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7 SHIFTS IN MISSION FOR A HARVEST BREAKTHROUGH

Dr. Juan Wagenveld

INTRODUCTION Story of Rosa I met Rosa de León Venegas in Buenos Aires last year. Rosa is a middle-aged Peruvian lady who immigrated to Argentina many years ago. She arrived with nothing but some clothes and a mattress, and some scars on her body and in her heart. Her face shows some of the struggles she has endured, as well as the tenacity with which she has confronted the challenges of life in a new country. She is a small but feisty woman —I told her I would not want to get into a fight with her! Rosa is a Christian. In fact, she is a leader of a small church of about 80 people, and she is going through the church planting modules of the Multiplication Network. Rosa has experienced the fullness of the transforming Gospel in her life, and she is passionate about helping others come to know Christ and find faith, hope, and love in Him. Rosa works in one of the sprawling edges of Buenos Aires, where thousands of Colombians, Peruvians, Paraguayans, and others have moved in, hoping to escape poverty in their own countries of origin. She decided that something more had to be done in this area of so few churches and thousands of people who need the hope of the Gospel. She started evangelizing and discipling people, and today she has a beautiful community of faith that shines the light of Christ to its own people, and to all who see them. Not only that, Rosa has planted several daughter churches. Younger couples and singles mentored by Rosa lead these churches. Rosa doesn’t want to just add to the Church as she bears witness to the Kingdom. She wants to multiply! Ten other church planters are going through the Multiplication Network church planting modules with Rosa. During a lunch at her house, Rosa introduced us to several of them and later we went to visit the neighborhoods where they work. These people are planting faith, hope, and love in areas that desperately need it. These neighborhoods are filled with idolatry, witchcraft, prostitution, drug use, family violence, and umbanda (an Afro-Brazilian folk religion). We even heard testimonies of demon possession witnessed by several leaders. However, the gospel is liberating and healing many people thanks to the work and ministry of these church planters. They have great joy in the work and are examples of perseverance. The COGOP hopes to have 30 new churches planted in Argentina in the next two years. Pray for Rosa and the planters she mentors. Rosa says about her mission context: "there is a lot of strength on the other side"... referring to the spiritual opposition she feels.

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TRANSITION Rosa is not just a pastor; she is a multiplier—besides making disciples and planting churches herself, she is also being led by the Spirit to equip others to do the same. People are confessing with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. Together they are bringing in a breakthrough harvest in the power of the Resurrection! Let me explain what I mean by “working in the power of the Resurrection.” You see, we can’t talk about any strategy or strategic shift in mission unless we first understand the power we Christians need for a BREAKTHROUGH HARVEST: the power of the Resurrection! Many people question this, but it is at the heart of the Gospel. This and this alone, is able to bring meaningful and substantive transformation. Let me give you three examples or evidences of this: Mary Magdalene Mary Magdalene was an unlikely leader in the early church. Not only was she a woman—and women had little status in Jewish society—but she was a woman of questionable background. Mary had been possessed by demons, and by some accounts she had a reputation as a harlot. Yet this messed-up, devalued woman was granted the privilege of being among the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not a Jewish businessman, or a Pharisee, or a rabbi. Not even John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, or Peter, the leader of the disciples. No, Mary is the one mentioned in all four Gospel accounts as being present at the crucifixion and the Resurrection. If you were making this story up in the first century you would never choose a woman to be one of your key witnesses. But something extraordinary had happened…

First Disciples The second example deals with Jesus’  disciples. They were men who had all run away after the crucifixion. In John 20 we see them hiding in a room with the door locked, afraid and disheartened. In Luke 24 we hear the doubt and disappointment in the words of the two walking to Emmaus. In Mark 16 we read that they are “mourning and weeping”  (v10). However, in the book of Acts these same frightened, doubtful, weeping men were now praising God and healing and preaching. These once scared and disheartened disciples were boldly standing up to the same authorities they had been hiding from! How can this be? Something extraordinary had happened…  

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First Christian Communities The third evidence revolves around the Church. The earliest Christian communities were notably different from their surrounding culture:

• They embraced the marginalized of their society. • They welcomed slaves as brothers and sisters in Christ at the same communion table. • They showed greater respect to women, and they cared for widows who had no children. • Not only did they refuse to abandon orphans—which was accepted practice at the time—

they established orphanages.

Why would these early Christians do all this?

