And welcome to The Unknown Webcast. This is broadcast number 277. Stephen Atkerson joins us to talk about growing a New Testament church today. My name is Don Vino. I'm president of Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc. in Wonder Lake, Illinois, which produces The Unknown Webcast. And our senior researcher is Ron Hensel. Greetings, Stephen Edgerson. We met Steve actually just a couple of weeks ago at the Founders Conference in Florida. He was next door in the exhibition. He's not an exhibitionist, but he did have an exhibition booth. He came over and said, hello, neighbor. And he had an exhibition booth with his associates there talking about New Testament church dynamics. And I thought I was going to be concerned, but I was intrigued. I thought I was going to be concerned for this reason, as I mentioned to Stephen when we met. Over the years, I have seen the church go through a number of trends and various groups rising up and saying, we are the one true New Testament church type, and you guys are missing it, unless you do, and fill in the blank, a house church that functions like this, or a megachurch that functions like this, or some other kind. So, you have all these kinds of claims all of which may be okay, but not necessarily the inspired, inerrant way of doing church. That's a problem. And there's also this lack of understanding—and I look this up just so I can talk about it just briefly—that the median church size in Canada and North America and the U.S. is 75 or under. So, generally, you're not looking at gigantic churches. If you look at something called the, that's the median church size, the mean church size, which is done a little bit different mathematically, is 184. But in the main, the median church size is 75 or under. So churches tend to be not mega churches to begin with. Would you agree with that, Stephen? Yeah, that's a confusing figure. Evidently, most Christians are in the bigger churches, but most churches are 100 or under. Right. Yeah, so yeah, that's right. Right, that's exactly right. Most churches are in the 100 or other category. Okay, so is a megachurch a superior type of church? And if not, why not? I got baptized at First Baptist Atlanta in the 70s under Charles Stanley, 7,000 members then. And then I was active at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis, Tennessee, just up the road from Elvis. And they had 14,000 members. I was on the staff there. So I had big church, I had us for sure. A lot of good comes from those big churches, especially programs and hopefully good teaching, not always, and super music. But that's extra on New Testament. You don't see churches that big in the New Testament because of no other reason, it was persecuted. So I'd like to say I studied myself out of a job. I was a pastor at a traditional church all throughout the 80s. And we had 300 people after I got done with the great big churches, so that's small by comparison to them. Anyhow, we started a church in Chattanooga, and I was the liaison to go up there and help them, and they got the idea that they wanted to be intentionally more Roman villicized, and their idea was to reproduce a network of smaller churches rather than one church getting bigger and bigger, because they could do things, big churches. I think I know how this started. Okay. Okay. I think it started one evening when a bunch of guys said, let's sit down and watch television together in fellowship. And they saw Steve Martin do his, let's get small sketch. And then it took off from there. You know how it goes. You know, guys start talking, let's get small. Researchers will tell you that in the early church, when they had worship services, it wasn't like a full-service gas station where you just went, sort of a spectator sport. Instead, what was encouraged was the free use of spiritual gifts, especially spoken gifts. Well, you know, one of the greatest fears people have is public speaking. And so to get up in front of 3,000 of your closest friends and share something, not very likely to happen. But it can happen in a smaller setting. So the big churches lose that necessarily. It has to be a spectator sport. In smaller churches, it don't have to be that way. Also, I would argue that in the early church, their polity was one of elders who were servant leaders who sold more than they told. In other words, through persuasion, built consensus. the main authority was the ability to persuade with the truth. If the church is small enough, you can work those lines of relationships and do that. But once you get over a certain size, it has to revert to more of a CEO model of man instead of consensus. Also, the scholars will tell you the early church had the Lord's Supper every week as an actual meal. It was a sacred covenant fellowship meal. And again, that's better in more of a family size setting than a huge cafeteria setting. It builds consensus, it builds community, it builds unity. So anyway, they started doing that in Chattanooga and I thought, wow, I really liked it. And as I studied it from the scriptures, I saw that is what the early church did. My desire came to be to do that. Anyhow, finally, if you think about it, every New Testament epistle written to church was written to church, it meant somebody's home. So arguably, the types of relationships and activities it describes were, I would argue, even designed for smaller settings. And so once you leave a certain size, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that. So our vision has been to start a network of smaller churches where you can actually know everybody there. And the idea is when you get so big you don't know everybody, it's time to do something else. So those big meetings, we would call those more ministry meetings that are great for evangelism, like Billy Graham did, or worship, like Bill