From Produce to Reproduce
15 April 2008 
The book of Genesis sets out God’s idea of success: filling the earth, subduing the enemy, making disciples through nurturing families? Is this what we are doing?
In order to think in the right way, we need to redefine what success is. It’s said that many businessmen look back at their life after doing well, but feel they climbed the ladder only to find it leaning against the wrong wall. This is also true of many people who set out in ministry. Their heart is set on building a big ministry, but after many years they realise that the ministry will never satisfy; that there will never be enough people in the church; that things will never be good enough. True satisfaction doesn’t come from producing a ministry, but instead through reproducing people.
When viewed through the lens of family, everything we do must be with reproducing in mind. The way we bring up, model to and discipline our kids is all in the context of what they will become. The opposite approach is to see everything with a ‘produce’ mindset. This judges everything by immediate deliverables; we count seats, programmes, money – anything – to help us ‘feel’ successful, because most of what we do is seated in produce. Many families today are crippled because parents try to ‘produce’ certain things in their children for their own ends, rather than with the children’s real interest in mind.
Reproduction is based upon our values, which make up who we are. If we want to reproduce disciples, then our values (our DNA) must be good. We see this in Jesus’ life. His ministry was not about producing miracles; rather, his goal was to reproduce himself in the lives of 12 other people so that they could change the world. What he did was a natural outflow of who he was.
The Bible starts with a family, and quickly grows into clans, tribes and eventually a nation. Each is dependent upon the other; each is a part of the other. Israel is a nation made up of 12 tribes: each distinct in its culture and function, but united together. This is a great picture of the Church: many tribes, but one nation under God. It’s also a pattern of how we should plant churches in our cities. Rick Warren uses the phrase ‘little and large’, describing the method of continually reproducing families while at the same time bringing them together to form a large tribe or church. However, this can only be successfully done if we get the first family DNA right, otherwise it quickly becomes another organisational monster. Getting that DNA right means focusing on becoming spiritual parents, not business leaders. First, this means leadership, not management. It means keeping the end in mind at all times; not looking at what is, but at what is to come; not interested in maintaining a status quo, but rather an environment for growth.
Second, it means effectiveness over efficiency. If we are dealing with very large numbers we often fall into the trap of efficiency. When we work on a reproducible mindset, we are only concerned with effectiveness. We are never dealing with large numbers, but rather a core group. As we start to change our thinking, the questions we ask of our ministry change also.
The third element is spontaneity over structure. We often hold on to our structures because they provide a sense of security, but in fact all they do is mask our insecurity. Our security needs to come from the depth of the relationship we have with one another, and not upon any external structure. The Holy Spirit is spontaneous; he often enjoys doing things differently. Just when you think you have it he changes the rules. How spontaneous are you able to be with your spiritual family?
Fourth, we must discern rather than simply measure. Measurement is good in that it shows us how things have physically grown, for example, our children’s height, or our spending. But we can’t measure our maturity (our spiritual depth); this can only be discerned. If we were to spend more time discerning, we would be surprised at what we find. Discernment is centred in the other person, not upon our own personal growth. It puts the other person’s development at the heart of what we are doing.
Fifth, we should look at the cause, not effect. A trap that many leaders and parents fall into is to react to the fruit or effect instead of responding to the root or cause. But real parenting requires taking the time to unearth the roots that bring about bad behaviour; it requires understanding and much patience. In most busy, programme-driven church environments there isn’t the time to do this, so we find ourselves chasing the effects over and over again. We need to ask, ‘What is the root of this?’ and make time to work it through.
Finally, we need to release or empower, rather than control. A controlling parent will always breed insecure kids, and this can be seen in church family situations. A controlling leader produces either rebels or robots – neither are secure, readjusted disciples. People who are not heard or given room to grow often rebel or just give up and toe the party-line.
Everything about making disciples is about empowering and releasing, but to be able to ‘release’ people we must become secure ourselves first. If you need people you can’t lead people. If you need people around you to qualify you for your job you will never be able to release them. It is often much easier to do something yourself, but if this happens all the time, who learns? We have to lead and parent with the end in mind always. If we are not releasing people to try out ministry and be given opportunities then all we are doing is breeding potential rebels or producing robots.
So let’s always keep our eyes on the big picture: a transformed and changed world; a vibrant, reproducing, spiritual community in every street, village, town and city.
on April 20th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
On the subject of breeding Christians etc. This may be of interest (my latest blog).
Will Doors, the multi-millionaire owner of the direct marketing giant Streetsell fell ill on his 40′th birthday. After a simple blood test the doctor told him that he had leukaemia. Will was devastated. He decided to take a few days off work to come to terms with this news before telling his wider family and friends. Obviously he couldn’t keep his diagnosis secret from his immediate household and the sad news was soon known by his household staff.
Within a few hours his Philippine housemaid asked if she could speak to him privately about his illness. She explained that in the Philippines she had often seen people instantly healed of all kinds of diseases following prayer and asked if she could pray for him. To cut a long story short he was instantly healed and became a Christian.
