– Alright, well good morning everyone. Welcome to day two, of the Virtual Disciple-Making Forum. We are so glad you have joined us this morning and we’ve got a great session lined up this morning, so we’re thankful you’re here. If you were here yesterday, you heard from two incredible leaders, and you’re gonna hear from another one today. So we heard from Daniel IM and Ken Adams yesterday in two different sessions and now we’re gonna hear from Scott Kindig. In just a minute I’ll let Andrew introduce him. My name is Mark Gainey. I’m the lead pastor at Fultondale First Baptist and I have the honor of the privilege of serving on the Disciple-Making lead team at the State of Alabama. And Daniel Edmonds leads that group and Andy Frazier and Robert Mullins and I help him with that. And so we’ve kind of, we’ve been blessed and privileged to be able to gather the people who would have been here in person at my Church right now at Fultondale First Baptist for a State Discipleship Conference We’ll tell you a little bit more about when that’s gonna meet in a bit, at the end of our session today. But instead of meeting in person, we’re gathering virtually. And so we’re thankful that they agreed to do that. And so I’m gonna pray for us and then I’m gonna hand it over to Andy, who’ll introduce Scott, so let’s pray. Father thank you so much for another opportunity to hear from a leader in Disciple-Making. And father thank you for those who have gathered here. Thank you for their interest and passion for fulfilling the great commission, the mandate you’ve given us. And so Father I pray that for the next few minutes, that we’d be able to eliminate distractions and focus on what you would have us to hear and what you would have us to learn and put it in practice, in our Churches and in our lives. In Jesus name we pray Amen. All right Andy, take it away.
– Good morning everybody! Mark thank you for opening our time together today and wow! What a great day we had yesterday with Daniel IM and Ken Adams. They shared some things that were very, very helpful, insightful, encouraging, and even challenging. And I know this morning is gonna be the same. We’re thankful for Scott Kindig who is joining us all the way from San Antonio, Texas. Scott serves as the Executive Pastor for Kingdom Initiatives there at Community Bible Church in San Antonio. Scott is a disciple maker. I don’t know of any other way to describe him. Mainly because he has been discipled, he loves to make disciples. Some people invested in him early on in his walk with Christ and that’s just kinda stuck with him. He loves the idea of being, in continually investing in the lives of others, he loves multiplying, he loves being a part of the genesis of movements of Disciple-Making. So, the Lord has actually influenced a lot of what we’re doing here in the state of Alabama through Scott’s Ministry and Scott’s friendship and partnership. You can talk to Robert Mullins or Larry Highchair or Brandon Fombie about that they were discipled by Scott. So Scott, we’re so thankful that you could join us today. Let me encourage all of you who are with us as we go along, use the chat function to just kind of communicate with each other. You can even comment on what’s happening there, but if you want to ask Scott a question, use the Q and A. We’ll be glad to bring your questions up and try to get Scott to answer those at the end of this time. So make sure also as you get ready to do this, that you get a pen and paper handy. You’re gonna want to take notes with what Scott has to say today. So Scott, we’re so thankful that you could join us and we really appreciate the time you’ve given us here this morning. Now I’m gonna turn it over to my friend Scott Kindig.
– I’m excited about the time that we have together. And I wanna dive in just as quick as we can. And my two goals basically for today has been, can we look at how Jesus multiplied and can we imitate that? So if we can look at how Jesus did things and then we can mock copy what we do from his model and the ways that he made disciples, we’re gonna be… It’s significantly further down the road if we follow the model of the master disciple maker. So there’s a couple of things I wanna show you and in the chat bar, feel free to put questions in there and feel free to make comments and we can pick up those things as we go through our time together. But what I wanna show you is that God, from the very beginning in Genesis had this idea that he was going to create the World and that we were gonna inhabit the World and we were gonna represent him well everywhere that we go. And he gave us the really divine mandate for us to be fruitful and multiply. And so I wanna show you just a little way to look at multiplication that might be a little different than what we got in our third grade multiplication table reality. And so what we’re gonna look at is a model that shows that there’s fruitfulness and relationship with Jesus. And the way that we’re gonna support that is that these three overlapping circles give us five different, opportunities to look at how we approach Ministry. This relates to Disciple-Making, but it also relates to Leadership Development Multiplication. Also relates to Church Planting. And so one of the things we wanna do is we want to look at these overlapping circles and we wanna consider how we can be fruitful and multiply. And so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna call a level one subtracting, that’s a subtracting reality. Level three is addition, and level five is multiplications. So what we have is subtraction, addition, and