churches have more not-yet-Christians in them than
followers of Jesus.
Recently in Stockerau in southern Austria, a modestly sized city of
15,000 people, a new church was birthed using a course called MyLife-
Workshop. The course was promoted in a local newspaper and to the
great surprise of the few Christians who advertised it, total strangers in
Stockerau who weren’t followers of Jesus signed up. These people came
to faith in Christ, and a small group was started. Out that small group,
a new church was birthed.
Where do we usually go to find models of conversion-based church
planting? We travel to Africa, Asia and South America. We get on
airplanes, submerge ourselves in a different culture and observe many
great movements of God on other continents. And that is the problem.
We seem to have to go outside of our continent to witness a great
moving of God’s Spirit.
What we’re so sorely lacking, we can nevertheless experience.
What would keep your church and churches in your town or city from
becoming the next case study of conversion-based church planting?
We need to become the case study our society needs. We need to show
others that conversion-based church planting is indeed possible, even
where we live!
4. Our church planting approach is pastoral when it needs to

be missional.
Most church planters are shepherds who occasionally function as
missionaries. But what we need is missionaries who occasionally
27
Shift
function as pastors. I get it. Pastors functioning as church planters is an

understandable phenomenon. We receive our training from professors
who are teachers. Very rarely do apostles and evangelists become
educators. Why not? Because apostles and evangelists don’t have the
patience it takes to be professors. They would rather be on the front
lines than talking about what it’s like being on the front lines while
grading papers.
The pastoral approach, steeped in theological education, has seeped
into our approach to church planting. Thus, the pastoral church planter
will spend large amounts of their time behind a study desk. Because
that’s what they were taught—prepare well, feed the flock, and don’t
neglect the study of the Word. The problem is this approach, while
understandable, often leads to concentrating on the found instead of
seeking out the lost.
5. Our lack of faith in what God wants to do prevents us from

seeing conversion-based church planting.
This is possibly the gravest of the five reasons why we’re not seeing
conversion-based church planting. Because we’re not looking for it!
We’re not looking for it because we’re not looking to God for it. The
Lord loves big, hairy, audacious faith.
What’s the difference between great faith and little faith?
Great faith always trusts God for what’s beyond our human means
and capacity to produce. Little faith trusts God for what we can usually
engineer by human effort—denigrating church planting to what we
can do. If we ourselves can get the job done, there is little need for
great faith. Great faith is seen in offensive praying—thanking God
for the miracles of new birth before they happen. Little faith is seen in
defensive praying—“Lord, keep us safe, be with us, protect us, heal us,
help us . . .”
When we think of the sweeping movement of the Reformation
in the sixteenth century, we have Martin Luther in mind. What
many don’t know is that Luther leaned upon the mental prowess of
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his younger friend, Philip Melanchton. Once when asked how he

envisioned the Apostle Paul, Luther replied “I think he was a scrawny
shrimp like Melanchton.” Yet, Luther knew he couldn’t advance the
cause of Christ without Melanchton at his side.
In June of 1540, fever had incapacitated Melanchton and he
lay dying in Weimar. Luther hurried to his bedside. Doctors had
surrendered Melanchton to imminent death. Luther was horrified.
When he saw his friend in his affliction, Luther fell to his knees and,
praying for an hour, told God that Melchanton cannot die because
he needed him. God heard Luther’s imperative prayer and healed
Melanchton, allowing him to outlive Luther. Great faith in the face of
imminent disaster.
I think you’ll agree with me that little faith is reflected in
“us-prayers.”
Church planting is like creation. God created our world twice. The
first creation was a vivid picture of what the fully created world would
look like living in the mind of God—His own dream or vision. The
second creation was when God spoke, “and it was . . .” Churches are
always planted twice: first in the hearts of the church planters, and then
visibly.
The vision is where the action is. We need to learn to pray along our
vision of conversion- based church planting, instead of along the lines
of what has always been.
PATHWAYS TO CONVERSION-BASED CHURCH PLANTING

All of this brings us to the crucial question: How can we become
conversion-based church planters? Allow me to suggest three pathways:
looking, relating and connecting.
Looking: Seeing the future through the eyes of God and

saying “YES!”
The writer to the Hebrews tells us, “Without faith, it is impossible to
please God . . . he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb. 11:6).
29
Shift
Jesus led His disciples into the harvest, telling them the harvest was
plentiful (Matt. 9:35-38). Why did He do that? Because His disciples
(and we among His disciples today) had no vision for the harvest. The
future of the church-planting venture is a harvest reality. Faith sees the
harvest before it’s gathered. Faith cheats the way things are and trusts
God for the way things shall be. In the eyes of God, the future is full
of new believers. Do we see what He sees? Seeing what God sees and
thanking Him for it before we gather the harvest is called faith. And
faith is based on hope.
“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for” (Heb 11:1). The word
“hope” stems from the old English word “hoppen.” Hoppen (hopping)
is to jump for joy in the anticipation of what will transpire. Are we
jumping for joy in our faith as we consider what it will produce: a rich
harvest?
Relating: Being Christ to others

So much of Jesus’ life was relational. He spent lots of time with his
disciples—and sinners. He was showing us how we become His
witnesses and make disciples. The glue of every healthy church plant is
healthy relationships.
I encourage every church planting leader to concentrate on building
up at least fifty relationships with non-Christians before they even think
of holding an organized worship service. We must learn to give people
the gift of our time. But what do we do with the time we give them?
Three things: we listen (listening is the language of love today); we learn
(what are their aspirations, longings, frustrations, hopes, fears?); we
empathize (“I have those feelings too”).
As church planters, we let lost people know we need their help. Our
project is to plant a church for a group of people. We then go to those
people and elicit their aid by asking: “What are your dreams? What
makes you angry? What do you do in your free time? What is the good
life to you? What are the things you would die for? What do you read?
If you could ask God just one question, what would that be?”
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Before we tell, we must learn. To learn, we must listen. As we listen

and learn, we gain valuable insight into the lives of the people we seek
to reach. The time we take to learn from them can also a bonding time
of mutually drawing close.
Connecting: Bringing the gospel to our unchurched

friends in a meaningful way
Some church planters are great at relating to non-Christians, but that’s
as far as it goes. They don’t invite their non-Christian friends to take
the next step that would naturally lead them to a life with Christ. We
need opportunities that allow people to connect not just with us, but
with the living God.
We use a resource called MyLife-Workshop, designed for people
who have no Christian upbringing or little interest in Christianity
(more on it in chapter 3). It begins with the narcissism of the non-
Christian. After all, in most cases, people love themselves and love to
talk about themselves more than doctrine.
Much of our church planting amounts to nothing more than a
”transfer of the saints.” It’s not growth as the New Testament describes
it. The need today is for the Lord of the harvest to add to our number
those who are being saved. The Lydia model of church planting is
conversion-based. Knowing this about the early church, we can now see
it in our mind’s eye and trust God to do His work of salvation as we
partner with Him. That’s when we’ll see His kingdom coming into the
lives of individuals who will be led to plant new churches differently.
Questions for discussion:

• If you as a church planter were the circus elephant I described
earlier in this chapter, what would you identify as the chain that is
keeping you from embracing and initiating conversion-based church
planting?
31
Shift
• What do you need to start doing and stop doing to see harvest
fruit?
• How would the prospect of conversion-based church planting
change your prayers?
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C H A P T ER T WO
Shift 2: From Big to Small

“Do not despise these small beginnings, for the
LORD rejoices to see the work begin . . .”
— Zech. 4:10 6
Look at the two images below. What do you notice?
Fig. 1. $100 bill
6. New Living Translation.
33
Shift
Fig. 2. “A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte,” Georges Seurat
The first thing you notice is a denomination of money most of

us would like to have much more of; the second image is the famous
painting by Georges Seurat completed in 1884. The Grand Jatte is a
public park on the banks of the Seine River near Paris. Both pictures
are very different—and very much the same.
Both the $100 bill (and all U.S. money denominations for that
matter) and Seurat’s painting were produced with a technique called
pointillism that uses a minutia of distinct dots applied to patterns
to form a picture. The bill and the painting are the culmination of
millions of dots strategically placed to form the images we see.
OUR GOD LOVES SMALL BEGINNINGS

Throughout Scripture, we see God use the concept of pointillism—
taking small, seemingly insignificant pieces and using them to play a
large part in what He’s doing in His grand scheme of redemption.
The prophet Zechariah tells us that God has a great love and
plan for small beginnings: “Do not despise these small beginnings,
for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin, to see the plumb line in
Zerubbabel’s hand” (Zech 4:10).
That plumb line began with Abraham. To reach every nation on
earth, God called Abram to be the channel of blessing for all: “The
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Chapter Two | Shift 2: From Big to Small
Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your
father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a
great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you
will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses
you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you’”
(Gen 12:1-3).
Seeds are small and can easily be overlooked. But when seeds are
planted, watered, and cared for, they can produce enormous amounts
of good fruit. I’ve always loved Jesus’ comparison of something as vast
as His kingdom to something as tiny as a mustard seed: “He told them
another parable: The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a
man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds,
yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree,
so that the birds come and perch in its branches” (Matt. 13:31-32).
When Jesus fed the multitude by the Sea of Galilee, all He had
to work with was a few fish and five loaves of bread: “Taking the five
loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and
broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to distribute to the
people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up
twelve basketfuls of pieces that were left over” (Luke 9:16-17). Five
thousand men plus many women and children had their hunger stilled
by just a small amount of food.
Repeatedly, Jesus emphasizes the small unit—two or three or
twelve—to achieve His great goals. He sent out seventy-two into all of
Galilee in groups of two (Matt 10:1). He took only three disciples with
Him to witness His transfiguration (Matthew 17). And at the end of
His ministry on earth, He entrusted the initial discipling of the nations
into the hands of his chosen Twelve.
Small has great importance in the eyes of our Lord.
THE UNASSUMING POWER OF SMALL

It’s interesting to me to see how size often equates to importance,
especially in America. When Americans start something new, it’s often
35
Shift
with great fanfare: huge amounts of money, a robust business plan and
over-the-top advertising.
Small is usually not the goal. Yet in nature, small contains great
potential. In every baby, seed, or a heart given over to God, there lies
hidden potential for growth. A seed has all the genetic structure of a
mature plant. When a farmer has quality seed, they can expect a large
and bountiful harvest.
Small even has power in technology. The secret to powerful
computers lies in their nanotechnology—small chips with extremely
high performance. And small is also key to church multiplication,
whether or not you want to admit it. Essentially, church planting relies
on paying attention to the smallest sociological entities in the life of
the church and purposefully working toward their multiplication. If we
can multiply on micro levels, we can extrapolate these to higher levels
- movements on a macro scale. The Bible bears out the power of small,
and so can we.
If we want to see churches multiply and movements emerge, we’ll
be attentive to the small. I’m convinced that one of the reasons why
leaders are hesitant about planting or daughtering churches is that
they see church planting happen only on the macro-level: a mature
church spawning another church. What they fail to see is the power
of the many small entities that exist in the macro church: one-on-one
discipleship, small groups.
My thesis: If we were to give our focused attention to the small entities
and see them multiply, we will have all we need to generate thousands
of new churches and thereby lay the foundation for Level 5 ministries of
multiplication.
REPRODUCIBLE SYSTEMS
At the risk of being controversial, allow me the following insight: I
believe we have over- emphasized the roll of spiritual gifts in ministry.
Don’t get me wrong. Most certainly, spiritual gifts are great strengths.
On four separate occasions, Paul and Peter highlight the value of
36
spiritual gifts to the healthy growth of local churches.7 Especially in the

realm of church planting, we need certain gifts that often result in great
blessing.
But what if the gifts are not present? The truth is the Great
Commission is still underway, with or without gifting. An over-
emphasis on spiritual gifts can become the bottleneck of the ministry;
it restricts growth. A ministry can only grow as wide and as deep as
those who lead it with the gifts they have. How do we deal with these
obstacles?
Reproduction is one way to overcome an over-dependence upon
giftedness. In the realm of corporations, business professor and author
Robert Quinn refers to this as the “tyranny of competence.”8 The more
an individual’s contribution to an organization is unique, the more
dependent the organization becomes upon such individuals. My guess
is you can think of many fine ministries built upon the gifts of the
leadership. But once the leadership left, the ministry floundered and
stagnated. Systems of reproduction tend to be better than the people
using them, while integrating and maximizing their giftedness and
making up for inadequacies. They help leaders overcome their innate
reliance upon their own strengths to see the ministry go forward.
Every thriving movement needs healthy systems of reproduction
that are better than the people using them. Systems like this are not
only practical, easy to use and reproductive but also exert benevolent
power upon its users. Benevolent power is the power to change into
Christ-likeness and the power to reach people far from God.
MINI CHURCHES
In the church that we planted years ago in the city of Kaiserslautern,
Germany (population 100,000), we began experimenting with a hybrid
7. The four references to spiritual gifts in the New Testament are Romans 12:6-8;
1 Cor 12:7-11; Eph 4:11-13; and 1 Peter 4.
8. Robert Quinn, Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within (San Francisco, Jossey-
Bass, 1996), 115-120.
37
Shift
form of “triads,”9 or what we call mini- churches. The model is as simple

as it is reproducible.
How does it work? Initially someone invites two FAT (faithful,
available, teachable) Christians into their home. The guests are the same
gender as the host. The host announces that they would like to start a
new mini church with their two (FAT) friends. They agree to covenant
with each other to exercise what author Neil Cole calls “spiritual
breathing.” Inhaling means taking in the Word of God (which is
oxygen to the soul).
Each participant agrees to read the same chapter of God’s Word
each day. Bible reading can consist of consecutive chapters (for example,
on Monday, John chapter one; on Tuesday, John chapter two, etc.). Or
members could read the same chapter each day for a full week (such as
Psalm 23 every day for one week).
Each week, participants come together to share how God has been
speaking to them through the Bible reading. Then they exhale (confess),
telling one another how they have lived during the previous week.
Examples of questions repeated each week could be: 1) Where were
you tempted last week and how did you respond to the temptation? 2)
Did you give your family (or closest friends) priority time? 3) Did you
get angry at someone and remain angry? 4) Did you secretely serve
someone without getting caught?
Spiritual transformation rarely occurs when we talk about the
Christian life in the subjunctive mode; you ought to live this way, you
should live this way. Rather, transformation occurs when three things
come together: nearness, openness, accountability. Accountability is
understood as giving an account concerning how you have lived during
the last week (note the past tense).
It’s important that mini-churches be gender-specific. By mixing
the genders, which so often happens in most small groups, there is
9. Neal Cole, Cultivating a Life for God (Carol Stream, IL: ChurchSmart Resources,
1999), 63-70.
38
guardedness. A man will not talk openly about his pornography if

a woman is present. But get men together with other men, and the
shame-factor is lessened. The same is true for women.
When the other two FAT Christians agree to be a part of the start
of the mini-church, the host gives each a small portion of yogurt to eat
and asks the two Christians to generate parallels between the yogurt
and their mini-church: “Tastes nutritious. Our new group promises to
be nutritious.” “The yogurt has living organisms in it. Our mini-church
will be lively as well.”
“But after we’ve experienced the life-transforming power of our
mini-church, we’ll invite a fourth person into our group and that
person will be one of our not-yet-Christian friends. We will invite them
to do what we do, but initially for only two weeks. You see, our not-yet-
Christian friend is hesitant about what this would mean for him or
her. The two weeks are enough time to test it and then decide to stay or
to leave.”
In this way, you give the seeker enough time to experience the
wooing of the grace of God, as well as a convenient and face-saving
exit, should they decide to discontinue. The groups are intent upon
seeing non-Christians come to faith in Christ and continue in life
transformation in the mini churches.
At the end of the four months, the four members of the mini-
church go out and enjoy a meal at a local restaurant and afterwards
divide up into two groups of two. Each of these groups invites a new
FAT Christian into the newly formatted mini-church and the process
begins again.
What are the characteristics of a reproducible system illustrated
by mini-churches? First, the format is simple to understand and to
implement. Spiritual breathing, inviting a not-yet-Christian to join
the group, adhering to an expiration date, multiplication—these are
easy to grasp and, given intentionality, easy to implement. Second,
reproducible systems are non-gift related. Anyone who’s FAT can do
them. Third, they’re designed to multiply. Reproduction is built into the
39
Shift
DNA of reproducible systems. Fourth, these systems are not leadership-

based. They can be started and reproduced by people who don’t have
leadership gifting. Fifth, mini-churches make disciples both among
those in their pre-conversion state and among those who are already
following Jesus in the same reproducible system.
The beauty of this form of reproducible system of disciple making is
its leaderless-ness. It’s not dependent upon giftedness to make it work.
And that’s extremely significant. In an average evangelical church, only
ten percent of the people have the gift of evangelism. What about the
other ninety percent who don’t have the gift of evangelism but are still
called to live out the Great Commission? The format of mini-churches
becomes a spiritual discipline that makes disciples and evangelizes in
the same body.
LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Church history affords us a dramatic illustration of the impact of
system compared to giftedness. In the eighteenth-century Western
world, George Whitefield and John Wesley were towering figures.
Whitefield was such a powerful orator that David Garrick, a popular
actor and contemporary of Whitefield, once said of him, “Whitefield
could make his audiences weep or tremble by varying his pronunciation
of the word Mesopotamia.”10 He was a remarkable evangelist, speaking
without amplification to more than twenty-five thousand people at once
in the open air. Many people heard him gladly, including one of his
greatest admirers, Benjamin Franklin.
At the same time tens of thousands were giving their lives to
Christ in North America, John Wesley was providing leadership to
a movement that would change British society for the next hundred
years. Expelled from preaching in Anglican cathedrals, Wesley was
forced out into the open country. Not only did he preach powerfully,
10. Joseph Beaumont Wakeley. The Prince of Pulpit Orators: A Portraiture of Rev.
George Whitefield, M. A. (New York: Curts & Jennings, 1899), 226.
40
on an average of four times daily throughout his life and with great
effect, but he also generated what were known as class meetings that
had a lasting effect on the lives of those in attendance.
Religious historian D. Michael Henderson analyzed Wesley’s
ministry: “The ‘rungs’ on Wesley’s ladder of Christian discipleship
were small interactive groups: the class meeting, the band, the select
band, the penitent band, and the society. Each group within the
system was designed to accomplish a specific developmental purpose,
and each group had its own carefully defined roles and procedures to
ensure that the central objectives were accomplished. The heart of this
revolutionary system was a cell group of six to eight people, which
Wesley named ‘the class meeting.’ They met weekly to give an account
of their personal spiritual growth . . .”11
Giftedness or reproducible system? Which one had the greatest and
longest lasting impact? At the end of his life, George Whitefield wrote
to his associate John Pool assessing the impact of his ministry. This is
what he wrote, “My brother Wesley acted wisely—the souls that were
awakened under his ministry he joined in the class, and thus preserved
the fruits of his labor. This I neglected, and my people are a rope of
sand” (emphasis mine).12
Wesley’s method of disciple making via his classes produced
what we refer to as Methodism. It became a reproducible system that
transformed individuals who transformed British society. In contrast,
Whitefield’s evangelistic fruit, left undiscipled, was merely “a rope of
sand” of no lasting consequence.
Suppose we had someone in our church-planting ministry who
saw their mini-church grow and divide three times. That person would
have proven to us that they’re a church planter. How so? They have
shown that they can initiate and shepherd groups to grow and multiply,
discipling both Christians and non-Christians in the process.
11. D. Michael Henderson, John Wesley’s Class Meeting: A Model for Making Disciples
(Nappanee, Indiana: Francis Asbury Press, 1997), 11.
12. Ibid, 30.
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Shift
The key to seeing the great potential of attentiveness to the small is

intentionality. Good leadership will see to it that new mini-groups are
generated and come to the point of multiplication.
Reproduction is one way to overcome a stilted dependence upon
giftedness. The more unique an individual’s contribution to an
organization is, the more dependent the organization becomes upon
these individuals. Many fine ministries are built upon the gifts of their
leadership. But once the leadership has left, the ministry can flounder
and stagnate.
Systems of reproduction tend to be better than the people using
them, while integrating and maximizing their giftedness and making
up for inadequacies. These systems can help leaders overcome their
innate reliance upon their own strengths to move the ministry forward.
The leader then sees their role as working on the reproduction of
mini-churches (although it’s wise to also be a part of a mini church).
As movement leaders, we need to find those church planters that we
are leading and then instill in them the vision for the power of small.
We inspire, model, show them how to do it, perhaps through role play.
Then we turn them loose and follow them as they lead their people to
implement mini churches or other small, self-replicating groups.
Church planting leaders have a grand vision of what God wants
to do through their influence. When the apostle Paul wrote about
new churches he planted, half of those churches relate to regions (for
example, the churches in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, etc.).
Geographically, how big is the area where you’re trusting the
Lord for a church-planting movement? Divide that area into smaller
subsets without a significant gospel presence (towns, villages, districts,
neighborhoods). How many subsets did you name? Now, ask yourself
these questions:
What would I need to do to see at least one missional mini-church
in each of these subsets of my area of ministry?
Enlist FAT people and give them a vision for starting mini-churches
in their area.
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What if each mini-church purposefully targeted a new area after

division had taken place?
Cluster multiple mini-churches in an area together. Provide
leadership. Plant new churches with clusters of mini-churches.
Remember Seurat’s painting and his technique of pointillism at the
beginning of this chapter? Imagine a landscape made up of hundreds of
small mini churches. Do you see the beauty in something like this? As
you surrender to the Lord, you open yourself up to a future of healthy
reproduction with the potential to grow in ways you can’t imagine.

