Tim O’Neill
National Leader, Exponential Australia
Ten SHIFTS to Birth Disciple Making Multiplication In Your Church or Plant
No. 10 Four Simple Multiplication Practices For Any Church
“Multiplying will not happen on it’s own. If we aren’t choosing to make it happen, it’s probably not happening”
(J. D. Greear in the Forward to “Hero Maker, Five Essential Practices for Leaders to Multiply Leaders” by Dave Ferguson and Warren Bird)
I’ve come to believe that a true Kingdom vision for a church will involve multiplication rather than just addition.
Multiplication is an extraordinarily powerful concept. To illustrate this point, if you were offered one million dollars today or one dollar today with the amount you have doubling every day for the next year, which would you choose. You’ve probably guessed that the better answer is the second option but the figures will likely astound you.
One dollar today doubling every day for a year would give you $2,251 trillion and it would make even the richest people in the world seem like paupers in comparison with your wealth which would be about 10,000 times more than theirs!
That’s an illustration of the power of multiplication!
So would you reach more people with one church that you put all your focus into growing, or many churches where your focus was on multiplying?
Larry Walkemeyer in his book The River Church: Unleashing a Culture of Multiplication in Your Church explains how God shifted his vision for the church he led from collecting water (people) to grow like a lake, into being a river church that would release many to start new churches. And that’s what happened with Larry and his wife Deb seeing nearly 2 new churches a year from his church planted over 20 years.
Across the church across Australia, multiplication is a missing key; a missing biblical key.
Multiplication is God’s Idea!
Scripturally we can’t help but see that multiplication is God’s idea and it’s part of His plan.
God told Moses and his family to “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth, … be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” (Genesis 9:1&7)
God had given Adam and Eve a similar command in Genesis 1:28.
The Lord told Abram that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. That couldn’t happen by addition alone. Multiplication would be required.
And when Abram believed what the Lord had said, God credited it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:5,6). Get that? It was Abram’s belief in a result that could only be achieved through multiplication that saw God credit Abram as with righteousness!
Then in Acts we see that a key to the spread of the early church was that the word of God was spread through multiplication (Acts 12:24)!
In Australia, some churches have multiplied and are multiplying, but why isn’t it happening more broadly?
As W. Edwards Deming, famously said “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it does.” And in Australia, that is what happening with the way we currently do church being perfectly suited to provide the outcomes that it is producing.
Some Obstacles to be Overcome
Larry Walkemeyer in his book “The River Church, Unleashing a Culture of Multiplication in Your Church” writes that to move from addition to multiplication, there are certain obstacles to be overcome. They include fears that leaders must die to, fears like the fear of failure, conflict, discomfort, rejection, loss of control, financial hardship and of change.
He also writes of tensions that may exist in the church, tensions like:
- Facility Acquisition (Expansion, Remodel, Relocation) vs. Facility Sacrifice
- Financial Security vs. Financial Sacrifice”
- Attractional vs. Activational
- Filling Our Church vs. Starting a New Church
- Staffing Mother vs. Staffing Plants
- Leadership Retention vs. Leadership Release
- Tension Relational Stability vs. Relational Transience
- Systems Optimized vs. Systems Distributed
- Mother’s Maturity vs. Baby’s Birth
- Senior Leader Coasting vs. Senior Leader Climbing
- Proximity Protection vs. Proximity Evangelism
- Missional Focus vs. Multiplication Focus
- Missions Focus vs. Multiplication Focus
- New Campus (Multisite) vs. New Plant (Multiplication)
4 Simple Multiplication Practices
Switching to having a multiplication focus can seem daunting, or perhaps impossible. Thankfully it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact Bishop Ric Thorpe when speaking in the Exponential Australia April 2023 Regional Events suggested four simple multiplication practices that can get multiplication happening in your church.
The first two of these are:
- Ask the person you are discipling “who are you discipling?”
- Ask your leaders “who is your apprentice?”
The idea is that every person should be discipled and they should be discipling another person along the lines of 2 Timothy 2:2. Likewise every leader whether it be the senior leader, a ministry leader or a small group leader should be apprenticing another person to lead. Apprenticing is another word for discipling. Leaders apprenticing other potential leaders will solve any leadership pipeline crisis your church may be having.
Ric suggests two more multiplication practices:
- Train church plant teams, not just church planters.
- When a new church is planted, plant pregnant with a vision for the next plant and with the next planter already on your team.
If you train just a church planter, the church planter then has to train the team, or more likely it doesn’t happen. Train the team they are to journey with so they can move forward together!
And to plant pregnant, have an apprentice leader in the church plant so that apprentice can help the leader, be trained by the leader and in time move on the plant another church.
Whatever multiplication practices you decide on, your Scorecard should keep track of how these practices are being adopted.