Gaither did, or even seminars like Bill Gothard used to do. But as you can see, if your first name's not Bill and your last name doesn't start with G, you can't have a big meeting. Yeah, you seem to occupy a niche that is kind of, well, it's kind of new to me. Although it shouldn't be, because at least in terms of, you know, you have these, sometimes they're just, you don't know, are these just fads? Or is this something that somebody has woken up to that is going to be permanent? You know, that's going to, there's always going to be a presence of this It might have to coexist with other models of doing church, but it's going to stay. It has staying power. For instance, you talk to people who are not necessarily in small churches, but they have something called family integrated ministry, which has to do with really, I have a very limited understanding of it. Let's just say we don't have Sunday school or something like that, or everything is family integrated. The worship service, the kids don't leave and go to any place else. They stay in the worship service. I don't want to oversimplify it, but there's another model, house church movement. You're not saying we have to be in houses, but you are saying we should maybe not say that big is necessarily the ideal. In fact, it probably isn't the ideal. In fact, the ideal seems to be something maybe a little bit bigger than can comfortably fit in the house. but you wouldn't do what Joel Osteen did and go buy a sports stadium to put your church into, right? Yeah, well, to quote Johnny Hunt, a big church guy, bigger isn't better, better is better. And so we would say that the problem with modern day house churches is our modern day Western homes aren't quite the same as those first century Roman villas in terms of how big these interior rooms were. So for example, there were 120 in somebody's upper room. I can't get that many in my house. And so the typical American house church might have 20, 30 people in it, which is not quite the dynamic equivalent to what you see in a New Testament house church. So it's actually often sub New Testament. We found there aren't enough Holy Spirit raised up leaders for that many micro churches. You don't have a diversity of spiritual gifts like you see cataloged in First Corinthians 14 in that house church at Met in the home of Gaius. You don't have any financial strength. So they tend to be weak and anemic modern day western house churches now there are exceptions of course so yeah we're one one notch bigger we're thinking Roman vilicized and often that means not meeting in a home unless you're out in the country and can add on to your house and have plenty of room for the cars. So another problem that we have the Romans didn't is where you can park all those cars that drive up for that many people in a house. I have been like yourself. I have been in both small church, mega church, and I tend to stay in the small churches. I just think there's a better dynamic. There's a better opportunity to grow spiritually together to get to know everybody, at least by face, if not by more intimate relationships, those can grow over time. It seems to me that the modern, this is something I've written on in the past, so I'll throw it out there. It seems to me that the modern megachurch model, which has gone from just being a megachurch, being a megachurch with many other campuses. You have one central teacher who is really not known by anybody other than seeing them on a screen. You don't know what his personal relationships are like. You don't even know if he's got bad breath or not. I mean, you just don't know anything about him. But you follow him because he's the guy doing the teaching every Sunday. Now, that comes, in my opinion, from a mistaken idea that evangelism is supposed to happen in the church. And so our task is to figure out a way to bring unbelievers into the structure where we meet, sneak up on them with the gospel, make sure we don't offend them with other symbology or sounding songs or whatever, to sneak up on them with the gospel. And then you create a sort of a multi-level marketing plan for Jesus, if you will. But does discipleship really happen in those settings? Do those who have different kinds of giftedness exercise them? Are they able to, or is it limited to a small number of people who are the beautiful people that will conform to the leadership standards? Now, I've probably successfully offended most all megachurch people, and my response is, I don't care. Bill Hybels about a decade ago said, you know, we realized we're not making disciples. We're just a great big revolving door and we need to rethink everything. The point being, you said, are they making disciples? And there's one guy who said, no, we've decided we're not making disciples. So we don't do the attractional model. We would definitely say churches for believers and evangelism is supposed to mostly take place outside of church. We equip believers to do evangelism, but the Sunday church meeting is to encourage the saints to equip the believers. It's definitely believer-oriented. That's right. Okay, so our book, actually Stephen's book is New Testament Church Dynamics, and there's a picture of it behind me right there. Growth Strategies of the Ancient Church. So let's start in the beginning. In the beginning was tradition strategy for success. Okay, I think what Roman Catholicism has done with traditions scares evangelicals badly. There's good tradition and there's bad tradition. What we're talking about is the word tradition is used positively and negatively in the New Testament. For example, 1 Corinthians 11, 12, 13, 14 There's a big section on church practice and Paul leads it with, I praise you for holding to the traditions that I passed on to you. None say teachings, he said traditions and it's the traditions