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is published by the The Vineyard USA

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Creating Multiethnic Communities of Faith

When: November 18 & 19
Contact: Hosted by the Vineyard Community
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a complete schedule including workshops visit us
online at: www.vineyardpomona.org/mission/multiethnic.html or contat Kimberly Anderson at
[email protected]

Executive Editor
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Editor
Jeff Bailey
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SouthEAST Region
Church Planting 101Who, What, & How

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When: February 3& 4, 2006

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volume 9 number 2 autumn 2005 :: the vineyard usa

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THE EFFECTIVE PASTOR

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MANAGING TIME, MANAGING CHANGE

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Churches go through different seasons of life, just

as pastors do. Sometimes such change in seasons
is expected; often it is not. How to deal with that
changeon both micro and macro levelsis a
massive challenge facing all leaders.
Few people have gone through as much
significantand publicchange as Rick Warren.
A few years ago he was known mostly to his
(sizeable) congregation at Saddleback Church,
and to (thousands of ) pastors he had trained in
his Purpose-Driven Church conferences. But with
the attention brought about by his best-selling
book, The Purpose-Driven Life, Rick found himself
navigating change on a level few encounter. He
spoke with Cutting Edge (One of my favorite
magazinesIve read every single issue since its
come out, he told us) at length about these and
other challenges facing the church today.
We also spoke with a number of other insightful
leaders about change management. Vineyard
megachurch pastors Tri Robinson and Rich Nathan
talk about it from the vantage point of church
growth, while Steve Nicholson discusses the same

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issues in relation to church planters. The man Fast

Company magazine calls one of the worlds most
influential thinkers on productivity, author and
consultant David Allen talks to us about managing our time amidst increasing commitments;
and we also replay one of John Wimbers classic
talks about moving a church through the cycles
of change. This issue also includes an update
on a (happily) ongoing change in the Vineyard,
as wellmore than 85 new churches have been
planted over the past two years.
Including all of this insight meant we had to
manage a slight change in the size of this issue
of Cutting Edge, as well! We hope you enjoy this
special, double issue.

Jeff Bailey, Editor

P.S. Watch for our next issue, in which Matt

Redman and others talk to us about worship,
church planting, and the future of the church.

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page 4 a second reformation?

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A Second Reformation?
Rick Warrens Vision for an Activist Church that Takes on the Biggest Problems in the World
Jeff Bailey interviews Rick Warren
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ing the majority of his time, energy, and money

in Africa and other parts of the developing world,
focusing in particular on AIDS, hunger, disease,
and literacy. Over 5,000 members of Saddleback
Church have now traveled overseas, and hundreds of Saddelbacks 2,600 housegroups have
adopted villages around the world to learn about
and help with problems such as disease and illiteracy. Saddleback Church has, in essence, been
an experimental incubator for a Global PEACE
Plan which is being launched among thousands of
churches across America this autumn.

Rick Warren needs little introduction these

days. His book, The Purpose-Driven Life,
has sold over 25 million copies, making
it the best-selling (nonfiction) hardback book in
American history. In 2004 he was named by Time
magazine as one of Americas most important
people, and he has received coverage in
Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and
Christianity Today (which calls Warren the most
influential pastor in America). In recent months
Rick has been seen on CNNs Larry King Live,
spoken to Harvards Kennedy School of
Government, and been a featured speaker to
American cultural leaders who gather annually
at the Aspen Institute.

>

Warren started Saddleback Church with his wife

Kay in 1980; the church now has an average
weekend attendance of 22,000 and has planted
34 daughter churches. Many church leaders know
of Warren through his book The Purpose-Driven
Church (the best book on entrepreneurship
according to Forbes magazine) and his PurposeDriven Church seminars, which have trained over
400,000 pastors in 162 countries in the principles
of church health.
Something many people dont know, however, is
the significant shift in focus Ricks ministry has
taken over the past three years. In response to
key events in his personal life, Rick is now spend-

While originally planning to talk to Cutting Edge

by phone, it turned out that Rick would be traveling through Cambridge, England to speak at several events held at Cambridge University. He arrived
straight from Rwanda, having been traveling for
the entire previous month. But as he sat down
with Jeff Bailey at a caf just yards from the old
Senate House and Kings College Chapel, Warren
was energetic and engaged, speaking about the
significant changes that have come about over
these past few years, and the surprising focus his
ministry is taking in the days ahead.

Youve got a great story about Saddlebacks

connection with the Vineyard in the early days.
Yes, it is a great story. Back in the late 70s, I was
graduating from a little Baptist school in Riverside,
California, and I felt like God was calling me to
plant a church. So I went into Anaheim Hills, which
was a new community just springing up, and
rented Canyon Hills High School, reserving it to
start services there. I had it locked up for about 3
months, and then a week before I was to start services, I was praying up on the hill nearby, and the
Lord said, If you dont go to seminary now, youre

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page 6 a second reformation?

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never going to go. So Kay and I left for seminary,

and I canceled the contract on Canyon Hills High
School. The very next week, Vineyard moved in.
So John Wimber and I used to talk about that a
lot, how in the plan of God He wanted that church
there, not the one I was supposed to plant. Then,
later, when I was getting my doctorate at Fuller
Seminary, John was one of the professors and
taught one of my classes.

When you hear people talk about that era

when Saddleback and the Vineyard were just
getting going, it sounds like they were pretty
heady days.
Oh, it was revival. Although, of course, revival is
a kind of ecstasyand you cant stay in ecstasy
permanently. At some point revival has to turn
into a movement if its going to last. Ive talked to
Pete Drucker, my mentor, about this a lot. He talks
about how eventually you have to institutionalize
certain elements. I used tell him, I dont want to
start an institutionI want to stay a movement.
And he would say, Yes, but movements die. The
things that last are institutions. Now, of course,
institutions then need to be renewed. Ive been
asked a lot about successorship. People ask,
Whos your successor? But I believe that a successor is not a personality; its a system that you
leave. Who followed Luther? Nobody. He left a
system called the Lutheran church. Who followed
Calvin? Nobody. But Calvin left a systemthe
Presbyterian church. The same thing with Wesley.
Now, those church systems need renewal again
today; there needs to be restructuring. But I have
often wondered, How long can you go before you
need renewal and restructuring?

What do you think?

Well, I think that there are four kinds of renewal.
Saddleback has now trained over 400,000 pastors
in 162 countries over the last twenty-plus years.
So, I have talked to a lot of pastors, and renewal
always starts at the personal level. It happens in
your own heart. You can call it being filled with the
Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, making Jesus Lord,
the deeper life, renewal, I dont care. The bottom
line is that Jesus becomes the real deal; your heart
warms up to the Lord. Once you have the personal
renewal, then comes what I call communal renew-

al. That happens at the fellowship level of the

church. There are a couple of ways you can know
when you have had renewal or revival at a congregational leveland one is that the singing gets
better! Another thing is that people hang around
longer. They like to be together. But those two are
not enough; you cant just have personal renewal
and communal renewal. Historically, in Baptist and
Methodist traditions for instance, those things
would happen through the annual revival. You
bring an outside speaker in, he speaks for two
weeks, everybody confesses their sins, gets right
with each other, and then things are good again.
You see these churches grow to 200-250 people,
and then they bump back down, over and over.
They never get above that and its because they
never get to the other two levels of renewal.
A third kind of renewal is at the level of purpose,
or mission. Thats what The Purpose-Driven
Church was all about. We are here for a purpose;
we are not just here for fellowship. Fellowship is
a legitimate purpose, but its just one of the five:
worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism
and ministry. These five purposes are modeled
in Acts 2, they are prayed for by Jesus in John 17,
they are explained by Paul in Ephesians 4, but
the best expression is the Great Commandment
and the Great Commission two from the Great
Commandment, three from the Great Commission.
Our phrase is A great commitment to the great
commandment and the great commission will grow
a great church. So when you get to that third level
of purpose renewal, or mission, things really start
taking off. All of a sudden weve got a mission bigger than yourselves.
Inevitably, when a church starts growing in this
way, you come to structural renewal, which is that
as you grow, your structure needs to change. A
human being needs to get a new bone structure
about every seven years; thats why bone marrow
is constantly sloughing off. The problem is that a
lot of churches and a lot of pastors want to start at
the wrong endthey want to start with structure.
They want to come into a church that is dying or
dead, maybe an old denominational church, and
the first thing they want to do is to change the
structure. I say, Whoafirst lets start with you.

Lets get your life revived and your life renewed.

Then well work on relational renewal, then on purpose renewal, and then well get to the structure.

Movements like the Vineyard are having to ask

questions about moving into more institutional
capacities; and yet it wants to hold onto its
characteristics as a movement, too. Talk of
institutions or structures can even feel like
a kind of betrayal of that identity as a movement. What does it look like to move from a
movement into an institution wisely?
I think you can take institutional elements into
your movement without becoming institutionalized. There is a big difference. You dont want to
become institutionalized. One of the things that
made Vineyard take off was the decentralization
of it. It was the spontaneous expansion of the
church. There were a lot of new church plants.
Of course, there was transfer growth, toothat
always happens when you have a strong charismatic leader; folks say, That guys got a vision, Im
going with him. But once that leader is no longer
around, what holds that group together? Vision
and values, nothing else. Actually, I remember talking with John a long time ago. He brought a bunch
of the guys together to try and add some structure,
and there was general rebellion! I would say that
what you want is a confederation. A confederation is different from a federation. It is made up of
totally autonomous groups that function together.

What sorts of things do you function together for?

The only purpose of a larger group, as I see it, is
three things. The first is identity. What do we stand
for? What is unique about us? What is the aspect
of the Gospel that we need to hold up, that we
feel the rest of the Church is ignoring? What part
are we supposed to speak up for? It can be a worship, signs and wonders, evangelism, postmodern
ministry, or whatever. God has different segments
of the Body speaking up about different areas that
we need.
Think about what has happened in the past:
every para-church organization in the last fifty
years got started because the Church was ignoring an important part of ministry. The Church
was ignoring students, so God raised up Campus

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a second reformation?

Crusade, Young Life and Youth for Christ. It was

ignoring men and women in the military, so he
raised up the Navigators. Now the thing about
para-church organizations is that they have the
right to specializebut the Church does not have
that right. The Church has to do it all. Because the
Church is the Body of Christ, it has to do worship,
fellowship, discipleship, ministry and evangelism.
And we have to give them equal emphasis. I
started saying fifteen years ago that the primary
issue of the twenty-first century would be church
health, not church growth. I still believe that. You
dont have to focus on growth; we have never done
that at Saddleback. Weve focused on health. If
my kids are healthy, they will grow. I dont have to
command my kids to grow. All living things grow.
If my children dont grow, something is terribly
wrong. The answer is balance. Just as our bodies
are made up of nine different systemsyou have
a skeletal system, respiratory system, central nervous system, digestive system, and so onwhen
all of those systems are in balance, thats called
health. If any of them get out of balance, thats
called dis-ease or disease. The doctors job is to
bring it back to health.

and quantify and credential, you get into all kinds

of controls. I would encourage all the leaders to
go back and read Roland Allens book from over
100 years ago, The Spontaneous Expansion of the
Church. That has been one of the fundamental
texts of my life. It helped me found Saddleback.

In the Body of Christ, we are a body, not a business. Im totally against the corporate model of

I think thats right. I think you have to say, What

was God doing then that was so unique, that he
still wants to do now? Actually, back in the early
days of the Vineyard I dont think it was so much
the emphasis on signs and wonders per se that
was so important as it was the openness to whatever the Spirit wants to do! That kind of openness
is even more important. Andif Im open to what
the Spirit wants to do, He might want to emphasize something else in the twenty-first century!
That whole issue is a real key to me.

organization. We are an organism, not an organization. We are a family, and families arent based
on policies, but on relationships, and the greater
the relationship, the greater the trust. When I first
got married to Kay, we had all these rules about
how you fold the towels, how you squeeze the
toothpaste. Ive been married thirty years now, and
we dont have all those rules now. The only rule is
Always tell the truth. The greater the relationship, the fewer rules you need.
So, as I look at Vineyard and I look at a movement
that God has blessed, I would say that you try
to create elements that preserve the vision and
values without creating the rules. The moment
you get into rules, you become a bureaucracy, and
thats the kiss of death. You start perpetuating the
survival of the organization itself. In a confederation, which is loosely knit with lots of different
elements, the primary purpose for associating
together is training, not control. Control kills an
organization, and when you start trying to qualify

It was central for Wimber too.

Really? I didnt know that. It certainly had a profound effect on me, back in the early 70s. Going
back to this thing about music, its interesting that
wherever God seems to be working, there comes
a plethora of new music. In the heady days of the
80s, almost all of the good music was coming out
of the Vineyard. Before that it was all coming out
of Calvary Chapel. Now it seems a lot of new music
coming out of Hillsong, or Soul Survivor, or places
like that.

Do you think the impetus for the new music

moves on because there is something new
God wants to do? In other words, maybe the
anointing for worship that once existed abates
because God is wanting to bring a certain
dynamism to new aspects of being the church?

And, of course, being concerned with evangelism

as I am, I note that one of the primary principles
of signs and wonders is that they attract people to
the Gospel. When you see God moving in an obvious power encounter, people watching say, Yay,
God! That is still true all around the world. I dont
know if its true so much in post-Christian areas
like England and Europe and even in America.
There I dont see people seeking the miraculous
so much as they are asking, Are Christians going
to care about the things we expect them to care
about: justice, poverty, illness, the works of Jesus.

One of the things we talk about at Saddleback is

this: A lot of people want to study the steps of
Jesus. I say lets study the stops of Jesus. What
did Jesus stop to do? What kinds of things did He
allow to interrupt His agenda? We need to have a
kind of openness to Lord, what do you want to
do next?
For example, we changed in significant ways
through the years at Saddleback. We have learned
an enormous amount about small groups from the
Chinese. They have taught us more than anybody
else. A real danger for places like Saddleback or
Willow Creek or Vineyard or Calvary Chapel is a
Not Invented Here mentalitythe presumption
that, if it didnt come out of here, it isnt any good.
That is something I fight constantly. I want to learn
from anybody. There has to be a willingness to say,
God loves to bless people I dont understand, that
I dont even agree with, and maybe I need to learn
from them. Its just being humble. Its like eating
fish; you take the meat and throw away the bones.
I tell that to pastors who come to our conferences:
You arent going to agree with everything we do.
I dont agree with everything we do! Wherever I
find people who are reaching people and growing
people and helping people get into ministry, helping people get into mission, living for the glory of
God, I say Amen, now teach me how to do it, too.

Youve begun to shift much of your focus to

international ministry in recent years. How did
that come about?
Thats true. The first ten years of Saddleback in
the 80s, I did almost no outside speaking. In the
90s things became more national, and we trained
about a quarter of a million pastors in America.
The church was still growingit tripled in size in
the 90s. But now in the 21st century, almost all my
time is spent in developing countries. God really
changed my heart about two years ago through
some personal things I went through.

continued on page 36

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image graciously supplied by Johhn McCollum John McCollum / elementville.com

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page 10 navigating change

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Navigating CHANGE
IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH
How Two Vineyard Pastors Have Taken their Congregations Through Change By Jason Chatraw

Much like we all go through tough

transitional times on an individual basis,
churches experience periods of transition,
as well. For many people in the church, change is
overwhelming and uncomfortable. Knowing how
to navigate a church through various transitions is
paramount for pastors, especially if they want to
maintain growth and health.

>

Cutting Edge asked a couple of pastorsRich

Nathan, senior pastor of the Columbus Vineyard
in Ohio, and Tri Robinson, senior pastor of the
Vineyard Boise in Idahowho have planted
churches and grown them to significant size,
about their secrets when it comes to making
successful transitions.

