Dave Ferguson and Alan Hirsch on Organizing for Reproduction
DAVE FERGUSON
3 significant advances that are taking place in the church
- church planting
- multisite movement
- missional/incarnational church
Observations
- new churches grow 23 times faster than established churches
- new churches grow 10 times as many conversions as established church
- only category of churches growing are churches that have been around for less than 20 years
- 1990 - 10 multisite churches
- 1998 - 100 multisite churches
- 2004 - 1500 multisite churches
- 1 out of 4 mega churches are multisite
- 33% of all churches are considering multisite
- 7 out of 10 fastest growing churches are multisite
- 9 out of 10 largest churches are multisite
- a shift in what it means to be winning…no longer bigger, now reproducing churches
4 Value Shifts For Becoming a Reproducing Church
- from thinking in terms of church growth to becoming a missional movement.
- a realization that you can’t build buildings big enough and fast enough to contain what God wants to do.
- Value the new more than the old.
- Value the edge more than the center.
- value the lost more than the found.
- Value the going more than the staying.
LEADERSHIP SHIFTS
- from ministry managers to spiritual entrepreneurs.
- from being reactive to proactive. (it’s not about size (being 80% full, it’s about artist and leader readiness) (if we can build enough leaders and artists, God will send the people) (When do we start a new church? When God gives us the leader.) (We have to produce more and better leaders and more and better artists).
- from addition to multiplication.
REPRODUCING 2-3 SITES (”organizing for reproducing sites graph available at newthing.org)
- when you go from one to two or even three sites, don’t overthink things too much.
- what makes multisite work well is TRUST
REPRODUCING 4-10 SITES (reproducing 4-10 sites graph available at newthing.org)
- ministry experts that help campus teams to make them successful.
- Authority rests at the campus level.
ALAN HIRSCH (Missional/Incarnational)
- concern with the church in the west.
- Large church has a decreasing appeal but still has room for effectiveness.
- Experiment with the 60% of Americans that find no appeal in America’s “big” way of doing church.
- Missional/Incarnational forms are where much expirementation is taking place
Movements
- believe they have a message
- a sense that their message is for the transformation of the world.
- If the organization is about doubt and cynicism than for sure it is in decline.
- emergent church is steeped in cynicism and doubt. The hand wringing will not allow it to become a movement that changes the world.
- movements - structure of the network looks more like Al Qaeda (decentralized) than the Roman Catholic Church (16 levels of authority).
- In Al Qaeda, you’ll find individuals, cells of individuals, and networks of networks.
- There is no center of the organization? You don’t really know.
- The important thing about movements is that it has the same DNA and you can reproduce the movement from any cell.
- It’s important to get the DNA right in the beginning.
- Everyone can become an agent.
- Recommends “The Starfish and the Spider”
- Taking out a spider leg and it should survive. Take out 4 legs…probably not.
- Take out the spider’s head and it will die. That’s where all the power is centralized.
- Take off a leg of a starfish. It produces a new starfish and the original starfish grows a new leg.
- Movements that are reproduceable have the same capacity.
- In each part, it has the capacity for the whole.
- REFERENCED: “The movie, “Pay it Forward” which holds the principle of multiplication.
a session during Exponential Conference (National New Church Conference)
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