for the Lord's Supper as a meal, and for participatory worship. And then in Thessalonians, Paul writes, he actually commands them as an imperative, hold to the traditions that you received from us, whether by word of mouth or by letter. There he wasn't talking about church practice, but the word traditions is plural, is a broader application than just the one tradition he was writing about in Thessalonians. point is, what do we do with these positive references to church traditions of the apostles that we see in the New Testament? At the very least, I would conclude that if they knew we were trying to organize our churches according to the traditions that we see in the New Testament, they would be pleased with that. And of course, I'm talking about New Testament traditions, not extra biblical traditions. And so my idea is if anybody understood the function of the church, it was the apostles. They've been handpicked by Jesus, hand-trained by Jesus. So when we look at the way they set up churches, you see, unless they were idiots, how they set the church up was consistent with their beliefs about what the church was supposed to do. So they say in the design, form follows function. So the form of the church we see in the New Testament is going to be consistent with the function of the church. And so that's what we get by looking to those traditions, things that we can see how they did it. And even if it's not expressly commanded, I would argue not to do it their way, cause for justification. They think I'm weird because I do it the New Testament way. I think we ought to look at people weird who don't do it the New Testament way, meaning the burden of explanation ought to fall on those who've decided to deviate from the pattern. I'm not saying it's sin. I'm not saying you should never do it. Like Moses said, don't work on the Sabbath. unless your ox is in the ditch, then you can work on the Sabbath. So there's reasons not to do it the New Testament way, but I'm just saying that ought to be the starting point. What sorts of traditions—just name one or two that might be helpful so that the person who hasn't seen your book yet will go, okay, oh, okay, that's a tradition I can kind of go with. Well, a tradition almost all churches go with is meeting for church on Sunday, the Lord's day. That's not commanded. That's a tradition. And most people do that. All right. Well, another tradition is observing the Lord's supper every week as an actual meal. That is what they did, even though that's not commanded. It's what they did as a meal. So the question is, why did they do it as a meal? What are we missing if we don't? And if doing it as a meal, if that idea didn't come from Jesus, where would it come from? And if it did come from Jesus, we really want to throw that overboard. And the historians will tell you the church continued to celebrate the Lord's Supper as a meal every week for hundreds of years. They don't know why it stopped after Christianity was legalized. The big churches stopped it first and then over time the smaller ones eventually stopped it also. But my point is that's a tradition, that's a pretty important one I would argue about how often and how to celebrate the Lord's Supper. So that would be one example of a tradition that they had. So when Paul says, as often as you celebrate, and some have taken that to be weekly, some have taken that to be anytime you meet during the week, Some have taken it to be once a month, once a quarter, which are possible understandings. What you're arguing is it should be each time you gather for your main Sunday service, let's say, as part of what you're doing. So you're gathering not only to have the meat of the word expounded upon, to share your gifts amongst the body, but to break bread together in remembrance of what the Lord has done. Connected dynamics of the individual believers in the group. Well, we don't believe the Lord's Supper should be an individualistic time. Rather, it's a community time. So today, when you look at the Lord's Supper, you see a bunch of pre-broken cracker crumbs and many, many little shot glasses full of fruit of the vine. And so that's a picture of division. In 1 Corinthians 10, he talks about because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one loaf and he talks about the cup of blessing from which we all partake so symbolically i think what we should see at the lord's table is a single loaf and a single cup that's the oneness aspect from which we all partake and as you know don typically pastors turn that into a time of introspection every head is bowed every eyes closed they're asking the holy spirit to shine the search light of his holiness into the deepest recesses of their hearts, looking for unconfessed sin. Look, I'm all for that. But I don't think that's what the Lord's Supper is about. When Paul warns the Corinthians there about eating judgment on yourself, that if you partake it in an unworthy manner, the manner is the problem. And of course, their problem was the rich didn't want to eat with the poor. So they connived to get there early. By the time the poor came, the food was gone. The sin was, some of the rich were drunk, the poor went home hungry. That's the unworthy manner. And what you're supposed to examine yourself about is, are there prejudices in my life so deep that there are brothers that I don't really even recognize as legitimate members of the body of Christ? I'm not going to eat with him. So if it's a black-white thing or a different caste system in India or whatever it is, that's the sin he's warning about. So back to your individualistic question. When we make the Lord's Supper about something else, and you're just randomly examining your life for unconfessed sin, and the organ's playing funeral music, and the lights are turned down, and every head is