When you recognize a big change needs to be

made in your church, what action steps do you
begin to take?
Rich: I love living in reality, therefore I try at all
costs to get the facts.I read and listen to successful practitioners outside my church. I never
listen to theoreticians, or those who dont love
the church. I also listen to the counsel of key staff
and lay leaders.But for me, I generally cant move

consolidate gains, and anchor new approaches in

the culture.I spend a lot of time thinking through
how to build a case for the change and the way
that Im going to communicate this case to various
groups of people.
Tri: The problem for most pastors in dealing with
the need for transition is that they dont recognize
it. You have to train yourself to recognize it.
I remember watching the movie, The Right Stuff.
There was a scene that personifies what its like for
a pastor to lead his church through change. Chuck
Yeager goes up in his high speed test plane, but
he hasnt yet kicked in the afterburners. As hes
jetting along, suddenly everything starts shaking
and shattering and the instruments are flipping out
of control. It seems like everything is falling apart.
But actually, he is moving toward mach 1.
There is this invisible barrier that you cant see as
you approach the speed of sound. You cant see it,
but the symptoms are there. In the scene, Yeager
had a choice to make: throttle back and not go
through it or power forward and blast through it.
He decides to push through it and when he throttles forward, the ground crew hears this explosion.

forward without a deep personal conviction that

the Lord is calling for this change.I need to experience something of the cloud and the pillar of
fire.This, of course, is not necessary for all decisions or for all changes.But big changes, such as
the decision to build a new sanctuary, or rework
the churchs DNA, or a major theological shift (all
of them exceedingly rare) require a deep sense of
divine leading.

They thought he blew up, but what they actually

heard was the sound barrier breaking for the first
time. And then they show Yeager, who is now flying
smoothly toward mach 2.

After our leadership team determines that a

change needs to occur, I have found the approach
in the book Leading Change by John Kotter (from
the Harvard Business School) to be extremely
helpful. Kotter describes how to build a guiding
coalition, how to develop a strategy, how to communicate the vision, how to empower for broadbased action, how to generate short-term wins,

For me, the most important thing is recognizing

what that stress is. Its always something like,
Nobody knows my name any more or This
church is getting way too big. Many pastors dont
understand it, so they dont break through. They
dont want to make waves. The most difficult part
of change is identifying that youre actually up
against a barrier. And most of the time, the

When you feel the thing shaking and it seems like

it would be a lot easier to throttle back as a leader,
this can be a sign that you are about to break
through the barrier.

changes are generally structural changes.

In order for pastors to throttle through it, youve
got to make shifts in the culture, such as how you
spend your time, or who you invest in. You have to
create better management systems to handle the
problems. Those are all cultural shifts and structural changes that we all experience.

What has been the most difficult transition you

have had to navigate in the life of your church?
How did you get through it?
Rich: One of the most significant changes for our
congregation was being adopted into the Vineyard.
We were an independent non-denominational
church loosely affiliated with a small coalition
of other churches.We held a series of congregational meetings for nearly two years as we walked
through the change. We also had many of our
leaders attend John Wimber conferences over
the course of two years.And most helpfully, we
invited Lance Pittluck to come in to introduce our
congregation to the theology and practices of the
kingdom.
Tri: I just went through a difficult change, where I
had to create a whole new management team to
respond to problems that quickly flared up in the
church in order to prevent it from getting out of
control. I first of all analyzed it by myself and tried
to get a rational look at it, otherwise youre just
listening to complaints and hearing people say
hurtful things as opposed to understanding the
real issue. You have to get above that and get a
bigger view.
You have to go to the Lord in prayer and say,
Lord, what is the bigger issue and whats holding
it back? Many times, its a management issue.
Oftentimes, you arent able to change quickly
enoughand thats the problem.
In developing this management team, I got a
diverse group of people who think differently,

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navigating transitional waters

especially about solving problems. In the book

Good to Great, one of the important points of the
book I think is so crucial to pastoral leadership is
that you have to embrace conflict and chaos as
your friend. People dont like change because it
changes relationship structures on your team, and
thats never fun. It always takes confrontation, but
you have to think outside the box.

How do you sell the vision for a big change

in your church with the leaders? How does
it differ when you sell it to the rest of the
congregation?
Rich: As a general rule, I try to leak big changes
to influencers (in other words, I send up trial balloons to sharpen my thinking and to field test my
message).I deeply appreciate Malcolm Gladwells
book, The Tipping Point, concerning how massive
change takes place in various social settings.I
also hold a series of meetings for leaders in which
very frank discussion and a robust exchange of
ideas can occur.For large changes, I personally
lead those leaders meetings.It is important that
leaders hear directly from the senior pastor what
we are doing and why we are doing it. Concerning
people in the congregation, I believe in over-communicating change using a variety of communication devices including Sunday morning messages,
emails, coffees, vision meetings, brochures, bulletin inserts, and celebration meetings. I also like to
give congregation members an opportunity to ask
questions to trusted and trained leadership team
members who understand how to communicate
the vision.
Tri: I talk with my advisors and elders first
about the problem that the change is addressing.
Sometimes, Im not quite sure what to do, so we
discuss it first. And then, I resolve the vision within
myself. Once we formulate a plan, I take it to my
first line of pastors and leaders and then I go to the
rest of the staff before I go to the congregation.
When I go to the people, I always present the
problem. I say, Heres the situation. Its usually
a good problem, but its still a problem. And then
I say, This is what were doing about it. I dont
ask for their advice. Ive already figured out what
were going to do and just explain how were going

to get it done. People appreciate strong leadership

in that way.

How do you feel about change in general? Do

you like it? Does it pain you to make changes?
Rich: Some people are wired to like change for
changes sake. They just get tired of the same old
thing. Thats not me. I love change. I think most
large church pastors do. But I love change for a
purpose; change that will link more disconnected
people with Christ; change that will result in more
people understanding Gods Word or discovering
Gods calling for their lives. Im not particularly
interested in change in order to be novel or cutting
edge (no offense to this wonderful periodical!).
Tri: I know change is a necessary thing for a leader,
and I also know its necessary to help a church
grow and move ahead. Part of it is funfiguring
out a more effective way to do things. But I also
hate part of it. Sometimes, Ill call other pastors
who have gone through it before me and find out
how they made it. I always try to ask lots of practical questions about budget, schedules, service
times, facilities, staff, etc.

What advice would you give to church planters

who are in transitional phases and needing to
make big changes in their churches?
Rich: Use the Lord told me rarely. You have only
so many bullets in that gun and you dont want to
waste them. Nothing will shred your credibility or
deplete your equity more than being consistently
wrong when you speak in the Lords name.

When all three are working together: character,

competence, and care, change is pretty easy to
bring about in a church.
Tri: Dont be above asking people for help who
have been where you are. Dont be afraid of
changeand lead through it with confidence.
END

Additional Resources
Revolutionary Leadership: How
the Synergy of Vision, Culture,
and Structure Can Transform Your
Church
by Tri Robinson
Good to Great
by Jim Collins

The Tipping Point: How Little

Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell

Leading Change
by John Kotter

Get lots of advice; talk with others. Remember

we have the mind of Christ. This is a plural,
community verse. In other words, we need other
peoples input.
Also, remember that peoples willingness to follow
a leader is based upon the three Cs of leadership:
character, competence, and care. People will follow
someone who has a reputation for honesty and
transparency in decision-making. That is character. People also want to know that your decisions
generally turn out well. That is competence.And
people will follow someone who has personally
ministered to them or their family. That is care.

00:14:54:04

page 12 transitioning to a culture of love

00:14:54:04

Transitioning to a Culture of Love

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Tri Robinson is the pastor of the Vineyard Boise in Idaho, a growing church
with over 3,000 regular Sunday attendees. The following is an excerpt that
talks about change from Tri Robinsons book, Revolutionary Leadership.

As our church began to grow, many exciting

things began to emerge out of the church
culture, such as a homeless ministry. But
I also began to notice that our culture was not
entirely healthy. (While we had bumper stickers
that stated, Come as you are! Youll be loved!
But, somehow, it didnt always seem like we were
reaching out in love to each other as well as newcomers. So, I challenged our people to remove
those stickers until they actually lived those
words.) I began to feel ineffective as a leader,
which emerged out of what I saw as a deficit in our
ability to fulfill our God-given vision. That vision
for us is developing authentic followers of Christ.
The burning question in my heart was this: Are
peoples lives really being transformed? I wasnt
sure that I was seeing the fruit of this and it disturbed me.

>

If you want to build a community of love, you

really have to be a community of trust. People
who truly love each other are people who trust
each other, who are faithful, who understand the
vision and purpose, working together with one
heart and one mind.
One of the things Ive observed in churches is
that so many of them experience leadership
explosions. Every time there is a blow up or
hiccup in the leadership team, it sets the church
back, sometimes a year or two. The church never
has the opportunity to build momentum and move
into a place of great productivity and fruitfulness.
From the very beginning of our church, I recognized the need to build leaders from the ground
up, to home grow our people so that they not
only trusted and understood me, but also trusted

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transitioning to a culture of love

and understood my passion for building a church

that disciples people into Christian maturity.
Early in our church planting adventure, I discovered another mistake many pastors make. In their
rush to assemble a leadership team, they select
elders too early. One Christian leader suggested
to me in the beginning stages of our church that
I wait to appoint elders in our church for at least
seven years. He said I would not even know who
was going to stick around until I gave the church
some time to develop. I took that advice and
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began building councils, but not eldership boards.

There was accountability, but in the first phases
they were transitory leaders.
As I looked to the Bible for a model that would
work in building our church, I found it in Luke 6.
Up to that point in Jesus ministry, He had been
doing the entire ministry Himself. He had done
all the teaching, performed all the healings and
miracles. He had yet to select His 12 disciples. But
He was preparing His followers for what was next,
and this particular passage deals with the day that
Jesus finally selected them. (Luke 6:12-19)
Two facets surrounding this passage jumped out at
me. First, I noticed there were four reasons people
gathered around Jesus. They came because they
wanted to be taught and learn truth. They came
because they wanted to be healed from whatever
it was that was afflicting them emotional, physical or spiritual diseases. They came to be set
free from the bondage in their lives. They came
because they wanted to be close and touch Him
because power was coming from Him. Essentially,
these are the four reasons anybody comes to
church. They come to be taught, to be healed, to
be set free, and to be close to the Lord.
The second thing I noticed was that there were
three designations of groups of people. First, there
were the throngs (or multitudes or crowds). There
was the mass of people who were coming from
all over to see Jesus. But of that mass, there was
another group that was designated as the multitude of disciples, possibly the 70 or the 120 that are
talked about later in the Gospels. I see a difference
in these people when compared to the throngs.
These people had already committed to following
Jesus. They did not show up just for this event;
they traveled with Him, following Him from town to
town. It was out of the multitudes of disciples that
Jesus chose 12 and named them disciples. And we

know of those twelve, there were three Peter,

James, and John who spent extra time with Jesus.
They were with Him at the transfiguration. They
were with him on a hillside over Jerusalem when
He was talking about the last days. They were the
ones He sent ahead to prepare for the Passover.
They ultimately became the high profile leaders of
the church of Jerusalem in its early stages.
Each person from all three of these groups came
for the same reasons at one point in their journey.
However, there had to be a transition between
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not just get to get. This is how I define someone

who has made this transition. I also recognized
that in order to have a multitude of disciples, you
have to have people in place who have already
made the choice to disciple others.
In my mind, the 12 disciples are these people who
are discipling. In the case of the local church, this
is the lay leadership of the church, people leading
the small groups, the nursery, the mens ministry,
etc. They are people who are stepping into this
second arena and saying, I get to give. Out of
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a throng mentality and a multitude of disciples

mentality. And there was also a transition between
the multitudes of disciples to one of the 12 disciples. My heart has always been to make disciples
authentic, mature, spirit-filled, reproducible
Christians. So, I asked myself, what is the difference in these groups?
I realized that the throngs are consumers. They
come to get. They come because they have needs
and they want to get those needs met. They come
because they want to be healed, they want to be
delivered, they want to be close to God. They want
for themselves and they have great needs. All of us
who are authentic Christians were members of the
throngs at one point. We all had needs to be met,
because until we received, we really had nothing
to give. It can cause a church a lot of strife when
empty people are trying to give what they do not
possess. I wanted to set up a system by which I
could help people develop into mature Christians.
When people truly experience the love of God and
therefore have that love to give, then a true community of love, care, and outreach can exist. I knew
I couldnt do it by myself and Jesus didnt do it by
Himself either. He trained and deployed this group
of people to carry out the work of the Kingdom.
As a result of these principles from Luke 6,
I believed the Lord gave me a process and a
plan to usher people from the throng mentality
into discipleship.
The multitudes of disciples were the ones who
made the shift from a throng mentality to a discipleship mentality, which was this: I want to
be taught so I can teach. I want to be healed so I
could be an instrument to heal others. I want to be
set free so I might lend a hand to help others be
set free from their bondage and addiction. I want
to be close to the Lord so I can usher others into
the Lords presence. I want to get in order to give,

this group of disciplers there are some that begin

to emerge as the three. The people who fit into
this category become the eldership, or leaders of
leaders, of the church.
In processing this information, we developed a
system at Vineyard Boise where people could
progress from crowd mentality into discipleship.
It also provided opportunity for the Lord to reveal
to us those who were leading so we could pull
them into the leadership arena. I had no interest
in guessing who my elders might be by measuring
whether they were charismatic people, or had a
good business background, or seemed to understand organization. John Wimber always said, You
know your elders because they eld, meaning you
know who your elders are because they are doing
the work of the ministry more than the others.
END

00:20:34:06

IX

page 14 getting lift off

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page 15

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>

What is the typical church planter who

is married and has children unprepared
for in terms of his time?

I think the biggest thing, for almost all church

planters Ive met, is that they are not realistic
about how much time and energy has to go into
gathering. They do a little bit, they meet a few
people, and they think really aggressive work is
contacting ten people a week or soand thats not
enough. To give you an example of what I mean, I
recently met a guy in England who planted a new
church in a new area of London, England. This was
not a Vineyard. He had a small team. In 18 months
he built the church to over 150 people. And heres
how he did it: he walked and prayed through
every single street and over every single house in
that whole area that he was trying to reach, and
then he gave a really nice little invitation to the
church to every single house. That means that
over the course of 18 months he hand-delivered
over 200,000 invitations100,000 of which
he delivered himself. His team did the second
100,000. Now what that works out to, if you figure
going out every single day for eighteen months
with no breaks, no days off, no
holidaysis close to 500 invitations
every single day.
Now Im not saying thats the right
strategy for everybody; what I am
saying is that thats the right amount
of effort and focus on gathering
that has to happen in order to get a
church off the ground.

So gathering is where we really

underestimate the time required?
More than anything else, because
churches need to gather a good number of people quickly on the front
end. Your pioneers who come with
you only have a limited amount of
patience, and if you are not over the
hump by a certain amount of time,
they start bailing and then you have
to start all over again.

So time is not on your side in this.

I tell planters that they need to think of the first
12 to 18 months as being absolutely nuts, so that
you can back off after that, and not be constantly
in danger of thinking Are we going to survive? I

think what I am saying is that you need to gather

in such a way that the survival of the church
question is settled within about 18 months.

You know right then and there that you are

going to make it? Youve put the time and
energy in, youve prayed it through, youve
channeled your passion for this thing into
gathering, and enough people have bought
into it to make it go.
There is no question that it is really hard. Doing it
is going to be just grueling. But, heres the thing:
I dont think that its ultimately as difficult as a
five year span of never being sure you are going to
survive, going up, going down, never quite getting
there, always wondering, people getting demoralized and leaving, never getting enough momentum. I think its better to suffer for a very short
time on the front end, going full-out on gathering,
and then you can live a regular life after that. I
think that in some ways, the first 18 months you
have to decide you are not going to live a sustainable lifestyle. That its a sprint.

I heard a Vineyard church planter say once

that hed talk to 100 people a week. Im not
sure I even see 100 people in a week. How do
you fit this into your style, who you are, the
demographics around you?
No matter how you do it, who you are, or what
your style is, you have to understand from the
beginning that a church plant is in some ways
playing a numbers game, in that not everybody is
going to be called to your church. Not everybody
is going to fit with your church. Not everybody is
going to respond. So if you are going to get and
keep something survivable, which is probably
over 100 people, you really do have to think that
you are going to want to contactin one way or
anotherthousands, in order to get 100. Your percentages are not going to be high.

It seems like for most church planters, you go

into it thinking, This is going to work. Theres
no Vineyard here, theres a need for one, I
know Gods called me to this place, weve got
what we need to make this happen. You have
maybe an over-inflated sense of yourself and
what you can accomplish, and you dont really
acknowledge that many people, maybe most
people, are not going to be into what you are
doing.
I think thats true. There arent that many churched

people these days who are ready to just jump into

a Vineyard church. Most of the people who wanted
to be in something like a Vineyard found it and
joined it a couple of decades ago! In the meantime, a lot of other churches have moved toward
the Vineyard in the way that they do things, so we
are not as unique as we were then. Thinking there
is going to be a flood of people from other churches is not realistic, nor desirable. That means that
you are looking to reach unchurched people. Some
of them might be Christians but have dropped
out of church attendance. Some might not be
Christians at all.