• In what ways have you fostered multiplication on the smallest level
up to now?
• What would happen if you helped generate three mini-churches?
• What are the two greatest obstacles to seeing “big to small”
transpire?
• What must you change about the way you lead for “big to small” to
occur?
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C H A P T ER T H R EE
Shift 3: From Cognition

to Emotion
“Christianity needs to make emotional sense
before it can make rational sense.”
— Timothy Keller
T
hink back to the first time you heard the gospel. Who
communicated it? How did they share it? As important and as
transformative as the gospel is, it still needs to be communicated
winsomely in a way that breeds understanding. And when that
happens, we embrace the gospel.
But is communication of the gospel through intellectual reasoning
getting the job done? Not where I live. My context is Europe,
more specifically Germany. You would think the epicenter of the
Enlightenment and rationality would be the perfect context for
apologetics to win over people to faith in Christ left and right. It’s not.
Our neighbors in the other five units in the apartment building
where my wife and I live in Frankfurt are all either atheists or agnostics.
They eat evolution for breakfast. Lunch is science. Dinner is intellectual
prowess. We have introduced them to the likes of Francis Collins and
John Lennox—and they scoff.
The rational communication of the best news available on the
planet is not enough for people to come to know Jesus as their Lord
and Savior. Understanding the gospel without feeling the gospel will
45
Shift
short circuit conversion. They might buy in with their minds, but their
affections remain untouched.
Jesus told us that the heart of the matter is the heart. The greatest
commandment, He said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37).
The heart loves before the mind does. The heart is the seat of emotion
and volition. It is that place in our soul where our deepest decisions
are made. The heart encompasses the mind but represents the core
of who we are. When we’re undivided in our love for someone, we’re
wholehearted, totally committed, unreservedly devoted to that person.
Bottom line: The mind (intellect), though important, just doesn’t elicit
the sticking power the heart does.
Let’s look at some reasons why this is true:
The pride of getting it right

An overly positive assessment of who we are based upon what we know
and how we communicate it is what the Bible refers to as pride. Pride is
like a cream puff; it looks great on the outside, but on the inside, there’s
just a whole lot of air. When we think we’ve communicated the gospel
in an understandable way, but our friend rejects it, we may dismiss
them as being “hard of heart.” The underlying assumption is, “I got it
right. They didn’t get it. It’s their fault.”
Gospel communication cannot be reduced to cognitive
communication because there is much more at stake. Evangelism is
warfare. Don’t forget that the people you’re trying to reach are living
in captivity. They’re not intellectually free. Instead, they’re living under
the bondage of Satan, and 2 Corinthians tells us that Satan, “the god
of this world, has blinded the minds (my emphasis) of those who don’t
believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News.
They don’t understand (my emphasis) this message about the glory of
Christ, who is the exact likeness of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).
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Chapter Three | Shift 3: From Cognition to Emotion
The weakness of assent

Sometimes when I have a conversation with someone far from God,
they’ll tell me they themselves truly believe in God. That’s their way
of saying, “Bug off, I’m not as bad as you think, for I too am a theist.”
After praying for courage, I tell them there’s a passage in the Bible
that says, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons
believe that—and shudder” (James 2:19).
“What makes you different from a demon?” I ask. I tell them
that demons are theologically orthodox. They could teach in any
conservative seminary and garner much applause. What makes them
demons is not a lack of good theology but rather theology derived of
surrender. They don’t want to act on what they know to be true.
Jesus says the same thing at the end of His Sermon on the Mount
when He talks about the wise man and the foolish man. Of the two
men who built their houses, both had the same knowledge base. But
only the one who had built his house on a rock (firm) foundation
(versus the other on a foundation of sand) survived the storm. The
difference between the two men wasn’t knowledge. Both heard the
same message from Jesus. But one heard His words and obeyed them;
the other didn’t (Matt. 7:24-27).
In His Great Commission, Jesus does not tell His disciples (us) to
“teach them everything I commanded you.” Surprised? Rather, Jesus
commands us to “teach them to obey everything I commanded you”
(Matt. 28:20). Teaching is always meant to be obedience-based. If we
haven’t done it, we haven’t learned it.
Insular intellectualism
I’m the son of an electrician. My grandfather was an electrician. My
uncles were electricians. I learned at an early age that what keeps
electricians alive is the insulation around the wire. Insulation prevents
contact with electricity.
Similarly, communicating something as electrifying as the
Good News of Jesus the King cognitively can insulate hearts from
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Shift
experiencing the gospel. Back to the demons’ knowledge of Jesus. If

understanding and assenting to the truth of who Jesus is and what
He has done could save, then demons would be with us in Heaven.
Cognition must go further than mental assent. I must aim to capture
the heart of the not-yet follower of Jesus.
Emotion—the new starting point

The antidote to an overly intellectual approach to the gospel, however, is
not an over- emphasis on emotion.
I have been on a journey that has resulted in a shift from cognition
to emotion in evangelism. Several years ago, God woke me up very
early in the morning; this continued each day for several weeks.
Between 3:30 and 4:30 a.m., God called. He seemed to be saying to
me, “Dietrich, get up and in partnership with me, let’s develop a course
for postmodern secular people that would be different from anything
you’ve ever known or experienced.”
At this point in my life, I had planted five German-speaking
churches and was the department head of evangelism and church
planting for the Evangelical Free Church of Germany. I venture to say,
there was not too much out there in terms of evangelism that I hadn’t
either tried or heard of. This challenge was huge.
Rolling out of bed, I slipped into my robe and went downstairs
each morning. I began to pray, read portions of the Gospels and simply
waited on the Lord. He met me. Impressions and thoughts began to
make their way into my consciousness. I was scribbling down notes.
In the ensuing weeks, what God gave me was a course for postmodern
secular people that I have dubbed “MyLife-Workshop.”13
Allow me to briefly introduce you to how MyLife-Workshop shifts
from cognition to emotion in its approach to evangelism. In the first
unit titled “Coin,” participants sit at tables in small groups of four
or five. The setting is a third place and isn’t allowed to be a church
13. www.mylifeworkshop.net.
48
building. A church facility is that last place a person far from God
wants to enter. The first course I conducted in Germany was in a café.
The facilitator briefly welcomes the participants who have come to
“discover things about themselves they had never seen before and to
discover how great God’s interest is in them.” In a very non-invasive
fashion, total strangers begin to share their lives with one another.
Then they watch a video of how a coin is minted, after which
we reference Steve Jobs. As a young man, Jobs was a student at a
community college in California. By his own admission, six months
of college was all he could endure. He said he was bored with every
course he took, with one great exception. A course on the history of the
development of letters and calligraphy. Jobs said that that one course
opened to him a new world of the beauty of design. In fact, it made
such a strong impact on him that we can see it replicated on every
product Apple produces.
Holding up a coin, the facilitator says, “We’re all like Steve Jobs and
like this coin. All of us have been shaped. We have all been influenced
by two things: people and events. In the next ten to fifteen minutes, I
want you to brainstorm and write down on the Post-Its in front of you
the people and events that have positively shaped you to become who
you are today. One item per Post-It. Stick each note on the top of the
table in front of you.”
After this time of self-reflection and writing, the facilitator
encourages participants to share with one another at their table one
person and one event that has positively shaped them into who they are
today. A lively discussion usually ensues.
Afterward the facilitator holds up the coin and says something
like, “A coin has two sides to it. We’ve just shared one side of our lives:
the people and events that have positively influenced us. The flip side
are the people and events that have painfully shaped us.” Participants
write down the people and events that painfully shaped them. After ten
to fifteen minutes, the facilitator says, “Now, you have the option to
remain silent. You don’t have to share your pain, if you don’t want to.
49
Shift
But if you’ve worked through something hurtful and can talk about it,
then please do. Also, be selective. You don’t have to share your deepest
hurts.”
At this point, it’s not uncommon for tears to flow. What I’ve
learned is that if you want to create competition between people and
garner defensiveness, share your accomplishments and achievements.
But if you want to build bridges to the hearts of people and connect
with them emotionally, share your pain and failures.
This far into the first unit, no one’s looking at their watches. People
are leaning in, glancing at one another with looks of sympathy and
caring. Connectivity is palpable.
An A-3 piece of paper is given to each participant on which to
transfer their postits on to their timeline, divided up into segments
which are years (For those under 35 years, the segments represent five
years. For those over 35 years of age the segments symbolize ten years).
Each person weights both their highs and lows, connecting the postits
to form a diagram.
MyLife Map
Fig. 3. MyLife-Map
Then we introduce God, saying simply that He’s interested in the

ups and downs of our lives, and read Psalm 139:1-6:
50
You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
The reading of this powerful passage is the only biblical input in the
first unit. It’s simply read and left for participants to ponder.
FOUR CRITICAL INSIGHTS

What are some of the underlining values in MyLife-Workshop? Let’s
look at four major ones:
Non-Christians are most interested in themselves. Non-Christian
participants love themselves first and foremost Instead of rejecting self-
absorption outright as a sin to be dealt with, we tap into it as a place to
begin to explore deeper personal and spiritual issues. This is significant
when considering how most apologetically based courses appeal to
outsiders. They must be convinced they should interest themselves in
something that doesn’t interest them. They’re not usually interested in
questions such as who is Jesus? Is the Bible true? What are the claims
for Christianity? No. What non-Christians are most interested in is
themselves.
Non-Christians despise canned presentations. MyLife-Workshop is
unpredictable in its design. What postmoderns despise is prepackaged
material with the answers already set before the questions are posed.
They’d rather engage in dialog, come up with their own conclusions, be
51
Shift
part of the creative process of developing the course as it develops. This

is what they indeed experience.
The power of self-reflection is key. We want people to think deeply
about themselves and about the gospel. In each unit, there are two
phases in which each participant is asked to think about an issue that
pertains to their lives and to document their thinking, which is geared
to sharing some of that with others in their group.
Evangelism should be organic in a person’s life. MyLife-Workshop
is always relevant, dealing with who a person has become, what
they want out of life, and where their life is heading. We emphasize
autobiographical learning. By starting with their own life and
connecting it with the gospel, evangelism becomes organic, a part of
who they’re becoming.
UNEXPECTED TREASURES IN SUFFERING

I met Joey at a Walmart during a trip to Greensboro, North Carolina.
While waiting for a prescription to be filled, I elected to get a haircut.
Joey was my barber. He has been in the business for seventeen years,
very experienced. But never having gotten a haircut at Walmart before,
I was a bit nervous. Joey quickly put me at ease.
At one point, I said, “Joey, can I ask you something? If you had the
opportunity to ask God one question, what would it be?” A bit taken
aback, Joey said he’d need some time to think about his response. Hair
was soon falling, which led me to believe Joey was absorbed in thought,
and I was getting more than my money’s worth. Then he stopped
clipping, looked directly at me, and said, “I would ask God, ‘Why did
I have to go through so much in life?’” Great question. It’s a question
I hear a lot, so I’ve spent some time with it, thinking about how God
uses our suffering.
What we perceive to be negative is actually God’s tool to produce
great beauty through unusual means. Suffering can strengthen what
was previously weak in our lives. Suffering is an invitation to reflect.
As we reflect, we mature. Oswald Chambers writes, “Sorrow burns up
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a great amount of shallowness.”14 There is profound mystery in this.

Compassion and empathy, patience and resilience, understanding
and insight, contentment and serenity—they are all fostered in the
crucible of the smelting oven named “pain.” Suffering can make faithful
Christians more faithful, as well as draw the lost to the Savior.
The emotional pain in suffering can lead us to reflect deeply on
what’s most important in life. The Bible makes it clear that joy and
meaning in life are not tied to physical or mental health, even as our
culture preaches that health and beauty are the prizes most sought
after. Flip though any glossy magazine, and you’ll find adherence to
the gospel of health and beauty. Most of the people I know, myself
included, will never see themselves in a fashion magazine. I think back
to Janis Ian singing her hit “At Seventeen”:
“I learned the truth at seventeen/

That love was meant for the beauty queens/
And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles/
Who married young and then retired./
It was long ago and far away,/
The world was younger than today/
When dreams were all they gave for free/
To ugly duckling girls like me.” 15
The song became a No. 1 Billboard hit in 1975 and earned a

Grammy award. It resonated because Ian’s haunting song is an echo
chamber of our hearts. We know the pain of growing up more or less as
“ugly ducklings,” misfits to ourselves and others.
By exploring emotion, especially pain, we eliminate inferiority
among participants, both Christian and non-Christian. The first thing
a non-Christian realizes when they attend an apologetically based
14. Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery
House, 1935).
15. Janis Ian, “At Seventeen” from the album Between the Lines, 1975.
53
Shift
course is they are a second-class citizen; they’re sitting in Economy

while Christians are in Business class. They quickly realize that
Christians think themselves better off and that they’re not in such a
privileged position. But pain is the great emotional garden that knits all
people together (as MyLife-Workshop shows). Connectivity runs deep
when pain is surfaced. All walls fall when hurts are openly and honestly
discussed.
Inarguably the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century,
C.S. Lewis ends his magnum opus, Mere Christianity, with emotion:
“Look for yourself (by this he means “into yourself”), and you will find
in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay
(descriptions laden with emotion). But look for Christ and you will
find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”16 When we look
at who we have become and how we have been shaped, we’ll encounter
great pain and disappointment. What will give us the deep-down
perspective we need to make sense of the hurt and embrace the gospel
with both head and heart? Christ and the pain that He suffered for
us—no better news!
Questions to ponder:
• What are the advantages of being emotionally focused in your
evangelistic and church-planting efforts?
• If you’re leading or are part of a church-planting team, ask
everyone to come up with their own oikos (relational network
of non-Christians). How many are there collectively? What are
their similarities and dissimilarities? What values do you see them
embracing?
16. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, Macmillan Publishing Company, 23rd
Printing, 1977. P. 190.
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• What steps could you or your team take to trust God to see new
converts to be a part of your church plant?
55
C H A P T ER FO U R
Shift 4: From asking

“What?” to “What if?”
“If is a word of infinite intellectual significance,
for it indicates actions not yet completed but with
the possibility of alternative outcomes.”
— James A. Michener17
T
he question of “What?” leads us to what we should do next,
serially. “What do we need to do next?” deals with the here and
now. But the word “if” and the combination of “What if ?” are
vastly more powerful. Why? Because it frees us from what we have
always known and possibly experienced. “What if?” transports us into
the future and future possibilities, such as alternative outcomes. “What
if ?” is the genesis of Level 5 ministry.
Most church-planting strategy begins with the wrong question,
the question of “What?” What do we do next? Many church planters
commonly assume this question is the right one. But before we ask
“What?,” we need to take a step back and ask, “What if ?” “What if?”
takes us out of the realm of what is and transports us into the realm of
what might be. “What if?” is the question of vision.
Behind the Great Commission lies the divine “What if ?” Jesus,
being both God and Savior, commands His disciples then and now
to go and make more of what they are: His learners, shaped by him
17. James A. Michener, Centennial (New York: Random House, 1974), 143.
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Shift
(Matt. 28:18-20). Now, what if we took this seriously and, having the
world at our feet, we went and intentionally made followers of Jesus out
of those who responded to the gospel?
Jesus was serious about making Himself known as King of His
kingdom, so much so that he saturated all of Galilee with this “good
news of the kingdom”: “Jesus went through all the towns and villages
(of Galilee)” proclaiming and demonstrating his kingship (Matt. 9:35).
“What if ” the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few? Only after
postulating “What if?” does Jesus come to the “What now?”: send out
workers into the harvest field (Matt. 9:38).
We apprehend the divine “What if?” in creation. In calling the
universe into being, we realize that God created it twice. The first
creation took place in the heart of God Himself. He had a picture of
what it should be, a vision of His preferable future. Then secondly, He
spoke – “and it was.”
In the same way, churches are planted twice. This chapter is about
the first creation of a church plant—in the hearts of the planters. We
need to prayerfully dream with the Lord and with our team about the
impact the church could have on the culture into which we’re entering.
“What would it look like if the drug addicts of our city were to
follow Jesus? What would it look like if there was no divorce in our
families? What would it look like if business leaders were to follow
Jesus? What would it look like if everybody was employed? What if
we solicited the aid of non-believers and asked them, using the New
Testament as a basis, to help us devise ways of starting a new church?”
We call this “thinking free”—free from prior restraints that are inherent
in a situation or culture. When Disney World first opened in 1971, its
creator, Walt Disney, was already dead. At the grand opening of Disney
World, a reporter, speaking to Mrs. Disney, exuberantly said to her,
“Wouldn’t it be great if Walt were here to see this day?” Thereupon Mrs.
Disney retorted, “Young man, if Walt hadn’t seen this day, you wouldn’t
be here!”
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Chapter Four | Shift 4: From asking “What?” to “What if?”
“What if?” probes the outer regions of conventionality. In 1967,

Steven Sample was contemplating the invention of a new kind of dish
washer. At that time, dish washers were controlled by a clock motor
timer. Sample, an electrical engineer, gave himself to thinking free. To
invent a new way to control a dishwasher, he did the unthinkable: he
lay on the floor forcing himself to imagine hay bales, elephants, planets,
ladybugs, sofas, microbes, newspapers, hydroelectric dams, French
horns, electrons and trees, each in turn and in various combinations
controlling a dishwasher. He recalls how he could only endure these
fantasies for ten minutes at a time, so mentally excruciating was the
exercise. Then he writes, “But after a few such sessions, I suddenly
saw in my mind’s eye an almost complete circuit diagram for a digital
control system for a home appliance. This system was unlike anything I
or others had ever contemplated before.”18
The question of “What if?” will invariably lead to a shaping of new
ideas hitherto unimagined.
Here’s an exercise to help you think “What if ?” We are aware of
Google Streetview that gives us an up-close view of a street; Google
Earth allows us to see a city made up of many streets from a bird’s-eye
perspective. Google Earth is thinking-free. We begin by finding the
highest point from which we can view our church-planting context: a
tower, a hill, an airplane or even Google earth.
As you look on your city, imagine people who don’t know Christ in
a blue-colored zone. There is a lot of blue. If people in blue zones were
to commit to following Jesus, they would turn yellow in color. As you
look on your city from a bird’s-eye perspective, we imagine blue turning
yellow. We’ll then ask the Lord this question, “Lord, what do You
want to do in people’s lives to turn the blue into yellow?” We need long
periods of quietness and stillness, listening for God to speak to us.
18. Steven B. Sample, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass, 2002), 14.
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Shift
THE PECULIAR DISCIPLINES OF WHAT IF?

What are the disciplines needed for us to immerse ourselves in “What
if ”? Let’s look at five.
1. We need the discipline of memory loss. Yes, you read that correctly.
The more experienced church planters are, the more they will rely
on their past experiences to form their opinions. The more they rely
on their past experiences, the less they’ll be able to engage in the
“What if?” exercise. Experience and memory of those experiences
tend to inhibit “thinking free.” Benign dementia will be the gift we
need to envision something never seen before.
2. We need the discipline of suspended judgment. Another way of
rephrasing this discipline is to practice open-mindedness. We
react almost instinctively to any new idea with our own personal
assessment: “Oh, that will never work.” Like a professor grading
a student’s term paper, we entertain a new thought in terms of
how well it measures up to accepted standards. The path to the
digital dishwasher that Steven Sample took was that of suspended
judgment. Only when he restrained himself from thinking
conventionally was Sample able to conceptualize the new and not
yet seen.
Suspending judgment is a way of knocking out our penchant
for selectivity. Psychologist and author Adam Grant writes, “The
biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea
selection.”19 We think we instinctively know what is good or right
and that premonition, if adhered to, will keep us from new and
better ideas of planting new and highly impactful churches.
3. We need the discipline of slow thinking. Linked to suspended

judgment, slow thinking is a guard against acquiescing to
our intuition. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has written a
19. Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (New York:
Penguin Books, 2016), 31.
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fascinating book on the merits of slow thinking.20 Slow thinking is

essentially focused attention on one issue that, if not interrupted,
will lead to greater insight than gained by intuition. Here, we need
to train ourselves to fight against what comes naturally to us: the
snap judgment, the impulsive thought or the pontificating on merit.
Edward de Bono’s comments on the merits of slow thinking
bear repeating. “Most of the time, we think far too quickly . . . We
confuse quick understanding with quick thinking and slowness
with being dull-witted. If for ‘slow’ we substitute ‘leisurely’ or
‘exploratory,’ then we can more easily appreciate the benefits of
thinking more slowly.”21
4. A fourth discipline is possibility dreaming. Possibility dreaming

is releasing ourselves from the past and the present, from what
is actual, and catapulting our minds into the future. One of
my glaring strengths as a child was the gift of daydreaming. I
remember well sitting in class in the third grade, tuning out the
teacher while looking out the window dreaming about how I would
spend the rest of my day after school was over (my mother always
said parent-teacher conferences repeatedly surfaced this unique
gifting). Vision is internally seeing what isn’t yet there, entertaining
a preferable future that’s not by-the-book, but is nonetheless
pleasing to God.
The last discipline towards a “What if?” posture is having the end
in mind. What is it that we want to reach by entertaining the question
of “What if?” We want what God wants and that is harvest, new life, a
return home to the Father. Although this discipline is free association,
it doesn’t imply that it’s nebulous. Rather, it’s always tethered to a major
20. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin Random House,
2012).
21. Edward de Bono, de Bono’s Thinking Course (New York: Facts on File, Inc, 1986),
10.
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Shift
controlling grand outcome: the extension of the kingdom of God in a