bowed, and the eyes are closed, that is individualistic. So I guess to answer your question, it destroys that, Don. I think Lord's Supper is about a corporate sacred covenant meal. It shows our oneness in Christ. It reminds us of his promise to come back and eat it again with us. The meal part of it is like rehearsal dinner. before the wedding banquet of the lamb, or it's a type of the wedding banquet of the lamb. But then also, of course, the elements remind us of the new covenant and his death on the cross. So it's all those things together. So I think the problem is by removing the weekly meal aspect of it, we've replaced it with something else, which is not bad by itself, but it's not as good as what Jesus is not as good. Right. So in that setting, you really are getting to know one another better. You have someone of means actually sitting next to someone who is not of means, and you get to know them as persons and to pray with them and to understand what their life is like. So there's a lot of benefits to that. Okay. Now, you mentioned participatory worship. What did you have in mind? Okay, well, let me lead in by saying, if we do it the New Testament way, you've got a time of song and testimony. You've got a time of hardcore teaching, and then you've got this uninterrupted time of fellowship around a meal. So you've got all the elements of what a person needs, so to speak. It's a whole enchilada. It's whole wheat bread, not white bread. For church, it's the full thing. But back to the participatory part, 1 Corinthians 12, 13, 14, he's regulating the use of spiritual gifts in a church meeting. The assumption is you can use your spiritual gift in a church meeting. It's obvious that their use was spontaneous. It wasn't scripted in advance. The prime directive is that it had to be edifying. And it was not pastor-centric. Instead of one man has, it's each one has. And now he puts caps on it, like two or at the most three people can prophesy. It's got to be one at a time. As I said, it's got to be edifying. So we see pastors in that phase of the meeting, rather than being just our players, they're the sideline coaches. And they're keeping it according to the rules, but you'd rather somebody else out there carrying the ball instead of the pastor in that phase. So you see that also in Hebrews 10, 24, it says concerning our coming together, not to neglect it, but he says, consider how to stir one another up to love and good deeds. So before you ever come to church, he's saying, you need to consider how's God gonna use me to stir other people up to love and good deeds. So church needs to be formatted in some way that there's ample opportunity for stirring up love and good deeds. And one way to do that is to allow any member in good standing to speak in the church meeting, as long as what is said is designed to build up the saint. So that's what I mean by participatory worship. So you can call it song and testimony if you want to. So the first hour with us, we sing some songs. And then after that, I don't know who's going to speak or how many people. And I'm just coaching it from the sidelines. And my job is to keep it moving, keep it edifying. coach people outside of the meeting, if there's not, and ending it at a reasonable time. I became a Christian in a group called the Plymouth Brethren. Oh yeah, sure. Open Brethren. So there's, in terms of at least how they organize their Lord's Supper, there's a lot of overlap between what you're saying. If you go to the British Isles, you'll find Brethren assemblies that organize both their Lord's Supper and their ministry meeting, as they call it, the same way. What New Testament Reformation Fellowship is about is not just church size. It's about a whole philosophy of doing church. Yeah, but the size is integral to that. You get past a certain point, it's increasingly difficult to do. I've been bivocational since 91. And we're offering small churches growth ideas, we got directly from the New Testament, spiritual growth ideas, but it's especially helpful for bible vocational pastors, because this way of doing church is not as pastor centric. it incorporates more people into the process of what happens on Sunday. So yeah, it's not just that you're small. See, a lot of problems with small churches is they try to be a big church, and they can't be. You can't compete with that. So if the big church are the galleons of the Spanish Armada, these little churches are more like the small ships of the English fleet sailing in between them. They shouldn't even try to be like the Spanish Armada. God bless them. But let's not try to be like John MacArthur's church. You can't do it. So we're going to play to our relational strength. So that's the ideas we're offering to leaders of small churches, whether they meet in a building or a home. Right. So no chaos and pandemonium in the church service. That's one of the things you're talking about. First Corinthians 12, 13 and 14. Right. One of the things that I emphasize when I speak in churches on the role of the pastor, as I point out, the pastor has really tasks that are assigned to him biblically, which is to pray for the congregation and to teach and guard the congregation. They kind of go together. Teach the word and protect the congregation from false teachers that would creep in from the outside or those who would rise up from within. That's really his two jobs. His assignment is not marital counseling. He may do that because he's gifted at it, but that's not his job. And hospital visitation is not his job. He may do that, but it's not his job. And I have on more than one occasion had elders come to me after and say, can we go out to lunch? And I go, sure. And we go out to lunch and they look at me and they go, okay, well, if That is not to pass your job. Who's supposed to do that? And I look