Given that, how would you think about your

time at the different stages of being bi-vocational and then full-time with the church?
I think that in the beginning, if you are bi-vocational, you need to think of the way you live as the
same way people live who hold two secular jobs.
In a sense, both jobs are full-time in the way you
must work at them. Its not sustainable long-term,
but for a good purpose many people do it all the
time. If you go into it thinking, Ive got half a job
that brings in our income, and half
a job doing the church plant, I suspect thats not going to be enough.

Does it work to think, Ill go at a

slower pace because I have less
time?
It has to be more compressed than
that, because of the expectations
that average people have about
churches. At least in North America,
most people will not think that a
church of 40 or even 50 is an acceptable size of church in terms of what
it can offer and do, the security of
its future and so forth. Theyll put up
with a church that size if they think
its on the way up. But they wont
think of that size as acceptable. You
can find some small niche groups,
highly creative people who thrive on
churches that are small, for example. But thats
not mainstream people. So youve got to have
more than 100 people for the community to think,
This is a real church that is going to be around for
me to count on. The thing is, if you are not there
within three or four years of starting, they start

00:26:52:01

page 16 getting lift off

00:26:52:01
panicking and thinking, This is never going to
get there. They start asking questions about the
leadership. They start looking around and jumping
off. They start thinking, Maybe this is the Titanic,
not the Queen Mary. At that point, you start going
backwards.

follow this person? That is going to be based on

how they relate to you in informal ways, so there
has to be lots of opportunity for those. You reach
out aggressively to everyone, and then as you find
the ones whose hearts you think might be ready,
you spend lots of informal time with them.

How then do you approach time and gathering

so that you are not just this marketing person,
so that it is still spiritually driven? How do you
stay motivated by the Spirit, not by numbers
and marketing?

They want to see what you are like when no

ones looking.

I think it starts from your planning right from the

get-go. You develop a strategy that is based on
what youve received from God in prayer and what
fits you as a person. But you pursue it with the
degree of aggressiveness and time-focus that Im
talking about.
Second, I think there has to be a realization that
marketing alone wont do it. There has to be substance to it. You can contact 200,000 people, but if
they dont find anything when they get there, if you
are not willing to spend time with them, if theres
no compelling vision, if the spiritual atmosphere is
not positive when they get there, its not going to
help. In a sense what you are doing really is not so
much marketing as looking for the people whose
hearts God has prepared, and who he is calling to
be a part of this community that you are building.
But you dont know who they are or where they
are, and what you are doing is presenting your
vision from God to as many people as you possibly
can, just so you can find out who those people are.
I think its significant, and not to be overlooked,
that the guy in London I talked about was not just
going door to door handing out invitations. He was
praying over every single house, and over every
single street, the whole time. So in a sense he is
not just handing out 200,000 invitations; he is
praying over 200,000 houses, which is an awful lot
of prayer.
Another thing that church planters often dont realize when they start is how important the informal
part of their life is compared with the formal part.
The get-togethers over coffee, the movie nights,
the parties or neighborhood round-robin dinners
are all far, far more important in the early stages
than the formal meetings. One of the reasons that
is the case is because people are making their
decision on whether to join you and be part of this
community on a very personal basis do I want to

Very seldom are they making decisions to join at

this point on the basis of your great preaching or
your fancy programs. Even great preachers dont
usually start there as planters. Your music isnt
slick. Its all just very personal.
What I say to church planters in the early stage,
when they ask about sermon preparation, is to
try and get about 18 months of sermon outlines
done before you plant. Do all the prep work ahead
of time. Or use the outlines from other people
that you can adapt and make your own. In the
early years, you have to do a lot of preaching with
almost no effort, because you cant usually afford
to put the kind of time into your sermons while
you are in the gathering phase that you will later
on, unless you start with a really big team that
includes a lot of gatherers. You have to find short
cuts, in the short term.
As you are gathering people, you gather material for your sermons, and the content is more
connected to your heart. You make up for the
prep time lost with people-time gained. You lose
exegesis time but gain time in the lives of people,
and you gain passion for seeing this thing lift off
the ground.

So how much time should you spend in sermon

prep as a church planter?
Per week, in the first 18 months? About an hour
a week. Seriously. Of course, you cannot do that
unless you have done a chunk of it ahead of time,
or you are using outlines from something like the
Vineyard Resource CD or other respected sources.

What about when you are at 50 in attendance?

You have 50, and you are trying to get the next
50, and you are at the stage where what your
Sunday services are like matters a lot.
Then you might move to a couple afternoons a
week doing sermon prep, but no more. Of course,
I always tell planters, Look, dont do all the

preaching yourself. If you are close to some other

Vineyard churches, you should make stronger use
of guest preachers. Invite people from some of
the other churches to come and preach for you.
They will bring the best things theyve ever done,
and itll free up your time. That way, when you are
preaching, you can be better, because youve two
or three weeks to work on it. The difficulty is that
it is too easy to spend too much time in the office
with the books, and not enough time gathering.

My experience is that thats been the default

thing with time. Among all the things you need
to get done or give yourself to, the preaching
category inflates to fill the time. You can end
up spending a lot of time with that and feel
like you are still working.
You can spend a lot of time on that just because
it something you can control. The difficulty with
gathering is that you are going out there and
presenting yourself and your vision, but you dont
have much control over the outcome. You are getting bigger percentages of No, I dont think so
than you are Yes, I think I want to be with you.
Its very tempting to polish your preaching instead!

I started to find that people received my

preaching better when I was spending less
time on it. Now I try to meditate on a passage,
get it into me during the week, and then let it
fly. I dont even type out my notes. I just create
an outline.
Right. Now, I hasten to say that there does come
a point where you have to get good at preaching.
Its a significant issue! But I think that before you
worry too much about how good of a preacher you
are, youve got to get some people to preach to.

What about time with people? Who do you give

your time to in the beginning?
You give the vast majority of your time to people
who are not in the church yet or who are just coming into the church. I think newcomer follow-up
should be very personal on the front end, doing
it mostly yourself. The little bit that is left over
you give to your key leaders primarily, and those
leading teams. Your focus with them is on encouraging them, helping them stay together and stay
focused, and drawing them into the gathering
activity, and not too much else. This means that
one of the things you have to do on the front end

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getting lift off

is to keep things simple. Do a few things well. Be

very careful about other activities and events that
will take time, energy and money but will not help
you gather, even things that you ultimately want to
do. You just have to say, Later.

Otherwise you are polishing brass on the

Titanic?
Exactly. This is interesting: Its in your two year
plan, your strategic planning done before you even
start the church, that some of your key decisions
are made that are going to determine the answers
to the time question. Its also in the putting
together of your team. Of the church plants Ive
coached in the last five to ten years, the biggest
nonfunctional use of their time in almost every
case has been resolving conflicts with team members who should never have come with them in the
first place. Almost every single church planter has
spent an enormous amount of time and energy on
one or two people who came from the beginning,
who they knew from the beginning somewhere
inside themselves should not have been part of
the plant.

A lot of time is spent with people who want to

process with you because they are disgruntled
or dissatisfied. That takes time and emotional
energy.

of time resolving conflict. When you do have to do

so, you want to do it quickly and in a way that is
going to increase peoples trust. If that means you
have to apologize quickly and say, Sorry; I messed
up, then do it. You cannot afford to spend weeks
and weeks and weeks resolving conflict. Conflicts
need to be resolved in a day or two.

How much time do you want to spend with

your leaders?
I would say that you want to meet with them as a
group at least once a month for a couple of hours.
Then presuming that you have a dozen or less
leaders at the start, I would rotate it around so
that you meet with each one individually about
once every three months. Everyone is working in
the meantime. Anybody who has to be met with
every three days is too high-maintenance; you cannot afford them as a leader. You need to have as
leaders people who will feel like a chance to meet
with you one-on-one once a quarter and be all
together once a month is plenty. When you meet
with them you give them direction for their life and
ministry assignments enough to keep them busy
for the next three months! You are not holding
their hand the whole time in between.

What about in a more team approach? Does

that change the picture in terms of time?

Right. So you have to be very careful in selecting your team on the front end. Generally what
happens if you take the wrong person is that
they make trouble for other people or with other
people, and then you are spending time dealing
with the other people too. It ripples out and eats

My feeling is that the once-a-month group meeting

is the team meeting. At that meeting you discuss
whats going on, any problems, how are we doing?
Whats next? I dont know why youd need to meet
more often; anything you decide in that once a
month meeting ought to be big enough and chal-

time like crazy. When it comes to putting your team

together on the front end, if you have any doubts
about somebody, dont take them. So many church
planters struggle with too much time and energy
going into something that doesnt even help them
accomplish the task.

lenging enough to keep everybody busy for the

next month.

What if you are also friends with these people?

Yes. Thats just part of being human. It does help if

You can spend friendship time with them, if youve

got it. But Im talking about Heres what you have
to do. This is the work side of life. Though I would
add that one of the reasons that Im saying to keep
that kind of a pace for these meetings is to keep
the business meeting time low so you have more

you have a good plan on the front end, and you get
everybodys expectations clear at the beginning, so
they know what you are going to do and not do. It
does help to have a good coach who can tell you,
Dont do that, its going to be a mistake before
you do it! You do not want to spend a huge amount

time for informal meetings and parties and gettogethers. You might actually see these leaders at
parties, events, retreats, etc. a lot, lot more than
the two formal contacts every three months that
Im describing. The point is that the official meetings are kept real lean and mean so you have a lot

You are going to have struggle no matter who

you have on your team anyway.

of room for the unofficial, social stuff.

You put it on the calendar? These arent informal Lets just get together and hang together
and talk about whats going on?
Right. As a small church, you want to have social,
informal stuff going on all the time. Youll have
small group meetings and social events and parties. That needs to be happening multiple times a
month. So you are crossing paths with your leaders at all sorts of other things. If your strategy is
to hand out invitations at the local baseball game,
youll be together at the front end and maybe at
the end to go out for ice cream and story-telling.
So relationships grow as you are working together
on somethinghanding out balloons at a downtown festival, or whatever it is.

How does family fit into all this? How do you

do this so that your family doesnt get the
short end of the stick?
I think that if you are church planting, you and
your spouse and older kids need to understand
up front that for a short period of time, you are
not going to live a normal life. You are going to
be living on a shoestring relationally. Again, thats
another good argument for going at it full tilt for 18
months and then being able to ease back, instead
of stringing it out for five years! I do think that
you have to realize that this is not going to be a
no pressure on the family situation. It is going
to be pressurized, especially on the front end.
Everybodys going to have to invest, in the hopes
of getting the church to the place where the pressure can be off. Once the church is established and
growing and youve got 300 or so people, you can
actually put together a schedule where you are not
working the majority of the nights, where youve
got your full days off, where vacations are set and
predictable. Then you become more like everyone
else who has a regular job. You are not bi-vocational any more. However, you cant live like that at
the beginning, starting from scratch. You are going
to be working a lot of hours.
One thing that means is that planters might want
to think about when is a good time to do this, in
terms of family. I generally encourage people with
teenagers not to think about planting a church

00:37:21:09

page 18 getting lift off

00:37:21:09
while their kids are in those years. Teenagers
are less flexible and more needy than just about
any other stage. They need, by and large, bigger
churches with youth groups rather than church
plants. They generally have a hard time changing
locations, changing schools, changing friends.
Unless you have a special situation and unless
your teenagers have truly agreed, I think thats a
span of years to stay put. In general, with children,
you want your family to be at a point in time where
they can maintain healthy relationships with not a
lot of energy. So its not that you cannot plant
with kids. But you just have to be aware of the
stress levels.

Depending on your house and situation, you can

have a lot of the get-togethers at your house. For
the first six months with a first baby, they are
very mobile and you can be with them and still
be out and about. After that, you have to find
other options.

Given that you are doing the hard push for 18

months to two years, how can you stretch your
time best, especially with young kids?

around the activities the kids are involved in

sports, music, dance, etc. So that part gets easier,
but juggling all their activities and your own needs
gets harder. I do think planters need to be realistic
and realize that just doing those things that one
can do with children in tow wont be enough, in
terms of gathering. The numbers of people you are
meeting are just not high enough.

If you have young kids who are not in school yet,

one of the best things you can do is to think in
terms of spending time with your family in the
mornings. Most people think of spending time with
family in the evenings, but you want to switch it
around. Mornings are better for kids anyway, and
most of the people you want to contact are working at that time anyway, or in classes. Thats a
good time to be available for your kids. So flip the
schedule around.

How many nights, in the first 18 months,

would you think of being out of the house?
Five or six.

So if you are bi-vocational, what do you do?

You go to work all day, you grab a sandwich,
and then you are gone.
Well, I think its pretty impossible to do a full-time,
9-5 job and then do a church plant. I think you
need a job thats more part-time on the front end
if possible, 30-35 hours a week rather than 40+,
so that you have some hours to play with. Thats
another good reason not to go into a church plant
with debt. Debt starts forcing you to work longer
hours, and then somethings got to give.

You are going to want to leverage your time

towards being with people, which will take
out evenings and maybe lunches. So it could
be a simple as saying no to breakfasts
with people.

One of the things I was finding was that church

planting and family can overlap. Our library
has a story hour for kids on Saturday morning.
I would take the kids, and while I was there I
was meeting people.
Yes. And it works even better when they get to
be school age, because then there are other adults

What about when you are working from home

and dont have a church office?
One of the biggest difficulties is the whole boundary between when you are at home and available
and when you are at home and not available. I
think that in general it is better not to work from
home except when you are having people over.
If you dont have an office, you find the nearest
coffee shop and bring your cell phone and laptop
and make that your office. You dont want to be
home with your kids and have to say, Im sorry, I
cant respond to you now, Im trying to work. That
doesnt work; its better to just not be there. That
way, when you are home, you are fully engaged
with the family.

Thats been the biggest hard thing for us, having everything rolled up together, so its hard
to distinguish whats family and whats church.
Its hard for the kids to figure out.
Little kids cant figure it out, and older kids dont
want to, so you really have to create those demarcations yourself. That way when they ask, Wheres
Dad tonight? or Wheres Mom tonight? the
answer can be, Out working, and everybody
understands what that means. And you were there
that morning with them, so its all right.

What are some practical tools of the trade you

can give us to manage our time when we dont
have to clock in, dont have a boss to evaluate
us. How do we keep from procrastinating and
do the right things?
Number one, understand what you really need
to do and make sure those things get done first.
Number two, anything you find yourself wanting to procrastinate about, do right away, first
thing. Procrastination takes up energy and time;
you are better off just getting it over with. Third,
never do anything alone if you can help it. Always
bring someone else along. That way you are doing
double-duty. You are training a leader, but you are
also meeting with this newcomer, talking with this
person who is thinking about giving their life to
Jesus, etc. Fourth, make long term plans and stick
to them. Make a plan for the month and a plan for
the week, so you know what you are going to do.
Having to decide every day, What am I going to
do today? is deadly. It should already be decided.
When you wake up in the morning, you should
already know whats going to happen. On the
other hand, dont plan things too tightly, because
you want to have flexibility for the spontaneous
and the unplanned things.
When people from church call or contact you, you
want to respond quickly. A lot of times, people will
call and say, I want to have a meeting with you.
The first thing you do is to try and have the meeting right then. If someone calls me or talks to me
at church and says, Id like to talk to you some
time; can we have a meeting? my strategy is to
have it right then if at all possible. If you talk on
the phone right then, or you sit down after church,
nine times out of ten you handle the whole thing
in ten or fifteen minutes. It also gives people the
impression of responsiveness, which they like.
You are available to them right away. If you set up
meetings with them, no meeting lasts less than an
hour. They spend twenty minutes getting down to
business, twenty minutes doing business, and you
are going to spend the last twenty minutes trying
to get things wrapped up. Occasionally you know
its not going to be this way, but try. When I do
schedule meetings with people, I decide how long
I want them to be, and I schedule another meeting
afterwards, unless its a meeting I really want to
have open-ended. Schedule it, even if its a meeting with yourself. Then you can say, Im sorry, I
have another meeting now.

getting lift off

page 19

One of the things you have to keep in mind,

though, at the end of all this, is that the
business you are in is people. If people are
trying to get hold of you and they are finding that
its difficult or that they are not getting responded
to, their frustration level will rise very quickly. So
if people call and leave a voice mail or write an
email, our rule around here is that they should be
responded to within 24 hours. At the very least,
they need to get a message that says, Im on
vacation, but I will respond to you by such-andsuch. Thats important.
If you give yourself focus, and you dont get too
wordy or perfectionist about it, youd be surprised
at what you can do. I came back from vacation
a couple of weeks ago and I had something like
150 emails waiting for me, not counting the junk.
I knew there were going to be a lot waiting, so the
day I came back I set aside a couple of hours for
emails. I had dealt with every single one of those
emails, one way or the other, by noon. So dont
procrastinate.