Something extraordinary had happened… The Resurrection of Jesus Christ! Today we talk about the Resurrection almost nonchalantly. Nevertheless, only the Resurrection explains Mary Magdalene’s transformation, the disciples’  transformation, and the early Christian communities’ transformation. It was fresh and powerful then; but we treat it as commonplace today! Unfortunately, many Christians and churches take for granted how profound and far-reaching this transformation is.

It was the Resurrection that sealed in the disciples’  minds and hearts that Jesus was who he claimed to be. Now they understood that Jesus had ushered in a new order of things, namely the inauguration of God’s redemptive power in the world through the presence of the Kingdom of God. Seeing the Messiah raised from the dead meant that the Kingdom of God was real and it ignited a passion in the early Christians—it gave them something to live for, and even something to die for; because it made them joyous, and fearless!

THE RESURRECTION IS THE ESSENCE OF THE GOSPEL

Paul puts it in simple terms in the book of Romans: That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9) There are two premises in this thought: 1) Jesus is Lord, and 2) Jesus is Risen. This is a spiritual, political, ethical, economic, religious, and cosmic claim! It is an all-encompassing assertion! To say JESUS IS LORD in first-century Palestine—where the LORD was supposed to be the Caesar—was powerfully counter-cultural. And to believe that God raised him from the dead was to give the God of Israel the ultimate power over sin and death and life!

Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15:14: And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

The RESURRECTION is the cornerstone of our Christian faith! It is the definitive HISTORICAL EVENT that forever changed history and destiny. We celebrate this as an Easter

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people! NT Wright says, “The Resurrection is not a last-minute invention that is tacked on to the edge of Christianity. It stands as the centerpiece of our entire faith.” (paraphrase) We are an Easter people and Hallelujah is our song. We need to tap into the Resurrection Power of Christ, and this happens only by the Spirit and the Word! Like the two lenses of my glasses we need both to have a clear vision from God that can lead us to a BREAKTHROUGH HARVEST. You can know the Word inside and out, but if you are not led by the Holy Spirit you won’t get a breakthrough harvest. On the other hand, you can claim to have a lot of the Holy Spirit, but with no grounding in the Word you won’t get a breakthrough harvest—at least not a Christ-centered one.

TRANSITION The Resurrection is the foundation of our Gospel message. This is the source of its power. But many have drifted from this foundational, core message, and much of the Church has gradually leaned on other sources such as self-confidence, technical ability or even technological advances for strength, sustenance and inspiration. As a result, we are not seeing the breakthroughs God wants to see. If we will shift our thinking in seven key areas, we can once again experience a harvest breakthrough. (These sources in particular have helped shape my thinking on these shifts: Take Your Church’s Pulse, Koster & Wagenveld; The Shaping of Things to Come, Frost & Hirsch; 9 Critical Shifts in World Mission, T. J. Addington, and The Essence of the Church, Craig Van Gelder.) SHIFT #1 FROM EXTRACTIONAL TO INCARNATIONAL

It’s not about getting the whole world to go to church. It’s about getting the Church to go to the World! In this way she participates in God’s mission in the world and the Church is being sent out. This is a significant paradigm change.

Often the church has had a fortress mentality, sending out rescue missions to “save a few”  and extract them from the world and bring them “into the church.”  But this perspective stands in direct opposition to the “salt and light”  theme of the Scriptures. Instead of “extracting”  people from the world we need to think in terms of “incarnating the Gospel IN the world.”  Our mission is NOT so much to save people from hell or take souls to heaven. God will decide those things. Our mission is NOT only to tell people about a future salvation through Christ, but to shape disciples, men and women who are citizens of the Kingdom of God here and now. Heaven does NOT need more FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE. Earth needs that! Think of it. God created the earth. It belongs to Him. He then redeemed it, giving himself for mankind. Then he taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, ON EARTH as it is in heaven.”  Then he told us he is coming back! And when he ascended he sent us the Holy Spirit who dwells within us and with us. He comes to us and we are trying to go somewhere else!