multiplication. We’re gonna do a couple of quick really fun things here that you’re gonna like a whole lot. So if you look at addition one plus one equals okay, you can put them up on your hands, you know, two. Alright? It’s right. But one times one equals one. So for a season, addition gives us better results than multiplication. But if you carry that out a couple of generations, two plus two equals four, but two times two equals four. So now in one generation and multiplication, we’ve caught up with the advantages of addition. And then we get exponential past that. Because when you get into three plus three, that equals six. But when you get into three times three that equals nine. So what Jesus is trying to utilize our life for, is that we can be an exponential. If you keep going down here the results of multiplication, beat the results of addition every time. And so what we wanna to do is we wanna look at what is, going on in these different levels of multiplication as we make disciples. So first what we wanna say is there’s a Mantra. So there’s a Mantra for level one and that Mantra is “Please Stay”. And so this is the comment that middle school boy who’s 14 years old has a middle school girl is 14 years old and she wants to break up with the 14 year old guy. And so what this kind of says, hey let’s please stay. If this is happening in a discipling relationship, if this happened in a Church Planning relationship, you know what it’s like, right? When you begin something new, what you need is people who will just stay. And God is with us inside the reality of subtraction. We don’t have much money, we don’t have much resource. Our worship leader plays a kazoo and we don’t really know what we’re doing yet, we’re forming as a community. So level two is not quite yet to addition. So it’s somewhere between subtraction and addition. And the reality here is what we’re trying to do at level two is just survival. We wanna survive. We wanna keep moving forward in our discipline relationship. So we want to keep moving forward in our direction. If we’re a Church Plant or a Missional Group or a Community Group, we wanna multiply. So at the level of addition, the Mantra that we have moves from, “Please Stay” to “Please Come”. And what’s happening over here is we’re not doing very well because we’re new at this. In level two, we’re kind of figuring this out. We feel like we can pay our bills, we feel like we can survive. In level three, the only way we could get better now is if we get more people to come. But if we’re just getting more people to come, that’s a mark of addition. And Jesus in Genesis one, and then right after the flood, he came right back in Genesis and he reinforced twice that my goal is to multiply you. So what we have between addition and multiplication is this reality of hey, we can begin to reproduce. So what’s happening up to this point is we’re getting, the stuff in us from Jesus that helps us move from addition, from subtraction to addition. And then suddenly we start making disciples and we’re beginning to reproduce. Now you guys may not have the pleasure of this yet, but I happened to have the pleasure of on the call of having a grand baby. Now I love my kids, but every day, somewhere between three and five o’clock, we get a phone call from my grand baby Georgia, who lives in Atlanta Georgia. And she has figured out at 20 months old, how to get an iPhone, how to put it on a FaceTime and how to get grandma on the phone. And she loves talking to grandma, but the fun of the game, is when grandma goes to find Gee daddy. That’s what I’m called. I’m Gee daddy. But I’ll answer whatever Georgia calls me. And so just as soon as Kim comes around the corner and sees my face that just the most beautiful, wonderful thing happens. She goes Gee daddy, Gee daddy! And it’s just the most exciting thing in my life, especially in COVID 27 days, in sheltering in place. That reality for me is a big deal. I reproduced my kids, you know, so that’s not really a multiplication. So what happened is Kim and I have four kids. There’s two of us and now there’s four kids,. Seth, Nate, Drew and Marguerite. And thank God they all got their DNA from their mother, so they’re really smart. But the challenge and the reality that we have is, when do we multiply? It’s when your babies start having babies. And so when we move to multiplication, the reality is I have made disciples of people who are making disciples of people. And if we do this right, if we do this the Jesus kind of pattern, what we begin to see is we see, begin to see generations of disciples start coming out from under generations of disciples. When Robert and I began talking about these concepts and he started gathering people around him locally, he invested in the people that were closest to him and now there’s several generations of disciples that come from the Robert Mullins tree of Disciple-Making. Because we moved from subtraction to survival, through addition into reproduction so that we could finally have babies, who were making babies, who were making babies discipleship wise. And Disciple-Making is so significant to Jesus that what happens, is you can probably intuitively pick this up. But you move from “Please Stay” and subtraction to “Please Come” ’cause we’re doing pretty good job now. We can probably hang out and do some good stuff together. Here at this level, the only way this gets better is if we, if more people come. Which is the Mantra of the Church, let’s measure the number of people in seats. lets measure the offering, lets measure the baptisms. But when you get to multiplication for the first time, you have the opportunity, not just the “Please Stay”, not just the “Please Come”, but all of a sudden you have the opportunity to send, to send people to go make disciples. And when you invest in people over a long period of time, which Jesus had 12 guys for three years and he spent more than 50% of his time with those 12 guys for three years. Those of you that have heard me, you’ve heard me say that God’s formula for and strategy for bringing peace to the Middle East was that he made disciples. His strategy for making peace in the toughest parts of the toughest cities, was he spent three years with 12 disciples. 