Lets say you are a slow learner and a

procrastinator, have been doing a slow build,
have made some mistakes over time, and you
are trying to have a family and life intact at the
end of the day. Is there hope?
Sure theres hope, just like there is for someone
who falls down and bruises himself. Is there hope
for walking? Sure. You get up, dust yourself off, figure out what you did wrong, and you go at it again.
END

00:43:46:05

00:43:46:05

XII

THE ART OF GETTING THINGS DONE

II

III

IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

XI

XII

II

III

AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR AND CONSULTANT DAVID ALLEN

IV

We live in a world full of stress, commitments,

(Viking, 2001), as well as a more recent follow-up,

massive amounts of information, to-do lists

Ready For Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for

that are always growing, and emails multiplying in

Work and Life (Viking, 2003). Articles about Allen

our in-box. All of these things and more are true

have appeared in Fortune magazine, the Wall

among church leaders, especially those who

Street Journal, Wired magazine, NPR, and the

are engaged in new church start-ups.

BBC. Allen has coached top executives at

In order to help us think through these

challanges, we talked with David Allen,
who Fast Company magazine calls a personal
productivity guru and one of the worlds most
influential thinkers on productivity. He has

Microsoft, the World Bank, the U.S. Navy, and

scores of Fortune 500 companies. He now travels
throughout the world consulting, coaching, and
teaching public seminars on organizational workflow and personal productivity.

written the best-selling book Getting Things

We spoke with him from his home in

Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Ojai, California.

00:45:16:05

page 22 the art of getting thigs done

00:45:16:05

>

What are the key concepts that you

would want someone who is coming to
your material for the first time to grasp?

I think the key concept is capturing, clarifying and

managing the massive number of commitments a
person makes at multiple horizonswith themselves and everybody else. Most people simply
dont realize how many commitments they have
made, and the level of stress and distraction they
live with when they are not responsible to them.
Theyre trying to sit on top of this horse, but they
find themselves being driven by the horse instead
of guiding it.

So they have all sorts of things spinning

around in their heads as a result of these
various commitments, and need a way of
capturing them.
Not only do you need to capture them, but you
also need to clarify what exactly they mean to you.
So, for example, you go outside and say, The yard
needs mowing. Now, a yard that needs mowing
lets you know very easily what you need to do.
But if you walk out and say, I think I might need
a gardener, now you have just stepped into a
whole different world. Now you actually have to
think. Now you have a project called research
gardeners to see if you actually want to get one,
and if so, how. Now, every time you walk out into
your yard, you feel a certain pressure. Thats the
difference between mow your yard and do I get
a gardener? Most people dont realize that this
involves knowledge-work, and it takes real effort.
Its the concrete moves of actually having to think.
You have to actually sit down and think about what
done means for this project, and you also have
to decide what doing looks like. Thats how you
get things done: you define what done means
and you decide what doing looks like. Neither
one of those conclusions show up already prepared for you.

A lot of people, Im guessing, handle these

decisions by pushing them off to the side and
trying to ignore them.
Most people finally decide what doing looks like
and what done means in crisis. In fact, productive behaviors actually show up in crisis. In a crisis
you have focus, lack of distractions, youre highly
engaged toward the desired outcomethats
high performance behavior. The problem is that

its coming out of fight/flight, your forebrain has

shut down and youre not living with any kind of
relaxed intelligence. Now you are living your life in
a highly reactive, knee-jerking way. Most people,
for example, make decisions about what to do with
elder care for their parents when the heat forces
them to, not when they first become aware that
this is going to be an issue. So, the big paradigm
shift required is this: learning to make decisions
about capturing and clarifying stuff when it first
comes to your attention as opposed to when the
heat forces you to.

how are your family relationships? And, by the

way, how is the yard? And, oh, by the way.So,
yes, knowing that you are serving God is at least
going to give you the motivation to sit down and
say, Gee, Im burning the toast and Im yelling at
my spouse, which doesnt seem like a Christian
thing to do, which may turn you back around to
say, How then do I deal with this practically?
with some internal standards about quality of life.
The most spiritual people I know are some of the
most grounded, practical, get-it-done people on
the planet.

Is one of the things unique about modernity

that weve made so many more commitments
than in generations past?

For the person who is saying, What youre

talking about is exactly what I need to do,
what are the basic tools he or she needs to
start working with?

Most people reading Cutting Edge have, in the last

72 hours, taken in more change-producing, project
creating and priority-shifting information than
their parents got in a month, some of them even
in a year. The truth is that when things change,
that impacts all of your projects and priorities.
Most people havent trained themselves to look
around and ask, Which priorities are now more
important, and which projects do I now need to
get rid of? If they dont do that, its a formula for
blow-up. People simply have a limited capacity
to manage a certain number of commitments. So
whats different about modernity is that, first, a lot
more input is coming at us that generates more
potential commitments and, second, a great deal
more of intense thinking is required to clarify how
we want to respond to those commitments.

A lot of time management systems say that

the key is getting a better big picture, or clarifying your values, and that the appropriate
responses will follow.
You do need to do those things. But those are not
the only horizons. My purpose is to serve God
is not going to help you with deciding which of
the 2,000 emails youve got backed up should be
answered first. It will help a little bit. It will help
you define the vision you want to be fulfilling out
there, which will help you define some objectives
and goals you set to make sure you are expressing your work for God, which is going to help you
define the thirty to a hundred projects you actually
have in the real world to make that happen, and
thats going to help you a lot in finding the 160200 next action steps youve got for any of those
projects. But, by the way, hows your health? And

You need an in-basket and a pen and paper, so

you can first of all capture all the stuff you commit
to when you make the commitments. You need
capture-buckets where you can capture these
commitments in retrievable ways. Thats because
the most irretrievable place for filing something is
in your brain. The mind retrieves things based on
how recent it was and how much emotional content you have tied to it, and thats a crappy way to
run a filing system. Your head is for having ideas,
not for holding them.
Everybody has felt themselves up against the wall
where they have so many things in their head
that they feel forced to sit down and make a list.
If they actually understood why that helps, theyd
never keep anything in their heads again! If you
use your brain for filing, you end up not finishing
things when you think of them. And the older you
get, the ideas you have for what to do with your
church arent going to come to you at church; they
are going to leak out at the beach, on the bus, and
in other strange places. You need to have tools to
capture ideas, commitments, things to do, things
you then need to think about and decide what
they mean.
You need to then train yourselfonce youve
learned to capture things in an in-basket or a
listto go down each one of these things and
decide much more discreetly what exactly each
one of those things means to you and what your
commitments are about them. Is this item a crazy
idea that you might want to do someday? Or is it
something you are committed to move on right
now? Is it trash? Is it reference material? This is

the point where you sit down and get more

discreet about what things mean to you.

And you have to set aside blocks of time to

do that.
For the typical professional these days, it takes
somewhere between 30 to 90 minutes a day just
to do that. It takes on average about half a minute
per item to decide and organize. Then, once youve
decided what to do with it, if you arent going to
act on it right then, you need to keep track of it
somewhere. If Ive decided I now need to make a
call about my new gardener, but not right now, I
need to have an organizing tool for keeping track
of things like calls that have to wait until I am near
a phone or have time.
The process of picking the thing up, deciding that
the next step is to make a phone call, and then
putting it into some list of phone calls to make
whether you type it into a category in Outlook, or
write it on a page in a planner, or throw it into a
file folder called Calls to Makethat takes about
half a minute per item, if you average it all out.

But in some ways, you are still talking about

something different than the person who has
tried prioritizing things in their Daytimer.
Nearly every to-do list Ive ever seen is usually
nothing more than an incomplete list of stillunclear stuff. Its either attracting or repulsing you
every time you look at it. The problem with most
to-do lists is that you did not finish the thinking
so every time you look at it, you are reminded
subliminally that youve got thinking to do that you
havent done yet. And all that does is stress you
out even more! And the list is incomplete to begin
with. So your head ends up being the only system
you trust, and now youve got this extra thing out
there that you trying to keep up but you are not
really keeping it up, so its out of date. And all its
doing is creating guilt and beating you up every
time you look at it.
Thats the problem. The problem is not the tool.
The problem is that people are populating these
tools with information thats incomplete, inconsistent, and only half thought-through. Therefore its
not a system. A system is complete, current and
consistent. Every phone call you need to make in
your life needs to be listed someplace you can see
when you are at phone and have time. If you dont

have that, you dont have a system.

Most people dont worry about where they need
to be and when because they trust that they can
look at their calendar. The problem is that 95% of
their life is not calendared! If they understood the
principle they use with their calendar, theyd realize they could get everything else out of their head
just like they got the stuff for their calendar out of
their head, and put that information in a place they
trust the same way they trust their calendar.

You mentioned in the book that one of the

things youve done with some executives is
just taken them out and buy them a good filing
cabinet.
Yes. One of the first people I coached 25 years
ago didnt even have a desk. He was one of these
people who had such a low egohe was a chiropractor running an alternative health clinicthat
he didnt want to have an office because he didnt
want people to think he had a Big Office. So he
didnt have anyplace to even plop a piece of paper
down. The first thing we did was buy him a desk,
put some stakes in the ground and give him a
place to sit down.

Do you find that when you consult with

people, the surface level issues mean that
you actually have to work with them at deeper
levels in terms of what they want to be about,
what they want to be doing?
Well, it all rolls downhill. Ultimately, if you dont
care about what you are doing or you dont know
why you are doing it, you will find every excuse in
the world to avoid doing these things. If actually
attempting to proactively manage your time and
commitments is going to force you to deal with
things that are closer to your soul, you may avoid
it like the plague as well. Getting organized would
force you to step up to that thing you need to do!
The truth is that I am very behavioral, as a consultant. I say, Hey, we dont have to deal with that if
you dont want to. We work with work flow.
Why are you on the planet? Thats your primary
work. Everyone has one projectto fulfill their
destiny. Thats your game, and ultimately until you
get the answer to that and orient your life around
it, you are going to have something gnawing at
you. All of that is central to consult with people
about, if they will look at it. But most people dont

have the bandwidth, the capacity, to work at that

level. Vision will get you into the ballpark, but if
you get your pant leg caught in the bicycle chain
on the way in, youll curse the vision that got you
into the park! Somebody loves God, thats what
got him involved in the church. But then when he
feels like the world is being pulled out from under
him, he may start blaming the wrong source.

Let me give a couple of scenarios. Someone

is leading a church in the start-up stages.
They dont have a team to delegate to; they
are doing the marketing, the sweeping up,
everything. What are some of the unique
challenges that you work on with somebody
whos doing that?
Well, they are wearing so many different kinds of
hats that require very different kinds of personalities to engage with things. If your brain is still
wrapped around the pennies your check register
was off by, its hard to go party and have your
church social. The ability to be able to compartmentalize your work and define it and get control
of it makes it a lot easier to switch hats real fast,
which is what people in those stages have to do.
If you carry one meeting into the next, or one
role into the next, you are never fully available
and engaged.
Another issue to deal with is, how do I make
decisions about who to start to bringing in to help?
How do you start to build support? You need to
understand what your own weaknesses are and
how to create your own system. The problem is
that people often have such trouble delegating
because they cannot manage their own systems
and they wont give away anything they cant
control.

How about pastors of large churches of 500 to

1,000 or more?
I dont think the issues are all that different, actually. Start-ups feel the issues more keenly because
they are having to meet them so fast, presuming
that the start up is successful. But in both cases
you find yourself with a whole lot more to do than
you can do, because each one of the things you

00:56:39:08

page 24 the art of getting thigs done

thank God for david allen

00:56:39:08

are doing demands more of your time to do well.

called Action and Waiting For.

You emphasize in Getting Things Done how

important certain tricks are to making these
things work. Are there certain tricks that turn
the lights on for people again and again?

No trick is going to get rid of the necessity of

going back and looking at stuff and making
executive decisions about them, which people are
often avoiding. But it makes it a lot easier to train
yourself to use a system to sort things, so you are
left with 16 emails that require actual work, and
relieves you of having to keep re-opening, re-thinking and re-deciding the ones that dont.

Well, the Two Minute Rule is worth its weight in

gold. It says, any action you are ever going to take
at all that will take less than two minutes, you
should do the first time you see it, because itll
take you longer to track it and file it than it will
take to just do it the first time its in your face. If
people get nothing more out of the book than that,
theyll add an extra six months to their life!
It also gets people thinking, Wow, how can I get
closure on this? Most people havent trained
themselves to get value out of closure. And yet
everyone experiences the value of doing that. So
training yourself to get quick closure on some
things begins training you to think about that
whole process more consciously. So its not just
the Two Minute Rule. Its learning to ask, How
can I get this off my plate? It trains people, for
instance, to throw out a lot more mail on the front
end instead of dumping it on the counter. Just
simple little things like that can change how folks
approach their lives.

What are some of the most important ways of

dealing with email?
The big thing there is to not let email pile up into
this enormous blob in your in-basket without getting it reviewed and sorted in some way. Youve got
to make an executive decision about what exactly
emails mean to you. Deleting the ones you can,
filing the ones that you have no action step for
but want to keep, handling the two-minute ones
right away, will leave you with only two kinds of
emailsones that take longer than two minutes to
read, negotiate and manage, and ones that represent something for which you are waiting for more
input from somebody else. A quick way to manage
that is to create two folders, one called Action
and one called Waiting For, and file the remainder
accordingly. That gets your in-box empty. The only
problem with that is that people have never seen
their in-box empty, and they get so excited that
they never go back and open the actual folders

Nothing is going to replace taking time to sit

down and actually think.
Yep. Im sorry, but hard thinking is required to get
things done.
END

Thank God
for David
Allen!
By Jeff Cannell

Recommendations:
Getting Things Done: The Art of
Stress-Free Productivity
by David Allen

Ready For Anything: 52

Productivity Principles for Work
and Life
by David Allen

One of the best websites on personal productivity

and time management which incorporates much
of the principles found in Getting Things Done is
www.43folders.com.
For information about productivity seminars
and executive coaching with David Allen, or to
listen to audio interviews, visit his website at
www.davidco.com.

I am by no means an organizationally gifted

person. On my report cards growing up I often
received comments regarding my disorganization.
I have literally spent over 10 years intending to
organize my back office at home.
For five years I served as a pastoral assistant at
Vineyard Church Columbus where I could often be
the greatest trial ever faced by the administrative
staff. My creativity was inversely proportional to
my organizational skills. When I was investigating
whether or not I was called to church plant many
had reservations about how I would find assistance in prioritizing and managing the ongoing
projects associated with it.
Several months into the church plant I began to
feel overwhelmed. I was visiting at VCC and a former colleague cornered me and told me that I had
to read David Allens book. He had read it himself
and it led to a personal renaissance.
As a pastor one of my objectives is to help people
see their life as a fully integrated life. Yet structurally most people try to organize their life by
categorizing it into different sections. In this area
I was perhaps the chief offender. This oftentimes
results in differing and sometimes contradicting
systems for home versus office organization. One
of the many reasons I think Allens book works is
because it treats life as a unified whole. I spent

thank God for david allen

page 25

forget about the grizzly

a week going through the initial exercises in the

book and I felt like the scales of chaos were beginning to fall from my eyes. My countless to-do
lists, random notes, ideas, dreams, and material
for later review were formerly filed in an endless
mishmash of milk-crates, Target Containers, and
the abyss of my desk. Adrienne (my wife) sat in
awe as she saw the endless debris transform into
a simply organized file cabinet and a project matrix
document residing on my powerbook desktop.

take care of the church in my absence, I caught

a glimpse of David Allens book, Getting Things
Done, on my bookshelf. A book Id been wanting
to read for a while, but just hadnt gotten to yet. I
picked it up, opened to chapter one, and read the
first sentence: Its possible for a person to have
an overwhelming number of things to do and still
function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control. A divine appointment with a sentence, if Ive ever had one.