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Our task and mission is not about extracting, but about incarnating. That is what Christ’s incarnation is all about and he said, “As the Father sent me, so send I you.”  For Jesus, taking on human flesh meant a full identification with those he loved and for whom he gave his life. In the same way, the church must incarnate the message of Christ as it bears witness to God’s Kingdom in our world. The Church is called – and enabled – to be the hands, feet, and mouth of Jesus the Savior. The Church is sent to feed the hungry, heal the sick, bind up the wounded, encourage the fainthearted, and to preach the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ alone. The Church is God’s Plan A. And there is no Plan B. Yes, sin has brought distortion and brokenness to every person’s relationship with God, self, others, and creation. But the healthy church does not fear that brokenness. We are wounded healers. We have been healed and saved by the grace of God. Now the healthy church actively participates in God’s grand project of redeeming and restoring all aspects of life in and through Christ. Passages like Colossians 1 and 2 Corinthians 5 teach us that we are “reconcilers”  and “ambassadors.”  The Church helps bring healing and justice and right relationship between the different aspects of God’s creation. Yes, we are called to be holy, which means to be separate. But holiness is not just “separate FROM.”  It should be understood also as “separate FOR.”  The church is FOR the world. We are supposed to engage the world, as opposed to either escaping from the world or over-identifying with it. The church does not extract people from the world; it incarnates the Gospel of God in the world. As Leslie Newbigin would say, “We are the open hermeneutic of the Gospel to an unbelieving world.” Erwin McManus (Mosaic Church, Los Angeles) writes: “The Church is not here for you. You are the Church, and you are here for the world.”  

 For a breakthrough harvest we need to be more incarnational and less extractional.

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SHIFT #2 FROM AUTOCRATIC LEADERSHIP TO SERVANT LEADERSHIP A second shift that needs to happen in the Church is to move from worldly power approaches to a cross-centered servant leadership. Here we must touch on a typically neglected aspect of Christian leadership: the right kind of Christian leadership takes us to the cross, through suffering, and only then to the resurrection. This is true not only for the Church in the West but also in the Global South where it is growing the fastest. The ultimate expression of Christ’s service—death on the cross—rarely appears in popular teachings on Christian leadership. Most leadership teaching minimizes the role of sacrifice and suffering in the experience of Christian leadership. But the Apostle Paul conveys that such sacrifice is expected, and accompanying suffering is normal, that we should expect it! He writes to the Philippians: Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, and being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (2:5–8, NIV) This does not mean that the Christian leader seeks to suffer or wants to die as a martyr. It does mean that the Christian leader understands that the greatest results often come when commitment to Christ, commitment to Christ’s people, and commitment to the power and purposes of the Kingdom meet up against the strongest opposition, difficulties, or personal risk. It also means the Christian leader is confident in hope that on the other side of the cross there is resurrection and fulfillment of God’s purposes. It reminds me of the eager church class that asked the visiting missiologist, “Which is the most effective way of spreading the Gospel?”    The experienced academic replied. “We have studied this question around the world. And we have learned that the strongest correlation to rapid growth of the Gospel is martyrdom!”    So the class asked, “So what is the second best way to spread the Gospel?”   What distinguishes Christian leadership from worldly, usually autocratic, leadership is the foundation of service to others that is willing to embrace suffering to fulfill the purposes of God. The shepherd gives his life for his sheep. Jesus said that the greatest among us must be the servant of all. Leaders serve at the same time that they direct and guide. The spirit of service confirms that a leader is a servant of the Lord. The servant doesn’t command, dictate, or impose. The servant serves. Today more than ever we need servant-hearted leaders. This is rooted in God’s value of sacrificial love to the benefit of others.

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AND TO GIFT-BASED TEAMWORK For a BREAKTHROUGH HARVEST we need to shift in our leadership thinking from a worldly “Lording it over people”  mentality to a “mobilizing teams according to their gifts”  approach. As Paul writes in Ephesians 4:11-12: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”   T.J. Addington calls it moving from “being in charge”  to “equal partnerships.”   We leaders often don’t want to delegate and empower others because we think they won’t do it as well, but sometimes we don’t want to delegate because we think they will do it better! Fear and pride win over faith and trust. We need to repent from these fears that hold people back and shift into the paradigm of God’s humility that leads to life-changing power. Besides, how can you multiply churches if you don’t multiply leaders? And how can you multiply leaders without training them? And how can they be trained without being given experience? And they can’t get experience without getting empowered. I remember when I asked a person to lead the Bible Study on a Wednesday night. His immediate response was: “Won’t you be here?”   I thought about that. Our church culture is such that we think a potential leader should be given a responsibility only when the pastor is not going to be there. But that’s wrong, or at least short-sighted. So I answered, “I will be here, but I think you should do it! You will do it well.”   I am so glad I invited him to do it because I will never forget what I learned that night.

