Creating capacity for multiplication - 1
From a podcast by Confluence
Alan Frow is a church leader from South Africa, currently leading Southlands church in California. He has authored several books including; "Broken for Blessing: The Underrated Potential of a Medium-Sized Multiplying Church". He is part of the Confluence family of churches which multiplies by church planting.
In a podcast with Bryan Mowrey and Bo Noonan, other leaders in Confluence, they explore strategies and real-life experiences of those who have effectively expanded their churches. They also discuss actionable insights and practical steps to empower your congregation in the mission of profound spiritual change in your community. Here are abridged extracts from the podcast:
Alan:
Our church has quite a long history of of multiplication. It's ebbed and flowed. I came here in 2007 from South Africa. We'd only really ever known multiplying churches. The first church we joined as a married couple, was a little church plant and within 2-3 years they were already sending people around the world. So that's what we were born into.
When we came to California, we saw the multiplication muscle flexing in a whole new way. The whole church was shaped around multiplying. The leader's desire was kind of to empty the church. Not about seating capacity at all, just about sending capacity. So as a church, it never really grew above its seating capacity. But they planted 12 churches in 14 years as a medium sized church. So we came and we saw the beauty of that. We also saw the the cost of that.
The church was like a woman who had 12 babies in 14 years - real joy and serious stretch marks. So we looked at that and said there needs to be some sense of replenishing, particularly in terms of leaders. We coined this phrase; "We've got to win our home games and our away games." It felt like a church that was mainly winning its away games but was pretty depleted from a leadership point of view, from a finance point of view and even what it was to make disciples of Jesus in its own postcode.
After three years, in 2010, the then leader asked if I would lead the team. There was a really, really solid team of elders, but most of them were pretty tired and waiting to plant out themselves. Only two of seven saw themselves staying for the long term. I felt the team was full of fingers, but no thumbs. Fingers point, going somewhere - full of apostolic vision. But thumbs hold - they shepherd. So we just tried to build a leadership team of both fingers and thumbs and pressed pause. No planting for three years as we tried to build a more pastoral culture. I vowed that we would not lose this sense of apostolic multiplying culture but we'd have to find another way of doing it.
It took about three years to up our health, start growing again, get out of debt, build the leadership team and, in 2013, we had grown significantly. We had gone from one service to two services. We've got out of debt and felt like the Lord was calling us to push play on on multiplying again.
Brian:
I've been asking churches to have faith, desire and a plan.
It all starts with what you see. We want people to get a glimpse of what God sees in their church. Too often, as pastors, but really as human beings, we just go quickly to what we can do in our own resources. And as we only do what what we can do in our own resources, what we have won't be near what God has for us. So we want to live with faith, a sense of something beyond ourselves. Getting a a bigger vision, bigger vision for our lives, for our church, for our communities and what we can could be. Secondly, a desire. Anytime you grab a hold of something new, you have to let go of what you have and and there's pain in that. And then ultimately, you need a plan and a plan really has to do with preparedness. The disciples caught how many fish? Well, they caught as many as their nets can handle. You know what we receive by our preparedness.
Alan:
We, our team, needed a plan. We had a a little bit of a mantra prior to 2010, which was, find five families who have got faith and desire and we'll send. What would happen is that they'd get going and then they'd hit a ceiling quite quickly. The ceiling was certainly around gifting but also it was around strategy and resources. So a number of those 12 churches had either plateaued at around 60-70 people or had closed. But there were a couple of outliers that had grown large just because of the sheer gifting and grit of the lead couple. God just sometimes does something extraordinary, but we've got to be careful that we don't make that exception, the principle.
So we start to say, what would people need who do not have that extraordinary level of gifting and favour? We started to to just study. We started to look at different models. We looked at a bunch of different multi-site models and landed on a model that was a bit of a hybrid. We've now launched 5 multi-sites. We've also planted two other autonomous churches and one of the multi-sites we planted has become autonomous. So we're doing both.
We became far more strategic and one of the one of the strategies was, 'let's take a nine month, pre launch track and get pretty granular around context - the city, the team'. Let's plan a mission before we plan a meeting which was really new language and a new approach for us.
We became quite impacted by the Soma missional movement. They focus on Jesus' incarnational model that the Word became flesh and dwelt among them. So we started to say, rather than just parachute in and set up your tent, what is it to actually tabernacle as a people? So we would just have prayer meetings once a month in the evening in the city for some months. We would invite anyone who wanted to come to come. You didn't have to be committing to this church plant. We do that for three or four months and then after that we just go and eat in the city and continue praying. We would welcome other pastors into the prayer meetings and pray for their churches. Speak to mayors and police chiefs and and ask what is it to really love this city and and be a blessing to this city - Jeremiah 29 stuff.
And then as we began to build a core, we would have sort of an ultimatum day, which was normally around six months in, when we would want people to commit if you're going to be part of this plant. But during that time, we would encourage people to start establishing missional rhythms where we would say, "Are you willing to drink bad coffee for the sake of the gospel? Are you willing to actually go to the place that's not the trendiest, but actually that has people that you can build relationships? Are you willing to to, to eat, work, play even put your kids in a different school, move your home towards the city?"
In that six months, we'd really be encouraging people to tabernacle there and then normally around around the six month mark, we'd move from prayer and education about the city to actually, definitely move. Going in, moving into the neighbourhood and calling people who had said yes. You need to sell your house. You need to rent a new house. You know this is more than just having coffee in a new place but actually putting roots down. And in that final three months, we would start to have sort of goldfish bowl moments where we'd have 'looking in' meetings in the evening. A sort of pop-up church where we just be saying, we're going to launch a church but we want to give you an opportunity to get to know us. We'd do that every week for three months and then normally either pick a date to actually launch. And so during that final three months, it's really getting the teams together in terms of a meeting but, hopefully by then, you've established something of a mission through prayer, through relationship and actually through moving in.
Brian:
My church's history has been an emphasis on trans-local or beyond local at the expense of local. We were an exception. We were just successful enough to keep doing it. There was a lot of unnecessary pain, and predictable pain in some cases. Like we knew better but we did it anyway. So we realised that we'd swung too far with it, but, at the same time, we'd learned some very valuable lessons.
It's not just about what's in the person's heart and their head, but really what are they gifted to do. We learned a lot about the role of the leader and how to assess that leader. And so now we still want to raise the banner high and say, "Who's up for planting?", but then take them through a process to help prepare them and then to resource them. Then to really put our money where our mouth is and and resource, help and support them.
Part 2 of this blog will be published shortly. But if you want to hear the whole podcast, then listen to the 46 min podcast here.
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From a podcast by Confluence, 21/01/2025