One of Allens key points is that ideas bouncing

Ive always been fairly organized, relatively speak-

around in the dark recesses of the brain stifle

creativity and project completion. I spent several
hours brainstorming to capture every idea and
thought that was stuck in my head. By the end
of the exercise I had a 10 page document with
one sentence idea summaries. After that point I
was able to realistically categorize the projects or
dreams. My stress level has been greatly reduced.
I think this book should be required Church Planter
reading along with Wimber and Ladd.

ing. In a techno-geek sort of way: exhaustively

categorized email folders, PDAs and cell phone
with synched contacts, appointments, task lists.
But it didnt do diddly-squat to give me a clear
head and a positive sense of relaxed control. At
best, it was a kind of organizational due diligence.
At worst, it highlighted to me how justified I was in
feeling overwhelmed.

In one week achieved more organization than

in the countless combined hours of the previous
decade and embraced a system that actually
works.
END

FORGET
ABOUT THE
GRIZZLY
By Jesse Wilson, Vineyard Church of Milan

links:
www.centralvineyard.com
www.jeffcannell.blogspot.com

Seven days to go in my first vacation as the neophyte pastor of a church that had launched 9
months earlier, and I was completely on edge. The
return to the office loomed over me like a massive grizzly bear in the inky blackness ahead. It
wasnt any one thing I was dreading; no particular
relational issues, no nasty controversies, nothing
of the sort. Just too many mundane things left
undone that I knew Id have to deal with, and no
idea if or how Id ever catch up. Not to mention
this terrifying conviction that every day I stayed on
vacation, to-do items were multiplying like caged
bunnies. I felt vaguely out of control, in a hyperalert, non-medicated kind of way.
In the midst of half-heartedly wrestling with Jesus
about cutting vacation short or trusting him to

The GTD approach, on the other hand, has worked

as advertised. Essentially, developing the discipline of deciding on and capturing next actions
in an efficient and reliable system has the effect
of freeing ones mind from the burden of juggling
open loops, which it unconsciously spends time
and energy fruitlessly trying to close. For me, its
paying off in all sorts of unexpected ways. In personal prayer, my mind has less internal white noise
to deal with, and more readily directs my soul to
God. When Im with my wife and kids, disengaging
from the busyness of the day is easier. Sermon
prep has improved, since I can give more attention
to the Spirits leading and spend less energy trying
to reign in frenetic thoughts.
Pastoral work is still the same blend of the
now and the not yet of the kingdom, of course.
Paperwork is paperwork, people are people, the
phone still rings at the worst times, and most
projects still take twice as long to do as the time
Ive set aside to do them. But increasingly often,
I forget all about the grizzly bear, and its Jesus
knocking at the door whos more likely to get my
attention.
END

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the change agent process

The Change Agent Process

by John Wimber

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John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard, is

often remembered for bringing an emphasis
on worship and the supernatural into the
evangelical church. What is sometimes forgotten,
however, is the number of years John spent consulting with hundreds upon hundreds of American
churches of all denominations as director of
the Church Growth Institute at Fuller Seminary.
Thousands of pastors benefited from the enormous wisdom John had about leadership and the
practicalities of instituting organizational change.
In what follows, much of Johns wisdom comes
through in this abbreviated, edited transcription
of a talk John gave to church leaders about how to
manage change in their churches.

>

A number of years ago, I was introduced

to Curt Leuwins Force Field Theory. Lewin
theorized that when there are equal and
opposing forces, you can do one of two things: you
can either increase pressure ten times, and by so
doing break inertia and change things, or you can
concentrate on removing the forces of equal pressure and thereby change consensus or the circumstance. As a young man, I think I leaned towards
the first step. I think it was part of the American

>

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cultural pattern at the time, actually; it was certainly part of my lifes pattern. If things didnt go
right, we turned up the volume. We yelled, got
angry, got upset, and in that process we were able
to change the status quo.
All too often, as a leader, the inclination is to try
to use force when things arent going well, to try
and turn up the volume, preach a little harder, do
a little more convincing, do a little more arguing,
try and get people to move with youas over
against finding the kinds of things that are impeding progress, identifying them, and removing them
as the opportunity arises. Over the last few years,
I think Ive learned a little bit about not being quite
so aggressive in my working with people. I want
to share with you some of the things that have
helped me as a leader in dealing with issues in
which there is a status quo condition that I feel
needs to be changed. These are the processes I
go through.

Gaining Clarity
The starting point, of course, is to state where you
are and where you want to be. Usually what I do is

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get a yellow pad. I dont write very well so I print

very big. Sometimes Ill use the whole pad just
trying to make a statement of where I am, what I
see in a situation. As a pastor I might be looking at
the whole church or one aspect of the church. If it
were one aspect, I might be looking at leadership
development. I would try to identify every positive
thing about leadership, and every negative thing
about leadership. I would state everything I could
think of, however incidental. It might take me an
entire day. I like to do hard work like that in outdoor settings. I tend to get not quite as heated. If I
get off in a closet somewhere, I get so focused and
so upset about what Im trying to do that I cant do
it very well. So Ill go sit in a park somewhere and
just write.
Then I try and look at where I want it to be, as
opposed to where it is. Now, the moment you
begin seeing clearly the distinctions between
where you are and where you want to be, you are
well under way in planning, analysis, and resolving
the problem. In the early stages, its hard to see

01:07:51:01

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01:07:51:01
the distinctions. Keep in mind that our psychological makeup tends us toward focusing much more
on failure than on success. Things that are going
well we tend to take for grantedand furthermore,
we are uneasy with them! When things are going
poorly, we are much more comfortable. We are
conditioned within the context of our society to
expect that. Furthermore, in the church we are
even more conditioned to that; keep in mind that
a great deal of our preaching is focused on finding
people that are unhappy and asking them to join
us. And we call this the Gospel, the Good News!
There is truth in that, but there is also the reality
that the well-adjusted need saving, the happy and
the content in the world need to an encounter with
Christ as well as those that are miserable and malcontent. So we are much better able to look at the
downside of things than the upside. You need to
know that as you begin this process.

Producing Change
So I will take two or three big legal pads and begin
writing, and after a day or so of work I have a fairly
clear picture of where I am and where I want to be.
The second step is to state all the forces that will
help you make the desired change. I begin looking at these things on the basis of, Whats going
on now in the system that will produce change?
First of all, in our church we know that very few
people stay very long. Three years is about an
average tenure in our church. If I were looking at
leaders, I know that they stay a little longer than
the average person and so I know that every three
or four years, we are going to have all-new leaders
anyway. So if Im having problems with leadership, I can look at it more on a theoretical basis
than on an individual basis. If Im having problems
with given individualswell, they are going to
leave pretty soon, anyway! Its the nature of what
we do. Because of the kind of church we are, we
train people to leave; thats what were for. Its the
nature of our commitment to get them equipped,
get them in process, and get them out and on their
way so they can go somewhere else and minister
with someone else.
On the other hand, I also can recognize that, much
like GM or Ford, if Im producing cars without fenders there is something wrong in the assembly line
process. I need to back up to the point where fenders ought to go on, and find out whats going on
down there. If Im producing leaders that have very

little loyalty or commitment to what we are doing,

then I know that there is something in the process
that is not being put in. If Im producing leaders
that just dont really know what to do in most situations, then Im not producing leaders at all, and
I need to go back and look at the process. So you
can look at the final stage of what you are doing
and analyze whats missing, whats not being put
in during the process.

Examining Strategic Flow

How does the process start? How do we meet people? How do they join us? When they join us, what
is the process for joining? At what point do they
join us? Do they join us in Sunday church? In small
groups? In the training center? In our particular
case, we have all three points of access. They join
us through personal relationships. They join us
through neighborhood evangelism. They join us as
a byproduct of various counseling and training programs that we have. So Im looking at the point of
access how do they come in among us? What is
their felt need when they come? What kind of leadership profile did they exhibit before they came to
us? What was the nature of what they were doing
when they were in this other kind of setting? Keep
in mind that many people in other systems have
the title but not the reality. They will come with the
title of elder, for example, but when you find out
what that means, it means coming to meetings and
making decisionsbut it has nothing to do with
the Biblical perception of eldership. You have to
become definitive in terms of your analysis, so you
can see where you are going.
So you want to state all the forces that will help
you make the desired change. But you also want
to state all the forces that will hinder change. I
remember one time talking to a pastor who was
locked into a church that would not change. He
had been working on it for two years, and he was
caught in a situation where everything he was
trying to do was being defeated at Board and
Committee levels. I asked, Do you feel that God
would have you leave? He said, No, I feel that
God wants me to stay here and bring change.
We talked about this on the phone two or three
times, and I just could not think of anything. I gave
him various options, but it never occurred to me
to ask what the median age of the congregation
was. Finally after about five conversations, I asked
How many people are we talking about here?

He said, About fifty adults. I said, Whats there

average age? and he said, 71. I said, Just wait
a few years. You wont have any problem at all.
I could almost feel his grin come over the phone,
and he said, You know, thats the truth! Why am
I worried about this thing? It wont be long before
they wont even be able to get to church, much
less run the church! Im going to get focused on
winning some new people. That was a turning
point for him. He suddenly saw what he had in a
positive light. You can imagine that with all those
folks being that old, trying to get them all into
small groups or out to evangelize or get out into
the neighborhood was just silly. It never occurred
to me to ask that question. He was a young man,
this was his first pastorate, and he was wanting
to make major change. As it has turned out since
then, he has made change; as the people have
gotten older or died or retired to other towns,
he has won a lot of new people to Jesus and the
church is doing quite well now.

Taking Action
So analyzing, prioritizing and plotting will help you
as you think about the things that bring change.
Now you need to brainstorm for possible action
strategy options. As you look at things that need
to change, you need to think and pray and seek
the Lord and find the various kinds of solutions.
Usually you will need to produce several solutions and then pick from them. Now most pastors
are not objective enough to spend a great deal of
time doing this, and I recognize that. When most
pastors talk to me about their plan, its really
not much more than a hunch and a calendar. They
really havent written much down or thought much
through. In our case in Anaheim, were in the process of printing up our five year plan, and it looked
to me like it was about 200 pages. You can see we
have done some thinking about where we want to
go, how we want to get there, and who is going to
help us do it, and what are the processes and programs that we need. You say, I thought you were
a Charismatic. I am. The Spirit of God does lead
us. But once the Lord sets the direction, we organize the parade. We put the process together after
God tells us what he wants done, where he wants
to go. We are to get on with planning, organizing and structuring so that we can get something
done. I think thats the nature of this relationship. I
think we have a collegiate responsibility with God
that he has called us into.

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A number of years ago, I visited a city as a consultant and was called by a pastor who said,
Were having a lot of problems with our leaders;
can you come down and spend a day with us?
He picked me up at the airport, and we went to a
meeting with the pastoral staff. On the way from
the airport to the church, he told me about every
problem in his church. I could tell he was really
well-rehearsed. He knew all the names, how they
functioned, every problem in the church. From the
emotional picture he gave me, you would have
thought that these people had three heads and
fangs. I was surprised when I walked into the room
and saw such a mild-mannered group of people.

church. I told him, Look, Ill tell you what to do:

I want you to go back home and over the next few
days, I want you to write five hundred reasons why
someone ought to join your church. He looked at
me and said, You mean five reasons. I said, No.
Five hundred reasons. The first two hundred and
fifty ought to be for the unsaved, and the other
two hundred and fifty ought to be for the saved.
Break it down into subcategories: families, empty
nesters, singles.

We spent the afternoon together, dialogued about

the church, looked at a lot of situations. Then that
evening we had a larger congregation group come
in and talked to them for awhile. I summarized
some findings, and the meeting ended. I got in the
car with him, and as soon as we started backing
out of the driveway, he began again to rehearse
the problems, again! Evidently he didnt think Id
understood after listening for a whole day. Right
in the midst of it, I broke in and said, We have
about an hour and a half before my plane comes.
Why dont we spend that time talking about the
potentials of your church, as over against the
problems. Well, you would have thought I had

someone should join our church. I sent him an

outline on church planning he had asked for, and
then forgot all about it. Two years later I was at a
National Association of Evangelicals convention
and this guy comes up to me, grinning from ear
to ear, totally transformed in personality. I said,
Howre you doing? He said, Oh, great! Youve
got to come to my church! Its so exciting there!
I said, Whats going on? He said, Weve tripled
in size in the last two years. We baptized over fifty
new people this year. Weve got new members
in the church. Our budget is up, were adding to
the building, were having a wonderful time. And
you were the cause of it all. I said, What do you
mean? He said, Writing out those reasons why
people ought to be at the church. What he ended
up doing in writing them, he was getting convinced
himself in the process. So he used that material to
preach on for the next year. These ideas became
part of all his thinking. He could hardly meet someone in the market or down at the post office or
anyplace else without telling them why they ought
to be in his church. He was full of a very positive
perspective. Now I think God was involved in this,
dont you? This was no mere exercise in positive
thinking; rather, in answering the question, Why
should someone come to this church? he began
seeing the church from a different perspective,
through Gods eyes. It transformed his thinking
and produced a whole new situation.

hit that man right in the face. His face got red, he
rammed the car into gear, spun out onto the road,
and wouldnt talk to me all the way to the airport.
When we finally got to the airport, he pulled into
the parking lot, turned off the car, shuddered,
and said, All right. What do you mean? I said, I
didnt mean anything; I wasnt trying to hurt your
feelings. I just think you are really well versed in
the problems but I dont hear you saying anything
about what can be done to resolve any of these
things and make solutions that are functional.
He said, Well, I dont know any! I said, I think
thats exactly the problem. Why should anybody
want to join your church? Well, I dont know! I
wouldnt join it, he said. I told him, Thats the
problem. I dont think youve ever examined any
of the reasons why anybody ought to join your

About a month and a half later, I got this big stack

of hand-written pages. Sure enough, I looked
at the last page and it said Reason 500 why

Determining Options
After brainstorming possible strategy options,
select the best of these options. Mass murdering
your board of elders is not your best option. You
can scratch that one off, and look at some other
ways to change them and bring some excitement
to your church.
Keep in mind that most people do not plan ahead
for the moves they want to make; they have
not thought them through. They operate under
impulse and call that the work of the Spirit or
Gods leading. Most of the time it is not God
leading you at all. It is simply your inability to get

a cognitive understanding of where you want to go

and develop a rational plan to support it.

The Importance of Timing

Then you want to calendar the plan. One thing to
remember is to give yourself plenty of lead time
for major change. If you are going to relocate the
facility, or replace every person in the church,
give yourself a few years. If you are going to try to
restructure the church and change the polity, if you
are going to introduce some major change, give
yourself some time. Think in terms of long blocks
of timenot one or two sermons plus asking
for the Holy Spirit to come. Are you hearing me?
People are much more responsive to leadership
than we will allow for, because we are so often
abrupt and impatient with the process. Most pastors dislike their flocks because they see them as
something that is stopping them from becoming
successful. Thats sin. Jesus would lead his people
along; he was gentle.
I think of it this way: leading up to change, I like to
give 80% of the time, to simply informing. By that
I mean that if I want to make major change, like
moving where the church meets into a completely
different area, I would start talking to the lay leaders or staff about a year before we did it. I would

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01:18:24:06
mention it from the pulpit, I would drop it into private conversations. I would start before I had any
concrete plans. I would not suddenly announce A
Plan. I would inform people on the level of need
to know. Not everybody needs to know everything
all the time. You give people time to get used to
the idea. The last 20% of the time is for persuasion. Now that people are entirely informed, you
want to persuade. Then you move. Once you are
moving, you shut up about it, you dont talk about
it any more. Ill talk about why a little later.
You want to watch out for excessive change in too
short a period. If you make too many changes, you
can so aggravate the temperature and climate of
the group that they cant function any longer. They
get so stimulated that they just cant stay together.
The cohesion is lost. If they lose too many of their
leaders and if you change too many programs and
too many situations too fast, they get to where
they dont know whats up and whats down.
Pastors tend to scold and become very parental in
that kind of climate. You dont trust me. No, its
not a matter of trust, youve just done too much
to them too fast! Give them some time and some
space if you want to bring them along.