50% of his time, if you won’t follow him around the gospels was given to him being with the 12 or with parts of the 12, the three and the one. And so, so Jesus showed us, not only can we be fruitful and multiply, but can we be fruitful and multiply so that we become a blessing to all Nations. You know from San Antonio, could we do something here in this City that would spread to all Nations? And as we gather the people who are closest to us, like Robert did, like Andy’s doing, like Mark does, like the Discipleship Department is pressing forward in Alabama. This whole idea of multiplication that Disciple-Making was Jesus’ primary ministry strategy to continue his ministry on planet Earth once he ascended. And I want you to know, it was so effective that they, that the believers who there were about 120 in an upper room, were scared to death until Pentecost. And then when the Holy Spirit who Jesus promised to send them, came alive inside of them, they didn’t have watch this. They didn’t have a formed Bible, they didn’t have a building, they didn’t have great programs and incredible curriculum. What they had was this process of Disciple-Making in homes that supplemented what was being done at the temple in the early days and then in the gatherings and in later days. And so what happens is, we can put 80, 90, 95% of all of our attention into our programming, our curriculum, our buildings, at having the best personalities and having the best worship leaders with the greatest hair gel and the best skinny jeans with holes in them that you could possibly ever find, with smoke and mirrors and phone all that sort of stuff. But what happened with those 120 people who once they were empowered by the Holy Spirit to go out and find their people and sit at tables in their home and make disciples? They went from in 33 ish AD to 365 AD, having half of the planet captured for Christianity through Disciple-Making. And that process of making disciples can be replicated anywhere. It’s the only scalable, reproducible, sustainable and multipliable thing that every believer can do. And Ken talked about that yesterday when he was with you. He talked about the primacy of Jesus’ final words. Go make disciples of all Nations. But how do we do that? If we start where we are, and then we slowly allow, the process of Jesus to invest six months, maybe nine months, maybe really in different levels over the course of two years, like you’re teaching them to do all the things that you’ve done. And as they go do it, you spend time with them. So our strategy, if it looked a little more like Jesus, now I know we can’t walk around with 12 people, but we can take the people who are closest to us and we can help them see that man, when you take this down to 10 times 10, that’s a hundred people, when 10 plus 10 is 20 people. God wants to use your life where when you see Jesus face, when everything is settled and you hear it, I will see his face. And when you see his face, he’s gonna tell you if you’re a disciple maker, a multiplying disciple maker, he’s gonna tell you to turn around and look and you’re gonna see the sea of people who multiplied past you that you’ll never get any credit for on Earth. Because nobody has a tracking system good enough to track what multiplication is gonna look like. Nobody can, I mean life way can give it a shot, but they’re probably not gonna get it past the fourth generation because you can’t keep up with people to the fourth generation. I just wanna tell you just a couple of things. There are pockets around the Country of places where the guys that are leading discipleship in Alabama have invested. In the Northwest there’s a set of Churches that when they began to live life together and when they began to multiply and when they began to use Jesus’ methods that a Church system of two and a half Churches that were doing pretty well as turned into, over the span of six years because of Leadership Development through Disciple-Making. That they’ve planted 16 Churches in the span of just a handful of years because they have enough leaders that they can send. That’s what Jesus was doing with the 12, he asked, he amazed the crowds. He asked, he spoke as one who had authority. He delivered people who had demons and he healed people who had diseases, he did amazing things. But there’s nothing quite as amazing when you measure it, as what happened when his disciples full of the Holy spirit went to do with other people what Jesus had done with them. And so here’s the goal. The goal is, if you’re in a Disciple-Making process already, be the leader who other people would want to imitate. We wanna have a life worthy of imitation. So we can’t be the people who are worn out, torn down, beat up, angry, bitter, upset over whatever the… If government’s doing or over whatever’s happening in my Church, the reality is at the Disciple-Making level, you can multiply and you can have when you see Jesus