around the table and I go, I noticed most of you are over 40 or 50 already, have been married for 20 years. Is there some reason you can't do marital counseling? Or some of you that are like 60 and above are already at the hospital because many of your friends frequent to the establishment. Is there some reason you cannot do the hospital visitation? And they go, well, we have never thought about that. I said, that is what the body of Christ is about. Everybody can do everything, including the pastor. You agree with that, right? Oh, preach it, brother, preach it. And by the way, now, Ron, to complete the thought, we're not denigrating in-depth Bible teaching. No, I didn't say that. Yeah, so our first hour is, we call it song and testimony, if you want to look at it that way. Second hour is in-depth teaching from somebody qualified to do it. And then the rest of the day is the Lord's Supper is a meal. So our church starts at 1030, Sunday mornings, almost every week at 530. There's still people there. They just don't want to go home. They can leave and tell me what to. I'm good till about 330 and I've enjoyed all I can stand, but people really like it and they stay and stay and stay. So I do think we're meeting the need for sure. Yeah, it's unfortunate because I don't know that I would go 930 to 530. I'm sure I wouldn't in fact. do that. But on the other hand, we sort of have this undefined or unstated practice of getting my God hour in. I put in my hour for the week or my two hours for the week. I put the check mark of, okay, did the God thing. And now I can go on with my other stuff. So, you know, as you describe this, it's a really, it's a comprehensive, holistic, you might say, word that's been overused in the past, but I like it here. Philosophy of church, how to do church, how to do church ministry. Do you find that certain, either church backgrounds or denominations, however you want to put it, gravitate more than others? And maybe I should also ask, are there different denominations represented in your approach? Do you find people from Southern Baptists, other PCA, applying these principles? Yeah, we're Southern Baptists ourselves. A lot of Baptistic people do it. Other denominations, more liturgical by tradition, don't have the freedom to do a lot of this stuff. So I get some inquiries from Anglicans, but they don't seem to have the freedom to really do a lot of these things. Well, you know, you take, I just mentioned my own denomination, the PCA, and there is no standard liturgy. in, well, any Presbyterian church, really. In fact, when the Westminster Assembly gathered, one of its tasks was not only to produce a confession of faith in two catechisms, but also produce a directory of worship. And they did produce one, but they refused to actually legislate a specific order of worship or liturgy. So it wouldn't be beyond reasonable speculation to say that this could happen in a PCA church. I was just wondering if it had, if you're aware of it, apparently not, but a lot of churches get kind of high bound in tradition, but that probably happens in the SBC too. You probably run into that. Yeah, of course. We just work with the guys that are open to it. So again, it's not all or nothing and it's not, we think you're in sin if you don't do it, but we're offering these as tools to those who are open to consider it. Some of these things are all of them. We've been practicing it for 30 years and found it to be quite a blessing, all of them for 30 years. And so we've learned a lot about applying 2000 year old concept in a more of a modern setting. Like for example, I told you the problems we ran into with house churches is being too small. So no, we're just happy if anybody does anything of this, I think it'll be a blessing to God's people. And most pastors have never heard of any of this. I sailed through seminary without learning any of it. It's not that it's unknown. It's just that it's been deemed irrelevant, like we're in a toga. Therefore, it's not talked about. So one of the things that this is just my opinion, I come to my brain right now, so I haven't even thought about it overly much, I suppose. But there's this kind of an idea that the church's task is to get large, to grow large, and to hire professionals to do worship and whatever. But what we're finding in Scripture is no, it's not really that way. It's really all about focusing on Christ and the individuals in your immediate sphere. those that you're taking care of. And we also find that by the third century, fourth century, the church was so effective at helping even those outside the church that Julian the Apostate writes, you know what, if we want to restart these pagan churches, we've got to start acting like the Christians, right? Because they're feeding the poor, not just their poor, ours as well. Right. They're taking care of other people's children. Right. They have hostels for travelers, not just their people, our people. So you priests in Galatia, you can't go to places that are low on a base. You've got to start taking care of the poor. If we want to be successful, we've got to start acting like the Christians, and today we have the opposite effect. We have megachurches going. If we want to be effective, we have to start acting on culture. That's scary. Well, that's right. Big meetings might be fine for evangelism, like the miracle evangelism you see in the temple courts, but my church is in the Atlanta Baptist Network, big and all that nine marks stuff. And one of the guys at a recent pastors meeting, he says, you know, guys, preaching is essential, but it's not sufficient. I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, you got to have personalized discipleship along with the preaching. And that's right. I think another plug for the smaller church is it's really effective for disciple