Limits to Growth
Here are some typical problems Ive encountered
in this process. A primary one is what Pete Wagner
calls primary groups with a growth impasse. Primary
groups are a sociological phenomenon in which
people become so cohesive that they begin operating as a block, and they can retard growth or control
it, without even intending to. It can be a good thing;
its only a bad thing if youve got just one primary
group. You want a church full of primary groups,
many of them. If you only have one primary group,
it will resist growth in the church. They become so
bonded that they do not want new people. Now
they have a problem because they have a theology
that says to welcome new people, but they have a
practice that prohibits that.
Another problem is when there are facility limitations. That can be in the parking lot, or the nursery.
Quite often in churches Ive gone to, the nursery
or the parking lot have been inadequate, and they
dont know why the church has stopped growing.
The growing edge of most churches starts at the
parking lot and continues into the nursery. If you
dont make the young mothers secure about their
children, the church will have a hard time bond-

ing. If you can solve that problem, the church can

move. Its a very, very big problem and one that
most pastors are blinded to. They are much more
focused on their sanctuaries and their offices, and
the nursery is actually much more important.
Also, quite often, a church is not growing because
there simply is nothing redemptive happening
within the social life of the church. It might as
well be the local Lions club. The Spirit of God isnt
moving in their midst; people arent being healed
or saved or strengthened. They are just socializing, and that in itself isnt all that redemptive.
You can only be just so friendly. Friendliness is not
the totality of a relationship. I, for one, am not by
nature that friendly of a person. I would not elect
to join any group. If it werent for Jesus, I wouldnt
go to any church. I actually dont like churches
or church people all that much. I get fed up with
religious talk real quick. Often there is a lot more
honesty in the local bar than there is in the local
church. Now, there are problems in the local bar
too, so Im not advocating that! What Im saying is
that socially there can be too little of redemptive
activity in a church to stir people, to make them
want to stay. People are not going to pour out
their life to build somebodys building. People are
not going to pour their life out to develop a good
womens group. Youve got to have a much higher
calling to really empty your life and give your life,
your resources. That calling is, of course, Jesus and
his purposes. But many churches have whittled
those down to such a degree that its not that
exciting to be a part of it. Just running programs is
not going to grow the church. You have to have the
Body ministering, with impact.
Rigid and outmoded pastoral models can also
inhibit the growth of the church. Quite often the
pastor himself is the bottleneck in the average
church. Hes not producing an atmosphere of
change. He hogs all the opportunities for ministry.
He does all the counseling, marrying, burying,
evangelizing, teaching. People have very little
place to get involved in ministry. Its very helpful
when we look at our models of ministry and find
more ways to give away ministry to the people so
they can be involved in it.
Another factor can be a staff limited by ineffectual
administrative and leadership abilities. Quite often
in the average church, staff is not hired so much as
it is absorbed. You need a warm body so you ask if

somebody can come in for a day or two a week and

do some volunteer work, and they eventually get
absorbed into the staff that way. But they have not
been hired because of skill or proven ability. They
havent been prayed for; nobodys been seeking
the Lord and looking for him to send them. They
are just loyal and they are there, and keeping them
is easier than looking for somebody else. They are
good people, nice people, and they are often your
friends. But they are often ineffectual and not the
best people for the job. This has been so common
throughout my years of being a consultant.

Understanding Different Reactions to Change

In thinking about how change works, one tool that
has helped me, developed by Carl George, is an
axis in which we are looking at four basic types of
people and their reactions to change radicals,
progressives, conservatives, and traditionalists.
The radicals are the people who are the strongest
proponents of extreme change, whereas progressives are a little more moderate proponents of
change. Conservatives are disposed to maintaining the existing conditions, and traditionalists
are generally opponents to any kind of change.
The assumption you might make is that there are
approximately equal numbers of each of these
types in every church, but that is not the way it is.
Keep in mind that both Progressives and
Conservatives tend to operate in a very rational climate, and therefore are able to relate to
each other much more effectively than either
extreme group, the Radicals and Traditionalists.
Furthermore, the Radicals and Traditionalists
operate in an emotional climate, are much more
likely to be disruptive in their dialogue, and therefore are not as effective in communicating with
Progressives and Conservatives. Churches tend
to have a disproportionate number of one or the
other of the extremes. Churches that are a little
older tend to have more Traditionalists. Churches
that are first generation churches tend to have
more Radicals.

The Radicals
Lets talk about them now in terms of their subcategories. First of all, the Radicals are a source
of many good ideas. They live in a swirl of good
ideas. They provide a real leavening in the mix of
church life. A church without Radicals will have

the change agent process

of growth needs, and very attuned to living in a

way in which risk is a normal part of their daily
activities. So when it comes to their church life,
they will bring that kind of breadth and scope and
perception.
Furthermore, they quickly perceive the benefits
in good planning. They are a helpful source for
reviewing your plans, because they will tell you
quickly what the positives of your plan are. If
you show your plan to the Traditionalists or
Conservatives first, you will never show your plan
to anyone else! You want to spot the people who
are Progressives in your church and go to them to
find the salient and selling points of what you are
trying to do, because they will quickly see them if
there are any.
very few good ideas, very few people who really
create, stir up, and excite life within the church.
You need people who will stretch and pull you. A
church without Radicals is a church without a great
deal to offer, in many respects.
But they are not necessarily a good source of leadership. They are not the best place to go to screen
your new ideas. Im thinking about relocating,
you say, and they reply, Great! Lets go burn the
church down! But on the other hand, they are
incredibly helpful in the starting of new programs.
They just have a quick burn-out. Its like the difference between people who can race fast in short
races as over against marathoners; you need both.
Radicals can help you. They are like boosters, they
can get your rocket off the ground. I think thats
what God has designed them to play just that role,
and I think they are important to the church. You
need to leave place for them and embrace them.
They are usually expelled from systems at the end
of a first-generation church. Radicals often start
churches but often are pushed out by the end
of the first generation, and thats unfortunate. It
ought not to be that way.

The Progressives
Progressives are tuned to anticipate growth needs.
They think in terms of growth. They themselves
live on the growth edge of life. They usually gravitate to jobs and life experiences in which they are
involved in calculated risk. They are not radicals;
they dont operate in an emotional swirl. They are
people who are attuned to look at things in terms

They will also spearhead new directions. They

do not have the kind of burnout syndrome that
Radicals do. They can sustain new programs. They
are not very good at administrating old ones. They
are not very likely to take a Sunday school leadership program. But they would be very interested
in redesigning or rewriting a new curriculum and
developing a new Sunday School. They just dont
want to administrate long-term. So Progressives
are very helpful for starting new areas, and of
course they are incredibly helpful for starting new
churches.
They are the best communicators to Conservatives.
Progressives are what Conservatives would have
wanted to be if they could only have afforded it!
Progressives are driving the cars the Conservatives
would have bought except they were just a little bit
too much money. Of course, the Progressive probably paid for it with credit, and the Conservative
paid for it with cash. Thats a major distinction.
Progressives are a tremendous source of thrust
for new ideas, new energy, new focus, new help,
and new leadership, but they are not necessarily the people you will get the greatest financial
resource from in starting things. Their lifestyle is
not focused on that, compared with Conservatives.
But Progressives can help Conservatives along in
the process, because they both operate in a rational way.

The Conservatives
Conservatives see the value of the status quo.
When the look at the church they joined, they did
it because the church met their needs, so their

page 31

tendency when you want to make change is to get

rigid and resistant. They are very helpful to you
when you want to find out what benefits there
are in the status quo. You can go to them and say,
What do you find of value in the church? and
they can just go right down the line articulating
it. You go up to a group of Conservatives and say,
I want to enlarge the parking lot; were having
difficulty getting everybody in, and their first
response will be, Well, I find a place every week.
And the second thing theyll say is, Why dont
they just come a little earlier, like we do? They are
almost totally oblivious to the onus for reaching
out. You can equate that with lack of spirituality,
but if you do so you are making a major mistake.
You have missed something very important. They
just simply dont have the same felt need for
growth that you may have.
Conservatives do not generally jeopardize personal comfort in order to accommodate your
plans for growth. Again, when you sense in them
a resistance to jumping up and doing what you
want done, as a leader your tendency is to begin
judging them. Watch out for that. You need the
Conservatives, believe me, if you are going to
move ahead. They will interact with you in a way
that will often anger you, because they are going
to ask questions that you didnt ask yourself, and
they are going to insist on answers before they
make any kind of a move. They need real answers
to real questions in order to move.
This is very, very beneficial to you, because it will
force you to do the kind of planning and research
thats necessary to secure success in the change.
The Conservatives give you ballast in your ship.
They give you an anchor so you dont drift away.
They keep you on target in terms of where you are
going, because they will insist that you answer
the issues, the situations, and the questions that
will keep you on target. They can be frustrating,
because you dont want to take the time to answer
all these peoples questions. But if you dont, you
wont have them with you, and you really need
them to keep you honest.
You also need them because they carry most of
the financial burden for change. They are the
ones with the money. The Radicals dont have any

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01:27:56:06

money! The Progressives make money, but they

dont keep as much of it, and the Traditionalists
never give any money because they never buy in
to what you are doing, until youve got the new
tradition, and then they buy into that tradition. So
the bottom line is that Conservatives actually carry
the bulk of all change. Now do you see why you
have to help them by answering your questions?
They usually are the major proportion of any giving
group, in terms of percentage.

kind, they never buy in, and they are no significant

resource in the change process. Im not saying
that they dont buy into church life, attend, give,
get involved, work; they often do. But if you are
depending on them for money to make the change,
you will never get it. But they will continue to give
money to the church during that period of time
because they have already made that commitment.

time for them to hear it; youve got to give them

time. Talk about it. Give them a long time to absorb
these ideas. Then when you get to the point of persuasion and pushing it through, they understand it
and are much more ready for it.

First, Second, Third Generation Churches

In dialogue with pastors, I have come to realize

that they just dont understand the value of these
people. Do you know what that Board is making me do? Weve had to go back now and spend
another $8,000 to do thus and such to satisfy
them! Thats right. They would rather risk another
$8,000 instead of the $800,000 you are trying to
get them to risk without having their questions
answered. If you answer their questions and the
risk has been sensibly minimized, they will put the
money down. Thats really the bottom line.

Churches generally categorically fall into the following breakdown. First generation churches will
have a high percentage of radicals and progressives. They will gravitate to you because they
like new things, things that are moving. They will
become a problem to you at a later point when its
time to settle down. They will tend to move on to
other things that are starting new, and thats good,
because thats really what they are for, if you look
at it from a standpoint of function and gifting. This
is not a bad thing at all. God has them in his kingdom to do these things.

changes around here, what kinds of ramifications

does a remark like that can have? The whole office
can tremble! What does he mean? All hes actually
talking about is the carpet. But they dont know
that. So change is less fearful if you set specific
boundaries. Its very helpful to tell people, Heres
where we are going. Heres how I think it will look
when its all done. How do you feel about that?

Now keep in mind that people are not 100 percent Conservative, or Radical, or Progressive, or
Traditionalist. These are just general categories
people tend to fall into as it relates to change.

The Traditionalists
Now Traditionalists are extremely resistant to
change of any kind. They are hostile to change,
angered by it, frustrated by it. They are very, very
vocal when change is going on. They complain.
They argue. You need to give them time in the
change process to verbalize and vocalize their
frustrations, and help them through the process
so they dont harm and hinder themselves or you.
Traditionalists arent necessarily unintelligent or
misinformed. But what they are arguing for is no
change at all, and leaders who want to take people
through change see them, in a sense, as the
enemy. Now they are not the enemy; your brother
is never the enemy. But, in one sense, they are the
enemy of the idea you are proposing. Just keep in
mind that once the change has happened, then
they eventually move to the new status quo. But
along the way they will not support change of any

Second generation churches tend to have a higher

percentage of Conservatives and Traditionalists. By
the third generation, they can be immobilized by
the weight of the non-moving populace. That is to
say, some churches have mostly Conservatives and
Traditionalists, and very few Progressives. Its like
an airplane without engines. Its real hard to get
that sucker off the ground. Thats what happens
in many churches over a period of time, theyve
eliminated almost all the Progressives and certainly all the Radicals.

Helping Congregations Navigate Change

Here are some useful guidelines when you are
trying to help people through change. First of all,
keep in mind that change is fearful, particularly
change that you dont have any way to negotiate.
Change that is forced on you, or sprung on you, is
frightening. No one likes that. So it is very important that you understand that when you are a pastor or a leader and you are proposing change, the
very thing you are proposing can be frightening to
the people on its first hearing. Thats why it takes

Its much less fearful if specific boundaries are

established for change. When a boss walks into
his office and says, There are going to be some

In any kind of process of change, you need to let

people express their fears in this process. Dont
perceive that as resistance or something that is
going to stop the process. If they dont have a
place in which they can express fears, you are in
trouble, because theyll make a place, and often
its a place you dont want them to pick. You need
to let people have a place to express fears about
change. Set up forums, set up places of exchange.
That isnt to say that youll be able to answer
every issue, but they need to have a place to say
it. Furthermore, the leaders attitude sets the climate for release. If you are steady and quiet and
non-threatened during these exchanges, it will
help them get release. It is okay for them to feel
fear and express it. Its not helpful for you to react
in a threatened way to that process and get very
parental, or try to crush that exchange. Relax. Do
your thinking, planning and praying ahead of time,
so that you can feel secure enough to actually help
people along.

Becoming People-Focused in Change

Now, when the actual change is underway, there is
a point in which the momentum has begun. At that
point, I take on a certain profile. This is the way I do
things that Im sharing it with you. First of all, go
slow when you are moving fast. Youve loaded the
gun and youve pulled the trigger. Thats not the

page 33

the change agent process

time to re-aim it. Thats not the time to re-examine

the gun. Its done now. Once youve got the thing
going, you dont have to keep talking about it and
shouting about it and keep exciting people about it
and selling it some more. Thats not the time to do
that. Its underway now. Just relax. Nows the time
to slow down. When the change is underway, you
move away from the focus on the change itself,
and put your focus on the people. You become person-centered, not change- and program-centered.

wing, theyve built their new building, and

lost their people in the process because they
have bruised them so hard to get their money.
Ever hear of anything like that? I have seen
so many pastors be blown out of their jobs
and lose their place in their churches because
they just had to have something happen
immediately.

Suppose youve initiated a new program and its

taken months to get the thing underway. People
have been frightened or upset about it, whats it
going to do, its going to make us a different kind
of church, and so on. Now the thing has started.
You do not go back into the pulpit and preach
about the program for another six weeks. Thats a
mistake. Now its time to become person-centered.
Be there for people. Yes, its hard. Im scared
too. But you know, weve just got to trust the
Lord through these things. Hes brought us to this
place, and we all agreed it was his idea, that he
wanted us to do this. If you are gentle and con-

soling, and say, Im scared too, but were going

to do this together, and lets just agree that when
we get on the other side of this were still going
to be friends and were are still going to love each
other, that will help them. I am not doing that
to manipulate them. Im doing that to help them.
If you are the captain of a ship thats in turmoil,
its not the time to yell at everybody and act like
them. If you are their leader, you are going to have
to be a little more mature than them. Help them
through change. Recognize that all they are doing
is expressing fear over change, because people
really are frightened by change.
All too often, we pastors tend to think that every
new change is some sort of test of our leadership,
or of Gods blessing of our lives. It does not have
to be that. Certainly there is an element of testing whether we will lead or not. But I share things
and I take it slowly, because I dont want to lose
the people in the process of leading them. I dont
know how many times as a consultant Ive gone
to churches where they have gotten their new

Change Requires Logic and New Vocabularies

Furthermore, introduce supportive logic for
change. If you dont give them the logic for the
change, theyll produce their own. Oh, hes just
going through midlife crisis and he wants to do
another number on us. You need to give them a
clear, logical basis for what you are doing.
Its helpful if you can give new vocabulary for
change. If you want to move from Sunday School
programs to something else, you need to have a
new name for the something else. You need the
logic and the new name. I remember when we
moved from a Bible study model of small groups
to the kinship groups, people had a terrible time
with that. I had to develop a basic logic for it. I
pulled everybody together and gave them a three
hour lecture on primary groups and what happens
to churches when primary groups control growth.
That was one of the most electrifying nights Ive
ever had with a group of people. Our people got
upset, got angry, yelled at me, We are not like
that! But they were; they were just like that.
These werent people I didnt like heck, some
of them were my relatives, yelling at me! I loved
them. But I knew we needed to have a new, solid
basis for our thinking because we were already
forming this solid primary group that would have
stopped change and stopped growth.
So I gave them new logic and then I needed to give
them a new name. We need small groups, I said.
Yeah, yeah. Bible studies, they said. No, I told
them, weve done Bible studies. Now were going
to learn Kinship groupsbecause a Kinship group
is where you make new families. We were needing to create space to make new, multiple circles
of relationships in our church if we were grow and
not get stuck with one primary group. And that
new vocabulary for our groups expressed that
underlying logic.