face that turn around moment where you see literally millions of people. Now, one of the things that I wanna do, I wanna add to this real quick and then we’ll kind of move to another thing. One of the things that we’re discovering now is, if you were to take these three issues and discipleship, the way we do discipleship now in most Churches is based on your IQ. We wanna teach you in classes and that is a form of discipleship. We wanna teach you in classes, but much of the teaching about discipleship, is really about your IQ. Your IQ is your intelligent quotient. And I know everybody in Alabama like has like 200 or 300 more points in their IQ, than anyone else has in the State, believe me I’m from Georgia and I’m from Texas, so I know how smart people in Alabama are. And so the IQ is high there. So this works in lots of places in Alabama, Texas and Georgia doesn’t work quite as well, you know we have to look at, really work hard, to help our IQs, you know, be able to help other people. But the reality that we have is, IQ alone only gives us the information about Jesus. So we can do information transfer really, really well, if we teach, teach, teach, teach, teach. But Jesus took teaching to a whole another level that’s called training. So he apprenticed to people with him. Come with me while I go over here. And anywhere you went with Jesus, you were gonna figure out something that you had never seen before. Stuff that you’d never imagined. The kind of healings, the kind of comments that he made, the kind of the way he dealt with difficulties. So they were not just learning from him, they were becoming like him. And there’s a reality that there’s more than IQ in discipleship. There’s also EQ, this is your emotional intelligence. And your emotional intelligence lets you realize a moment when God’s breaking through and great things are happening because of that moment. And you can see what’s happening in people and you can see when there’s a breakthrough. Because here’s the reality. What Jesus did by giving us the word of God and by teaching us and having all the records, is he gave us the best truth in the history of the World. We have the best truth, we have it. But sometimes we miss the needs of people, and our empathy level is inexact because we’re not necessarily sitting across tables from people at the level that we should be, because it’s easier to herd them into a space and to do IQ than it is to actually know them and for them to know you and for them to love you. And listen to me, I mean, really listen to this. The emotional reality of being a pastor and being a leader is a heavy weight. It can pull you down into all the negative things that are taking place, things people are saying, slander, gossip in the Church, all that kind of stuff is going on. And so we have to be emotionally healthy, so that the best truth can actually get to the right places in our heart. And the way that works is perfect. Just like this, God breaks into you. There’s an inbreaking of the kingdom of God that takes place when he teaches you something or when another brother or sister sits down with you and lead you through something and you can see like the impact and the emotion that, that brings. And that moment, is the moment we have to pay attention too, so that the breakin actually gets to breakthrough and breakthrough is taking what your breakin does, and I want it to be something that impacts my life. So really what Disciple-Making is, is integrating the good news into a lifestyle. That’s what we’re aiming for. We want to integrate the good news of Jesus, into a lifestyle style. Everything you find in the Bible is good news. As a matter of fact, when bad stuff happens to you, God according to Romans eight 28, turns that into good and he helps you. And so even when something bad comes, look for the bow on the package because God wants to deliver that book. So it breaks in, so that it can break through, so that you can see a breakout around you. And Jesus had breakouts all the time, his breakouts were amazing. Thousands of people fed, 12 baskets of food leftover so that the 12 disciples can see wait a minute hey, we started out with just loaves and fishes and now all of a sudden all of us got a basket full of this stuff? Jesus you’re gonna have to explain this to us. And Jesus took the breakin and made it a breakthrough and then there was a breakout. That’s the way emotional intelligence meets us in discipleship. We can’t just be full of knowledge, we actually have to be full of emotional empathy. Now here’s the last one and then, we’ll kind of put a bow on this package. This is LQ, LQ. So LQ is your love and intelligence. Now here’s what we know. They’ll know that we’re here as disciples by how we love one another. Now listen, we’re called actually to love everybody. We’re called to love people who hate Jesus. We’re called to love people who have different political parties than we are. We’re called to love people who have issues in life that have never been resolved because of the way that they grew up, or that they we’re born in a specific place that didn’t have much access to the gospel. And so our love quotient works like this. We take the information of God and we actually care for people with it. And when we care for people that we’re discipling, then we go on mission because the love quotient is, we can’t just collect knowledge in our heads without going with our hearts into the mission field. So you are a missionary force, going to a missionary field, and when we have a force field at work like that, we have intelligence, you have