making because you know everybody there. You can't get lost in the crowd. And so it's personalized, customized disciple making. And I think that's where the rubber hits the road. You're not just lost on the ground. I agree. You and I have talked about that at some length. I have had the view for a very long time that disciple-making is largely understood by the American church today. And I say that to get to this next point. Everybody is discipling already. They are doing it well or they're doing it badly, but they are doing it because disciple-making is observation and imitation. Others around you are observing how you live your life, and they're imitating how you live your life. And isn't that what it says in Hebrews, to observe those who are leaders and imitate, right? That's exactly what disciple making is doing. You can't do that in a mega church. I mean, you are doing it. You're just not doing it well. You're doing it badly. You can do it in a smaller setting. That's right. Two quick stories. I had a lady visit our church. She's in her 80s. The first week she came, I didn't talk to her. Other people did. She got away before I could. Second week, she came back and I did talk to her. And I said, I'm sorry, I didn't talk to you last week. And she said, oh, that's okay. At the church I go to now, it was two years before a pastor spoke to me. We say, that church too big. And another guy came to visit. He was a president of a Bible college in Ukraine. And when the Russians came in the first time, they overran his campus and he wound up back here in the States. So he was looking for a church in Atlanta and he was going through the list of churches that he wanted to visit. And I don't know, we were fourth or fifth church on the list. And I was talking to him and he said, you know, of all the churches we visited so far, this is the first church where anybody talked to us. We were able to get in. and out without being spoken to. Well, those churches are too big. That was part of the philosophy, though, of the church growth movement, that people like anonymity. People don't want to be approached, you know. So, you know, and this is the funny thing is that I attended a conference in Arlington Heights, Des Plaines or whatever, Some guy who later wrote a book about some purpose driven stuff. It was teaching it. It was 1986. He wasn't really a big, you know, big deal yet. And later he became, I hear he even prayed at an inauguration or something. So that, that was, that wouldn't be Rick Warren by chance. Okay. Yeah. That was his name. I'm not kidding. I can't remember. I remember most of what he said at this conference of all these people who we were all, it was 1986. I had just heard of Willow Creek. Literally. I just heard of it. I was like salivating over these concepts. And when I walked into Willow Creek for the first time, it was like I had this aha experience. And here's the thing, I talked to a lot of people who had joined. How did you come to know Willow Creek? What brought you in? It's like we all, and I was one of them, we all had the same story. We were banging our heads against a wall. in a small church, trying to get it to get unstuck from hidebound traditionalism, to reach out, to try to reach out to the community. They would never change. They would never adapt. They kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, or they went through splits or whatever. And we finally just were exhausted. Everybody I talked to had taught Sunday school, had been involved in all kinds of things in their church. And we all said, All we wanted was a place to come and just relax and kind of hide to recover. But everybody I talked to by the time I met up with them, they were all really involved. So they'd come to relax and they got re-energized at this place called Willow Creek. But I, after a year and a half, I was done with it. And I can talk about that some other time. It's not important here. Let's just say that for me, the mega church thing started out as something so cool, I couldn't believe it. At the end of it, I was disillusioned. I guess if I were to summarize the contrast between, and this is after not only attending Willow Creek, but attending church growth seminars and collecting a small library that I still have of church growth books, that Church growth was sold to us as a way to grow the church. What it turned out to be was a way to grow churches. Do you see the distinction? In other words, it ended up not being about the church as a whole. Which is the body of Christ. Right. Because one of the reasons I say this is because I saw this, maybe not everybody did, time after time after time, they believe their way was the only way. If you talk to them, this came out recently with Andy Stanley, but it was also Heibel's attitude. He called Willow Creek, the whole Willow Creek idea, the hope of the world. This is the hope of the world. And what you've basically done right there is you basically are, you're saying whatever's going on in the third world or Eastern Europe really doesn't count. All that really counts is what's happening here in the North American Western scene. You know, that's the only, And you and others, I think, are trying to find a way to grow the church, even if it doesn't grow my church. Because anytime I hear about a church, whether it's following your particular philosophy or some others, that says, you know what? Others do. We're going to set a limit. We're not going to get huge. We're going to start planning daughter churches. And I said, well, they want to grow the church. Amen. Well said. Well, Barna did a study and he said small churches don't grow because of the people that are in it. So, you know, there's good big churches and there's bad small churches. It's worth talking about, sure. And you remember Jesus said you can't put new wine