01:38:06:02

page 34 the change agent process

01:49:26:07

Strategic People and Timing

You need to understand the power structure.
Identify the opinion-makers, the policy-makers
in the church. Quite often, they are people you
would not even have thought of as the primary
opinion-makers, but they are the ones that set the
direction of the church, and you need to identify
them. The quickest way is to find out who people
quote. If you hear a name several times, you can
bet they are right up on top of the list. You need
to know who they are, think about them, pray for
them. They are not your enemies. You dont say it
to them, but if you want to put something through,
you need to sit down with those people individually and talk it through. You dont need to call a
meeting and say, Look, Im afraid that you are
going to blow me out of the water on this decision,
so lets get together and talk about it. Its a matter of sitting down with them in a casual situation
and saying, Ive been thinking about doing thusand-so; what do you think about that? You will
know right away whats going to happen.
Recognize that in the context of the emotional
climate, you must be assessing it all the time for
each new move. Its a constant process of taking
temperature. Sometimes its just not time to go to
war. You need to rest for awhile. Other times it is.
Some times I let things ride for months that probably should be acted on, but the climates not right,
either for me personally or for them. Sometimes
Im just not ready to go to war over something,
so I wait. Other times after I assess it I decide its
just going to take care of itself after a little while,

so I just let it go. Other things have to be acted on

now. But I like to make that decision in a rational
climate with a sense of God leading me, as over
against irrationally or emotionally just jumping
into it. Now Ive done both, but believe me, the
one works better than the other.
END

page 35

How long have

you spent reading
Cutting Edge today?

01:53:48:04

page 36 a second reformation?

01:53:48:04

continued from page 7

Can you say a little more about that?
There were three things that happened. The first
was that, about two and a half years ago, right
after The Purpose-Driven Life came out, my wife
got cancer. During that time she happened to read
an article she had picked up that said, 14 Million
Orphaned by AIDS in Africa. She threw it down
on the ground and said, I cant believe 14 million can be orphaned by anything, much less by
AIDS. Over a few days God began speaking to her,
saying, Are you going to let this reality into your
heart and let it break your heart, or are you going
to close it off? She said, Im going to open my
heart to it.
So she began to say, What can I do about this?
Im a white, suburban pastors wife. I just teach
Bible studies! So she began to share her vision
of helping those with AIDS with me. And, honestly,
my reaction was, Honey, I support you 100 percent, but its not my vision. God has called me to
train pastors, and thats all I want to do. But, I
told her, I want to support you like you supported
me when we started Saddleback. As they say,
nothings more effective than pillow talk! And as
she began to talk about these things more and
more, God grabbed my heart and just ripped it
out and threw it on the ground and said, You are
going to care about this. And I began to think not
just about HIV and AIDS, but about other things I
might have been missing.

You began thinking in much broader categories.

Right. The second thing that happened was the
success of the book. The Purpose-Driven Life
has been the best-selling book in the world for
three years, the best-selling non-fiction book
in American history. When all this happened I
thought, What is this? Im not even an author.
Im a pastor. There is nothing new in The PurposeDriven Lifenot one thing that hasnt been said
by historic Christianity. All I did was say it in a
very simple way. And in the sovereignty of God, he
just said, Im going to use this book. So all this
money starts pouring in from the book salesmillions and millions of dollarsand all this attention. All of a sudden, Im getting calls from the
White House and from Congress asking for advice.
I start getting calls from a group of film producers

in Hollywood. Im invited to Harvard. Well-known

billionaires are saying, Will you disciple me? And
Im thinking, whats a pastor doing in these places?

They are all in it for the money. But I dont know

a single pastor who does what hes doing for the
money.

So I began to ask, God, what do you want me to

do with all of this sudden affluence? And how do
you want me to steward this influence? I dont
think God gives you money or fame for your own
egoespecially not a pastor! I didnt want it.
When we started Saddleback, I said, We are never
going to go on TV or the radio. I did not want to
be a celebrity. Always being in the spotlight blinds

The fourth thing we did was to set up three

different foundations. One is called Acts of Mercy,
which helps those with HIV/AIDS, both affected
and infected. Another is called Equipping the
Church, which keeps training the pastors weve
been training. And then the third is called The
Global PEACE Plan.

you. I dont want that. I just want to stay under

the radar and train pastors. And all of a sudden
this attention and money is coming in. So I go
to Scripture as is my habit, and God highlights 1
Corinthians 9 for what to do about the money, and
Psalm 72 for what to do with the fame.
In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul says that those who preach
the Gospel should make a living by the Gospel. In
other words, its okay to be paid for your ministry.
But, he says, I will not accept that right because
I want the privilege of serving the Gospel for free
so that I am a slave to no man. I said, Thats
what I want to do. I want to serve the Gospel for
free. So Kay and I made five decisions:
First, we said we are not going to change our lifestyle one bit. We didnt go out and buy a bigger
house. We dont own a guest home. I still drive
a four-year-old Ford truck. We simply said, We
are not going to use this money on ourselves.
Second, I stopped taking a salary at Saddleback
church. Third, I added up all that the church had
paid me for the previous 25 years and I gave it
back. I just didnt want anyone to think that we
did this for the money. I knew the stereotypes the
media had of megachurch pastors. I knew God was
raising me up to a position of prominence, and I
was going to be in the spotlight. So I said, Ive
got to be above reproach. Sure enough, the very
next week after we gave twenty-five years worth
of money back, Time came to do an article on me,
and the very first question was, Whats your salary? I was able to say, Well, honestly, Ive served
my church for free for twenty-five years. It felt
so good to just pop that stereotype! And heres
the thing: every pastor I know would do it for free
if he could! The perception of the world often is,

Finally, the last thing is that we became reverse

tithers. When Kay and I got married thirty years
ago, we started raising our tithe every year by one
percent. So after the first year of marriage, we
went to eleven percent, second year twelve, third
year to thirteen, and so on. We did that because
we found that every time we give, it broke the grip
of materialism in our life. It made us more like
Jesus. It makes my heart grow bigger every time
Im generous. Well, now weve been married thirty
years, and we actually give away ninety percent
and we live on ten. And, honestly, thats just a
whole lot of fun! And, really, I dont have a lot of
needs. I just need to replace socks occasionally.

But I suppose what to do with the money was

actually easier to know what to do with than
the increasing scope of your influence.
Exactly. I went to Psalm 72, which is Solomons
prayer for more influence. When you read this
prayer, it sounds very self-centered, very egotistical. He says, God, I want you to make me famous,
I want you to spread the fame of my name through
many nations. I want you to bless me and I want
you to give me power and then you read why
he did it: so that the king may care for the
widow and orphan, defend the defenseless, relieve
the oppressed, care for the poor, assist those who
are sick, the people in prison, the immigrant and
the foreigner. Basically, Solomons talking about
all the marginalized of society, and God said to me,
The purpose of influence is to speak up for those
who have no influence.
And I just had to repent. I said, God, I cant
think of the last time I thought of the widows and
orphans. They are not on my agenda, they are not
on my radar. It wasnt that I was doing anything

page 37

a second reformation?

wrong. I was busy building a huge church. There

are 82,000 names on the roll, 45,000 on Easter
Sunday alone. 4,462 gave their lives to Christ this
past Easter. It was like a Billy Graham crusade.
Weve baptized over 15,000 adult believers in the
last ten years. So its not like I wasnt busy. We
were training pastors and building the church! But
I wasnt caring for those that nobody cares about. I
said, God, Im sorry. I will use whatever influence
and affluence you give me to care for them for the
rest of my life.
So there was the thing that happened with Kay,
God speaking to her, and then there was the success of the book. The Bible says, The goodness
of God leads to repentance. The third thing that
happened was this: I went to South Africa a few
years ago to teach The Purpose-Driven Church
seminar, and we broadcast to 400 sites across the
continent. About 80,000 pastors went through
this thing; it was a big deal. I thought thats why
I was there! But after it was over, I told one of the
people there, Take me out to a village. I just want
to meet some pastors. Honestly, I dont even like
pastors of big churches! I like real pastors, pastors
of 100, 200 people. Thats what I grew up in. So
we went out to this little tent church where theres
75 people50 adults and 25 children orphaned
by AIDS. And while we were there a pastor walks
out of the jungle and walks up to me and says, I
know who you are. Youre Pastor Rick. And I said,
How do you know who I am? He said, I get your
sermons every week. (I put every sermon Ive
ever preached on www.pastors.com. We charge
Americans for them and then we take that money
and use it to translate them into other languages
and give them out free around the world.) I said,
How do you get them every week? You dont even
have water or electricity in this village! He said,
No, they are putting the internet into every post
office in South Africa. So once a week, I walk an
hour and a half to the nearest post office and I
download your free sermon, and then I walk back
and I teach it. You are the only training I have ever
had. And I burst into tears and I said, I will give
the rest of my life to guys like that.

And guys like him reflect much of the rest of

the world.

Thats right. So I began to think, God, what are

the biggest problems in the world? What are the
Global Goliaths that are so big they dont affect
millions, they affect billions of peopleproblems
so big that nobody has solved them, including the
United Nations? And I eventually came up with a
list of five global giants:
First, the biggest problem in the world is spiritual
emptiness. People dont know Christ, and they
dont know that God has a purpose and a plan for
their life.
The second is egocentric leadership. Its self-centered leadership instead of leading like Jesus. The
good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
Most leaders think the followers are just for them
and not vice versa. There are little Saddams everywhere. We give a guy a little bit of power and he
turns into Stalin on a church committee. Most
people do not have the spiritual maturity to handle
power or to handle influence. They dont have
the character to handle it. And our world is being
torn apart by egocentric leadership on all levels of
society.
The third is poverty. Half the world lives on less
than two dollars a day. I was just in Rwanda where
folks are living on 67 cents a day.
The fourth major global giant is disease. What is
unconscionable to me is that we have billions of
people suffering from diseases that we found the
cure for in the nineteenth or twentieth century
and its now the twenty-first century! We have the
cure for malaria, for yellow fever, for typhus, for
water-borne illness! But we dont have leaders who
have the courage and the guts to say, Were going
to eradicate this; were going to get rid of it.
The fifth is illiteracy. Half the world is functionally
illiterate. How are they going to make it in the
twenty-first century, if they cannot read or write?
How can churches take the Gospel anywhere else
if they are so poor that they cant even get out of
their village?
So I began to pray, God, whats your plan? How
do you take on these five giants? As I looked at
Scripture, first I found Luke 10 and Matthew 10,
where Jesus sends the disciples out and tells them,

When you go into the village, find the man of

peace. And when you find this man of peace, you
bless him, and if he blesses you back, you stay
with him and you start your ministry there. If he
doesnt, if hes not open, you dust the dust off your
shoes and you go to the next village.

How do you understand this man of peace or

woman of peace Jesus is talking about?
I would describe such a person as someone who
is open and influentialopen to the Gospel and
influential among the people. It might be the aged
grandmother that everyone respects. It might be
a Muslim. It might be an atheist. When Jesus sent
out his disciples, you know, there werent any
Christians! He just sent them out. Once you find
the man of peace, what do you do? I started looking at scripture. What did Jesus do when he was
here? He did five things: First he planted a church.
I will build my church. He shared the Gospel, he
planted the church. Second, he equipped leaders.
He spent three and a half years training the disciples, and in John 17 he gives us a list of what he
did. Third, he assisted the poor. In his first sermon
in Luke 4, he said, Im here to preach good news
to the poor.
You know, when I started thinking about these
things I thought, How did I miss these 2,000 verses in Scripture about the poor? I went to a Bible
college and two seminaries and earned doctorates.
How did I do that? I had on evangelical blinders.
Finally, he educated the next generation. Suffer
the little children to come unto me. Theirs is the
Kingdom. Unless you become like a little child
So he had an educational element to his teaching.
So being a good Baptist, I came up with an acrostic PEACE, a Peace Plan: Plant churches, Equip
servant leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick,
and Educate the next generation. Now, for the last
two and a half years Ive had 4,500 of our members at Saddleback on the field overseas, testing
the PEACE plan in 47 countries. We started out
with what we called Clinic in a Box, and then we
started doing School in a Box, and then we added

02:04:12:06

02:04:12:06

Business in a Box, and Leadership Training in a Box

and even Church in a Box. You say, How do you
do that? How long does it take to plant a church?
Just one day. Ive done it hundreds of times. You
go to a village, you show the Jesus Film to 300
people, and typically 30 percent are going to come
to Christ. So now you have thirty new believers.
That means tomorrow they need a church. That
means that one of the thirty has to become the
pastor. They are never going to have another pastor. Hes no further along than anyone else, so you
have to do just in time training! Im going to
teach you something today, and you listen to what
I say and tell everybody else about it next week.
Then listen to the next cassette next week, and
so on. Paul would often go into a village, spend
two days there, appoint elders and leave, saying,
In six months Ill write you a letter. That was his
follow-up! Our idea of elders is that youve got
to go to seminary, youve got to be a believer for
ten years, youve got to have all kinds of degrees.
Paul said, Youre a leader, youll do. His idea of
appointing elders after two days is a little different than ours. The longest he ever spent in one
town was Ephesus and Corinth where he spent two
yearsand thats where he had the biggest problems! He should have left sooner!

Where are things at with the PEACE Plan

right now?
We are testing the PEACE Plan at present. None of
these things are new. Whats different is that this
is totally church-to-church, local church-based,
small group-based. We have 2,600 small groups in
Saddleback church. They are spread out over 83
cities, from Santa Monica to Carlsbad. Every small
group has adopted a village to do PEACE in.

Just in Africa?
No, not just Africa, but somewhere in the world.
And what we doing is to first send a team in to find
the man or woman of peace in the village. They
assess what needs to be done. They come back
and then they start doing this church-to-church
thing, small group-to-village. We dont let anyone
go on mission by themselves, because you come
back disoriented, you dont have anyone to share
it with, and in six months you lose your fire. But if
you go as a group, the group has cohesion.

How can this happen for the wider church in

America? Evangelicals are often criticized for
being overly pietistic and not focused on justice and the needs of the world.
I think we need to see the American church move
from selfishness and self-centeredness to unselfishness. And the way I hope to help with that is
through a series of four campaigns. The first one
is called Forty Days of Purpose. Weve now had
ten percent of American churches go through Forty
Days of Purpose. Thirty thousand churches. This
year, another ten thousand churches are signed
up to do it. What it does is produce small groups.
Forty Days of Purpose is essentially a small group
factory. The average church quadruples the
number of small groups they have. I just talked
to a lady today who said, We have 100 people
in our church and weve never had a small group.
We heard your thing about exponential thinking.
We decided that our goal was to start ten groups
in our church. But we actually started fourteen!
And now the church is running 150 people. At
Saddleback it had taken me 23 years to get to 800
groups. When we started Forty Days of Purpose,
we added almost 2,000 small groups in one week.
Unbelievable. Our attendance at Saddleback
during Forty Days of Purpose went from 17,000
in October, to 18,000 in November, to 19,000 in
December, and our small group attendance went
from 8,000 in small groups to 24,000 in small
groups in one week. It was really amazing. The
average church that does Forty Days of Purpose
grows 80% in their worship attendance, and the
number of their small groups quadruples. This is
what weve found after 30,000 test cases.

Whats the stage after that?

The second campaign we intend is called Forty
Days of Community. The basis of this campaign
is, You cant do it on your own. We need each
other. We cannot fulfill Gods purposes for our
lives except in the fellowship of Gods family. If
the Purpose campaign is about What on earth am
I here for?, the Community campaign is What
on earth are we here for? We are now starting to
take these 30,000 test-case churches through the
Forty Days of Community. This campaign is about
building community in your church and to reach

the community around your church. It essentially

gets people started on a project outside the walls
of the church. Our first project at Saddleback was
to feed every single homeless person in Orange
County three meals a day for forty days. And we
did it. When we added it all up, we fed 42,000
people. During Forty Days of Community, we took
over 2 million pounds of food and collected, sorted
and distributed it. It took 9,300 volunteers in our
church feeding 42,000 people three meals a day.
Now, that could never have happened if we hadnt
had the small group network. The small group is
the network that does it. And its these first two
campaigns that build the structure which builds
the base for PEACE. It helps churches get their
groups solidified.
The third one is calledfor lack of a better term
right nowForty Days of Priority, and its about
the stewardship of life. It is based on the idea of,
What are you doing with what you have been
given? Stewardship of every area of your life
your intelligence, your attitudes, your memory,
your money, time, talents. And the last one is Forty
Days of PEACE, where we move people into doing
the PEACE Plan. Its totally decentralized so that
anybody can use it. There is no centralized control that says, Give your money here. You run it
through your church, choose who you want to go
to, and go do the PEACE Plan.
My goal is ten million churches with a hundred
million small groups mobilizing a billion foot soldiers for the Gospel. Honestly, we need a second
Reformation. The first Reformation was about
belief. This Reformation needs to be about behavior. The first Reformation was about creeds. This
one will be about deeds. What does the church do?
And basically what I am saying is that the Church
is the Body of Christ, and yet the Hands and the
Feet have been amputated, and all weve been is a
big Mouth. Most of the time we are known for what
we are against. What we need is a Church known
for what it is for, not against. When the church is
assisting the poor, praying for the sick and educating the next generation and equipping leaders
and planting churcheswell, what Jesus did in
his physical body he expects to continue doing
through his Body, the Church. The Kingdom is to
be continued through the Body of Christ. Jesus

came to do the works of the Kingdom. I think thats

the next wave, the next Reformation.