your IQ, you have your EQ, you have your love quotient. We’re moving forward on mission ’cause we’re not making disciples, if we’re not going on mission. We’re not making disciples, if our disciples don’t make disciples. And so what we have to do is create a scalable, sustainable, reproducible, multipliable way, for you to take what has been poured into you and for that to spill over into everybody around you. Now real quick, like what I’d love to, what I’d love to see on the call and in the chat for just a minute, is how many of you have actually had someone who took a season of time, six months, nine months, a year and they intentionally, intentionally poured into you and all the capital that somebody had put into them, they put into you. Now you can use the reaction mode there, you can clap, you can you can raise your hand, you can get on the screen, we can do this deal, yes I had that. Our goal would be that, that everybody that’s a believer actually has a season like that. So that season becomes the breakin, so that a believer who’s been walking a little bit longer, in Disciple-Making can help you get the most out of your breakthroughs, so that they can then send you to be a person of breakout. Now, this past week I got a, I got a real sweet, so sweet little note from somebody and I know I’m talking a lot, but we’re gonna have questions and answers just in it. And so somebody, somebody did this for me. They said okay so, here’s Scott, at the time I was living in Atlanta and here’s this guy named Drew and he’s living in Washington State and for a period of two years, discipled Drew and spent time with him and then he discipled his brother Kyle, who was also in Washington State, and then several other leaders alongside him. And Drew discipled this other person named Jane, who they married, and Kyle discipled this other person named Sarah, who he married. So I’m not saying that Disciple-Making is a meat market here, that you can just get married, you know, just start cycling with people and you can find your spouse. But in reality that is what happened for me, in the disciple group I started in, and it is what happened for Drew and it is what happened for Kyle. But now, they’re in their 11th and 12th generation of discipling people who you wouldn’t know their names and it wouldn’t matter if you did, and there’s been at least from, what was it, two year, I’m gonna take care of this brother as much as I can in a Disciple-Making way so that he can do everything he can possibly do, and that Church system that went from two and a half Churches to 16 Churches in the span of just less than a decade, triggered off of Disciple-Making. And then over here what we’re seeing is, four and five generations of people who are three generations down from me. And so the reality that we have here is, if you take one on eight, you have nine at the end of the year. But if those eight take on six at the end of that, that’s 48 more and you’re taking on a new eighth. And then if the 48 you take on four, if they take on four, then that’s a 192 people and you’re looking at, if your investment is six months or nine months, you’re looking at within three years, influencing 249 people, by spending time with them, in a cluster of people who can do life together with a leader that’s not perfect, but it’s imitatable. And our goal is to help as many people as possible have a reality like that. You can still have gatherings at Church and do all of the things that you do at Church. It’s a great swimming pool for the people that you’ll find that you can disciple. And then the people that you discipled become leaders, and all of a sudden, over the span of just a couple of years in a couple of the places that we’ve been, we’ve seen six and seven turnover multiplying into leaders who have the same, who categorically are in the same DNA. And the 12 had Jesus’ DNA so much that without Jesus being present on the planet anymore, they went from 120 people scared to death in an upper room to 20. What Rodney Stark says is, 20 million people at a time where the planet of the Earth had 40 million people in it. This is not just selling a better mouse trap, this is a reality of how much can we get, as much as possible like Jesus in the way that we make disciples that sit at our tables a little more frequently and that we talk about what is the breakin that breaks through so that we can break out. So Eddy, I’m gonna slow down here and turn this over to you to help us facilitate some of the Q and A times and that may run into more drawing on boards or whatever, but you guys can leave me here, I’m gonna grab a drink of water and let you guys get us started on that.
– Yeah Scott thank you so much for leading us. I mentioned in the chat that this is more like drinking from a fire hydrant than it is sipping from a water fountain, so…
– I’m so sorry about that.
– But now and that’s a good thing. So I know you guys as you have listened to Scott are probably in your head formulating some questions that you’re thinking about. Don’t be shy, ask. So go ahead and submit those questions in the Q and A and we’ll try to walk through those and answer those the best we can. Scott a couple of questions we have to start with are, it’s being asked that someone in their current experience, seems to kind of get locked out at stage three, that just the addition stage, the “Please Come Stage”, do you see movement to four and five as more organic, or a loving push of encouragement? So I don’t wanna try to assume details in that question, but I’m guessing you see what they’re talking about there.