Raúl led the Bible study, read a passage about the gifts, and then gave a small package to every person there. We did not know what it was, but it looked like a gift. “What should you do to find out what it is?”  he asked. We answered that we had to open it, and we did. We were surprised when we realized that each person had a piece of a puzzle in his or her hands. Then he asked, “What should we do for this to be useful?”  At that moment, we understood what the leader wanted to teach. We had to work together if we wanted to see the completed puzzle. We moved to a table and worked together, putting the pieces of the puzzle in their places until we began to see a beautiful scene of a church in a field. But we noted that there were some pieces missing to finish the puzzle. “Raúl, there are pieces missing,”  we told him. He asked us to return to our seats and then he spoke to us, full of excitement: “Each one of us has been given a spiritual gift. But it is of no use by itself. It is meant to fit with the gifts of others. And there are pieces that are missing. We have to seek more lives for Christ, and then the gifts of these new believers will complete the work that we have begun in this church. But the only way to do it is to work together!”  What a great lesson we learned that day! We are incomplete on our own. It is only in community with other believers that we can discover our gifts and fully use them. The healthiest, most complete churches are not those where only a few people are using their gifts. God gives all of his people gifts, and he wants all of those gifts to be used to carry out his purposes

Notice the following graph of contrasting leadership:

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For a HARVEST BREAKTHROUGH we need to do it differently now. Equip, empower, and encourage those with gifts as leaders--teachers, pastors, apostles, prophets, and evangelists. Create teams! Yes, it can be messy (Prov. 14:4). But it is more effective and can be more fun! You cannot do the work yourself, nor should you. An old African proverb says, “If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together!” The role of the leader is to demonstrate teamwork. He is not the star of the team—he is the coach! It is in equipping ALL believers that we come closer to a harvest breakthrough.

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SHIFT #3 FROM SEGMENTED FAITH TO AN INTEGRATED FAITH True discipleship means a change of worldview—a new way to see and interpret reality. A biblical worldview covers all areas of life and does not allow the segmentation of faith. The following diagrams show the difference between a segmented and an integrated view of faith and life.

SEGMENTED FAITH INTEGRATED FAITH

Dualistic thinking has influenced the Church to the point of weakening it. It weakens the church because it limits its influence to a reduced sphere of life. When we compartmentalize our faith it loses its saltiness. It becomes fragmented. We need to regain holism and integration of our faith into all areas of life. As Abraham Kuyper, Pastor and Prime Minister of Holland, 1901-1905, said: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” 1) For example, we have divorced orthodoxy from orthopraxis. “Just believe the right things.”  

We’ve been led to believe that if we just believe the right set of rules and regulations we will “get into heaven.”  We have divorced orthodoxy from relational orthopraxis to the point, as some would say, “We are so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good.” Modern dualistic thinking has made it so that we can compartmentalize the faith as just one more aspect of life that does not necessarily bear any influence on other aspects of life. It is as incongruent as the German Nazi officer who pets and feeds his dog, loves his wife and children, and then goes and works the gas chambers all day.

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2) We think we have “sacred and secular” relationships. We have divorced relationship with God from relationship with others. We think of salvation as the restoration of my relationship with God, but in reality, salvation is bigger than that. It restores this vertical relationship but also my horizontal relationships in the context of community.

3) We think we have “sacred and secular” times. We have divorced Sunday morning faith from

Saturday night faith. This is similar to Point 2; “church”  is not just a location or a time for acting like a Christian. The things I learn and hear and sing and pray on Sunday morning should be the basis for what I decide and how I live Saturday night. And Monday morning. And Thursday afternoon. What happens on Sunday morning should be equipping me to live as a disciple all through the week.

4) We have made too many EITHER/OR’s that should shift to BOTH/AND. For example, being

results-oriented vs relational, body vs soul, justice vs righteousness, personal virtue vs. public justice. It is a both/and! The extreme poverty and social injustice around the world demand that we have holistic approaches of relevant witness in the name of Jesus. We have divorced Word and Deed…Justice and Justification…Heaven and Earth. Truth and grace. God is interested in the whole enchilada and his purpose is to redeem us, and get us to participate in his grand project of renewing ALL of creation.