Does this entail a shift from just showing

compassion to also acting for justice?
Yes. Poverty brings you to all kinds of justice
issues. There is only one way to help people not
be poorjobs. When there are unjust systems that
keep people in poverty, both governmental and
business, then you have to attack those. We are
testing things like that with International Justice
Ministries right now. We are working with them on
things like forced prostitution, forced labor. Thats
why I came out in support of things like the One
campaign. Bono of U2 asked me to support it,
and I said, Are you kidding? Of course Im behind
this! We got behind it because we need trade,
not just aid. For instance, in Rwanda they produce
three times the amount of food they can use. Two
thirds of it dies because they dont have anything
to do with it. So, yes, we have to attack structural
issues. The One Campaign is primarily advocacy;
its going to the government and saying, Lets do
debt relief. We got debt relief for Rwanda and
things like that.
But ultimately it has to be up to the Church, and
the reason why is this: The President of Rwanda
read The Purpose Driven Life a year ago, wrote me
a note and said It changed my life. I want you to
come to Rwanda. We want to be the first PurposeDriven Nation!
So we did our due diligence. We went to Rwanda
for a week. We invited the President of Rwanda to
come speak at our 25th anniversary just recently,
where we rented Anaheim Stadium and had
45,000 people, the first time wed ever had our

entire church in one service, and then we went to

Rwanda in July 2005. I spent three days training
the religious leaders of the nation. We spent two
days working with the top business leaders. We
spent two days with the government. We did a dinner with the Parliament. I met with Cabinet. I had
two meetings with the President.
And our perspective is this: Government has
agenda-setting ability. They can either make it
hard or easy for you. Business has expertise in
capital. But these guys will never get the job done
by themselves because they lack what the church
has! The church has, first, the greatest distribution
channel in the world. I could take you to a million
villages that dont have a school, a business, a
clinic, a fire department, a post officebut they
do have a church. What if you could network those
churches to do not just spiritual care but health
care, business development, education? Second,
the Church has a volunteer army of foot soldiers,
which neither business nor government has. I tell
them, You cant get it done without the church;
the church has to be an equal partner. So we
raise the church up in their eyes. Of course, the
church also has the power of God and the promises of God, and thats no small thing, either.
END

LINKS
www.pastors.com
www.saddleback.com

02:12:44:02

page 40 vineyard church planting growth

02:12:44:02

Vineyard Experiences
Big Growth in Church Planting
A National Update on Church Planting for Vineyard USA By Cindy Nicholson

page 41

vineyard church planting growth

This past May of 2005, Vineyard pastors

and leaders from across the US and around
the world met at the Vineyard Columbus
(Ohio) for an envisioning, exciting week together
at the biannual Vineyard National Leadership
Conference. One of the highlights of these conferences is the chance to celebrate the new Vineyard
churches planted since our last family reunion
two years earlier. For those who werent able to
be there to hear the results in person, here is an
update on the last twenty-four months of church
planting in the Vineyard USA.

>

Since July 2003, 87 new Vineyards have been

planted (and another dozen are about to be planted in next two months). Within that period, 19 new
Vineyards have moved through the entire process
of church plant to mission church to becoming
a fully established Vineyard church. And we currently have 71 potential planters planning to plant
a new Vineyard in 2006 alone.
As Bert Waggoner, National Director for Vineyard
USA, said in a recent letter to all Vineyard pastors: Church planting is not the only sign of the
health of a movement. There are many others such
as unity, spiritual vitality and numbers of conversions and baptisms. But this is a vital sign that the
Vineyard vine is still in good soil. If we succeed in
planting as many as 90 new churches this year, it
will mean that we are planting more than 10% of
our total size. What church would not be happy
with that kind of increase?

Strategic Jump Starts

At the leadership conference in 2003, we
also introduced a new, additional approach to
church planting in the Vineyard called Strategic
Jump Starts. These are new churches planted by
experienced Vineyard pastors who have already
established large, catalytic churches that have, in
turn, sent out multiple church plants. These are
pastors, in other words, who have demonstrated
an ability and commitment to grow a healthy
church that plants numerous daughter churches.
These pastors have also been deeply involved in
the wider Vineyard in their area, showing their
ability to be a team player. They are targeting
large metropolitan areas that lack a large, catalytic, church-planting church.

The first of these Strategic Jump Starts, the

Huntersville Vineyard, was planted in 2003 in
Charlotte, North Carolina, under the leadership of
Thor and Bonnie Colberg; it has grown quickly in
attendance and is already preparing to send out
its first daughter church this year. In 2004 Vineyard
USA initiated a second Jump Start church, the
Blue Sky Vineyard, in the greater Seattle area of
Bellevue, Washington, pastored by Steve and Shuhui Morgan. We anticipate that both these churches will continue to steadily plant new churches
around these major cities. We have several potential Jump Starts in the wings for 20062008. (For
the complete list of target cities for the Strategic
Jump Start Initiative, check out Cutting Edge
Volume 7, number 3 (Fall 2003) in the archives
of the Vineyard USA website: www.vineyardusa.
org/publications/cuttingedge.aspx.) These plants
are just a small piece of all the planting we do, but
they are simply one more way we are trying to creatively help move ahead the Kingdom.

Multi-Cultural Churches
On another note, one of the cutting edges
for Vineyard church planting is in the area of
multi-cultural churches. During this years 2005
conference, a group of 20 church planters and
coaches gathered over lunch to discuss immediate
strategies for intentionally planting multi-cultural
churches that reflect the diversity of many of our
cities and towns throughout America. As many
of our readers will know, this is not easy to do.
The Western Region, which covers southern and
central California and Hawaii, will be firing one of
the first shots across the bow in this regard with
a conference November 18-19 called Embracing
the Nations: Creating Multiethnic Communities
of Faith, organized by Doug Brown, the Western
Region cross-cultural church planting coordinator.
Doug has worked cross-culturally both in the US
and around the world for most of his adult life,
and he has gathered leaders from all around the
LA basin, who are successful specialists in starting
and establishing multi-ethnic communities of faith.
(See the back page of this issue of Cutting Edge
for registration info.)

come to Columbus for the conference, the time

together represented a wonderful opportunity
to learn, to compare notes and battle scars, and
to see something move that they did not have to
push for a change. Many potential planters were
busy asking questions, listening to stories, getting coached by veterans, and picking up every
resource that was available. On Tuesday evening,
we had the privilege of introducing to the thousands of Vineyard pastors and leaders gathered
the planters and spouses who had planted since
our last conference in July 2003 in San Antonio,
and those planning to plant by September 1, along
with their sending pastors and their coaches. As
the crowd in the front by the stage slowly grew
from a few to many to an overwhelming number, it
became a bold visual witness to the dry numbers
that tell us that we are indeed a church planting,
church-multiplying movement, constantly innovating, constantly pushing against the boundaries,
constantly making new opportunities to give
away what God has so generously given to us.
The planters represented every region and nearly
every state. When the last planters arrived at the
front, there was a roar of celebration that was loud
and long! Then we prayed for them all, not only
the planters, but the mother churches from which
they had been sent and the men and women who
have made extra space in their lives to coach these
planters and help them thrive. There was a strong
sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit filling that
front space.

CHURCH PLANTING HOT SPOTS

Here are some target areas of the U.S. that are in
huge need of Vineyard church plants. Do any of
these places spark something inside of you?

6 metro areas over a million people, with only

one Vineyard church:
Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point NC
Hartford, CT
Buffalo/Niagara Falls, NY
Memphis, TN
West Palm Beach/Boca Raton, FL
Louisville, KY

National Leadership Conference

For the planters and spouses who were able to

02:26:53:06

page 42 vineyard church planting growth

02:38:06:02

..
..

Washington

..

.
Montana

Oregon
Idaho

Minnesota

..
.. ..

South Dakota
Wyoming

..

Nevada
Utah

......

. ..

Wisconsin

.
. ..
.
.. .
.
.
. .
.
.. .
.
.
.
. .. .
..
.
.. ...
.
.
.

New Hampshire
Massachusetts

New York

Pennsylvania

Illinois

Kansas

Michigan

Iowa

Nebraska

Colorado

California

Maine

Vermont

North Dakota

Indiana

New Jersey

Ohio

Delaware

West
Virginia

Missouri

Rhode Island
Connecticut

Maryland

Virginia

Kentucky

North Carolina

Arizona

Tennessee

Oklahoma

New Mexico

South Carolina

Arkansas

Alabama
Louisiana

Texas

6 states that have no Vineyards at all:

New Hampshire
Vermont
Rhode Island (Providence/Fall River/Warwick has
over 1 million population)
Delaware
South Dakota
North Dakota

..

Mississippi

Georgia

.
..

Florida

... .

Newly Planted Churches Since July 2003

Northwest Region
John & Janet Avery, Kings Vineyard Christian
Fellowship, Keizer, OR
Scott & Sandi Braithwaite, Elk Grove VCF, Elk
Grove, CA

Tom & Sheri Wilson, Deer Lodge VCF,

Deer Lodge, MT
Allen & Jennifer Hodges, Billings Vineyard,
Billings, MT
Western Region

16 metro areas with populations between

500 thousand and 1 million people with no
Vineyard:

Shawna & David Diehl, Vineyard San Francisco, CA

Aaron & Lisa Peterson, The Hub, Sunland, CA

Scott & Debbie Randol, Rogue Valley Vineyard

Church, Central Point, OR

Rick & Sharon Morton, Church on the Vine, Garden

Grove, CA

Stockton-Lodi, CA
McAllen/Edinburg/Mission, TX
Youngstown/Warren, OH
Harrisburg/Lebanon/Carlisle, PA
Springfield, MA
Charleston, NC
Sarasota/Bradenton, FL

Steve & Shu-hui Morgan, Blue Sky Vineyard,

Bellevue, WA

Eddie & Elsie Espinosa, Oasis Worship Center,

Anaheim Hills, CA

Zane & Cathy Springer, The City VCF, Shoreline, WA

Bill & Theresa Kay, Dayspring VCF, Hesperia, CA

Steve & DeAnn Porter, The Vineyard Northshore,

Bothell, WA

Billy & Donna Minter, Church at the Well, Grover

Beach, CA

John & Joni Schneider, The Bridge Vineyard

Community Church, Des Moines, WA

Peter & Linda Mano, Hope Vineyard Community

Church, Santa Clarita, CA

Steve & Kathi King, Wine Country Community

Church, Kirkland, WA

Jim & Laura Barnett, The Neighborhood A

Vineyard Church, Etiwanda, CA

New Vineyard Church Plants

vineyard church planting growth

David & Anita Ruis, Basilea, Tujunga, CA

Southwest Region

Rick & Sonja Mazaira, Journey Vineyard,

Oakhurst, CA

Mike & Liz Huff, Huntsville Community Church, TX

Great Rocky Mountains Region

Rob & Jen Martin, Vineyard Church in Lawrence, KS
Keenan & Carolyn Tompkins, Boulder Vineyard
Church, Boulder, CO
Great Lakes Region
Ed & Jodi Charlton, Vineyard Church of
Washington, PA
Chris & Kirtene Macky, Vineyard Church of Knox
County, Mt Vernon, OH
Hal & Debra McIntosh, Mosaic Vineyard Church,
Cincinnati, OH

Mike & Amber Lehmann, Trinity Vineyard Church,

Cypress, TX
Rolando & Estelita Caluguay, Eastside Vineyard
Church, El Paso, TX
Michael & Sara Hawthorne, Northeast Austin
Vineyard, TX
Joel & Vickie Willson, Mars Hill Vineyard, Baton
Rouge, LA
Micah & Vicki Ellis, Tigerland Vineyard, South
Baton Rouge, LA
Eastern Region
James & Angela Ciliberto, Niagara Falls Vineyard,
Amherst, NY

page 43

Darrell & Margaret Chatraw, Bay Area Vineyard

Church, Milton, FL
Tony & Linda Valentino, Vero Vineyard,
Vero Beach, FL
Curt & Bunny Simmons, The Vine, St Augustine, FL
Chris & Angie Mayeaux, Vineyard Church of
Murfreesboro, TN
Joshua & Jamie Stump, The Anchor Fellowship,
Nashville, TN
Aaron McCarter, Vineyard Christian Community,
Maryville, TN
Tom Waser, Smoky Mountain VCF, Kodak, TN
Bucky & Becky Buckles, North River Vineyard,
Hixson, TN
Midwest Region

Jeff & Adrienne Cannell, Central Vineyard,

Columbus, OH

Charles & Carolyn Park, River VCF, New York, NY

Evan & Colleen Nehring, Wausau Vineyard, WI

Derek Ratliff, The Southern Vineyard,

Columbus, OH

Larry & Karen Nobles, Vineyard Church of

Henrietta, NY

Craig & Roxanne Brooks, North Country Vineyard,

Rhinelander, WI

Mark & Chelsea Francis, The Vineyard Church of

Chillicothe, OH

Dorothy & David Ross, Monroe Park Vineyard,

Rochester, NY

Michael & Trisha Houle, Vineyard of Chippawa

Falls, WI

Greg & Lori Eades, Vineyard Community Church of

Lebanon, OH

Brad & Becca Zinn, Vineyard Community Church,

West Philadelpha, PA

Brian & Andrea Brinkert, Two Rivers Vineyard

Church, Mankato, MN

Ben & Jill Hodges, Four Corners Community

Church, Union Centre, OH

Bob & Debra Morris, The Vineyard Church of

Wellsboro, PA

Jeff & LeQue Heidkamp, Mercy Vineyard Church,

Minneapolis, MN

Linda & Richard Reiter, Vineyard Church of

Reynoldsburg, OH

Marc & Emily Pitman, Vineyard Church

Waterville, ME

Josh & Cory Miller, Harvest Vineyard, Ames, IA

Brian & Michelle Burd, Vineyard Christian Church,

Pickerington, OH

Brent & LeAnna Alderman Sterste, Vineyard Church of

Northampton, MA

Britt & Kathleen Hanson, Kings VCF, Zeeland, MI

Southeast Region

Bill & Angie Van Wey, Countryside Vineyard Church,

Evansdale, IA

Jason & Dana Anderson, River Valley Vineyard

Church, Rockford, MI

James & Candy Bowman, Vineyard Community

Church of Wake Forest, NC

George & Judy Marshall, Harvest Vineyard,

Waterloo, IA

Jesse & Ronni Wilson, Vineyard Church of Milan, MI

Chris & Sue Todd, Vineyard Northside Community

Church, Wilmington, NC

Sam & Anita Jones, Victory VCF, Chicago, IL

Bruce & Mara Ouverson, Vineyard Community

Church, Mason City, IA

Vic & Paula Holtz, Monroe Vineyard, MI

James & Tammy Stokes, La Via del Rio de Vida,
Wyoming, MI
Greg & Danielle Dostal, Act 1 Vineyard Church, Fort
Wayne, IN
Tim Beeson, VCC of Noblesville, IN
Kevin & Robyn Clark, Vineyard Community Church,
Lexington, KY
Jon & Michelle Allis, Vineyard Church of
Bellevue, KY

Thor & Bonnie Colberg, Vineyard Community

Church, Huntersville, NC
Kent & Janna Moore, Vineyard Church of
Savannah, GA
Chris & Christa Cahall, St Pete Vineyard, St
Petersburg, FL
Bill & Kate Moore, The Fathers Vineyard, Largo, FL
Tom & Lisa Ponchak, Matthews House Vineyard,
Lakeland, FL
Michael & Karen Oliver, St Johns Vineyard, Fruit
Cove, FL
Rafael & Cathy Gomez, Doral VCF, Miami, FL

02:49:26:07