in an old wineskin, otherwise it ruins the wineskin. You got to put new wine in a new wineskin. Well, These things I'm talking about in the book are wineskin issues. I'm assuming you've got wine to put in there. But if a church is small because they're dead, and they don't have any new wine, then the wineskin is irrelevant. You can put it in old wineskin, new wineskin, it don't matter. So I'm assuming there's wine there. Now that is an assumption I've made. So if the small church has wine, these practices can result in spiritual growth, and I would argue numerical growth, But if the church is dead, well, then probably just let the dead bury the dead and go to a big church and forget it. Jerry Samandel has a really good question. Are we saying it's wrong to invite people to our church or ask members to invite people to come and join us? I would say the answer is unequivocal. No, it's not wrong. Not wrong. We invite people all the time. We invite lost people too. We do. Everything's geared toward believers. So no, we want people to come and we want to grow. But when we get to a certain size, we want to start another church instead of knocking out walls and building bigger building. That's the difference. Now, it is important in your model to be able and I think you've I'll just give away part of what I'm getting at here by saying, you've already said you're bivocational and you've been that way since 91, right? So in other words, your model is not expected to be well-suited or ideally suited at least for a full-time pastor. Yeah, if it's too small, it won't be. Now, if you get up around 100, you could. Okay. I'd even go to 150. We've talked about that. 100 to 150, I think is... And churches in your orbit that could get that big and maybe have? Yeah, sure. Okay. Do they ever... I don't even know, but offhand, is it with 75, 800 families that you need really to support a full-time pastor? Do we have... or 100 members, I should say. Well, I don't know. That's a good question. Depends on how many wealthy people you got in that mix. Yeah, right, right. What is the median income and how are they given? And cost of living and yeah, everything varies. So you get to a certain threshold. Do NTRF churches ever get to the point where you might take on an associate or anything like that? Or is that getting too big? We believe in plurality of leaders, plurality of elders for sure, but usually only one of them winds up getting some support from the church, but we're not opposed to that. Generally, they wind up being Bible cake, half working for the church and half doing a secular job, but we're not opposed to anybody being full-time. The churches aren't so big, you usually need two people full-time. Is there a typical kind of secular job that tends to fit well with this model of ministry? Well, a lot of guys have been window cleaners historically. It's pick up work and you can do it yourself and there's a fair amount of money in it. So window cleaning is something a lot of them have wound up doing. Like there's a church out west that we work with. He's the wealthiest guy in the church. And he's a water cleaner. And he's an artist. Entrepreneurial. We have a lot of that here in Southwest Florida. I mean, it's the reddest part of Florida. It's very entrepreneurial. And most of the people, the most successful just started mowing lawns, cleaning windows. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's nice not to have an eight to five job working for the man because you're so limited. If you can have your own business where you can be time flexible, that's good. Not all people can do it, but being a professor is another like a college professor or something you got all summer off and a pretty flexible schedule. So any job like that, I had my own electronics business. I had people working for me. They were doing the work and I was over there riding shotgun and I could steal time from myself and it was perfectly all right. I'm thinking about somebody who might be watching this either now or later who says, you know, I felt the call to ministry, but they've thought about just cold turkey leaving their job. go to seminary, whatever they have to do and get ready. Well, wait a minute, you know, there's another way to approach it. There's bivocational ministry. And I think we need more models of that, more people who present that as an option and show how to do that. Most in mission to cults and non-Christian religions that I know, including myself, are bivocational to varying degrees. I have more flexibility than some, but so that's not unusual. I want to do a couple of things here before we run out of time. Okay. One is, in response to Jerry's question, I wanna point out what you're advocating, it sounds like to me and in our discussions, is the family time, which is our Sunday gathering, is open to non-family and they should be invited. That would be no different than when we have a Christmas celebration or a birthday celebration, we have all family here and whoever they happen to bring along with them. Amen, but let me just say, that the only people we allow to speak are people we know and love. We say at every meeting, if there's visitors, what the rules are, so to speak. And we say, we have to know you and love you. Membership has its privileges before you get a person. So that's one. Second, and it kind of keys in on this idea of discipleship to some degree. Paul says to Timothy, the things you have learned and seen and learned from me, pass on to faithful men who will in turn teach others also. That's discipleship toward leadership. Yes. Because I also am convinced that, and you've mentioned this a few times about starting other churches. As a young believer, I had an evangelist stay with us one time. Loved the guy. And he asked Joy and I a question. He said, what is the fruit