given area through the planting of vibrant churches.
Put off planning and plunge into dreaming. Take a month or two
of non-planning and give your team the gift of unfettered musing.
Pepper with prayer lots of associative conversation that outlaws the
word “but.” Allow the harvest to permeate all things: “What if the
gospel transported by us and our new community would truly impact
hearts and minds? What if we lived totally unconventionally as we
associate with our not-yet-Christian neighbors? What if God were to
show up in Holy Spirit-sized proportions!” Praying “What If?”
I remember this incident of years ago, having just moved into
our new rental row house near Mannheim, Germany. We knew God
was calling us to plant a new church but had very little contact with
people around us. It was evening, and I was in our daughter’s bedroom,
looking out the window praying for our neighborhood, when My eyes
fixed on a man sitting in his office in the second story of his house. I
began to pray for him, his wife and their two boys, not knowing who
they were. What if the gospel were to come to that family? I thought. As I
was interceding for their salvation, I was suddenly overcome by a wave
of assurance. In my spirit, I sensed a deep confidence welling up within
me that they would indeed become followers of Christ. Then I did what
I had never done before—ever. I stopped praying for their conversion.
Instead, I began thanking God for it. In the ensuing months, we not
only got to know the family, but they also became our friends. And not
only that. They found Jesus in all His beauty to save and to transform
them.
Once a church-planting team has formed an internal vision
they’re collectively moving toward, they need help in getting there.
Intrinsically, vision has a very short shelf life. Vision dies every thirty
days. After one month’s time, because of the intensity of ministry,
people forget why they’re doing what they’re doing. Therefore, the
team leader needs to become the shepherd of the vision, reframing
and refreshing it at least monthly. One of the easiest ways of refreshing
62
vision for the entire team is restating it when a new person joins the
team: “John, we’re delighted that you’re joining this grand venture. You
have the right to know what we are all about on this church planting
team. Our vision is. . . .”
If vision is the heart, then goals are the feet of the church planting
venture. Setting realistic goals22 is putting our money where our vision
is. Otherwise vision becomes nothing more than a pipe dream; it all
goes up in smoke. Realistic goal setting is an act of faith. It is a way of
showing what we deem to be a priority. If we cannot see it, on paper
and in our behavior, we don’t truly believe it. Seeing is believing. Goal
setting is the bridge that we cross between the two shores of “What if?”
and “What now?”.
A helpful tool in setting goals is a waterfall diagram.23 Essentially,
planters begin by formulating an all-encompassing goal, like “planted
a conversion-based church” with a specific date attached to it. Notice
that the goal is in the past tense to reflect a sense of accomplishment.
Planters write this all-encompassing goal on the bottom right-hand
corner of a piece of paper. All planning will flow down, toward this
all-encompassing goal. Now, in a brainstorming process that leads to
reaching this primary goal, the planning team comes up with multiple
intermediate goals and orders them chrononogically. These steps are
plotted on an annual calendar with monthly goals imbedded into it.
The result? A waterfall diagram with intermediate steps broken down in
monthly increments.
Each milestone needs the name of a “father” or “mother” because
goals are orphans in search of parents who will commit to seeing that
milestone accomplished. To be effective, goals need to be adopted.
When a goal is everyone’s general responsibility, it is no one’s specific
responsibility and rarely, if ever, gets accomplished.
22. By realistic goals, I mean those that are SMART: specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant, timed (i.e., have a date attached to them).
23. For an excellent resource see, Carl F. George and Robert L. Logan, Leading and
Managing Your Church (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming Revell Company, 1987).
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Shift
My friend Arno is a very gifted evangelist in Germany who likes to

set up a “wallpaper table” on a city sidewalk. A wallpaper table is about
ten feet long, with hundreds of puzzle pieces. He sits on a folding chair
and begins to find pieces that fit together. Passersby stop and ask what
he’s doing, and he tells them he’s putting together a puzzle; then he
asks if they’d like to help him. Soon, three or four people are sitting at
a table on folding chairs working on a puzzle. Invariably someone will
pipe up and ask, “Do you have a picture of the puzzle we are working
on?” My friend lets them know he doesn’t have a picture, and asks if
seeing the end result is that important to what they’re doing?
“Absolutely,” they say. “Without the big picture, how do we know
where the pieces fit?”
That’s when Arno asks, “Do you have a picture of the life you’re
constructing? And if so, what does it look like?”
Prayerfully exploring “What if?” in your church-planting team is
like having the picture of your venture before you. When the preferable
future has taken shape, it becomes much easier to put together the
pieces and come up with meaningful goals that will fit like pieces to a
puzzle, allowing us to see what we believe.
In all this, there is much more than our dreaming and planning.
The first person to ask, “What if?” is God Himself. His questions:
“What if ” I could find a group of people who would commit themselves
to Me audaciously, wholly, unreservedly? Trusting Me to do the greater
things? “What if ” I had total sway over their hearts, homes, bank
accounts and their time? “What if ” these people would allow Me to
move them out of their comfort zones? “What if ” together, by the power
of My Spirit, we could plant not only a church but also a movement of
churches that would transform individuals and society?”
Now, what if God is calling you to be that person, that team,
to step out of the boat and walk on water? Are you ready for this to
be not just a possibility but a reality—the reality of His calling and
empowering those who trust not in their own devices but have put their
faith in God and His resources?
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• What role does prayer play in formulating your “What if ?”
• The aspirations God has for us in church planting are always above
and beyond our means and capacity to accomplish. If we can do
it ourselves, it’s probably not of God. Thinking about your church
planting ministry, what is beyond your means and capacity to
accomplish?
• Describe the big picture of what you sense God is calling you to
become?
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C H A P T ER F I V E
Shift 5: From Membership

to Discipleship
“So far as the visible Christian institutions of our day
are concerned, discipleship clearly is optional.”
— Dallas Willard24
W
hat is it that you expect of people when they come into your
church-planting ministry? Traditionally, church-planting leaders
emphasized evangelism, eventually leading to baptism that
culminates in membership. And membership meant commitment to
the church. People are expected to regularly attend church functions,
be loyal to the church’s doctrine and leadership, to serve in the church,
and of course to financially support the church.
Newer church plants tend to completely do away with membership,
deeming it too institutional. In its place, they emphasize belonging—
being part of the church without needing to formally join it. Such non-
membership membership seeks to address people’s aversion to formality,
commitment and any sense of impingement on personal freedom.
Whether formal or informal membership is at play, both come at
great cost: non-discipleship. Emphasizing being part of a church plant
without being shaped by Christ.
Recent history has shown that church members and those that
called themselves Christians can nevertheless be more committed to
24. Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on
Discipleship (San Francisco: Harper, 2006).
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Shift
popular culture than to Christ. The concept of a Christian nation was

endemic to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the 1930s. Artur
Bonus first coined the term “the Germanization of Christianity” in
1896. In soliciting the help of the clergy, both Protestant and Catholic,
Hitler skillfully wove nationalism into Christianity in such a way as to
taint it distinctly German: Arian (superior to other races), anti-Jewish,
devoted to a powerful leader, culminating in a Third Reich. The result
was a horrific loss of life on all sides, the pinnacle of which was the
extermination of more than six million Jews alone.
THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP

How was that possible then, and how is it possible now in our day and
time, that culture can supercede Christ? Noted German evangelist and
martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, follower of Christ during Nazi Germany,
has a chilling answer: cheap grace. Look at what Bonhoeffer says in his
watershed book, The Cost of Discipleship:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring

repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion
without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap
grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace
without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace is the gospel
which must be sought again and again, the gift that must be asked
for, the door at which a man must knock.”
“Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace

because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs
a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true
life . . .”25
25. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company), first paperback ed, 1963), 47. Incidentally, I am named after Dietrich
Bonhoeffer.
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Chapter Five | Shift 5: From Membership to Discipleship
When the Lord called you to the grand and glorious ministry of
church planting, He called you to make disciples, not simply members
or visitors. He called you to challenge those both within and still
outside of the kingdom of God to leave their small worlds and to lay
hold of the gospel. You are called to teach and preach a message that’s
as compelling as it is honest—to die to self and live unto Christ. This is
the life beautiful and strong, a foretaste of Heaven, open to us now.
The normal way of referring to Christians in the New Testament
was not the word “Christian.” It was “disciple.” The word “disciple”
occurs 269 times in the New Testament; “Christian” is found only
three times.26 A disciple is someone who learns from a master, an
apprentice. An apprentice lives with the master, learns from the master,
with the goal of living and working like the master. As we lead others,
we lead them to be apprentices of Jesus. But how do we do that?
THE 3M OF DISCIPLE-MAKING
To become attached to Jesus and stay with Him, to be His apprentices,
we need to be about 3M: marvel, move, make.
Following Jesus begins with wonder. We are astonished at the One
who calls us to Himself and to a lifestyle of apprenticeship under His
influence. We marvel at the person of Jesus Christ. When Jesus invited
His disciples to follow Him, He invited them to Himself—not to a set
of doctrinal statements. We will only want more of Jesus when we see Him
as . . . .
• the life we’ve always wanted;

• the truth that’s absolute;
• the beauty that’s irresistible;
• the refuge that is our haven;
• the savior who is our peace.
26. Ibid, 3.
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Shift
What’s so great about Jesus? The answer to this question becomes the
starting point to following Jesus. We only follow whom we love. So,
why do we love Him?
We are attracted to Jesus because of all that He is and has
accomplished for us. He is contrarian. Jesus is everything we have ever
dreamed of but never expected. As we consider Him, we marvel.
In the ancient Greek pantheon, the higher up the chain of deity,
the less contact there was with mere mortals. In fact, mythology tells us
that at the top there was no meeting up between the gods and humans.
Zeus, the father of the gods, lived on Mount Olympus surrounded
by other created gods. The gods who displeased Zeus were punished
by being consigned to the world of humans. Aware of the fickleness
of their gods, humans believed they needed to influence the gods by
sacrificing or giving gifts to either appease their wrath or to incur
their blessing. For Zeus to have entertained mortals was unthinkable,
degrading, abhorrent.
Contrast Zeus with Jesus. The Apostle Paul, who certainly knew
of Greek mythology, writes, “[Jesus] who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own
advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature
of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in
appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to
death—even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:6-8).
Jesus condescends (not to be confused with condescension!), he
steps down and out, and in so doing He relinquishes His glory and
allows himself to be born as a man (without suspending His deity) to
serve humanity. He, whom angels served, becomes a servant to save
those who could not save themselves. In leaving Heaven to step down
that steep ladder leading to us, Jesus steps off the last rung—and is
nailed to a cross.
Jesus doing that for us is oxymoronic: “But we preach Christ
crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but
to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the
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power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is
wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than
human strength” (1 Cor. 1:23-25). When we speak of “cruel kindness”
or “to make haste slowly” or of the “living death,” what we mean are
paradoxes. Either one is cruel, or one is kind, but cruel kindness is a
contradiction.
When Paul proclaims Jesus as the crucified Christ, he is marveling at
the oxymoronic essence of Jesus. Either we have a crucified person and
thus someone rejected by God and man; a blatant criminal, deserving
what’s coming to Him; or we have the Christ, the Anointed One, God
Himself. But a crucified Christ—that’s simply too much to wrap our
minds around. Jews who heard this were abhorred. Greeks thought
it idiotic. We, however, marvel at the weight of grace in the crucified
Christ. Why?
The reason for God becoming man, allowing Himself to be treated
as a criminal, to be rejected by the Father (“My God, my God, why
have You forsaken me?”)—the reason for it all is us. Jesus did it to
demonstrate His love for us (Rom. 5:8). After all these years of knowing
Him, I’m still in recovery mode. I can’t get over this. I can only marvel.
We praise God that He has, in Christ, become our salvation: “In
that day you will say: ‘I will praise you, O LORD. Although you were
angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted
me. Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid’”
(Isa. 12:1-2a).
In his academic work focusing on Isaiah, theologian Edward D.
Young unpacks this scripture:
“What is meant when the prophet states that God is his salvation? It
means that God is the author, the cause, the agent, the accomplisher
of that salvation. Salvation apart from God is unthinkable. In
obtaining salvation we are delivered from the guilt and the pollution
of our sins, and we receive the wondrous and blessed righteousness
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Shift
of the eternal Christ . . . What more can we have—what more do

we need than God Himself? He is our salvation.27
When Jesus told His disciples (and referentially us) to go and

make disciples (Matt. 28:18), He meant, “go and make people wide-
eyed about me.” Discipleship always begins with wonder. Jesus saying:
“Teach them to marvel, and they will (gladly) obey all that I have
commanded you.”
Discipleship begins with marvel and leads to move. In the Old
Testament, the word used to describe a person’s reorientation toward
Yahweh was shuv (rhymes with move). Shuv means to turn, or to turn
around. Through His prophet Ezekiel, God announced to a rebellious
people, “For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the
Sovereign LORD. Repent (shuv) and live!” (Ezek. 18:32).
Martin Luther used a Latin phrase, so beautiful in meaning, to
describe the state of a person far from God and their need to return,
or turn, to Him. Luther said that such a person is incurvatus se: bent
inward into oneself. Without God, all we have is ourselves—our limited
vision, our limited resources, our limited strength, our limited hope. To
repent is to turn away from ourselves to face God. To shuv away from
self unto God.
In the New Testament when Paul was making disciples in the first
century, he wrote that he aspired for the people under his charge to be
grafted in Christ—“until Christ takes form in you” (Gal. 4:19). In the
forming of Christ in us, movement is implied: toward Christ, away from
sin and self and together with Jesus to others.
REIMAGINING THE CONCEPT OF CHRISTIAN

What is a Christian? A Christian is a follower of Jesus who looks more
like Jesus the longer they follow Him. To look more like Jesus in our
character, our knowledge and our skills, we need to move.
27. Edward J. Young, The Book of Isaiah, Vol I: Chapters 1-18 (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1965), reprinted 1993, 403.
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As Jesus appointed His disciples of old, so He appointed us

“to be with Him” (Mark 3:14). At the least, there is an element of
intentionality about “being with Jesus.” We truly want to be with Him
and thus intentionally move toward Him. We certainly won’t drift into
being His apprentices.
Moving toward Jesus precludes moving away from self at the
center of our lives. Someone once said humility is not thinking less of
ourselves but thinking of ourselves less. When we deny ourselves, take
up our cross daily, and follow Jesus (which is the normal Christian life
–Luke 9:23), we destabilize pride. Like stones placed in a glass full of
water displace the water, by allowing Jesus His pre-eminence there is
less of us to get in the way. The way to deal with sins (plural) is to deal
with the sin (singular) of pride.
Test yourself on how well you’re doing in debunking your pride.
Monitor how often you mention yourself, your accomplishments, or
even your failures to others. The more we talk about ourselves, the more
we realize that we mean much to us.
Jesus called His first disciples to Him “that He might send them
out to preach” (Mark 3:14). We’re sent to others who need to be
touched and spoken to by Jesus through us. We move with Jesus to
others. Paul puts it this way: “For we are God’s workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for
us to do” (Eph 2:10). The world is full of opportunities that God has
prepared for us to grasp! Following Jesus will inevitably lead us to the
spiritual and physical needs of others and in some way to meet those
needs.
We marvel at Jesus. We move toward Him, away from a self-
centered life, and with Jesus we move toward others. As we move, our
mission is to make disciples of those around us (Matt. 28:18). This
demands exertion. Dallas Willard says it well: “Grace is opposed to
earning, but not to effort.”28
28. Willard, The Great Omission, 76.
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Shift
The goal of disciple making is the reshaping of the soul, no less

than the transformation of a person from the inside out. In the Great
Commission, Jesus instructs us how do go about this ministry. “Teach
them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19).
Making apprentices goes beyond teaching about Jesus or the Bible
to applying what we know.
For five summers while he was growing up, Elvis Presley attended
a Christian camp. He grew up in poverty, and his parents simply
couldn’t afford to pay for him to go to camp. His church, however, had
a solution. Anyone who memorized three hundred and fifty Bible verses
in a year could go to camp for free. For five consecutive years, Elvis was
able to go to camp at no cost to his family because year after year, Elvis
memorized hundreds of Bible verses. Over a period of five years, he
memorized some 1,750 Bible verses. However, that knowledge was not
enough for him to lead a God-honoring life. Bible knowledge without
life change is just a hobby.29
Jesus sums up His Sermon on the Mount with an illustration. He
speaks of the wise man and the foolish man. Both men build houses,
places of security, rest, and comfort. One builds his house on a rock,
a solid foundation; the other builds his house on sand, an unstable
foundation. Then a violent storm descends. The house built on sand is
swept away, but the house built on a rock withstands the storm.
What both homebuilders have in common is the fact that they
have the same knowledge base. They have both heard the teachings of
Jesus. The difference between wisdom and foolishness is not insight; it’s
application of knowledge. Let Jesus’ words sink in: “Therefore, everyone
who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a man
who built his house on the rock” (Matt 7:24). Elvis heard, but didn’t do
what he knew to be true. In the words of Jesus, he was foolish.
29. Dietrich Schindler, The Jesus Model: Planting Churches the Jesus Way (Carlisle,
UK: Piquant, 2013),
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HOW DO WE MAKE DISCIPLES?

The core of making disciples is leading people to put into practice what
God is teaching them. It is obedience-based living. We learn from Jesus
what He did to make His disciples. Jesus made disciples relationally,
intentionally, situationally, multiplicationally and globally.
Disciples aren’t made in a classroom, in a church service or via a
program. Greg Ogden writes, “By discipling, I mean a process that
takes place within accountable relationships over a period of time for
the purpose of bringing believers to spiritual maturity in Christ.”30
Discipling begins before people profess Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
We know this to be the case because Jesus said to go to all nations—
places that are predominantly made up of not-yet followers of Christ.
Let’s look at Ogden’s definition and unpack it a little:
“accountable relationships”: The relationship is not arbitrary, but
intentional. Partners meet regularly with the intention of promoting
spiritual maturity.
“accompanied by others”: This process is deliberately not
hierarchical. This accompaniment aims to encourage, equip and
challenge.
“promoting spiritual maturity”: The goal of discipleship is to be like
Jesus in our thoughts, actions and feelings. At the end of the process,
we want mature Christians to be able to disciple others.
Reproduction is hereby the intention. Jesus commissioned us to go
to “all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Whether we’re separated by culture or
geography, we’re to take the initiative and go to them.
A spiritually formed person loves God and others. Jesus said as
much. When the pharisees confronted Him and asked Him, “Of all the
commandments, which is the most important?” (Mark 12:28), Jesus
answers by quoting the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-5: “Hear, O Israel:
The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God
30. Greg Ogden, Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time

(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 54.
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Shift
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
And then He augments this love for God with love for neighbor:
“The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no
commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:31).
New Testament scholar Scot McKnight refers to this as “the Jesus
creed.” It was the way in which Jesus himself was discipled, by praying
to Abba Father that Jesus would love him supremely and his neighbor
as himself. Jewish children were taught this prayer as their first prayer.
They recited it morning and evening. McKnight writes: “For Jesus,
love of God and love of others is the core. Love, a term that prompts
and shapes behaviors to help that person become what God desires.
Love, when working properly, is both emotion and will, affection and
action.”31
If love of God and love of others are good enough for Jesus, they’re
most certainly more than good enough for us as well. This is the
goal of all disciple making, the goal of all church planting: to make
apprentices of Jesus who would love God supremely and their neighbor
as themselves.
Healthy church planting will aim not at membership, but at
“followership.” It will instill in people’s hearts a vision of strength and
beauty found only in Jesus Christ. A vision like this motivates people
to turn from ordering their lives to be reformatted by Christ and the
Bible, the Word of God. This will, in turn, be so transformative that
people will see our love for God and for them. When they see such
transformed lives, they’ll begin to glimpse what Jesus looked like, and
long for Him.
31. Scot McKnight, The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others (Brewster, MA:
Paraclete Press, 2004), 8-9.
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Questions to discuss:
• In what ways can you tell that you and your church plant are
making disciples of Jesus?
• What does the process for seeing “Christ formed in people” look
like in your church plant?
• How can you fan the flames of disciple making?
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C H A P T ER S I X
Shift 6: From the Old

to a New Reality
“The further we go, the more danger we meet.”
— John Bunyan32
A
t the age of twenty, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I
wanted to plant churches in Germany. “Five to grow before I go”
became my life’s motto. Why five? Because I hadn’t met anyone
who had planted five churches in Germany during their ministry
career. I was really reaching for the stars.
By God’s grace and with the help of many, at age forty-four, I
planted the fifth church. But I was confused. Why wasn’t I dead and in
Heaven? Thankfully, my wife was happy that I was still alive. I asked
God what He had in store for me. His answer seemed to be, “more to
grow before you go.”
So, I threw myself even more intensely into the church-planting
adventure. A doctoral dissertation on the elusive topic of church-
planting movements in Germany followed. For six years, I headed up
the evangelism and church-planting department for the Evangelical
Free Church of Germany, helping the denomination move toward
planting one hundred churches in Germany in ten years. During that
time, I wrote a book on church planting, spoke at many conferences
32. John Bunyan. The Works Of That Eminent Servant Of Christ, John Bunyan,
Minister Of The Gospel (New Haven: Pub Nathan Whiting, 1831), 143.
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Shift
and taught courses throughout Europe. I experienced firsthand the joy

of winning in ministry.
What surprised me the most, though, was the depression that went
along with the blessing.
Since pain and disappointment were part of Jesus’ ministry, it
should be no surprise that they’re woven into the ministries of His
followers. Sri Lankan author Ajith Fernando comments, “We are not
used to experiencing frustration and pain. When we face such, we tend
to shrink from it. But frustration and pain are essential features of
incarnational ministry.”33
Dr. Archibald Hart points out to servants of Jesus that surviving
ministry is all about surviving depression. Look what he ways: “In
choosing the ministry, one chooses to command an outpost of
unequalled danger which threatens from within and without.”34 Jesus
expected disappointment and knew how to deal with it. His followers
in planting churches will have to learn to do the same.
When Dr. Hart speaks about surviving ministry as being akin to
surviving depression, he means reactive depression. Something painful
has happened to us on the ministry journey – a death of a close friend,
a church split, needing to surrender a building, a big financial hit.
The way in which we deal with loss and pain will predicate staying in
ministry. The worse way to deal with reactive depression is to medicate
it with adrenaline such as pornography, loud music, extreme sports,
autobahn-fast driving.
My wife and I, along with our three young children, had just
started a new church in the city of Mannheim, Germany. Things were
exploding—many people were coming to Christ, small groups were
burgeoning, worship was vibrant, attendance was growing. We were
living our dream.
33. Ajith Fernando. Jesus Driven Ministry (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2002), 22.
34. Hart’s comments were made during a Doctor of Ministry course at Fuller
Theological Seminary in September, 2003.
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Chapter Six | Shift 6: From the Old to a New Reality
After returning home from a long and restful summer vacation, I

began to sift through our mail. One envelope, particularly thick, got
my attention. The letter was from a lovely young couple, both highly
gifted and immensely involved in the ministry of our church plant.
My heart sank when I read it. It was chock-full of major criticism
against me and my leadership. In their last paragraph, they announced
that they were leaving the church and would not return. As if this
wasn’t enough disappointment, I soon learned that this couple I highly
respected had Xeroxed their letter and sent it out to everyone in the
church. I was devastated.
I said to my wife, “All I want to do is to go to McDonald’s and see
if they’ll hire me. I want to get away from ministry. I can’t take this
anymore.” Cooking and packaging hamburgers, not having to deal
with people, seemed to me to be the best of all possible worlds. I kid
you not. For three days straight, getting a job at McDonald’s was all I
could think about. I now refer to that time as my “McDonald’s days.” If
you’re a church planter, my guess is you’ve already had your fair share of
McDonald’s days. If not, just wait.
Church planters are principally change agents. I like what church
leader and author Leith Anderson says about the inherent nature of
planters and the risks they face: “Some persons and organizations try
to control change; we call them proactive. They want to be the change
agents; they want to initiate. Their numbers are few, their failures are
many (emphasis mine), and their impact can be enormous. Prophets,
reformers, and missionaries are all proactive change agents. They see the
way things are and envision the way things could be. They attempt to
create a new order which no one else may want.”35
AS CHURCH PLANTERS, WE WILL EXPECT SETBACKS