– Yes sir, let’s open this back up real quick. I wanna show you a couple of things to answer to try to answer that question just a little bit. So there’s some resistors in everything that we do. And so if you look at this mark at level two, it represents kind of a force field, a magnetic force field. ‘Cause everybody that’s at one, wants to end up at two or three because it’s just better, you can pay your bills, that’s a nice thing. And there’s a second force field, it takes place right here at level four. And here’s what happens is, as you move, and so let me just give you some steps that’s real quick. As you move from 80% of Churches in America are in level one. And that means the way they categorize this, is there a hundred or less and declining. So 80% of Churches are here. For a long time, 16% of Churches were here, but over the last, you know four or five years, this is an exponential format from Todd Wilson. You can actually go on exponential.org and you can download a book about this right here if you want more information. But it used to be 16% here and now it’s 13% of Churches are a hundred plus, And this is all of those a hundred plus all the way to mega Church level three in addition. And so this used to be 4%, but now there are 7% of Churches in America that are in reproduction. That means like they’re multiplying services, they’re multi-siding, they’re figuring out ways to have multiple, I mean, just they’re figuring out ways to fix these problems and then they realize these base problems keep coming, so what we gonna do is we got to start sending some people to be at Church somewhere. So the reality is the second force field, comes this direction. And by the way, if you guys wanna get on call, later with more depth in this, we can certainly do it. But this mirrors the journey from being slaves in Egypt, so crossing the Red sea to the wilderness, to the pro… To the Jordan river and into the promised land. And so what happens here is forces try to keep you, when you start getting to three, three and a half and four, that area, what happens is, all the forces that can be conjured up by the enemy try to push us back this direction. So what happens when you move from layer to layer is from here to here you just, you can pay your bills. From here to here, you’re doing what your original vision was intended to do. But if it stays in addition world, like we just need a few more rears in seats this week than we had last week, we need a few more dollars in the bank account than we had last week, we have more baptisms. Then we’re staying in the operating system of addition. And so what we have to do is start making decisions differently, and I’ll show you how easy this is. The operating system in level one is “We Can’t”, our only hope of success is God can. So God comes in and he does miracles. So the operating system is actually what defines what level you’re in. You might look like you’re in a level three, but actually be thinking with an operating system of we can’t. That’s sort of a poverty mindset in Church, God has all the resources that you need. The operating system in level three is “We can and You can help”. What that means is, let’s pay professionals who have degrees. We can take care of things, if you guys just show up and you pay your tithes and you pay the tax and you pray for the missionaries, that’s all we need you to do. And the operating system that moves from, you know, the Mantras “please stay”, “Please Come”, “Please Go”. The operating system is, We can’t, We can, You can help, and this is probably intuitive again, now it’s “You can”, why? Because we’ve discipled you and we can help and staff becomes, the people who are equipping the saints for the works of service that God’s prepared for them to do. So you move on this by the Operating System that you embrace. And so when you start making decisions like, you know what, our people are competent, they can do some of the stuff that we’re killing ourselves trying to do. When you start thinking that way, you’re really close to sending and multiply. So it is organic. But what we’ve discovered is, you don’t move this way as Church Planting reality unless you move this way, Disciple-Making reality. So Disciple-Making reality precedes groups multiplying and precedes Churches planted.
– That leads right into a combination of several questions, we’re having that kind of have the same theme, is kind of being asked or how do you maintain this fidelity and this sense of mission in reproducing and multiplying? How do you maintain that as you go in those that you disciple? I mean, not just trying to have a small group, Bible study or a close group Bible fellowship or whatever. How do you maintain that drive and that passion to keep going, to keep multiplying, to keep reproducing?
– Yeah, so this is a fun question for me. For example, Mark and Andy and Robert and Brandon and Larry and the crew people, that we have been investing in each other for several years now. We’re like a brotherhood when we get together. What happens is when you have the IQ and the EQ together, there’s some sort of a bond that takes place. And even though I stopped discipling a group of people so that they can go disciple others, they still find a way to my house and my table about once a month for a while. And so we stay relationally connected. You know, we have to love each other because the Bible tells us we have to love each other. But when we like each other, that’s a whole another deal. And so we become this posse of people who are about the same thing, but we all do it in our own personality and our own context. What I do is not gonna look like what you do, but when we do it together, you can smell the DNA of how we’re taking the principles of Jesus and putting them to work. And honestly, I just want you to know that if we can, if we took that triangle, we said these are the words of Jesus, these are the ways of Jesus and these are the works of Jesus, what would you say in that IQ, EQ, LQ reality? What we’re saying is that, ultimately it’s a fuller more robust relationship that happens with people that you spend six months with and or nine months with, or a year with and then they go out to do it and you come back together for a family reunion. It’s a beautiful thing, that’s how we sustain each other. And to be honest, about every six months, we now try to get all of the people who’ve been involved in discipleship together about every six months. So that we can say hey, we wanna hear what God’s doing over there. What’s the breakin that has broken through that’s broken out in your place? And how did it happen? Tell us about it. So we become a community, even though we’re not in the same Church or in the same States, we become a community and we learn from each other.