The Church he joined was quite a large one for the UK, it had about 300 members and a youth group of 100 or so. One Saturday in the summer the youth leader had arranged for a street witnessing day as part of the lead-up to a series of meetings to be held by an evangelist. Will was interested to see how the young people would do at what he knew best, street marketing.
The Saturday arrived and the witnessing group met in a corner of the town square. There were plenty of people about, it was a market day, there was street theatre and there were buskers, the sun was shining, an excellent day for street work. Will watched from the side of the square, he didn’t want the youth group to know that he was there. After a few minutes discussion they dispersed about the square in groups of three or four. Some of them looked in the shop widows or watched the street theatre, others silently handed out invitations to the evangelistic meetings, most just stood around looking embarrassed. Will was disappointed and a little angry but he had an idea. He would get them motivated.
Quite near to where he was standing was a Big Issue seller. Will called him over and bought all his magazines, the guy was flabbergasted! Then Will asked him if he would do him a favour………
One of the youth group was a little more bold than the others and right in the middle of the square approached a couple who were listening to a busker, she asked them if they were at all concerned about what would happen after they died and then was able to share the gospel with them, and to finish, gave them an invitation to hear the evangelist speak. Shortly after she had finished she was approached by a rather scruffy looking bloke who told her that God had seen what she had just done and was very pleased and by way of reward gave her a ten pound note! She was so stunned that she stood there open mouthed and accepted the gift. The scruffy bloke disappeared round a corner and she rushed over to her friends to tell them what had just happened. Someone suggested that it could have been an angel; others said that the scruffy bloke was probably just a nutter. As they were discussing this one of the group rushed over to report that the same thing had just happened to him, and then another. One of them had three tenners and she said “it only happens when I stop and talk to people, if I just give them an invitation nothing happens, but if I witness to them within a few moments this scruffy bloke appears from nowhere and gives me a tenner”.
Suddenly quite a few of the group had started trying this out for themselves, they didn’t always get a tenner but now and again they did, the best thing though was that they had found that witnessing was not that bad and tenner or no tenner they could do it and they could sense that God was with them and was pleased with them. Will said nothing but a few years later the Church was a thousand strong, sending out groups to start new Churches and young people were going into ministry. Not a bad investment, Will thought.
What had Will found? Was it that reward could overcome fear or was it that their God was not Yahweh but Mammon? Perhaps it would be kinder to say that they had two gods, Yahweh and Mammon, or perhaps three, Yahweh, Mammon and Self. In the story they are initially motivated by their love of money following the reports of cash received by the few brave ones who were rewarded first. What was holding them back from witnessing in the first place? Self? Thoughts such as; ‘these people will think me stupid if I tell them about Jesus, I will not appear ‘cool’ if I associate myself with ‘religious’ people, they may reject me and be rude and possibly offensive’.
All of the above may be true, if we take our self esteem from the society around us. But if our self esteem comes from, at best, God’s view of us, and at worst, the Christian community’s view of us, we will probably see ourselves differently. How has this skewed, world- centred, self image crept into the Church? The answer, I would suggest, is false conversion or poor ‘birthing’.
Throughout the New Testament, entry into Christ was always, like a natural birth of the time, fraught with danger. It began with the recognition that the wrath of God was focussed on the sinner, followed by repentance, baptism in water and in the Spirit. The accounts in Acts of Peter’s preaching major on his reminding the Jews that the Messiah, whom they had just killed, was now at the right hand of God and was coming to set up his Kingdom and put his enemies (those who had just rejected him) under his feet! Scary stuff!
No ‘come to Jesus and have a better life’, no ‘God has a wonderful plan for your life so just invite him into your heart’. This was ‘repent, you Christ-killers, before he comes to destroy you’! Read Acts 2:22-39 and check it out for yourself. We are all ‘Christ-killers’; it was because of our sin that he died. Those first century Jews had to turn their backs on the prevailing culture, risk disinheritance and possibly death at the hands of their own families just as Moslem converts to Christ do today. Why do we try and ‘make it easy’ for people to ‘become Christians’ out of a western culture? Are numbers more important than quality? Is it better to have thousands with a ‘slight touch’ of Christianity than just a few with it ‘real bad’? Didn’t Jesus start with just twelve and keep the bar to joining really high? Are large numbers of vaccinated ‘Christians’ any good to anyone or are they not ‘at the feast in the wrong clothes’. Vaccination means that you get a dose of dead ‘bug’ so that you can fight off the live ‘bug’. Isn’t that exactly what we are doing in our Churches today? In other words our weak version of Christianity has vaccinated us against the real thing!
What sinners need is a strong dose of the live Christian ‘bug’, strong enough to kill them. We can then safely bury them in baptism and birth them into a new life in the Spirit! A life in which we have but one God and one Lord for whom we have a burning fever of love which expresses itself in obedience and rejoices in suffering with him.