“Life is difficult.” It’s the first sentence in Scott Peck’s wonderful book,
The Road Less Travelled. Peck’s thesis is that despite the difficuly of
35. Leith Anderson, Dying for Change (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1990), 140.
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Shift
life, most people believe the myth that it’s supposed to be easy; they’re
surprised and dismayed when life indeed brings disappointment and
hardship.
“The safest assumption a ministry can make is that a crisis is just
around the corner,” he writes. “If it is not happening presently. This is
not necessarily bad news—just reality.”36
Along with myriads of open doors in a church planter’s life, there
are the manifold adversaries. The Apostle Paul knew of the many open
doors. He also lived with setbacks and frustrations: “A great door for
effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose
me” (1 Cor. 16:9). Paul teaches us to expect and adjust to adversarial
circumstances.
Frustration can be what the ancient Greeks called peirasmos, a
testing sent or allowed by God to expose the condition of our hearts
(James 1:2). The Lord will most certainly use setbacks to sanctify His
servants. Our reaction is the key to winning over hindrances. It takes
a healthy leader to generate a healthy ministry, and part of being a
healthy leader is accepting difficult times (such as a global pandemic or
on a more personal level, the deception of a staff leader).
ALLOW DEPRESSION AND SADNESS TO RUN THEIR COURSE

Dr. Hart talks about the “loss-proneness” of ministry. Think about
it. In ministry, we have to learn to say goodbye to things (systems,
processes, familiarity) or people that will never return. As leaders, we
must give ourselves permission to grieve the loss.
In fact, God gives us the “gift” of depression to help us calculate
the seriousness of loss. The deeper and longer the sadness, the greater
the loss. If you’ve ever lost a parent or someone close to you, think
about the amount of time it took to deeply grieve that death. The good
news is that the depression and sadness will lift if we let them run their
course.
36. M. Scott Peck. The Road Less Traveled. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.)
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What are signs that we could be depressed? Psychologists identify

the major three:
1. Anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure and joy). This

translates into loss of energy or a profound tiredness;
2. Withdrawal
3. Low mood or sadness. Often this means that our immune system is
at work. The body sends us a message to slow down to help us battle
sickness more effectively.
By now, you probably know that men and women handle

depression differently. Women who feel depressed are still in touch with
their emotions and will express them. Men, however, tend to act out
their depression behaviorally, either through anger or compulsive work.
After times of particularly intense ministry output, “post-adrenalin
depression” (the Elijah syndrome) often comes.
In his book, Reinventing Your Church, author Brian McLaren
writes:
“Psychiatrist Louis McBurney reports that low self-esteem is the
number-one problem pastors face. Why? We are in a high-demand,
low-stroke profession in a culture that does not value our product or our
work. We labor among people with unrealistic expectations, and deep
inside we expect far more from ourselves and the church. It’s no wonder
McBurney’s study identified depression as the second most identified
pastoral problem.”37
Dr. Hart adds: “Contrary to what many laypersons believe,
depression is a major occupational hazard for ministers. For many
ministers, surviving the ministry is a major matter of surviving
depression.”
He helpfully lists four principles in dealing with depression:
37. Brian McLaren, Reinventing Your Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 118.
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Shift
• The greater the loss, the deeper the depression.

• The more we are willing to submit ourselves to the depression, the
sooner we will get rid of it.
• Grief is a process of discovering what we have lost and then saying
goodbye to it.
• The purpose of depression is to make known our loss.
LOOK FOR THE LESSON TO BE LEARNED

We have an inalienable right to make mistakes; it is part of being
human. A mistake is simply one way of doing something. All of us
produce our own special crop of failure, but we dare not waste it. For
it is one of God’s primary messengers sent to teach us what no book
can convey. Poignantly, Hart says, “If you can’t deal with failure, you’ll
never get to success.”
The fundamental food of the church planter is his intimacy with
God the Father. That was not always true of me. I had to experience a
crisis before I took this basic lesson to heart.
In 1985, during my internship with the Evangelical Free Church
in Frankfurt, the elders asked me to assume leadership of planting a
new daughter church in the region of the Taunus Hills. To say I was
excited about this would be an understatement—I was white hot with
anticipation. After all, this is why I had studied theology for eight years.
I dreamed about church planting, talked about it, read about it, wrote
about it. It was fantastic to think that I was going to lead a church-
planting project. I couldn’t imagine anything better!
We began to meet, pray and plan with a team of twenty-five people
from the sending church. In no time at all, we sensed God’s grace and
favor with us. We were amazed when the mayor of the city of Oberursel
offered us the use of a community center at no cost—the first meeting
place for the worship services of our new church! A nearby church
offered us meeting rooms for our children’s ministry. Many people
agreed to volunteer. Advertising, positive articles in the local press, a
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spirit of acceptance on the part of other existing churches in the area—

everything went unbelievably smooth. People came, and some of them
became believers. Attendance at our services grew, so that within three
months we were numbering between 70 and 90 adults.
It was a dream come true. My wife and I prayed, we worked hard,
and we were happy. But my joy didn’t last long. Within about six
or seven months, I began to slip into a mild depression. Internally,
something seemed to be breaking down. I didn’t understand why this
was happening to me. I should have been the happiest church planter
in the country. But instead, all joy left me. In the middle of this dark
time, I made one of the best decisions of my life. I decided to hike
through the Taunus Hills, alone with Jesus. Taking only my Bible,
a notebook and a pen, I walked for hours along dusty paths through
fields and forests. All along the way I kept asking Jesus the same
question: “Why? Why am I so sad? I should be happy, but I just feel
completely empty, tired, and joyless.”
The Church fathers called this condition acedia—a tiredness of the
soul. I know that I was also suffering from anhedonia, the inability to
experience joy. I had accomplished so much already with God’s help,
and yet I felt as if I had lost something really important.
During the hours of wrestling, God gave me an answer. I read
Psalm 42, and suddenly it was as if blinders fell from my eyes. The
Psalm begins with the words of King David, who was forced to flee
into the wilderness when his son Absolom wanted to usurp the throne.
David says to God, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul
pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I go and meet with God?” (Psalm 42:1–2)
The reason for my acedia became clear: I was longing for God’s
blessing in church planting. I hungered and thirsted for it. But I was
not longing for God himself with the same intensity. That was it! I was
trying to feed my soul with God’s blessing, instead of with God himself. I
confessed my idolatry to Him: I have placed doing ministry for God
ahead of You.”
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Shift
Afterwards, something new and beautiful happened inside me.

I began to long—sincerely, hungrily, greedily, persistently—for God
and His presence. My emotional condition changed noticeably. Joy
returned.
Via detours like this one, I discovered what Jesus had taught us
through His life: the presence of God the Father is the only thing that
can sustain happiness and contentment; and Jesus bathed His soul in
fellowship with His Father. The presence of His Father was the source
of Jesus’ joy and authority. Jesus sought His Father’s presence, hungered
and thirsted for it. Likewise, healthy church planters will find and
guard their joy and fulfilment in Jesus before and during the early
stages of church planting, and beyond.38
I have learned more about myself through failure than in success.
Only failure has revealed to me new vistas of my pride, my driven-
ness, my impatience, my inattentiveness. I have learned most from my
failures when having reflected on them. When I begin to write about
them, I gain clarity. In turn, clarity brings insight and insight leads to
resolve. For resolve to be translated into habitual changed behavior, it
must be shared with someone who cares for us. When we’re vulnerable
enough to talk to a colleague or spouse about a failure, weakness or
temptation, we invite accountability that leads to learning our lessons
well.
HOLD ON TO HOPE
“Hope deferred makes a heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of
life” (Prov. 13:12). Hope revives and strengthens us. It keeps us moving
in the right direction. And because it’s anchored in the future, hope will
always pull us into the future. None of us can live and work without
hope. For those who have lost hope, their first mission is to find a new
hope.
38. As recalled in Schindler, The Jesus Model, pp. 39-41.
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In church planting, we will often experience “hope deferred.” It

makes for a sick heart. But hope deferred can also lead us to “hope
refocused.” We need to hold on to hope. What are some principles that
can guide us toward that?
Foster an attitude of expectancy. God is at work in our world. His
kingdom has come and is breaking into our reality. Prayer is all about
tuning our hearts to God’s workings and then keeping watch for signs
of God’s working.
Even blockage in ministry can foster expectancy. Our last church
plant was in a cinema. After two years, we wanted to find a place to
rent on an hourly basis for Saturday evening meetings in a different
location in the city. We wanted to do “exploratory drilling” to see if we
could attract people that we had been unable to reach in our current
setting. We turned over every stone and found nothing. That was
disappointing. But in the process, we came upon an empty building
that was ideal for further growth. Within a year, we doubled our
attendance. The point is, had we not been disappointed in our search
for an alternative meeting place, we would not have come across the
former cafeteria that became our new home. If God allows you to be
disappointed in one area, expect Him to encourage you in another.
Strengthen your heart in the Lord. David and his men encountered
terrible loss. Their city of Ziglag was pillaged. We read, “David was
greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him; each
one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters.” How did
David respond to hope deferred? “But David found strength in the LORD
his God” (1 Sam. 30:6).
When our spirits are low, we need to retreat with the Lord. Take a
long walk. Go on a spiritual retreat. Cultivate the discipline of silence
before the Lord. There is nothing like being met by God in our lowest
moments. God promises us: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be
dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will
uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isa. 41:10).
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Shift
Engage in healthy relationships. One of our greatest sources of

discouragement in church planting is people. The very people God has
called us to reach are often sources of huge emotional drainage. Why?
Because we are the care givers; they are the takers. We all need special
friends that affirm and strengthen us.
Once a month, our family met with another ministry family. They
had three kids about the ages of our kids. We let down our hair, had
lots of fun, prayed together and laughed a lot. We have come to need
those times away with our friends.
In his book, Restoring your Spiritual Passion, Gordon MacDonald
writes: “Special friends are part of the economy of spiritual passion, and
in most cases an indispensable part. Unlike the very draining and the
very nice people of our worlds, special friends are committed to helping
one another discover and maintain spiritual passion.”39
Laud flexibility. Church planters need a plan that leads to the
fulfilment of the vision. A vision is useless until it is translated into
performance. Planning is our resolve to take action. Church planters
make plans that often, however, do not pan out. We are the Plan B,
Plan C and Plan D people. Without flexibility, we become rigid. What
is rigid cracks under strain. What cracks is ultimately unusable.
Pull away from stress. Stress is a modern phenomenon that was
unknown in biblical times and until recently wasn’t identified. In
cultures where there is no electricity and no fast means of travel,
where most must walk to get anywhere, stress is not a major negative
influence. But we live and minister in a very different context, where
bad stress is part of our economy of living. When we proactively
manage stress, we can run the marathon of ministry until the end
without burning out in the process. Here are some proven guidelines
for managing negative stress:
39. Gordon MacDonald, Restoring Your Spiritual Passion (Nashville: Oliver-Nelson

Books, 1986), 175.
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• Create definable boundaries. Charles Spurgeon once said: “Learn to

say no; it will be of more use to you than to read Latin.” Saying no
is another way of saying yes. But if no is not a part of our lifestyle,
then we will find we’re unable to say yes to the opportunities God
brings our way. When does your workday end? What criteria do
you use to either take on or reject a ministry opportunity?
• Get enough sleep. Many people live continuously sleep-deprived. Dr.
Archibald Hart maintains that we need nine hours of sleep. Those
that get less than eight hours of sleep deprive themselves of mental
regeneration, which is the last phase of sleep. They will thus feel
disjointed or out of sorts. I remember reading about how one of
Dallas Willard’s spiritual disciplines courses focused on developing
a retreat setting. The only assignment for the first three days of the
course is for every participant to sleep ten hours each night!
• Learn faceting. The numerous cuts in a diamond are called facets.
Each facet lets in light at a different angle, enabling the light that
enters the diamond to refract in many directions. Faceting makes
for a beautiful diamond. In our lives, faceting means finding a
variety of interests outside of ministry that recharge us emotionally.
For years, I have enjoyed hunting for lost and old coins. Often,
I’ll pack up my metal detector, find a promising spot and search
for coins for the next couple of hours. It does wonders for my
emotional tank. Hobbies, sports and travel can become important
avenues for us, too.
• Improve tolerance for low-sensory situations. Our western culture has
become adrenally addicted. Ministry is often high on adrenaline.
But the way we conduct our lives is also often high-octane
adrenaline: loud music, fast driving, full schedules and multiple
tasks at once. Learning to slow down and plan for low-sensory
times will help us reduce stress.
The maxim holds true: If we keep doing what we’ve been doing,
we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting. If we seek change, then
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Shift
we’ll have to take risks. Church planting is all about taking risks,
making mistakes, seeing failure, trusting God, not losing hope, caring
for our own emotional health, staying close to the call of God and
seeing something emerge that’s above and beyond our means and
capacity to create (more on this in chapter 7).
• Resolve conflicts quickly. An ongoing problem with many of us in

ministry is low levels of assertiveness. We hope that the problem
will resolve itself. It rarely does. Major stress lingers where conflicts
or problems aren’t dealt with swiftly. I have written an assertiveness
prayer for my own emotional health and want to share it with you:
Lord Jesus, Maker, Redeemer, Sustainer of my life, you

have asserted yourself -
by becoming a man to die for the sins of man,
by risking the rejection of thousands in order
to capture the heart of the one,
by stooping to ascend the throne of my sinful self,
by entrusting me with the lives of people precious to you.
Lord Jesus, Lord of the Risk,
today I choose, in your power, to step out to do the difficult,
to unobtrusively, freely, lovingly, expeditiously address
the flawed character,
the leashed potential,
the insufficient service,
the wounded heart,
the weak faith.
Grant me today the gift of assertiveness, for in myself
there is no real courage,
there is no great desire,
there is no selfless abandon,
there is no God-sized love,
yet
with your love and power alive in me,
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I receive the determination to risk rejection,

the boldness to speak truth lovingly,
the sensitivity to your promptings,
the joy of seeing your will done on earth
as it is done in heaven:
freely,
fully,
joyfully,
assertively.
Amen.
Questions for discussion

• What loss have you incurred recently and how did you deal with it?
• Talk about your “McDonald’s days.”
• What one helpful piece of advice did you discover that will help you
better cope with your next round of loss?
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C H A P T ER S E V EN
Shift 7: From Go to Stop

“Learn to say no. It will be of more use to
you than to be able to read Latin.”
— Charles Spurgeon
T
he best gift we could give our church-planting ministry is the gift
of a healthy soul. Think about how true this statement is. Every
wholesome result has a healthy source at its core. Bad fruit on the
other hand is produced by a bad root. If we want healthy, thriving and
life- giving church-planting ministries, we need to be leaders who are
also healthy, thriving, life-giving.
My personal conviction is that the ministry of church planting is
the most significant ministry in the kingdom of God. The spiritual
and emotional health of church planting leaders is of paramount
importance.
THE JOYS OF BEING A CHURCH PLANTER

Being a church planter brings with it many pleasantries. Let me
mention four of them:
Independence
Church planters have a strong streak of independence. We get bored
with the status quo. We thrive on the freedom that we have: the
freedom to choose our own church-planting path; the freedom to
structure our day in a way that makes the most sense to us and our
objectives; the freedom to do new things; and the freedom to fail.
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Shift
Because of our independence, we are the lone rangers of ministry. We

go where we want to go without anyone to tell us otherwise.
Take-charge leadership
Church planters have what I like to refer to as “the gift of impatience.”
We do not wait for things to happen; we cause them to happen. Often,
this is evidence of the gift of faith the Lord has given us. We trust Him
for things that are above and beyond what we could accomplish in our
own strength and by our own resources. We are proactive. We love to
take risks. We see the kingdom come to the lost. We are movers and
shakers, influencers.
Respect
Why do church-planting ministries grow? One simple reason is leaders
been able to align themselves with those who respect and rally around
their vision. To see people embrace a godly leader who can help them
think bigger is a beautiful sight.
The thrill of seeing God at work

Church planting is all about breaking into what God is already doing.
It’s catching God in the act of creating beauty and exhibiting His
power. Marriages are healed, the lost are found, the self-centered
become servants of others, the passive become active—because God
is at work in their lives. Church planters have a front-row seat to what
God is doing where light overcomes darkness.
DANGER SIGNS
Those are some of the joys of being a church planter. But with the joys,
dangers lurk as well. What are some of the signs of danger we need to
heed?
An unreflected life
“Beware of the barrenness of busyness.” They were the words my
mentor taped to the passenger side of his car’s dashboard. I was a young
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Chapter Seven | Shift 7: From Go to Stop
follower of Christ, a sixteen-year- old who didn’t fully understand

those words. But now, after many years of living in the trenches, I
understand.
We church planters want to see good things happen. As a result,
we are activists, doing good things to (hopefully) get good results. But
sometimes the way we do the work of God destroys the work that God
wants to do in us.
Shallowness comes from activity devoid of reflection. Of the three
great questions that we pose as church planters (what, how and why?),
it is the question of “why” that matters most deeply. Why do we do
what we do? Our activism hedges against our motives. We need to
allow God to inspect our hearts to uncover our hidden motives. A
good way to do this is to pray the prayer of David: “Search me, God,
and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if
there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting”
(Psalm 139:23-24).
Why does David ask God to search his heart, to uncover the
motives behind his actions? It is because, like us, by himself David
was not able to plummet the depths of his own motives. We do not
truly know ourselves. God knows us. And because God knows our
hearts, only He can reveal to us what we in our activity have failed to
comprehend.
Try the following exercise. Sit down in a quiet place and place
yourself in the presence of God. Have an empty sheet of paper
and a pen in front of you. Then pray the prayer that David prayed.
After that, wait on the Lord for Him to speaking. The wait will feel
uncomfortable. Defy the inner agitation and wait. It may take minutes
before you sense God stir your heart. God will begin to uncover why
you do what you do, the motives that you were unable to locate. Write
down your thoughts. This becomes the launching pad for repentance—
turning away from sinful motives and turning toward God for His
intentions.
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Shift
Depression
A sure sign that things have seriously shifted for the worse in our inner
world is a phenomenon called “anhedonia.” If hedonism is a life lived
for excitement and pleasure, anhedonia is the opposite. Anhedonia is
the inability to experience joy and pleasure when circumstances warrant
them.
As we saw in the last chapter, the ministry of church planting is
loss-prone. If we have not learned to adequately befriend our losses, we
won’t survive ministry. Better people than you and I have medicated
their reactive depression with things like alcohol, pornography, adultery,
fits of rage, extremely fast driving, or loud music. If we aren’t careful,
we’ll go to adrenaline and not to God to ease the pain that ministry
invariably brings.
When sadness begins to take over, we must reflect on that sadness
before the Lord. We need to ask Him to help us discover what we have
lost what has made us sad. Once we have discovered the reason for our
depression, we can assess its value to us. After we have assessed its value,
we need to say goodbye to it. Lingering depression is a danger sign that
needs to be exposed before the Lord.40
Anger
Anger is an expression of frustration over not getting what we expected
or wanted. It is a sign that we have lost control of our circumstances.
Therein lies the problem: We have lost control. God was not in control;
we were. And when something in ministry happens that we can no
longer manage, we get angry. The root of this kind of anger is self-
centeredness. Sometimes anger will be articulated in the more benign
form of anger: self-pity, the sin of having self at the center of our lives,
replacing God as the true and rightful center.
40. We distinguish between exogenous and endogenous depression. Here, I am

exclusively concerned with exogenous depression caused by external factors.
Endogenous depression is often related to a chemical imbalance in a person’s system
and needs to be treated by a medical professional.
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Loneliness
Church leader and author Reggie McNeal writes, “Many church
leaders, for a variety of reasons, live in personally-imposed exile in
the middle of their community of faith. This makes them vulnerable,
especially to pornography (often representing a pseudo-intimacy) and
extra-marital affairs.”41
“Personally-imposed exile” means the leader chooses to live outside
of community. Living without community will produce loneliness. Just
as the first man was not created to be alone, we, too, will not do well
emotionally without healthy relationships. Therefore, ask yourself, who
are the people that I have invited to enter my world, our inner world?
Can you name recent conversations where you’ve shared your thoughts
and emotions with others?
Self-Promotion
A sure sign of spiritual malaise is self-advertising. Think about some of
the recent conversations with people you’ve just met. How often have
you volunteered something in those conversations that implied (motive)
how important or interesting you are? Self- promotion is not a strength,
but rather an indicator of insecurity. We need people to think highly of
us to build up ourselves.
Irritation with people and circumstances