of an apple tree? And my immediate response was apples. He goes, no, that's a byproduct. The fruit of an apple tree is another apple tree. The fruit of a church is another church. And so, One of the things he pointed out, and I think this is true, is you have a certain energy that comes from the idea that you're building into the local believers here. You're training up leadership. You are all using your gifts in the various ways that you use your gifts. Not every church is going to have all the same ministries because not everyone has the same giftedness within their churches. Right. And all of that is with a goal then to start another church down the road. Because of that energy, everybody is, it's kind of like a family. The husband and wife get married, they get pregnant, and then there's a certain excitement and energy that goes around the expectation of the new life that's coming to them that energizes everybody. Is that kind of what we're talking about here in this whole idea of disciple making? Oh yeah, small churches that reproduce other small churches that reproduce other small churches, but there's usually not a great excitement to leave. They love each other so much, nobody wants to go. So because we're committed to not building ever bigger buildings, it gets tighter and tighter and tighter in there. And if you're late, you don't even get to sit in the same room, you're in the outer darkness. And so then people start feeling the pressure. Well, maybe it's time. And we usually will start a church by geographical groupings. We'll have a group of families coming from two towns over kind of a thing. And that's kind of where the next church will start, assuming the leadership's in place. So anyway, yeah, over time, people do get willing to go because it's so crowded and they see the need. Nobody has to do anything. And the thing that slows us down more than anything is lack of leadership. That's always the hardest thing. But when you get around 100 people, then it's just as a numbers game, more likely you're going to have people that are qualified to serve in leadership and have somebody to send out to start a new church. So then it kind of becomes a task. Let's say you have someone who's particularly gifted in leading worship that I would call not the worship leader, but the lead worshiper. Facilitate. Okay. Yeah. Their domain of discipleship is going to be those who are gifted kind of in that area, not only in music, but how do you prepare for worship? How do you prepare yourself for worship? How do you prepare the congregation for worship, your prayer life, all of those kinds of things. So you kind of are going to be discipling your area of your giftedness. That makes sense. What do you do with those who come to you and go, I have a new idea for a ministry our church ought to get involved with? What is your answer? We believe that church is not to be by any one person's ministry. It's about helping everybody be equipped and encouraged about whatever ministry God has given them to do. And so if a guy wants to start a prison ministry, church doesn't all go do prison ministry. We say, brother, God bless you in that. How can we help you? get other people to go with you, it's fine, but we as a church won't have a Prentice ministry or a homeless ministry or pro-life ministry, but if you want to have a ministry and invite other people to join you, we're all for that. So that's how we do it. We as a church don't do anything except broadly encourage. We're recharging people's batteries when they come in on Sunday so they're ready to go out do another week of ministry. That's how we do it. That's an important way to say that, because I run to that a lot, and my response is not unlike yours. Because when a question is asked, it typically means, I have a vision that the church ought to do this. You go implement it. Yeah, that's right. And I have to say, you know, I'm called to a lot of things that isn't one of them. It sounds like a fine ministry. And so we have a rule, even in Middle East Christian Outreach, Anytime you think you have an idea that should be implemented, you are welcome to implement it and we will pray for you and with you and give you whatever resources we have available. But I already have all the things that God wants me to do on the stove. Amen. So, all right, they can reach you. Your website is what is it? ntrf.org.org. You can read about it, we got MP3s, we got videos, we got teacher's manual, all kind of stuff. That's just basically four key things we advocate that are neglected today. You can learn more about those four things at the website. And they can contact you through the website if they say so. Absolutely, yeah, contact us, that's right. They get the book through the website or they can get the book off Amazon, whatever they want to do. And we got the book on tape as well. It's on Kindle also. It is on Kindle, that's right. Yeah, okay, so there you go. If you can read, listen, or both, it's available to you. Or watch. Oh, hey, we offer customized coaching for pastors on how to do these things, what the Bible says, and how to implement them in their churches. So that's another thing we offer for leaders. This is church coaching, not like basketball coaching. Right, church coaching. Thanks for clarifying that. Just yeah, just an apologist. I have to make sure it's very precise, very precise. No room for misunderstanding. Rod, would you walk us out of here, baby? The Unknown Webcast is a production of Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc. in cooperation with Emergency Manicure Productions, both of whom are solely responsible for this content, although you will never be able to prove that in a court of law. Not even once. Not even. Okay. Okay, so now we can do the Royal Wave. Now that we've had you, you know you've been had.