– That’s fantastic. I think what you’re doing by answering that one question, you’re answering a big scope of other questions too, because a lot of those questions are along the same vein, like it’s not just how do we keep this movement going and how do we instill this into other people, but how, how do we personally change through this and influence other people? So another question we have is from a lady who is asking us as she disciples, women in her context and her Church and they’re about to reproduce, how do you as a person who has a heart for reproducing and discipleship and multiplication, but you’re going up against maybe some leadership, there may be a little friction there. Maybe they’re more comfortable with just survival and addition. How do you as a member of a Church who you’re actively involved, in trying to seek this and be involved in that, how do you implement or influence or encourage your leaders?
– Yeah so one of the primary things that’s important in a Church, is for leadership to know that there’s not somebody doing an end run around them. And so I would just wanna go and have a soft conversation that just says hey, I’m making disciples so that I can help bring more leaders into whatever you want them to do and when it comes to ministry because God’s given us our leaders. And Romans 13 is pretty clear, that we’re supposed to really submit to and be a blessing to our leaders. And so first Peter three, like 13 through 18 is a great passage. One of the things that I would say to you is, when you see a little bit of resistance about something new, it’s probably because at that Church in the past, something new came in and wrecked some stuff in the past. And so everybody remembers the wrecks, they don’t remember the fixes. And so what happens is there becomes a risk averse reality sometimes when anything new comes up. So there’s two realities that you can deal with that. Number one is just the straight up conversation. Hey, pastor or leader or a developer, I’m for you, But I just, my thing just happens to be, making disciples and I’d love to make disciples and I’d love to see an opportunity for me to make disciples and then for you to deploy them into ministry wherever they are. I’d love to be one of your leadership development people that helps this process go through, I’d love to sit down with you and show it all to you, everything that we wanna do. The second thing, is to just do it slow and steady. You know, the greatest things in the world, so the first Church that we implemented in this App, for a while it was the weird thing nobody understood, and then it became kind of Ooh, there are people who are coming out of this with stuff I don’t have. And so they’re not looking at which Bible study can I sign up for anymore? They’re looking at how can I get what this person has? And so when we disciple people rightly, what happens is people start saying hey, you know, what’s he having? I think I’ll have, I’ll have some of that, you know. And so the reality is if you go and you work hard, to disciple people and then they begin to disciple people, then it can come a huge blessing to the Church. But you need to make sure that your leaders are feeling fully supported by you. And I know that’s difficult in some places at some times, but I think if you explain your ministry to them, in a very cautious and really safe way, they will love the outcome, so help them love the outcome.
– Yeah, that is a gracious and loving way to address that when people start noticing the life change and the transformation and how this is helping their Church, is kinda hard to push back against that. So I wanna kinda end this time together Scott with something that I think is the elephant in the room. I mean it’s obvious all of this prior to the last two months or so, would be a lot easier to understand in our culture and our context. But give us a little bit of direction right now on what you’re seeing in your Church and in these multiplying movements and relationships you have. Give us a little bit of, of information on how that’s being helpful right now when people can’t meet in person and gather in person and maybe even give us a little direction of what you see, where we’re headed in the near future, with applying this to our Churches and our ministries.
– So, so what’s great, what I think has happened in this season of COVID, is that we have time to do some things that we have not had time to do in the past and we need to pay attention to the most important things. I would say the first words of Jesus were pretty important. And in Mark chapter one he said, “the time has come the kingdom goes in hand, repent and believe the good news.” So I’m here and I’m available for you, take me up on it and get all you can out of it, that’s the big words. The last words that Jesus, what Ken talked about yesterday, go make disciples of all Nations, not just people in your backyard, but actually if you… Were in Military City in USA. So every time we decide to talk to somebody that’s in the military, we know we’re deploying them to somewhere in the world, and so we have to disciple them well, and we have to do it quick because we never know when they’re gonna be deployed. So we take the most of Mark one, 14, 15 and we take the most of Matthew 28, 18 through 20. We moved those two things together to realize, this is what Jesus to do Disciple-Making pieces. How do you create relationships where there’s breakout to breakin, to breakthrough and a break into breakthrough to breakout? How do you, how do you create that? And the reality is, for years the Church has said, you know, if we only had something that was multipliable and scalable, if we only had something that would come along and give us the opportunity not to be stuck behind the desk doing Admin, but to actually be in the faces of people making disciples. Well, God blessed that in this season. And I have four huddles that we’re doing on staff with people I could not ever get into huddles in the past because their job is so intense. And so