In the New Testament, we find two Greek words for patience:
hupomone and makrothumia. Patience is the virtue that tells us how
healthy we are when events and people disappoint us. Hupomone means
“to remain under” the weight of an uncomfortable situation. And
makrothumia, “long-suffering,” means to suffer intolerable people, one
of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). When we get irritated either by
events or people, it’s a sign that we’re not living in the realm of the Holy
Spirit or under His control.
41. Reggie McNeal, Revolution in Leadership: Training Apostles for Tomorrow’s Church
(Abington Press: Nashville, 1998), 106.
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Shift
People and events that are oppressive to us are gifts of God. They
are the proving ground for either a life lived from God or a life lived
from self. We’ll never learn to be more Christlike if we’re only in calm
surroundings and with friendly people. Christlikeness is formed in the
storm and with those who rub us the wrong way.
PREVENTATIVE MEASURES
How do we maintain a healthy spiritual and emotional life as church-
planting leaders? Like oil in a car’s engine that’s designed to keep
the motor lubricated and prevents it from freezing up, we can take
preventative measures. The following five will make for a resilient and
healthy soul.
Daily time with God – journaling

A regular intake of the Word of God is like a good diet: it will keep
us well-nourished and healthy. Going to the Lord daily and reading
the Bible, as well as allowing the Bible to read us, is key. When we
add journaling to the equation, we have a means of meditating on
important thoughts that can remain with us. Writing slows down our
thinking and aids us in digesting spiritual insight.
Heed the warning here. God made us to read not so much with
our eyes but with our ears. Hearing God speak to us personally and
profoundly is the goal of reading words of Scripture with our eyes. Eyes
to ears is what we need, daily. Only after we have heard can we respond
in prayer by saying yes to God in all that He is and wants from us.
The urgency often associated with church planting will expunge
listening to God. Like forcefully opposing someone trying to break
into our living space, we will learn to forcefully oppose the urgency of
ministry tasks foisted upon us.
Spiritual disciplines
We all need sources of spiritual power that will take us beyond
what our quiet times can give us. Such are the spiritual disciplines.
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Spiritual practices infuse two areas, engagement (doing things) and

disengagement (stop doing things) and are of great significance. Some
examples of disengagement are solitude, silence, fasting, frugality and
lectio divina. The benefit of these practices of disengagement lies in their
power of indirection. As we practice them, we gain new strength and
power to subdue temptation and sin.
Physical exercise
All that God does through us, He does through our bodies. As His
temple, the body needs to be maintained. Regular physical exercise is a
way to remain healthy and spiritually alert.
Often, the answers we are seeking to vexing problems will be given
to us as we exert ourselves physically.
Good friendships and accountability

The twenty-three “one another” passages in the Pauline epistles suggest
that we need to be known and to know others on our road to maturity
in Christ. Spiritual growth is related not only to Christ but to other
believers. Relational nearness, transparency and accountability are the
three elements, which when they come together relationally, serve to
foster growth in our love for God and people.
Marital intimacy
For those of us who are married, we need to intentionally pursue the
one we have found. Marriage is exclusive, intimate and covenantal in
form and essence. No other relationship can claim such quality. No
wonder Paul uses the bride and bridegroom as the ideal picture of the
Church and her Lord (Eph. 5:32). Marriage is fearful and wonderful;
the smelting furnace for burning away the dross of selfishness in an
individual’s life. Forgiving and lovingly accepting one another mirror
the manner in which Christ deals with us in our waywardness. A
healthy marriage—a good marriage seeking to become better—is a
bulwark against destructive forces from without and a resting place for
quiet and refreshment within.
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Shift
Repentance
Martin Luther remarked, “repentance is a joyous business.” Like dirt
that gets lodged in an eye and is then cleansed, ongoing repentance
is God’s gift of cleansing the heart. As such, we strive to keep short
accounts with God. To love God above all things is to hate sin above all
things, first and especially, in our own lives.
SPIRITUAL HEALTH—WHAT IS IT?

If the best gift we can give ourselves and others is the gift of a healthy
soul, what is spiritual health? Rather than define it, let me exhibit it in
three qualities.
Joy
When David sinned against God, his fellow man, and himself by
committing adultery with Bathsheba, this was his prayer: “Do not cast
me away from your presence” (Psalm 51:11). Joy moves out when we
move away from God. Joy is what we experience when God’s face of
loving kindness is turned in our direction. In facing us, He gives us
his undivided, loving, and caring attention. In His nearness, we enter
joy. Sin destroys joy, which is why David pleads, “Restore to me the
joy of your salvation” (Psalm 51:12). “You will fill me with joy in your
presence” (Psalm 16:11). Joy is not circumstantial; that is happiness
(something needs to happen for us to be happy). Joy is relational. As
we are rightly related to our Father in Heaven, joy is ours to enjoy. A
healthy leader is a joyful leader.
Expectancy
In the last verse of Psalm 23 we read, “Surely goodness and love will
follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6). The Hebrew is even
stronger: goodness and love will pursue me all the days of my life. Like
a hunter going after his prey, we can expect God to be hot on our heels
with His goodness and love. A healthy leader expects goodness and
love.
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The flip side of expecting goodness is dreading evil. When the heart
harbors a foreboding—an anxiety of some sort of badness waiting for
us—then we know that the heart is out of sync. Heart murmurs of
this kind are principally destructive. They destroy confidence in the
goodness of God and His grace.
Longing for more of God

When I asked my seven-year-old niece what she liked most about Oma’s
cottage on the lake, her answer surprised me: “Oma!” What do we get
when we love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength? We get
God! A healthy leader longs for more of God.
Those of us in church-planting ministry often live with a long to-
do-list. The myriad of things we need and want to accomplish. What
we need, however, is to start a to-stop-doing list of the things that
we will intentionally not pursue in order to pursue greater depth and
intimacy in our lives.
No church-planting venture will be more spiritually vibrant than
the life of its leaders. Followers will take their cues from those leading
them. Ultimately, great church-planting ministries are not about
methods, communication, strategy or even fruit. Great church- planting
ministries are born from those whose inner life and relationships are
full of integrity.

• Do you agree or disagree with this statement: “The best gift you can
give to your church-planting ministry is the gift of a healthy soul.”
Why?
• In your experience, which of the six danger signs we discussed are
most prevalent in your life?
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• If you could focus on preventative measures we identified, which

measure would you focus on?
• What do you need to stop doing?
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C H A P T ER EI G H T
Shift 8: From Direct to

Indirect Influence
“The fruit of my work grows up on other people’s trees.”
— Bob Buford
I
sat there absolutely dumbfounded. As a young seminary student,
I was eager to learn from the best professors the evangelical world
had to offer. Taking courses on preaching under the legendary Dr.
Lloyd Perry was like sitting at the feet of Jesus. Dr. Perry, diminutive in
stature and lamed by polio during his childhood, was erudite, godly, a
riveting preacher, and someone who over the span of forty years trained
some of the best preachers in the world.
My hand would go numb after an hour of furiously taking copious
notes. I will never forget the day Dr. Perry stunned me. With tears in
his eyes he said, “I would rather be a king-maker than a king.”
He, not just the king of preachers, but the emperor, was telling us
that building into the lives of other people was more important than
personal success. Immediately, my mind went to Jesus words about
Himself in the Gospel of Mark: “For even the Son of Man did not
come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for
many” (Mark 10:45).
Servant leadership is principally others-centered. What we as
church-planting leaders do pales in the light of what others will
accomplish because we have supported them.
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Shift
Leadership is influence, which can be either direct or indirect. It is

the power of indirect influence that is crucial to the success of a church-
planting movement.
The fruit of an apple tree is not an apple. It is another apple tree.
The fruit of church planting should go beyond the church that is being
planted. It is the difference between one fruit tree and an orchard of
fruit trees. If we don’t simply want to grow one tree but produce an
orchard of trees, this will only happen through indirect influence.
THE PARADOX OF DIRECT INFLUENCE

Jesus was both direct and indirect in His leadership. The calling of the
twelve disciples was direct influence, “that they might be with him . . .”
(Mark 3:14). For three years, Jesus spent most of His waking hours with
twelve men. Although He often spoke to the multitudes, Jesus knew
that lasting change was with His inner circle. His disciple making was
often situational; after something happened, He would teach them—
just in time. Jesus was the master, and they were His apprentices. They
learned from Jesus by watching Him and listening to Him as they went
out to apply what they learned.
Imagine that. The creator of the universe, living on a planet which
at that time was populated by 250 million people, contained Himself
to a mere twelve men! Like the rabbis of his day, Jesus influenced his
students one on one. The goal was that they would “go into all the
world and preach the good news to all creation” (Mark 16:15). For the
gospel to travel globally, Jesus invested Himself locally.
Direct influence, however, has its limitations. It is limited by the
leader’s time, teaching, physical and emotional strength. It is limited
by the number of people in the inner circle itself. Only so many people
can directly report to any one person. The limitation of fallout is an
issue. One of Jesus’ hand-picked leaders did not make it. Judas turned
away from Jesus and turned Him over to His enemies. If it happened to
Jesus, it will certainly happen to us: we will not retain everybody that
we influence.
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Chapter Eight | Shift 8: From Direct to Indirect Influence
In teaching on leadership, I delineate between three different

leadership types: L1, L2 and (you guessed it) L3 leaders. L1 leaders lead
other leaders. They are typically those leaders who head up a ministry
area like small groups, evangelism or children’s church. L2 leaders lead
participants. The small group leader is a typical L2 leader who has
a shepherding role to ten to twenty people in their small group. But
by far, the biggest leadership group we have in our church-planting
ministry is the L3 leader. This is the potential leader, one who at present
is passive. These leaders sit in the second or third rows of our churches
and consume. The only way for them to become active is for us to
challenge them to get in the game of serving others.
How much of our leadership is direct and how much of it is
indirect? Consider an exercise to help you get perspective. Take out a
clean sheet of paper and put your name in the middle of it. Circle your
name. You are the influencer, the leader. Then, like spokes on a wheel,
write down the names of those leaders you influence directly, face-to-
face.
Fig. 4 Direct influence
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Shift
After you have named key leaders who report directly to you, draw
a circle around them. In Figure 4, for example, there are six leaders.
Now, draw five circles each emanating from the existing leaders you
put outside the circle. The total of these unknown leaders comes to
thirty. Ask your direct leaders to name the five leaders they are directly
influencing, most of whom will be unknown to you. What you have
before you in Figure 5 is a depiction of the power of indirect influence.
Fig. 5 Indirect influence
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INDIRECT INFLUENCE

Great church-planting leaders strive for indirection. It is the power to
move people through mediation.
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Dave and Jon Ferguson write about the power of indirect

influence that leads to Level 5 churches and movements, saying that,
“reproducing happens at the edge and at the center.”42 At the start of
their New Thing church-planting network, they identified two church-
planting leaders who were at the center of their thriving ministries.
They were asked to go to the edge and recruit leaders that would be
crucial to the unfolding of movement. We need to learn to do similar
with indirect leadership.
We can find a good illustration of the power of indirection in the
life of Moses. At the beginning of Israel’s newfound freedom from
Egyptian slavery, Moses settled all the disputes among the populace
himself. In Exodus 18:13-17, we see the challenge that Moses faced as
their leader:
“The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people,
and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his
father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said,
‘What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as
judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till
evening?’
“Moses answered him, ‘Because the people come to me to seek
God’s will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and
I decide between the parties and inform them of God’s decrees and
instructions.’
“Moses’ father-in-law replied, ‘What you are doing is not good.’”
The way Moses dealt with the challenge of mediating disputes was
not good. Is was a burden on both those seeking to resolve their issues
and on Moses who was exhausted in helping them. Moses’ problem was
that he was dealing directly with people and their grievances, and it was
exhausting.
42. Dave Ferguson and Jon Ferguson, Exponential (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
2020), 29.
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Moses’ father-in-law saw the key solution to Moses’ challenge.

Jethro introduced his son-in- law to the principle of indirection. We
read further in Exodus 18:
“Moses listened to his father-in-law and did everything he said.
He chose capable men from all Israel and made them leaders of the
people, officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. They
served as judges for the people at all times. The difficult cases they
brought to Moses, but the simple ones they decided themselves”
(Exodus 18:24-26).
The result of Moses being able to lead indirectionally through
others was the people going home satisfied and an immense burden
being lifted from Moses’ shoulders.
Most ministries today are not being led; they are being managed.
The difference is this: “Managers are people who do things right and
leaders are people who do the right thing.”43 Doing the right thing as a
leader is being effective, not just efficient. It is working through others
we are empowered to lead. Church planting expands when we place it
into the hands of capable leaders.
SIGNS OF MINISTRY INEFFECTIVENESS

Moses was in a tight spot. He was rapidly moving toward energy
depletion and ministry burnout. What are the red blinking lights on
the leader’s dashboard that indicate trouble? Let’s check out a few.
Too many people reporting to the main leader

Imagine people lining up from morning till evening waiting in line to
have Moses deal with their grievances. We will experience leadership
fatigue when too many people have direct access to us.
Here’s an exercise to help us become a more effective indirect leader.
Make a list of all of the people that report directly to us as a church-
planting leader. Should you discover more than ten people on that list,
43. Warren G. Bennis, Burt Nanus. Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge (New York:
HarperBusiness, 1997, 2nd ed.), 20.
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you are on ministry overload. Like Moses, we suffer under the burden
of being pulled in many directions by too many people. As a result, we
will lack both energy and focus.
Taking ourselves too seriously

When we feel we need to be part of all the leadership decisions being
made, then we are probably harboring a false idealism, which is actually
a form of pride. Doing everything in ministry is a sign of weakness.
Seeing to it that the right things are done is a sign of ministry
effectiveness.
Inadequate leaders that report to us

Moses’ father-in-law gave him great advice when he said that Moses
should search for capable leaders (18:25). What are the characteristics
of capable leaders? Jethro gives Moses a grid to evaluate future leaders:
“men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain” (18:21).
We, too, need criteria for leadership selection.
Three base character qualities exist to help us recruit the right
leaders. We have already referred to them as FAT: faithful, available,
teachable. When we discover these three qualities in a person’s life, they
become an invitation for us to invest in them and develop them into
leaders we trust to make good decisions. Without adequate leaders in
our ministries, what often happens is that we take things into our own
hands. By taking the reins into our own hands too often, we tend to
believe that no one can make good decisions like we can.
Leadership is about effectiveness. Whereas faithfulness is assumed,
it is no longer the overriding principle in determining leadership
quality. Author and church leader, Leith Anderson, explains:
“Faithfulness means loyalty, showing up, working hard, not

complaining, and tolerating less- than-the-best pay and work
conditions . . . The rules have changed. Faithfulness used to be
sufficient. Now effectiveness is expected. This is not to say that an
earlier generation rewarded incompetence, nor that today´s leaders
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Shift
need not be faithful. It is to say that the pendulum has swung

toward an expectation that leaders will not only show up but also
know what to do and when they get there and get it done before
they leave. . . . The new rules ask, ‘What have you done lately that
has made a difference for good?’”44
Remember Jesus’ Parable of the Talents? To the two servants who

increased their resources, the master said the same thing: “Well done,
good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I
will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s
happiness!” (Matt. 25:21–23). Notice several things about Jesus’
commendation of the two men. First is His assessment of their service.
He says, “Well done.” What He doesn’t say is “well meant” or “well-
intentioned.” No, He applauds their performance. They had measurable
growth to show for their effort. Second, faithfulness and goodness are
fused together and are the basis for the servants’ behavior—not their
outcome. Goodness and faithfulness are like paying the rent. When
the shop keeper has paid his rent, he needs to get down to business to
generate income that goes beyond the rent to sustain himself. Third,
effectiveness means proven-ness, which leads to more responsibility.
Whereas the servants were effective in managing “a few things,” the
master puts them in charge of “many things.”
The third servant gave back in full, without increasing the master’s
initial capital of one talent. That servant failure to produce good results
was based on a lack of character: “You wicked and lazy servant!”
(Matt. 25:26).
New leaders don’t just happen. They must be purposefully and
skillfully identified and trained. In many churches, raising up new
leaders is not done purposefully. Yet the health and growth of the
organism are dependent upon this kind of multiplication. Doing
ministry well is not enough. Every effective minister should be training
44. Leith Anderson, Leadership That Works (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers
1999), 119.
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others to do what they do well. The key to quantitative growth

(growing tall) is enlarging the leadership base (growing wide). The
greater the numbers of leaders we have, the more care we can provide
for those who enter our ministries.
Proven-ness, as evidenced in the Parable of the Talents, is the
measuring stick of leadership development. We don’t invest in potential,
but in proven capacity.
Emotional depletion
When we pay attention to our emotions, they will lead us to cognition.
Emotions are the tugboats of our lives; they surface the issues we should
be thinking about into the harbor of productive living. Emotions
surface the issues we need to address. When leaders suffer from
joylessness, a lack of intrinsic motivation, sadness, or lack of energy—
they are all signs the leader is leading poorly and needs to find a better
way. Very often, emotional depletion will result from either a lack of
good results or from a lack of having someone lovingly listen to us.
The difference between direct and indirect influence is the
difference between a lightning bug and lightning. Both illumine, but
with unequal intensity.
I have devised what I refer to as the Ten Commandments of the
power of indirect influence.
1. Thou shalt not do everything yourself (create a “to-stop-doing list”).

2. Thou shalt invest in people of godly character and good people
skills who get things done.
3. Thou shalt be results-oriented, not content with intentions.
4. Thou shalt make time for leaders who lead leaders (L1 leaders).
5. Thou shalt find a role model of indirect leadership and learn from
them.
6. Thou shalt regularly assess the power of indirection in your
leadership: Is it achieving good results?
7. Thou shalt give energy to introducing reproducible systems that are
better than the people using them.
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Shift
8. Thou shalt rejoice in the effectiveness of leaders who are effective in

their leadership.
9. Thou shalt have a Jethro who speaks into your life as a movement
leader.
10. Thou shalt remain humble, knowing that all success is ultimately a
gift from God.
HISTORY AND THE POWER OF INDIRECT INFLUENCE

Historically, we find movements of great potency generated by the
power of indirect influence. Martin Luther may have been the father
of the Protestant Reformation, but it was Johannes Gutenberg who
invented moveable type and thus the first printing press in 1439, which
gave the Reformation its legs. Gutenberg printed Luther’s translation of
the Bible into high German, which became the impetus for educated
people to read God’s Word for themselves. We can think of the printing
press as God’s indirect gift that would fan the flames that produced the
Protestant Reformation in Germany.
We have already noted the power of Wesley’s class meetings, a
reproducible system that changed English society. Before the Wesleyan
Revival, British towns and villages were so immersed in crime that even
the police dared not enter some of them. Alcoholism was so rampant
that even children at the age of five or six were dipsomaniacs. All that
changed when the power of the class meetings began to transform
people’s lives. So pervasive was the shift that many of England’s towns
and villages no longer had need of a police presence, because there was
no crime.
Both newspapers and multi-media fostered coverage of Billy
Graham’s powerful ministry of evangelism. His crusade in Seoul, South
Korea, from May 30 to June 3, 1973, drew a combined attendance of
3.2 million people. Seventy-five thousand attendees filled out cards
indicating they had given their lives to Christ as their Savior and Lord.
Many millions more in other countries around the world watched the
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crusade on their televisions. Mass media became a powerful indirect

influence in taking the gospel to the hearts and minds of millions.
Remember the power of small? God is not limited by numbers.
To accomplish great things, He seeks out that one leader whose heart
is open to Him. We will not be a Martin Luther, a John Wesley or a
Billy Graham. This is good news. God wants to use us uniquely. The
following matrix (fig. 5) can be a starting point for us to see more
leverage through our influence. Use the indirect influence matrix once
a week. Take ten minutes to answer the questions in each of the four
quadrants. Then leave the rest in the hands of God.
I II
Prayer: for God to bless Vision: What is a God-sized
indirectly. future in terms of church
• Adoration: Focus on the first planting?
three petitions of the Lord’s • Draw it
Prayer • Describe it in writing
• Confession: Psalm 139:23-24 • Put it on a map
• Thanksgiving
• Supplication: For His glory
and honor!
III IV
Leveraging: Moving from Outcome: What must happen?
leaders I know to those I don’t / What has happened?
• My list of leaders who report • Celebrate progress
to me directly • Dream some more
• A list of their networks and • What has not happened yet?
contacts • Who do I need to engage to
• What bridges can I build? help me see better results of
(conversations, social media, indirect influence?
conferences, meetings, • Do one thing that will lead to
Skype calls) greater indirect influence.
Indirect Influence Matrix
Fig. 6 The Matrix of Indirect Influence
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Shift
Imagine what would have happened to Israel if Moses hadn’t

learned the valuable lesson of indirect leadership! Moses would have
gone down in history as a leader who suffered from burnout, failing
miserably. It would have led to the disintegration of the nation of Israel.
Imagine what our church-planting ministries would look like if we
began to look beyond those whom we influence immediately and focus
on indirect leadership. It would be the difference between addition
and multiplication—leading to many hundreds and thousands of new
followers of Jesus. It would lead to fifth-generation church planting. It
would be the movement we have dreamt of.