In fact, that is what our world is hungry for as well. Social action is not something we choose “instead of”  evangelism. Social action is a form of witness—it is a way of sharing the redemptive good news exactly where people are hurting. It is a way of putting our faith in action (orthodoxy plus orthopraxis). It is how we demonstrate that our relationship with God impacts our relationships with others and with creation. It is how we practice the things we learn when we gather on Sunday mornings. It is how we build relationships AND achieve practical results. That’s what Rosa is doing when she is planting God’s church in Argentina—not just “saving souls,”  but forming holistic, alternative, Kingdom communities. She follows Jesus’ example of ministering to the whole person.

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SHIFT #4 FROM BUILDING TO COMMUNITY What’s the deal with our preoccupation with buildings? Again and again we hear successful church planters who describe their groups of 40 or 50 believers as something other than church because they don’t have a building! In Buenos Aires we visited a church planter and part of his nascent church on the 13th floor of a high-rise in the middle of the city. There were fewer than 10 of us there in the living room, but the church planter began to hook up a microphone to the stereo system so that, in his mind, we could “have church.”   Thankfully the National Overseer convinced him this was not necessary. One of the revolutionary differences between the early Christian churches and other religions of that time was that Christians met in each other’s homes. They had no designated temple, and they were all priests. Christians don’t go to church; we are the church. The Vision of both Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 is a new heaven and a new earth. For the Jewish people these two intersected at the temple. But the radical message of Jesus in the first century was that God had now intersected these two not in the temple, but in the person of Jesus Christ! The center of worship is now Jesus, and he is the one making all things new! Jesus then sent the Holy Spirit so that he might make his dwelling with us. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” This is the radical message of the Gospel. The temple of the Spirit is now each one of us and all of us, the Church, corporately. For “In [Christ] the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:21-22, NIV) Once I saw a leader promoting the construction of new church buildings show a picture of a brand new worship center, beautifully painted right next to a dilapidated building. He asked the people to look at the poor condition of the next door building and pointed out that it was the town clinic. He was proud that the worship center looked better than the town clinic which was falling apart: When I heard that I wondered two things: − Where would Jesus have been hanging out between those two buildings? − What if the congregation had considered painting and fixing the town clinic first and later

taken care of their own worship space? We need to regain a healthy tension between the Church Gathered and the Church Scattered. The building is just one more resource for meeting, for liturgy, for prayer, but these things can happen anywhere! See the following diagram.

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INTEGRATED PERSPECTIVES OF CHURCH

For a breakthrough harvest we need to shift from BUILDINGS to COMMUNITY.

SHIFT #5 FROM BOUNDED SETS TO CENTERED SETS (Missional posture) In The Shaping of Things to Come (p. 50), Frost and Hirsch differentiate an incarnational approach from an attractional one for evangelism. The attractional model has a “build it and they will come”  attitude. The incarnational approach emphasizes the “sent-ness”  of the church and seeks to permeate the society by going out. Our tendency as the church is to feel as though we have already “arrived,”  and now it is our job to help the poor “lost”  people arrive as well. What we don’t realize is how arrogant this can sound to the people we are calling “lost.”  Frost and Hirsch differentiate bounded sets and centered sets for evangelism. Bounded sets are like fences. Some are in and others are out. Instead of approaching evangelism as sharing “all that we know and you don’t”, it may be more relational to invite others to come grow with us. Frost and Hirsch picture people—Christians and unbelievers—on a journey towards the shalom of God, with Christ at the center. These are centered sets. Some people are closer, and others are farther. Some are journeying toward him, and others are walking away. But all are within the sphere of his reach. And all of us can help each other, no matter where we are. This shift in mentality can help us think less in terms of “us”  and “them.” It avoids paternalistic attitudes of mission and evangelism, and also empowers us to look for the creational image of God in all people. This is not some sort of soft universalism, but a difference in posture when sharing the Gospel and witnessing to Jesus’s life, death and resurrection.

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Not only does this shift help us avoid paternalistic attitudes it can also serve as an antidote to legalism. When one works within the bounded set paradigm one tends to keep drawing the line of who is in and who is out in ever tighter ways. The centered set paradigm frees us up to bear witness to God’s grace and mercy to others in gratitude for the way God has extended it to us.