on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we have these huddles that, we’re pouring into people who don’t have time, but suddenly they have time. And what they would say, now listen to me, here’s the big stuff. You can’t do that over a screen. Here’s the reality right now, we can’t do it without a screen, ’cause we’re sheltered in place. So we’ve been given a gift to be able to do this, and here’s what our executive administrative leader has said to us, I’ve never had the time to sit down and do this before, and I really thought it was stupid to try to do it on a computer, but there’s something about seeing everybody’s faces. We can actually do the IQ, the EQ and the LQ all at the same time because I see all of your faces in the screen and they begin to actually start discipling each other. So the best discipleship huddle that we have is when I talk less and the people are starting to take it over because you know that they’re gonna be really good leaders in the next generation. And so I believe that about a third of what we will do, six months from now, will be virtual. And it makes more sense for our people. What if we program it and say, hey, if you can show up at four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday’s, I will disciple you. But if you can’t do that, I can’t, I can’t make that work for you. But we have couples, they’re saying as soon as my kids go to bed at eight o’clock, I can be in a group, I can be in a huddle, I can be being discipled. And they actually prefer it. You know, our streaming went from 14,000 people in five services to 96,000 people watching online. And so we have something that’s multipliable and scalable, I think we need to receive this from Jesus as a gift and we need to get really good at this platform and other platforms like it will come out. Because the whole world is working by Zoom now. So every, every new upstart company and technology is gonna have a better version of this and it’s gonna be a cheaper version of this. And we can do it sitting in our table or at my desk in my office, and we’re not driving 30 minutes to get somewhere and driving 30 minutes back home and being two hours away from our family, we’re given one hour to discipleship in our home, at our desk, in front of our computer. I think God’s given this to us as a gift. Is that, does that kind of answer your question?
– Absolutely, yes. And I think what you’ve done so far today is not only answered some questions, you’ve probably created a whole list of questions for people. And as you’ve been talking, our Disciple-Making lead team has been chatting. And that’s Daniel Edmonds, Robert Mullins and Mark Gainey. And before I kind of let Mark close us out, I just want to mention a few things. The chat has been an indicator that we need more of this, so we’re planning on doing more of this.
– Great.
– But what you provided for us today, Scott has been so, so helpful, so encouraging and even challenging where we need it. So as we get ready to close our time out, I just wanna say thank you for joining us and thank you for sharing with us. We know that you have put a lot of thought and prayer and God has given you some great experience and some unique gifting to be able to do this. So we really appreciate this. So as we get ready to pitch things Mark you, do you say anything before we sign off? I mean you sign off?
– Yeah guys, ladies and gentlemen, I just wanted to tell you that, I love the State of Alabama and I love what God’s doing from a State conventionally perspective. But I hope that what Disciple-Making does is, it spills outside the boundaries of Baptist and it spills outside the boundaries of what our norms are. And we actually, when Cities for Christ, I just would encourage you with this one thing. What if you’re, what if your mission was, could we increase the number of disciples in our City by 1% this year? Could we do that this year? Just in one year, could we do that? And Alabama is very important, sweet to me. I spent one of the greatest years of my life in Birmingham, serving a great Church and that gave me a lot of these great relationships. So these connections you’ll hold onto for the rest of your life. These are guys that I do live with and love. So thank you all so much for your time today.
– Well thank you Scott. And now I’m gonna turn it back over to Mark as he calls this out. Thank you everybody for joining us.
– Awesome yes. Thank you so much for joining us, hang with me for just a second because I’ve got some important info to give you, for things that you’ll want down the road. But thank you again for joining us. I know you have been encouraged by all three of these sessions, if you’ve joined all three, I do wanna thank personally, I wanna thank Scott Kindig and Daniel IM and Ken Adams for joining us. And I wanna thank the folks, the leading team that Andy mentioned, I wanna thank Andy and Robert and Daniel and Jay Gordon also, who’s been moderating our chat all throughout these sessions. So thank you guys. If you are interested in a Disciple-Making huddle, you heard Scott talk about being poured into and somebody’s given you everything they’ve got to disciple you. If you’re interested in that, email Robert at that link. And then lastly, you’re gonna get to hear from all three of these guys again, from Daniel IM from Scott Kindig, from Ken Adams in September. We have rescheduled our conference, in person conference. You see it on the screen right there, to September 28th and 29th and you can register for free, it’s aldiscipleshipconference.com aldiscipleshipconference.com We would love to see every one of you there and invite others. We do have a limit of 200 people, so the first 200 to register we’ll get a spot there and Robert Coleman should be here with us as well, so we’re looking forward to that. But thank you so much again for joining us, these two days and I know that God is gonna use this to continue to spread the movement of Disciple-Making in our State and beyond. So thank you for joining us and we’ll see you in September.
by Dogwood