• How much of your leadership is direct influence? Indirect
influence? Come up with a percentage estimation.
• What examples of indirect influence can you think of?
• In what ways does indirect influence fuel movement?
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C H A P T ER N I N E
Shift 9: From Town to Region

“In little more than ten years, St. Paul established the church in
four provinces of the Empire: Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and
Asia. Before AD 47, there were no churches in these provinces;
in AD 57, St Paul could speak as if his work there was done . . .”
— Roland Allen45
R
oughly half of the references of newly planted churches in the New
Testament point to the individual cities in which the churches
were planted, such as Antioch, Corinth, Rome, Ephesus, etc. The
other half speak of regions that were covered by church plants, such as
Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia.
When Jesus and His disciples went out preaching the Good News
of the Kingdom of God, they were behaving regionally: “Jesus went
throughout all of the towns and villages” in Galilee (Matt. 9:35). At
that time, the Jewish historian Josephus, who held a military command
over Galilee, estimated a population of three million people in this
northern region of Israel.46 Jesus ministered in towns, cities and villages
with the goal of reaching the entire region of Galilee.
45. Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
Publishing, 1993, reprint of American edition 1962), 3.
46. In Vita, par 45, Josephus writes of 240 towns and villages in Galilee. In Bellum
III, iii. 2, he writes that the smallest of these villages had more than 15,000 residents.
We can thus calculate that according to Josephus, the region of Galilee had a
population of more than three million people.
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Shift
Our local church-planting ministries today often come at the cost

of the region around those localities. The vision we have for our town or
city can keep us from seeing our region.
Let me share a couple of beautiful illustrations of churches that
decided to focus on their region. In the 1970s, the elders of Elmbrook
Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, under the leadership of Senior Pastor
Stuart Briscoe, asked themselves how their one local church could
reach the greater Milwaukee area with the gospel. At that time, the
Milwaukee area had a population of one million people. The answer
the elders found was in church planting. In the ensuing twenty years,
Elmbrook Church was directly and indirectly involved in planting
eighteen churches in the greater Milwaukee area. Like Jesus and Paul,
Elmbrook’s leadership went from local to regional in their gospel
penetration and they did it by starting new churches.
In 1990 in Bonn, Germany, one Evangelical Free church existed.
In the next five years between 1990 to 1995, this church doubled its
membership, worship attendance, and more than doubled the number
of their small groups. This amazing growth came about through the
planting of new churches in the region around Bonn. Every year for
five years straight, the Evangelical Free Church of Bonn planted a
new church. Today, should one combine the attendance of all these
churches, they would be three times the attendance of the mother
church’s 600 people in Sunday worship.
If we never move from where we are, we will never move to where
God wants us to go. This is a basic tenet of movement. Should we want
to start more than one church but have a broader and wider impact,
moving away from focusing solely on our church planting locale will be
a big part of that.
When we speak of moving, we don’t mean physically moving from
one town or city to another, but that our emphasis in terms of praying,
dreaming, allocating time, resources, and manpower will be committed
to moving out, away from our present position.
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Chapter Nine | Shift 9: From Town to Region
A case in point is the life of William Carey. Born in England in

1761, Carey actually died in India in 1834. At the age of 22 while
apprenticing as a shoemaker, Carey came to faith in Jesus Christ
and was baptized. Early in his Christian walk, he was captured by a
prevailing question: Was the commission that Jesus gave to His apostles
to go and make disciples of all nations just limited to them or applicable
to contemporary Christianity? Carey became convinced that the Great
Commission was valid for Christians of all ages.
He was called to pastor a small Baptist church but needed to work
for a living because the church couldn’t support him. In his workshop,
he put together a large map of India and hung it on the wall in his shop
where he could look at it continually.
Carey, though unschooled and raised in poverty, managed to
teach himself Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Dutch and French. He was
instrumental in starting the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and
was the first missionary sent out. He and his family arrived in Calcutta
on November 10, 1793.
Carey gave forty-one years of service to India and lived to see
much fruit of his labor. In addition to the first complete translation of
the Bible into the Bengali by his hand, and into the Chinese by Dr.
Marshman, the two men printed Scripture portions in forty languages
and dialects. They established a college to train native ministers and
evangelize educated Hindus, a medical mission and a leper hospital, as
well as at least thirty large mission stations.
Notice how God expanded William Carey’s territory and worked
through him to start a movement of the gospel and plant numerous
churches in India. All because this Englishman was willing to move.
CENTERING ON REGION
In a very real sense, the Apostle Paul’s success was due to the young
leaders he was able to train and release into the church-planting
ministry. One of his major legacies was the many church leaders he left
behind: Silas, Timothy, Barnabas, Aquila and Priscilla, John Mark,
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Shift
Luke, Epaphras, Onesimus, Apollos, Tychichus, among others. Paul

teaches us that the key to successful church planting lies in the numbers
of effective leaders we raise up to go out and plant the gospel.
I love thinking about the picture that Acts 16:5 paints: “So the
churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.”
The grammar of the text doesn’t allow for the numbers of believers
growing daily in numbers. It was the churches that grew. The scripture
tells us that each day, new churches were spawned, new seedbeds of
viral growth brought on by the Holy Spirit.
Such astonishing movement of growth was predicated upon an
emphasis on regions in ancient Europe. If we want to see a church-
planting multiplication movement take hold in our country today, I’m
convinced we will need to emphasize regions. How does that happen?
What region are you claiming for Christ?
We need to ask ourselves: What region is God calling me to claim
for Christ and for a church- planting movement? To answer that
question, it will take three steps: prayer, vision and action.
Prayer
Vision begins with prayer. Ask God for a burden for a specific region in
your country. Linger over that region in prayer. Go to Matthew 9:35-38
and substitute the name of your region in the phrase “Jesus went
through x . . .” In prayer, can you see Jesus moving through the region
He has placed on your heart?
Vision
As you continue in prayer, God will start to surface vision in your
heart. You’ll see how great the harvest is and what needs to be done to
reach it.
To help you pursue the vision, post a map of the region. Just
as William Carey had a map of India hanging from the wall of his
workshop, you need a map of the region that God is calling you to.
Then highlight all the cities with a population of 5,000 or more. How
many of these cities are within your region? How many have healthy
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churches? How many of these churches are planting new churches?

Who are the key Christian leaders in these regions?
Action
Jesus didn’t go through all of the towns and villages of Galilee by
Himself; He took his disciples with Him. In another incident, we
read about Jesus sending out seventy-two workers to go ahead of Him
(Luke 10). We need to be going about this regional multiplication the
Jesus way. How can we do this?
Instead of having prayer meetings in church buildings in cities
already stocked with churches, why not organize prayer meetings in
cities that need new churches? As Jesus did, we can send out our people
in groups of two or three to walk throughout a city and to pray for its
residents.
One of the major motivating factors in reaching the lost is
compassion. Jesus had compassion on those who were harassed
and helpless. Much like your appetite which is stirred up by eating,
compassion is stirred up by interacting with lost people.
Give prayer duos or trios an assignment. As they are out praying for
the salvation of the lost and the starting of new churches among them,
give them an assignment to talk to non-Christians: “If you could ask
God one question, what would that question be?” As non-Christians
begin answering this question, the hearts of Christians (the people in
your church) will well up with compassion for them. Sometimes deeper
conversations will ensue.
Overcoming insularity
The European context in which I have spent all my adult ministry life
suffers from a Christianity that is bipolar. We have large cathedrals,
some of the biggest in the world, beautiful to visit, but as a tourist and
not on a Sunday for worship. These are high visibility structures with
low attendance presence because they represent a Christianity deemed
irrelevant.
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Shift
On the other side of the bipolar spectrum is our small churches,

often church plants, that have low visibility but vibrant faith. They may
be spiritually alive and culturally relevant— but they’re hidden and
unknown by the vast majority of those living around them. Therein lies
the conundrum.
The challenge of Christianity in Europe is to present the gospel
and community life with Christ that is relevant in a culture that
has relegated Christianity to the past, implying total irrelevance.
Evangelical churches in Europe are mostly obscure, out of the public
eye, unknown and unseen by most. The way churches have been
planted only exacerbates the bipolarity.
Rising to the challenge: Visibility

Before persecution set in, Christians were highly visible in society.
At the time of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit made the risen Christ
known in tongues of fire—with the gospel boldly proclaimed by
Peter—throngs of people were aware of what was happening. Luke
records how three thousand people gave their lives to follow Jesus and
were baptized. Other eye-witness accounts in the book of Acts were also
highly visible:
Acts 4:4. After Peter healed a lame man and preached the gospel we
read, “But many of those who had heard the message believed; and the
number of the men came to be about five thousand.”
Acts 4:16. Thoroughly shaken and confused, the Sanhedrin, the
leaders of the Jewish nation, asked, “What shall we do with these men?
For the fact that a noteworthy miracle has taken place through them
is apparent to all who live in Jerusalem (emphasis mine), and we cannot
deny it.”
Acts 5:14-16. “And all the more believers in the Lord, multitudes
of men and women, were constantly added to their number (emphasis
mine), to such an extent that they even carried the sick out into the
streets and laid them on cots and pallets, so that when Peter came by at
least his shadow might fall on any one of them. Also the people from
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the cities in the vicinity of Jerusalem (here we have region) were coming
together, bringing people who were sick or afflicted with unclean spirits,
and they were all being healed” (highly relevant).
Acts 5:28. “You have filled Jerusalem (emphasis mine) with your
teaching.”
From these passages we learn that the person of Jesus and the Good
News of the gospel were highly visible and attracted much attention
from those in and around Jerusalem.
Five Theses
Martin Luther had 95 theses. I have five pertaining to the challenge of
relevancy and visibility:
1. We are not public enough in our church plants to generate public

awareness.
2. When a church confines itself to a building, it relegates itself to
hiddenness.
3. Without visibility, there can be no credibility.
4. Playing it safe, keeping to the status quo, is unworthy of the gospel.
5. Acts of public gospel exposure are acts of faith.
AVENUES OF BOLD PRESENCE

How can we take the church to the people before the people come to
the church in the region where we minister? The following are a couple
out-of-the box ways to check out and adapt to your context to be boldly
relevant.
Missional behavior
If God is on mission, we should be too. Look at Jesus’ words: “As the
Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). Each person on
our team weekly invites a non-Christian friend to dinner or coffee.
The Christ follower does two things. First, they ask their friend, “How
are you doing?” Regardless of the answer (which could be“fine,” “not
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Shift
well” or even “I don’t know how I’m doing,” etc.), the Christian friend
will come back with an invitation: “What’s going on?” Listening is
the language of love that people crave. When we honestly and intently
listen to someone, we love them—and they sense our love for them. If
the conversation turns vulnerable, we can offer to pray for them on the
spot.
If everyone on our team were to practice such missional behavior
every week, we would engage in multiple significant conversations that
could lead to significant spiritual ministry.
Culturally relevant change

Try this exercise. Divide up your team in groups of two and send them
out into your town or city with the following assignment: For the next
two hours, write down everything you notice that is ugly. Then each team
comes together again to share their observations on ugliness in their
city.
Someone reads Isaiah 65:17-25, which speaks about the radical
change that will take place in society when Messiah returns to recreate
His new earth (such as transformation on ecological, social, relational,
economical levels). When Jesus returns to our world for a second
time, what will be transformed from ugliness to beauty in our church-
planting context?
The team then comes up with possibilities of how they can
transform some area of ugliness with their resources. As team members
begin to work together to renew it, people will begin to take notice and
ask questions: What are you doing, why, who are you? Our answer is
key to conveying relevance: “We are a group of people who are being
transformed. Our ugliness is being turned into beauty. We want to do
the same for our city. Do you want to help us?”
Thumb drive audacity

This last exercise, like the previous two, is meant to make what is
beautiful visible and thus relevant. We asked a gifted videographer to
come into our church plant and make ten to twelve short video clips
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of slices of life in our fellowship—the worship, children’s ministry,

preaching, interviews, etc. On a map, someone drew a circle a mile in
diameter around the church’s meeting place. We copy the videos on
thumb drives and identify how many households (apartments, houses)
are within that radius. Then we put the thumb drives and an appealing
invitation to worship with us in every mailbox within a one-mile radius
of our building. In this way, we bring our church to people before they
enter the church. In the security of their homes, people will look at
the thumb drive and if they find something appealing, they have the
information they need to visit us.
We need new ways thinking that will take us out of the box of
insular Christian living. Practical avenues that compel us to move into
our society result in visibility, credibility and relevancy; essentially,
when non-Christians glimpse a church they’re asking themselves, Do I
see myself there?
Remember William Carey who planted the gospel in India? God
is not restrained by a lack of training or experience. God could use
William Carey to do great things in India and elsewhere because Carey
believed in the veracity of God’s promises. As he spanned his life, this is
what Carey wrote (and it speaks to us today): “Expect great things from
God. Attempt great things for God.” I would add, “Experience great
things with God—both locally and regionally.”

• How big is your region in size and population?
• What would it mean in your life and your church to pray for a
God-sized vision of reaching that region?
• What are you doing today to ensure that new churches will be
started throughout your region tomorrow?
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C H A P T ER T EN
Shift 10: From Addition

to Multiplication
“If prayer is a protest against the status quo, then we
should all be crying out, ‘Why not here, O Lord?’”
— David Garrison47
I
n 2001, the business world awakened to a new benchmark when Jim
Collins published his provocative findings in his best-selling book,
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others
Don’t. Supported by a large research team, Collins identified companies
that made the jump from good results to great results and sustained
those results for fifteen years or more.
What he discovered was that good companies have been lulled
into doing business as usual, while great companies have excelled in
the areas of personnel appropriation, reality checks, “transcending the
curse of competence, cultural discipline and technology acceleration.”48
Collins’ findings riveted the attention of many and made the book into
a long-standing best seller.
What surprised Collins was not the enthusiastic reception his work
received from the business community, but also from members of the
non-profit sector. One third of his readers resided in social occupations,
47. David Garrison, Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World
(Midlothian, VA: WIGTake Resources,2004), 272.
48. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
(New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 13.
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Shift
and they were most eager to apply his principles to their setting. Collins
obliged the hunger of the non-profit community for greater clarity by
writing a supplemental monograph on how good to great principles
could be carried over to the social sectors.49
The imagery of “good to great” applies not only to businesses and
to the social sector, but also to church planting. Stellar church-planting
churches bear down on specific disciplines that infuse their ministries
with remarkable movement-based energy, vision and effectiveness.
In this chapter, I want to explore the areas beyond successful church
planting in a Western culture and explain how it can rise to become
great in nature. This is for church planters and church-planting
churches, those who have done it and seek to do it better.
In my thirty years of church-planting experience in Germany, I
have come to refer to seven disciplines of good to great church planting
as “G7.”50 By that, I mean they seem to have seven great qualities
that set them apart from merely good church-planting ministries.
These seven great qualities of church planting include: timed release,
generational distance, discipleship depth, intentional mindset, external
focus, reproducible models and multiplication coordinator.
I came up with these seven elements after studying church planting
in both the established Protestant Church and the various larger Free
Churches in Germany.
The chart below illustrates the major differences between good and
great church planting.
49. Jim Collins, Good to Great and the Social Sectors (Mongraph by the author), 2005.
50. This chapter is based upon “Good to Great Church Planting: The Road Less
Traveled,” Dietrich Schindler, Evangelical Missions Quarterly, July 2008, Vol 44,
No. 3.,330-337.
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Chapter Ten | Shift 10: From Addition to Multiplication
‘Good to Great’ Church Planting

Good church planting Great church planting
• Long recovery time • Timed release
• Direct involvement • Generational distance
• Emphasis on leadership • Discipleship depth
• Haphazard and situational • Intentional mindset
• Centripetal force • External focus
• Emphasis on giftedness • Reproducible models
• Near-sightedness • Multiplication coordinator
Now let’s look at of these seven “good to great” dynamics.
Timed Release
For colds, headaches, the flu and insomnia, pharmaceutical companies
gave us the ubiquitous tiny time capsules with controlled-release
systems engineered to provide ongoing medical treatment. One capsule
begins to work when another has exhausted its capacity. Great church
planting incorporates the concept of timed release. Timed release is the
discipline of setting the date of the next church plant launch shortly
after the current church has been launched.
My wife Jan and I, along with two other adults, planted a German
Evangelical Free church in Kaiserslautern in March 1999. Four years
later, in the fall of 2003 with sixty members and one hundred adults in
worship services, we launched our first daughter church in the nearby
city of Ramstein. The mother church was not big, but it was healthy.
Too often I have observed that after having planted a daughter
church, a mother church goes into an unusually long recovery period.
In our European context, it might take a decade or more before a
church summons enough resolve and resources to begin another
daughter church. Such is the fate of church starts that fail to begin with
the end in mind: the genesis of a new church.
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Shift
Church-planting churches won’t effectively impact their society

with the power of the gospel in increments of ten or twenty years. The
discipline of timed release, on the other hand, puts before us the goal of
launching new churches in shorter periods of time—a maximum of five
years. Every five years, high-impact churches will see to it that a new
church is birthed from their midst. To use another analogy, every five
years these churches set their clocks to run down to the date of their
next launch and do all in their power, trusting God, to see a new life
begun.
Generational distance
Whereas timed release is the discipline of chain reaction church
planting, generational distance is where multiplication begins. My
wife’s grandparents were married for more than seventy-five years when
they died. Grandpa was 105 and Grandma 97 years old, and they left
behind over 150 progeny. In their lifetime, they saw five generations!
Imagine holding a fifth-generation baby in your arms, knowing you
and your spouse were the first cause! How effective a mother church
is in forwarding itself via new church starts reflects what I mean when
by generational distance. Thus, great churches focus not so much on
the congregations they have spawned but on the number of generations
of churches they have spawned. Great church planting counts the
generations, not just the number of children it has fostered.
This is the stuff of multiplication. For multiplication to occur, the
first cause of new life must free itself from direct involvement. Great
grandparents do not give birth directly but indirectly to their great
grandchildren. Direct involvement is the vocabulary of addition; one
church starting another church via direct influence. Multiplication’s
quality, however, lies in its indirection: one church setting its offspring
free to procreate churches. Generational distance has rarely occurred in
our European setting, but it’s a key ingredient for multiplication.
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Discipleship depth
It sounds so easy! Why is it that the vast majority of churches never
experience Level 5 church multiplication? The answer lies in the third
dynamic: discipleship depth. This takes seriously Jesus’ charge for
His followers to form other lifelong learners of Jesus. Dallas Willard
paraphrased our clarion call beautifully: “I have been given say over
everything on heaven and earth. So, go make apprentices to me among
people of every kind. Submerge them in the reality of the Trinitarian God.
And lead them into doing everything I have told you to do. Now look! I am
with you every minute, until the job is completely done!” (Dallas Willard,
paraphrase of Matthew 28:18-20).
The quality of depth in good to great church-planting churches
is directly linked to how well they make disciples who, in turn, make
disciples. The constant need for new leadership is the challenge of
church multiplication. But strong leadership begins with strong
discipleship. A proven disciple is the best foundation for an influential
leader. In short, making disciples that make disciples becomes the
launching pad for churches planting churches.
To get to the place where discipleship is intentional, reproducing,
evangelistic and leaning into leadership development, we need more
than gifted leaders. We need to value and implement healthy systems
of discipleship training that enhance the people using them. A healthy
system of reproduction does good things to all involved. It instils
Christlikeness into people in a way they haven’t done for themselves.
Great church-planting churches witness life change and healthy
growth in their smallest life units: small groups or triads. Healthy
churches reproduce rapidly externally because they have been
systematically reproducing internally. A multiplying church’s various
disciple-making members will live with timed-release dates. In these
systems, non-Christians, as well as believers, make strides in coming to
or maturing in Christ.
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Shift
Intentional mindset
The will to want church growth is the engine that drives it. The same
applies to good to great church planting, which is another way of
stating Level 5 ministry. For it to happen, it must be intentionally
sought after. No person has ever drifted into becoming a concert
pianist; in the same way, no church-planting movement emerges from
nonchalance.
Inspiring vision and deeply felt need are the propellant fuels
of purposeful action. God inspired the patriarchs by transmitting
wide-eyed pictures of what was to come: teeming masses of people as
countless as the stars of the heavens or the sand on the seashore. A truly
inspiring vision sees the future with the grandeur of God and draws the
onlooker into it as metal is attracted to a magnet.
But even the most compelling vision loses its drawing power with
time. The builders of the wall around Jerusalem were obviously inspired
by Nehemiah’s vision. They set to work immediately. Yet this vision
didn’t keep them from stopping what they were doing. In their case, the
vision lost its lustre after 26 days, and they subsequently left the work.
Vision is like a campfire: it cools off with time and thus needs periodic
stoking, preferably monthly, for people to remain committed to it.
Vision by itself, even if periodically “stoked,” is insufficient to
propel most people toward action. Inspiration needs the additive of
deeply felt need, which propels us to act. Spiritual and societal movers
and shakers—such as Martin Luther King Jr., William Wilberforce,
Madame Curie and Mother Theresa—exemplify this fact.
My father died at age 58 brought on by a heart attack preceded by
kidney failure. Knowing this, my doctor urged me to have my kidneys
checked annually. I nodded in agreement—and did nothing. That is
until one morning when I noticed symptoms that could be indicators of
kidney problems. Within an hour and a half, I was sitting in the office
of a specialist. What brought about the change in behavior was not the
vision; it was a deeply felt personal need.
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A great church-planting multiplication movement shifts into gear