SHIFT #6 FROM OWNING & CONTROLLING TO STEWARDING & RELEASING T.J. Addington urges us to work in situations of partnership and to serve with an open hand. He says, “We own nothing, control nothing and count nothing as ours.” Our message to fellow leaders, especially in cross-cultural situations, must be, “We are here to serve you not to control you. We don’t own anything. We are only stewards.”  This not only requires a spirit of humility, but also a change of mentality from competition to cooperation. This is hard, particularly in the North American context, because we often are unwilling to accept help from others. We like to see ourselves as givers and fixers, not takers or “need-ers.” Even when talking about vision and leadership, so much that we hear seems to focus on SELF and on GROWING YOUR PERSONAL INFLUENCE with little regard for the other, much less the least, the last, and the lost. “My leadership, my influence, my vision….”     What ever happened to “we must become less so that God can become more?” And “He who wants to become great among you must be your servant?” We need to re-orient our perspective as learners WITH and FROM the least, the last and the lost with the lens of the Gospel.

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An attitude of “owning and controlling” is usually tied to a fear factor. “Stewarding and releasing” is more aligned with a faith factor. For a real harvest breakthrough, God wants to harness ALL the gifts, ALL the workers. Frost and Hirsch, in The Shaping of Things to Come, give us some insight about how leaders achieve that: Considered philosophically, all that a great visionary leader does is awaken and harness the dreams and visions of the members of a given community and give them deeper coherence by means of a grand vision that ties together all the “little visions”  of the members of the group. The fact remains that no one will be prepared to die for my sense of purpose in life. She or he will die only for her or his own sense of purpose. My task as a leader is to so articulate the vision that others are willing to embed their sense of purpose within the common vision of the community. Only if they think that the common vision legitimizes their vision will they be motivated by the leader’s vision.

SHIFT #7 FROM ADDITION TO MULTIPLICATION Doing ourselves vs. equipping and doing WITH others My friend Ron was a missionary in the Philippines and was out in a rural area and with his vehicle he ran over a chicken, killing it. The farmer came by and was visibly upset about losing his chicken. Ron reached for his pocket and asked the farmer how much he owed him for the chicken. The farmer, staring down at the bloody feathers, scratched his head and just said, “Oh, the eggs, the eggs…” Ron understood now that the farmer wanted compensation not just for the chicken but for the eggs it would have produced. So he reached for more money and asked him, “How much can I give you for the chicken and the eggs?” The farmer just kept shaking his head and again muttered, “Oh, some of the eggs would have hatched!” =) This farmer understood multiplication! As I think about this story I realize that with some of the eggs the farmer’s wife would be able to feed the family. Some of the eggs would have been sold at market and this would have provided cash for other family necessities. And yet other eggs would have been allowed to hatch. Not just to eat as meat, but to multiply this supply cycle. A farmer with little education understood the power of multiplication. The fast population growth in the Global South and the diminishing witness in the West demands multiplication approaches. This last shift is just a very practical and strategic one. 2 Timothy 2:2 is the classic multiplication passage. And Rosa is doing exactly what that passage teaches. And this is a good thing. As JR Woodward writes, “For as the equippers incarnate their lives and ministries within the body, the whole body will be aroused and awakened to live in the world, for the sake of the world, in the way of Christ.”

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I will give three examples of paradigms we must break to achieve a church planting and missions breakthrough. These are strategies that only allow for slow addition; some call these diminishers. Three practical but systemic obstacles to fast multiplication are these:

1. A full-time worker. We need to move from full-time workers to bi-vocational church planters if we want to reach this generation for Christ.

2. A fully trained seminary graduate. We need to move to on-the-job-training that

provides practical skills to those who are called to church planting.

3. A dedicated building. We need to move to a biblical understanding of sacred space as anywhere where two or three are gathered and that the whole cosmos is holy ground, and therefore fit for worship.

CONCLUSION: These seven shifts in mission can help us to continue participating in God’s mission in the world with hope and with joy. Grounded in the Scriptures and led by the Spirit, the community of faith can avoid the extremes of “churchless mission”  on the one hand and “missionless church”  on the other. We can have an integrated approach to bearing witness to the Kingdom of God. If the church stays plugged in to the power of the Resurrected Lord, plus the power of Pentecost, and is able to begin these 7 shifts in its mission to the world, we can become the FAITHFUL and FRUITFUL Church that God wants us to be, and, just like Rosa we will have the beginning of a BREAKTHROUGH for a bountiful harvest!    

Dr. John Wagenveld is Executive Director of the Multiplication Network Ministries. MNM’s vision is to see a healthy church, representing the Kingdom of God in every community. To do this, MNM trains and equips church planters establishing new communities of faith. For more information please visit www.multiplicationnetwork.org