by feeling the brokenness, hurt and pain of those not being reached
by conventional churches. Jesus was angered by the hardness of heart
of some of his hearers (Mark 2:5); He was in psychosomatic pain over
the lostness of the lost (Matt. 9:36). It was this deeply felt sorrow over
the state of the heart of the lost that propelled him and his followers to
move into the harvest.
It has been twenty-eight years, but I still remember the first
sentence spoken by my first homiletics professor in my first hour
of class. Quietly yet firmly, Dr. Holmes said, “Most of you will not
become great preachers (pause), because you do not plan on becoming
great preachers.” Intentionality is the mother of quality. Though not
guaranteeing a qualitative spiritual movement, such a movement is not
the by-product of chance, but of intentionality.
Early on in the church plant in Kaiserslautern, I secured a colorful
bag of plastic locomotives from a toy store. As people became members
of the church, each was given a locomotive to place on their desk at
home. The locomotive was a word picture. We told our people that we
were praying and working toward establishing new main train stations,
for example, new churches. We included church planting in our
literature, talked of it often, did it, and were intent on continuing to do
it. This is intentionality at work.
External focus
Where and how we spend our time reflects our values. Thus, our
behavior will always surface our true beliefs. Behavior is belief. We may
profess the importance of seeking the lost, but where we spend our time
decrees what we truly deem important. The men and women behind
great church-planting ministries spent lots of time with those they
were called to reach. As they do this, they behave as Jesus did. He was
internally motivated while being externally oriented.
For many people in ministry, time spent with the already reached
is where they devote their energies. The study desk can become a
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Shift
convenient barrier to time spent with the lost. We must overcome this
barrier. When we look at where Jesus spent His weekdays, we see him
in the harvest, criss-crossing Galilee with half-baked, not yet fully
convinced, yet seeking followers.
The older a ministry gets, the stronger the gravitational pull toward
the inside. Gravity is the problem in wanting to get from Frankfurt
to Chicago. To get from the barn to the harvest, we’ll need to be
externally oriented and pull away from the centripetal force of the
church.
In the first two years of our church plant in Kaiserslautern, I
intentionally visited over four hundred businesses. I purposefully asked
to speak with the boss, stating that I was the new pastor of a new
church in town and wanted to meet the “neighbors.” Looking back,
some significant and memorable conversations, some ending in prayer,
resulted from those visits. I certainly had enough to do without seeking
out the business community, but I realized that I needed regular
contact with non-Christians.
Should we intentionally want to see a church-planting
multiplication movement occur, we’ll emphasize the size of each
individual’s oikos. Ralph Neighbour has illuminated the concept of
oikos as it relates to evangelism.51 The oikos is our relational network.
To discover our evangelistic oikos, we’ll note the name of every person
we spend an hour or more with in an average week who is not a
follower of Jesus. These people are our natural bridges into the gospel.
The more relationships we have like these, the greater the inroads
God has into their lives through us. The composite oikos of church-
planting teams makes up the potential church. Neighbour summarizes
the problem of church planting dysfunction: “Less than one percent
of the salaried pillars of the church were (sic) investing one hour a
week developing personal relationships with the huge mass of totally
51. Ralph W. Neighbour, Jr, Where Do We Go From Here? A Guidebook for the Cell
Group Church (Houston: Touch Publications Inc, 1990), 114-121.
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unchurched.”52 Is Neighbour perhaps telling us that being away from

the desk is really being on the job?
Jesus taught us to be externally oriented. For church leaders, part of
that is focusing on the foundation for a good to great church-planting
movement. The future of every visible ministry is in the harvest
(Matt. 9:35-38) from which will come tomorrow’s leaders. The future
of the church relies on people who are not yet believers. The external
mindset is the missional mindset.
Reproducible models
Every great movement needs healthy systems of reproduction that are
better than the people using them. Such systems are not only practical,
easy to use and reproductive, but also exert benevolent power upon its
users. Benevolent power is the power to change into Christlikeness and
the power to reach outsiders.
In the church we planted eight years ago in the city of
Kaiserslautern (pop. 100,000), we experimented with a hybrid form of
triads made popular by missional thought leader Neil Cole. The model
is as simple as it is reproducible. Initially, three men or three women, all
Christ followers, band together to form a triad, or a mini-group. At the
first meeting, an “expiration date” of four months is given to the group
(healthy mini-groups share the commonality of an expiration date.)
Each member covenants together to exercise what Cole calls
“spiritual breathing.” In our context, we each inhaled (read) three
chapters of God’s Word daily, all reading the same texts. When we
came together once a week, we shared how God had been speaking
to us, and then we exhaled (confessed) how we had lived during the
previous week. Much discipleship falls short of life change because it
tells people how they ought to live. Only when we honestly tell one
another how we actually live does deep life change occur. Thus, we
asked questions related to temptation, finances, family, anger, etc. In
52. Ralph W. Neighbour, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here? (Houston: Touch

Publications, 1990), 82.
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Shift
the process of the next several months, we added a fourth member to

the group who was not yet a follower of Jesus.
At the end of the four months, each group meets for a meal to
celebrate God’s goodness and to signal the division of the group into
two groups of two. Each dyad then invited a non- Christian from their
oikos to join their mini-group for an initial two-week period. In this
way, we gave the seeker enough time to get wooed by the grace of God
as well as giving a convenient and face-saving exit, should they want
to discontinue. The groups were intent upon seeing non-Christians
come to faith in Christ and continue on in life transformation in the
mini-groups. These groups are again time-released to divide after four
months.
The beauty of this form of reproducible system of disciple making
is that it is leaderless. It is not dependent upon giftedness to make it
work. And it not only sees the lives of believers grow deep; it is harvest-
oriented and sees people come into the kingdom of God by virtue of its
essence.
“Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort,” Dallas Willard
said. It takes effort and a good reproducible model to make disciples.
John Wesley discovered this in his reproducible system, which he
labeled the “class meeting”: “They met weekly to give an account of
their personal spiritual growth, according to the rules and following
the procedures which Wesley had carefully crafted.” Life change occurs
where there is nearness, openness and accountability. It’s the stuff of
movements and healthy multiplication.
Multiplication coordinator
Why is it that the challenge of church-planting multiplication hasn’t
yet been met? One reason lies in the energy and attention needed in
planting just one church. For those of us who have planted churches, we
know how depleting the task is. There are seldom unused energies left
for other undertakings. Thus, church planting gets accomplished at the
expense of multiplication.
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For church-planting multiplication to occur, we need bifocal

vision. The task at hand of planting one church is the near-sightedness
of church planting. The task of seeing beyond that one church to a
plethora of new churches is the far-sightedness of the task which leads
to multiplication. This is where the church planting coordinator comes
into play. His job is to shepherd the process of multiplication, to look
away from the immediate situation and to look far into the horizon. He
is the keeper of the process, the coach with a training plan.
The multiplication coordinator sees to it that the church plant is
on track in terms of disciples made, leaders developed, coaches trained,
and teams generated for new churches to be launched. They function
as a controller of the process, which births entirely new generations
of churches. The multiplication coordinator is the church-planting
multiplication genealogist, able to show how an entire movement came
to be and hangs together.
Although the Western world has seen a new impetus to plant
churches, many efforts have and will continue to be only good, at best.
As in the business world, so too in the world of church planting, new
benchmarks or disciplines are needed to travel from good to great. It
will take the power of God and the steady determination of purposeful
men and women to see great church-planting movements birthed. As
poet Robert Frost indicates, not many travel such roads, for only a rare
few are willing to go the way less travelled.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The power of God and the power of choice will make all the
difference in the impact we have in planting churches. The difference
marks our determination to rise above the good to get to the great. We
will determine to be intentional, external and reproducible in our drive
to see G7 churches planted: those that make the difference between
good and great church-planting churches.
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Shift
Missionary statesman Roland Allen put it succinctly: “The great

things of God are beyond our control.”53 But these things aren’t
beyond our faith or our influence as we partner with the Spirit of God
in alignment with His Word. Great church planting takes the road
less travelled—and that will make all the difference in the destiny of
myriads of people.

• Which of the G7 characteristics frighten you? Which ones delight
you? Why?
• What is the next step your church-planting team needs to take to
go from good to great?
• What personal challenges are you facing as you consider parenting a
movement?
53. Roland Allen, Spontaneous, 13.
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C H A P T ER EL E V EN
Shift 11: From

Discouragement to
Encouragement
“What is needed is the kind of faith which, uniting a
man to Christ, sets him on fire. Such a man can believe
that others finding Christ will also be set on fire.”
— Roland Allen54
I
n the state of Washington stands beautiful Mt. Rainier almost three
miles high, the highest peak in the Cascades mountain range. The
Cascades are made of 25 large glaciers, which make up the largest
continuous ice field outside of Alaska. Whoever dares climb this
colossal tower of ice must possess lots of Alpine climbing experience
and much courage.
Donald Bennett is one of the few that has made it to the top of
Mt. Rainier. But what is so extraordinary about his achievement is
that Bennett is an amputee with only one leg. On one stretch of the
journey to the top, Donald and his team were confronted with a huge
ice field they needed to cross. To give themselves the needed traction,
each climber strapped metal cleats to the bottom of their hiking boots.
Unfortunately for Donald Bennett, with two crutches and only one
set of cleats strapped onto his one boot, he was constantly slipping and
falling. The only way for him to make progress was to fall forward on
54. Roland Allen, Spontaneous, 157.
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Shift
his face, pull himself up, thereby gaining three feet of progress. He did
this over and over.
His teenage daughter, Kathy, was on the climbing team. She saw
the torture her father was experiencing and jumped into action. For
the next four hours of her dad falling forward and pulling himself up,
Kathy was at his side, spurring him on, saying things like, “Dad, you’re
making it. You can do it! You’re the best father in the whole world!”
Kathy’s words touched Donald’s heart deeply. In fact, it was her
constant encouragement that enabled him to reach his goal.
Encouragement is a power in itself. It is a power that overcomes our
desire to give up. With encouragement we can finish high school, work
grinding twelve-hour days, stay with people we love in difficult times
and achieve great feats like climbing mountains. Encouragement does
so much for us, yet it’s often a rarity in our self-centered world.
The reality is, if encouragement were our main source of
nourishment, many of us would be starving. Why is that? Because
things like encouragement, praise, thanks, love and recognition are
the main sources of nourishment for human souls. Without them,
we shrivel up inside, become bitter, nagging and unpleasant for those
around us.
Hebrews 3:13 tells us, “Encourage one another”: “If a person´s gift is
encouraging, let him encourage” (Rom. 12:8).
THE EARLY CHURCHES WERE OASES OF ENCOURAGEMENT

• Barnabas was called the son of Encouragement (Acts 4:36).
• Barnabas encouraged believers in Antioch (Acts 11:23).
• Two prophets in the early church, Judas and Silas “said so much to
encourage and strengthen the brothers” (Acts 15:32).
• After being released from prison in Philippi, Paul and Silas went
to the home of Lydia “where they met with the brothers and
encouraged them” (Acts 16:40).
• When Paul was in Macedonia, Luke writes: “Paul sent for the
disciples and, after encouraging them, said good-bye and set out for
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Chapter Eleven | Shift 11: From Discouragement to Encouragement
Macedonia. He travelled through the area, speaking many words of

encouragement to the people” (Acts 20:1-2).
• On the way to Rome, Paul the prisoner met with believers, where
we read, “At the sight of these men, Paul thanked God and was
encouraged” (Acts 28:15).
Without question, in the first century when people wanted to tank

up on courage, confidence, and strength, they found they could be
filled up through the fellowship of believers.
Encouragement is the power we all need in our personal lives and in
the planting of new churches. We see the fuel of encouragement in the
life of the young nation of Israel in a crisis.
The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim.

Moses said to Joshua, “Choose some of our men and go out to fight
the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the
staff of God in my hands.”
So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses,

Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held
up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered
his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses’ hands
grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on
it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the
other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua
overcame the Amalekite army with the sword (Exodus 17:8-13).
GOD WILL PERFORM HIS WORK THROUGH US

Since the time God has called people to be His partners, we know that
work for God is an honorable and royal undertaking. Joshua, Moses,
Hur, Aaron and the army of Israel formed a bridge between the seen
and unseen world. It was across this bridge that God brought victory.
God is looking for bridge builders.
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Shift
In the Bible we find this seminal truth: God does His work on
earth through people who are wholly committed to Him. Paul writes
in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship (artwork), created
for good works (of art), which God prepared beforehand, that we might
walk in them.”
Did you know that Christ has saved you for Himself and for His
goals? Did you know that God wants to do His works through your
life? Did you know that your life is a bridge between the seen and
unseen world? Did you know that you are God’s partner in God’s
employment and that He has planned your mission from eternity?
WORKING FOR GOD IS STRENUOUS AND TIRING

Moses held up his hands in the air. The staff of God was a symbol of
God’s presence and power: “But Moses’ hands became heavy.”
Whoever works for God becomes tired. Sometimes it’s not only our
hands but also our hearts that become tired. There are seasons when
this is true. God calls us to ministries that uncover our weaknesses
and show our powerlessness. Even when we minister according to our
gifts, we often realize our limitations. In our own strength, we can’t do
anything for eternity. God’s works are never wrought through our own
means and resources; rather, we need the power of God. This power is
only given to us in fellowship with Him and through the support of our
brothers and sisters.
Martin Luther battled with bouts of depression. The burdens of the
challenges he faced pressed upon him. One day his wife, Katharina,
came down the stairs dressed in black as if she were going to a funeral.
Luther looked up, saw her and asked, “Who died?”
“God died,” she replied.
Luther shot back, “God is not dead!”
After which, Katharina said, “Then live as if He is alive!”
Work for God can make us tired and when we get tired, we often
lose perspective that God is alive and present—and at work. That’s why
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we need people in our lives like Katharina who show God’s perspective
to us.
MUTUAL ENCOURAGEMENT FOSTERS ENDURANCE

Someone once said that the Christian church is like a football game. In
a football game, there are 20 players on the field who are in dire need of
rest, and 40 thousand spectators who are in dire need of activity.
Let’s look at Moses holding up his hands. While his hands were
growing heavy, Hur and Aaron stood next to him. They could have
said to him, “Moses, it’s obvious that you have a problem. If you had
gone to the fitness center more often, you wouldn’t be in this mess.” Or,
“Moses, this is YOUR ministry to the Lord. You’re on your own.” Or,
in an overly spiritual fashion, “Moses, we’re praying for you.”
But nothing of the sort. What happened? The realization of Moses’
weakness led to their intervention on his behalf.
Imagine yourself as Moses in that moment. You see that the army
is losing the battle in the valley as your hands become heavy. Your head
tells you that you must endure, but your arms cannot. Panic and fear
grip you.
Then something wonderful happens! Our friends offer us a place
to sit down. And they hold up our arms. The physical support of Hur
and Aaron becomes emotional support, and we see how God gives the
victory.
We all need encouragement! And we can all encourage others.
Let’s decide to be encouragers of others. Here are a few insights we can
consider:
Encouragement comes through real support.

As with Aaron and Hur, we too can give others practical help. Pray as
you go through the day and ask the Lord to lead you to people who
need your encouragement.
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Shift
Encouragement comes through praise and thanks.

Why is it that we train our children to be thankful, but when we
become adults, we withhold praise and thanks? If we experience
something positive, we should express our praise.
What happens when we praise and encourage each other?
Our sense of well-being is heightened. The German word for
encouragement is “ermutigung.” Within the word is the word “mut,”
which is the word for courage, related to our English word for mood.
When we encourage one another, it does something to our mood. We
get a sense of heightened well-being.
Encouragement leads to courage. Within us there arises

a new motivation to be active.
Encouragement begets encouragers. Those who are encouraged
will want to be those who encourage others. And when an entire
church is affected with the power of encouragement, a new culture of
thankfulness and encouragement rises.
GOD WANTS TO ENCOURAGE DIFFERENT

ONES IN DIFFERENT WAYS
Our Lord challenges us in different ways, in order for Him to reach
His goals through us. He encourages us differently so that we might
encourage others. Therefore, let me identify three groups of people; each
with their unique encouragement challenges.
Members of the local church

God wants to encourage bodies of believers. Peter Wagner once wrote
that encouragement happens where churches experience contagious
expectations of what God can do in them and through them. How does
God want to encourage you as a member of His Church?
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God is challenging you to look outward outside

of church walls.
The commission Jesus gives His Church is a commission to take the life
of the body to the lost of the world. He wants the members of His body
to live and move among those that are not yet part of His body.
Weak and declining churches concern themselves primarily with
three things: the physical facility of the church, the care of its members
and the youth. All three areas are essentially inward-looking. Because
they are inward-looking, they blind the church from seeing those
outside of its parameters.
Jesus had bifocal vision. He saw those around Him who were
following Him. But He also saw beyond them, to those who were yet
to follow Him. Folks, the future of your church lies in the harvest, not
in the barn. Is your church outward-focused, or is it primarily focused
upon the already reached?
God is challenging you to be future-oriented and not

past-focused.
The question that every church body must answer each year is this:
“What year is next year?” The answer seems simple enough. Next year
is 2021. But in many churches, people answer this question with a year
in the past. They want next year to be a repeat of 1973, 1955 or 1990.
They want the future to be like the past. But time does not allow us to
go back into the past.
Our Lord encourages us to look to Him. When we look to Him,
we will be looking into both the present and the future. We will be
expecting Him to show Himself and to work in us and through us in
brand new ways yet unknown.
God is challenging you to embrace unsympathetic

people.
One of the best gifts God gives each one of us is unsympathetic people.
Why is that? Because we can only learn certain character qualities like
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Shift
love, patience and kindness when we engage with disagreeable people.

When the Lord wants to teach us to become like Himself, He gives us
people who are abrasive, obnoxious or overbearing.
In the past, I have asked people in our church this question:
“Where do you see the Lord challenging you to grow?” Answer that
question for yourself. Perhaps it’s in the area of patience. If the Lord
desires to teach you to be more patient, how will He do that? Probably
by placing you in the company of an individual or two who will try
your patience. Therefore, you’ll learn to think positively and acceptingly
about negative people and situations. Pray for openness and receptivity
for such people. They will bring you farther down the road toward
holiness than the many nice people in your life.
40 PLUS (40+)
Now we come to the second group of people that God wants to
encourage: those who are forty years and older. Consider some of the
special challenges this group faces:
Discover and develop younger people for ministry.

Joshua and Hur were able to support Moses because Moses supported
them in their development. Forty-plus people should be praying this
prayer: “Lord, what younger person is there in my church or in my life
that is faithful, available and teachable? And how can I invest myself in
them so that they can learn to do what I do?”
Learn to serve through those you are empowering.

Those of us over forty who have ministered alone need to learn to
minister through the people we invest in and love. The joy of the
older Christian is the joy of seeing younger believers excel in ministry
because of their encouragement.
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Learn to say “no” so that you can say “yes.”

The drug of choice for older Christians is to be needed. Only when we
learn to say “no” to some of the things we’ve been doing, will we have
the capacity to say “yes” to new challenges from the Lord.
40 MINUS (40-)
If you’re under forty years of age, I want to encourage you with three
challenges.
Allow yourself to be challenged to engage in new

ministries.
Develop an openness to new challenges. Often these will come through
the invitation of others. People will come up to you and ask you to do
things you’ve never done before. Out of principle, say “yes.”
It took all of two minutes to put me on a path that has led to full-
time Christian service. I became a Christian at age fifteen. Shortly
thereafter a youth leader asked me to give a short devotional for a high
school prayer breakfast. I accepted the challenge and prepared as best
I knew how. On a cold autumn morning, I rode my motorcycle to the
church and gave my talk to about thirty high schoolers. Afterward,
two mature Christians came up to me, and each said the same thing.
“Diet, I think God has given you the gift of teaching.” Those words of
encouragement took two minutes to say, but they ended up affecting
the trajectory of the rest of my life.
Satisfy your heart in Jesus.

Don’t get caught up in finding your deepest satisfaction in what you
do, but rather in the awe and joy of God’s fellowship. Augustine once
wrote: “The soul nourishes itself from that which gives it joy.” Nourish
your soul with large doses of solitude in the presence of Christ. Delight
in His Word. Memorize large portions of it. Let the Word of God
saturate your soul, that you might be full of joy.
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Shift
Allow yourself to be set in motion.

The test of encouragement is in the way we live our lives after we’ve
been encouraged. Encouragement begets courage, and courage leads to
action.
Your church-planting team isn’t primarily made up of workers
but rather ransomed, redeemed, loved people of God who serve Him,
each other and those in our world. But engaging in such ministry
leads to tiredness. At such times, the Lord will often send us someone
to encourage us and to give us a new perspective from God’s vantage
point.
I love this story about a young married man who sensed his need
for a special touch from the Lord in his life. As he was prone to do, he
got up early and went into the living room to spend time with God.
He had just confessed his sins and asked God for His blessing. He
felt a real need to be touched afresh by the love of God. He needed
encouragement.
His little son, Tim, was 22 months old at the time. While his father
was in the living room speaking with the Lord, Tim wandered into the
room. His dad noticed him and how he was quietly approaching him.
Most of the time, Tim was quiet because his mother had taught him
not to disturb his father during his quiet time. But on this particular
morning, Tim went directly to his father, laid his little hands upon the
folded hands of his father and spontaneously said, “Hi, special one! Hi,
special one! Hi, special one!”
Never before had Tim said those words. Six times in a row, he said
to his father: “Hi, special one!” At that moment, it became clear to the
father that God was blessing him through his son’s words.
It may be that you were raised in a family in which you were
criticized more than you were praised. Or that you have a boss who
constantly cuts you down. But God wants to encourage you. In His
eyes, you are loved and valued. You are His special one. Hear Him
saying this to you, “You are my beloved daughter, my beloved son. I
have works of art that I want to perform in you and through you!”
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That is all the encouragement you need to go up to someone else,

put your arm around their shoulder and say, “Hi, special one!”
Questions for Discussion:

• In what areas do you feel drained or tired right now?
• Think about a recent incident that lifted your spirits and relate it.
• What steps can you take to empower and encourage others?
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C H A P T ER T W ELV E
Shift 12: From

Mundane to Joy
“He ran ‘ for the joy set before him,’ which means he ran out of
desire. To use the familiar phrase, his heart was fully in it.”
— John Eldredge55
I
t’s been more than a dozen years now. Our youngest son Lukas and
I set out on a journey together when he was fifteen and very much
enamored with the material things his friends had. As a pastor’s kid,
he would sometimes ask, “Papa, why are we so poor?” So, I arranged
this journey.
We flew from Frankfurt to Ethiopia, landing in the capital of
Addis Ababa. After an overnight in the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM)
guest house, we were accompanied by a national to a small town in the
southwestern part of the country, close to the Sudanese border. After
two days of travel, we were met by five men who had walked through
the night to meet us. The roads leading into the small village where the
SIM clinic was located and where we were to serve were washed out by
heavy rains. No vehicle was able to make the treacherous journey. Thus,
the five men, some without shoes, were sent by a missionary friend to
carry our belongings and to guide us to the remote clinic.
The trek was utterly exhausting. We walked 30 kilometers over two
mountain ranges in arduous conditions: mud, steep inclines, streams.
55. Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the
Heart of God (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 197.
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Shift
At times we doubted we would make it. But after six hours, we were
greeted by our friend who took us to the small SIM compound. While
I painted the inside of a missionary home, Lukas helped at the clinic.
As many as one hundred people gathered early each morning at the
clinic entrance, patiently waiting to be seen by the nurses. Some had
walked all night to get there. They were very poor but also very content.
Lukas and I learned much from them in those ten days.
The people in that remote part of Ethiopia live in thatched huts.
Most were unacquainted with electricity, running water and, of all
things, doors, doorknobs and hinges. When people were called to come
into the clinic, they would come to the door and stand before it, totally
baffled about what to do next. Not having seen a door, they were at a
loss to know how to proceed. Most of the time, someone from within
would open the door and invite the person to step inside.
On any given day, we open many doors that all swing on hinges.
The hinges allow the door to move, which enables us to walk from one
room to another. Whoever invented the hinge did us all a great favor.
The phenomenon of the hinge is a reality in the New Testament. I
want to invite you into what I have chosen to call “the fellowship of the
hinge.” What is this hinge? The fellowship of the hinge is joining up
with the Lord Jesus in the work of church planting that He’s doing in
our context. The fellowship of the hinge is a movement that brings lost
people into the kingdom of God who start churches that start churches.
Where do we find this hinge? We discover the invitation to
join Jesus in the fellowship of the hinge in Acts 1:1: “In my book,
Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach . . . ”
This is the hinge. In the Gospels, Jesus began to do and to teach,
and in the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus continues to do what He began
through His servants. What He continued to do in the Book of Acts,
He continues to do today—through His servants and disciples, though
you and me.
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Chapter Twelve | Shift 12: From Mundane to Joy
IN THE GOSPELS JESUS BEGAN TO BUILD HIS CHURCH

Jesus proclaimed the gospel of the Kingdom of God.
The foundation for the church and for church planting is the kingdom
of God. Jesus came preaching “the Good News of the kingdom”
(Matt. 4:23). The Good News of the kingdom was on the lips of
Jesus at almost every teaching session he had. In fact, it was of such
paramount importance to Jesus that this was all He spoke of to His
disciples for forty days after His resurrection: “After His suffering, He
presented Himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that He
was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke
about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). This must have made a great
impression on His disciples, and it became the focus of Paul’s preaching
as well. We find Paul at the end of the Book of Acts, under house arrest:
“He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus
Christ—with all boldness and without hindrance!” (Acts 28:31).
Jesus is the auto basileia.

Jesus began and ended His ministry by proclaiming the gospel of the
kingdom of God. Jesus referred to the kingdom of God in the third
person, but what He really meant was Himself in the first person. Jesus
is the subject, the authority, the power and the content of the kingdom
of God. What do we mean when we talk about the kingdom of God
as it relates to our lives today? Jesus is the auto basileia—the kingdom
in person. Out of the kingdom of God proceeds the Church of Jesus
Christ.
Jesus is the founder of the church (Matt. 16:13-19).

After Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God,
Jesus makes this amazing statement: “And I tell you that you are Peter,
and on this rock I will build My Church.” Jesus is the founder of the
Church. He said, “I will build my church. And I will do it through a
man named Peter.”
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Shift
Jesus was the first church planter. The King of the kingdom of God
builds a new community called the Church—evidence of both the
King and His kingdom.
The Gospel of the Kingdom Has the Church as its

Expression of New Life (Matt. 5:20).
We need to go beyond believing in Jesus. We need to embrace our
need of becoming like Jesus. This is the heart of discipleship: not
simply believing in Jesus but learning from Jesus to behave the way He
behaved—automatically, joyfully, fully.
Believing in Jesus without being disciples of Jesus is what my
name’s sake, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, referred to as “cheap grace.” Believing
without following elicits nothing from us. Grace cost our Lord
everything. Therefore, following Him will be costly as well. As Dallas
Willard famously said, “Grace is opposed to earning, but not to
effort.”
Jesus came to offer us a righteousness that was “beyond the
righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees” (Matt. 5:20).
Righteousness is life lived in God’s approval. Such a life cannot be
earned. But once entered into, it’s made manifest. Jesus instilled His life
into the lives of His disciples. These became the prototype of the first
church. Jesus was planting His church while leading His disciples into a
new way of living. What did that look like?
New community
What Jesus began to do and to teach was a new community of spiritual
brotherhood and sisterhood, in which love for Jesus and for one another
was palpable and self-evident— evidenced by serving one another. In
this regard, Bonhoeffer in his wonderful book, Life Together, speaks
of the difference between soul-love and spiritual-love. Soul-love is
loving the other person for my own sake—for what I get out of the
relationship. Spiritual-love is the benefit the other person receives
though serving others. Jesus’ new community is one in which spiritual-
152
love, given in service to our brothers and sisters, is our way of loving
Christ.
New messenger
This new community lives unto themselves, and they are called to
proclaim the One who is their heart: Jesus. With the church, Jesus had
a new evangelist to proclaim the gospel and be His witness.
New lifestyle
The mark of this new community was both hearing and doing the will
of God. Later, the Spirit of Jesus was to descend on Jesus’ disciples,
enabling them to live the life of Jesus in this world. Their character and
interactions with people would mirror Jesus.
Religious sociologist Rodney Stark has written a book on how an
“obscure Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the
Western world within a few centuries.” Stark estimates that Christianity
grew at a rate of 40 percent per decade for several centuries, making it
the dominant religion of the known world.56
What was it that fueled such dramatic growth of the early church?
Stark highlights two specific behaviors of Jesus-followers in the first
three centuries that brought on the rise of Christianity. First, Christians
no longer exposed their newborn baby girls, allowing them to die in the
drainage gutters as the pagan world did. In fact, Christians often saved
such babies from death, took them and raised them in their homes.
Second, when plagues swept through urban areas, all the pagan citizens
healthy enough to flee to the mountains did so to save themselves. They
left behind their sick and dying family members. Amazingly, Christians
often stayed behind, risking their own health and lives to nurse sick and
dying pagans. In many instances, these destitute Greeks and Romans
56. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus
Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few
Centuries (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1997), 6.
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Shift
were restored to health and through the love and caring of Jesus-
followers became disciples themselves.
AS THE GOSPEL HAS MULTIPLICATION IN

ITS DNA, SO TOO THE CHURCH
Healthy, transformative changes happen to those who live with Jesus as
their master and teacher. Such personal transformation also impinges
upon the growth of the body of Christ. In the parables of Jesus, He
teaches us that the gospel has exponential growth in its makeup.
The farmer expects a large harvest.

We see this in Jesus’ parable of the farmer and his seed in Mark 4:20:
“Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and
produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what
was sown.” The analogy is clear: like a seed that takes root in the soil
and produces many kernels, the gospel that springs up unto life in the
heart of one person is meant to go on to produce new life in the lives of
many people. “From one to many” is the principle here. Every farmer
expects and hopes to harvest much more than he initially invested, so
too those of us who proclaim Jesus as the gospel of new life.
The gospel has inherent power to grow.

The gospel of the kingdom has inherent growth power residing within
it. Jesus said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters
seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the
seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the
soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel
in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because
the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26- 29).
“Automathe” (“all by itself,” automatically), the gospel produces a
harvest. What is endemic to the gospel is endemic to the church as an
organism: Jesus has purposed it to grow and to produce new churches
that produce new churches. As Peter Wagner once said, the fruit of
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an apple tree is not an apple. It is another apple tree. What we see in

Jesus’ teaching about the inherent growth of the gospel as evidence of
the expansion of the kingdom, we see in the Acts of the apostles in the
expansion of the church.
IN THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, JESUS CONTINUES

TO BUILD HIS CHURCH = CHURCH PLANTING
Where the gospel goes, new churches are planted.
The Jesus movement is centrifugal in its trajectory; it moves from a
center toward the outside. The movement of the people of God in the
Old Testament was centripetal in its trajectory: people came from the
fringes and moved to Jerusalem at the center.
The outline of the Book of Acts reveals to us the centrifugal
trajectory of the growth of the Church via church planting as a result
of proclaiming the gospel. “But you will receive power when the Holy
Spirit comes on you; and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in
all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
Here we see the concentric circles moving outward, centrifugally in
the Book of Acts. The acts of Jesus in the lives of His disciples, moved
and empowered by the Holy Spirit, produced new churches. First in
Jerusalem, then in Judea, then in Samaria and eventually to the ends of
the earth.
Newly planted churches plant churches (Acts 16:4-5).

The expansion of new churches planted in the first century was
nothing short of phenomenal. Such rapid church-planting growth is
documented for us in two short verses. For years, I assumed I knew
what was happening in Acts 16:4-5: “As they (i.e., church- planting
apostles) traveled from town to town, they delivered the decisions
reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey.
So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in
numbers.” The grammar of verse five leaves no doubt as to what was
increasing daily. I had always assumed that the number of believers was
155
Shift
increasing daily, but that’s not what this verse is saying. The number of
churches planted was increasing daily!
Every day in the life of the early church new churches were being
planted.
My question: How long does it take for the movement in your
country to plant a new church? In Germany where I live and minister,
we are planting one new church in our denomination each month. Our
brothers and sisters in the Book of Acts were planting new churches
daily.
What Jesus began to do in the Gospels—plant the prototype of
the first church—He extended into the life of the early church. So
rapid was the growth of Christianity that it became the predominant
religion of the world in two hundred years. Much of this growth was
predicated upon the planting of new churches. Research has shown that
the planting of new churches is the most effective form of evangelism
on the planet. More people find Christ in new churches than in older,
more established churches.
So, where does all of this lead us? It leads us to an invitation by
Jesus Himself.
INVITATION: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE HINGE!

Jesus longs to continue His work in your country with you
and with others. Will you partner with Him?
What the Lord began to do and to teach, He wants to continue to do
and teach through you in your country!
One of the things Christians are fond of doing is making our plans
and bringing them to the Lord for His approval. We do something like
prayerfully write out our plans for our lives and bring them to Jesus). At
the bottom of the page we have a blank line drawn and we ask Jesus to
sign off on our plans for our lives.
I can imagine Jesus looking at our letter to Him, smiling, silently
putting it aside and giving us a new letter. At the top of His letter to us,
we find this heading: “My Plan for Your Life” followed by a blank page,
156
at the bottom a black line. He hands His letter to us and asks us to

sign it. We recoil. Why? Because Jesus has not filled in the blank space.
Lord, how can I sign on the blank space if I don‘t know what You have
planned for me? Smiling, He just says, “If you trust me, you’ll sign.”
I ask, is it good to include Jesus into our plans? It sounds good, but
it isn’t. Jesus does not want to be included in our plans for our life and
ministry. He wants to include us in what He’s doing. “Our Father who
art in heaven, hallowed be thy name! Thy kingdom come, Thy will be
done as in heaven so on earth” (Matt. 6:9-10).
What can we be sure of in terms of God’s will for us? We can be
sure that what Jesus has begun to do He wants to continue to do—
through us! When we sign Jesus’ plan for our lives, we know that part
of His plan is to plant churches that plant churches. Are you willing to
allow the Lord to do what He began to do and to teach through you?
Jesus longs to do greater things than what we have yet

experienced. Do you see a church-planting movement
on the horizon?
Think of yourself somehow being present at your own funeral. The
service was wonderful, the hymns and the preaching truly uplifting,
God-honoring. Your body has been lowered into the grave. The last
mourner has stood over your casket, wiping away a tear. Friends and
family gather for coffee and cake at a nearby restaurant. You see your
best friends sitting together at a table. You hear them talk about you,
what you meant to them and what you did with your life.
They especially key in on your accomplishments. What do they list
among the things that you’ve done with your life? Are they God-sized
things—the things that are above and beyond our means and capacity
to produce. If we have done things with our lives that were in line with
our intellect, our talents and our leadership ability, then they were not
God-sized in proportion.
157
Shift
Think about Roland Allen’s observation: “The great things of God

are beyond our control.”57 But great things are in God’s power and
authority to accomplish in humans who have given over their lives to
Christ.
Trust the Lord with what’s beyond your means and capacity to
produce. Specifically trust Him to use you to see a church-planting
multiplication movement unleashed in your country.
Jesus wants to start with your heart. Will you give Him
your undivided devotion?
What will it take? What is the starting point for the Lord Jesus to do
greater things through you than you could ever imagine? The starting
point is your heart. Are you willing to accept Jesus’ invitation to
become a member of His fellowship of the hinge? Can you say, “I’m
done with making my plans for my life, and asking Jesus to bless
them”?
Jesus invites us all to join the fellowship of the hinge. Our response
to His call is joy at the privilege He affords us.
PRAYER OF RESPONSE
Let this prayer of response sink in: “Lord Jesus, I want to do Your will
and pray, ‘anything, anytime, anywhere, I am willing!’
“Lord Jesus Christ, no one and nothing compares to Your beauty
and holiness. You loved us when we were Your enemies. You saved us
from our sin and our selfishness to be Your disciples. We long to live
close to You and with You and out of your resources.
“We want to join You in the fellowship of the hinge—partnering
with You in continuing to do and to teach what You began during your
life on earth. Set us free and free us from self- interest. Empower us
to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of Jesus the Christ.
57. Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf
and Stock Publishers, 1962), 13.
158
Enable us to be a part of a church-planting movement in our country.

For your honor and your glory, Amen!”

• Can you say to Jesus, “Lord Jesus, anything, anywhere, anytime – I
am willing!”? Why or why not?
• What Jesus began to do, He is continuing to do (to evangelize and
to plant churches) and he invites you to join Him. What does that
invitation mean to you?
• For what are you trusting God that is out of your control?
159
Epilogue
W
hile you may not see it now, the end of this book can be the
beginning of greater impact in your church-planting ministry.
You can be part of seeing a dynamic Level 5 church-planting
multiplication ministry—so fueled by the power of God that it will get
away from you!
By now, you certainly know what that will demand of you. You’ll
need to shift in your perception and praxis of how you intend to move
forward. As you may know by experience when you first set out to learn
how to drive a manual transmission, it didn’t seem natural at first. But
eventually, shifting became second nature to you.
The same challenge awaits you now. As you begin to change the
way you go about planting new churches, much will feel out of sync,
disconnected. Yet the more you apply the principles in these pages, the
better you’ll get in their implementation. And the better you get in their
application, the better you’ll get in moving forward.
Unconventional, even to the point of being contrarian—that’s what
we’ve been considering together in these pages. If you wish to take your
church-planting ministry to the level of movement, you’ll begin to
think and act in ways uncommon to the common assumptions of how
to go about starting churches.
And as you shift from what was common or the status quo to what
is now contrarian, you’ll not only see new and better results, but you’ll
also get a sense for what it meant for Jesus to take on our humanity. For
God to become man and to live among those far from Him is probably
the most significant shift in God’s relation to us. The Creator becomes
His creation. How totally unexpected, yet life-giving for us who have
come to know Him as the source of all physical and spiritual life! In
161
Shift
following the way of Jesus, we too become unconventional and life-

giving in our church planting shifts.
I would like to sound a final warning. Do not try to do it all. That
will only lead to frustration, ending in resignation. Take one or two
of the principles in one of the chapters and apply it to your situation.
Stick with it, knowing that it will take two or three laps of application
before things fall into place. Trust God for fruit that will go beyond
your means and capacity to produce. As you see Him at work, step back
from what you see, praise Him for His deeds—and enjoy the ride.
162
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About the Author
Dietrich Schindler – Made in America, and Made for Europe

The son of German immigrant parents, Dietrich is the author of “The
Jesus Model: Planting Churches the Jesus Way,” a church planting book
that starts with Jesus as church planter rather than Paul. “Five to grow
before I go” has been Dietrich’s life’s goal since his early twenties: to
plant five churches in Germany before he died. Having accomplished
that, it’s now “more to grow before I go.”
For thirty-five years he and his wife, Jan, have made their home in
Germany. Dietrich has a Europe-wide reach as a speaker, consultant,
and leader of church planters. He is on the board of Exponential
Europe and is the author of an evangelistic tool, MyLife-Workshop, that
invites post moderns to discover the gospel. Dietrich is a graduate of
Columbia International University, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School,
and has an earned doctorate from Fuller Theological Seminary, and
wrote his dissertation on “Creating and Sustaining a Church Planting
Multiplication Movement in Germany in a Free Church Context.”
Dave Ferguson writes in the Foreword, “There are few people alive
who have the authority, experience, and genius to pen the contents of
this book. Cherish this book. Give this book away. Discuss this book
with others. This is a refreshingly great guide for all of us who love
church planting but struggle with the tidy formulas of how to get it
done.”
167

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“With the savvy of a seasoned veteran, the wisdom of a sage, and the

creativity of a thinktank researcher Dietrich Schindler challenges us to

“For years, Exponential has championed the Level 5 language for

“Shift is a book that will challenge your assumptions of church and

“Dr. Schindler aptly dismantles the old and increasingly failing

“It excites me to see how Dietrich Schindler combines knowledge,

“Whether you are a seasoned church planter, a beginner in this area or

“This is an unusual book. Dietrich Schindler asks questions and

“In Shift: The Road to Level 5 Church Planting Multiplication, Dietrich

“Many of us in the church planting world have grown increasingly

“Dietrich Schindler is a contrarian. He looks at what’s considered

Exponential is a growing movement of activists committed to the multiplication

This book is manufactured in the United States.

ISBN 13-978-1-62424-054-6 (ebook)

Foreword by Dave Ferguson

1. Shift 1: From Organizational to Organic

Øivind Augland, Norway

Dave Ferguson, Chicago

Nick Boring, Maryland

Terri Saliba, Carolina Beach

Peyton Jones, Carlsbad

Lindy Lowry, San Diego

Jan Carla, Frankfurt, Germany

Shift 1: From Organizational

• The first assumption is control. We need to be high on organization

second chance to make a good first impression.” And that first

The issue I’m trying to raise here is one of substance. Pragmatism

How do we make this 180-degree turn?

BIBLICAL EVIDENCE FOR CONVERSION-BASED

• “So the Word of God spread. The numbers of disciples in Jerusalem

The church in Antioch started with the newly converted as well.

Now, those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection

The first church in Europe was in Philippi, and it was started on

Thus, the church in Philippi—the focus of Paul’s great epistle to the

5 BARRIERS TO CONVERSION-BASED CHURCH PLANTING

1. The people we‘re trying to reach have already been

3. Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (Baltimore: Penguin Books,

God wants me to be a good person and not a jerk; “therapeutic” = God

2. Our expectations of what God can do have been

4. Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s

Think about a circus elephant. At a very young age, the elephant is

3. We lack role models of conversion-based church planting.

4. Our church planting approach is pastoral when it needs to

function as pastors. I get it. Pastors functioning as church planters is an

5. Our lack of faith in what God wants to do prevents us from

his younger friend, Philip Melanchton. Once when asked how he

PATHWAYS TO CONVERSION-BASED CHURCH PLANTING

Looking: Seeing the future through the eyes of God and

Relating: Being Christ to others

Before we tell, we must learn. To learn, we must listen. As we listen

Connecting: Bringing the gospel to our unchurched

Questions for discussion:

Shift 2: From Big to Small

Look at the two images below. What do you notice?

Fig. 1. $100 bill

6. New Living Translation.

Fig. 2. “A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte,” Georges Seurat

The first thing you notice is a denomination of money most of

OUR GOD LOVES SMALL BEGINNINGS

THE UNASSUMING POWER OF SMALL

spiritual gifts to the healthy growth of local churches.7 Especially in the

form of “triads,”9 or what we call mini- churches. The model is as simple

guardedness. A man will not talk openly about his pornography if