The Future Methodism: Multiplication Culture

This is the third post in a series on four commitments I believe will be essential to all expressions that remain and emerge after the period of transition the United Methodist Church is experiencing. The first two commitments I described in previous posts on lay mobilization and intentional discipleship are foundational to the commitment to a culture of multiplication.

I will confess that I am in the early stages of thinking through what a culture of multiplication looks like in future Methodism. Not long ago, several Indiana Conference staff and team members from multiple departments committed to reading Hero Maker: Five Essential Practices for Leaders to Multiply Leaders and processing the book together over a period of a few months. We are still processing the book together to discern what can be specifically applied to our ministry areas, but I am already convinced that a culture of multiplication would have a revolutionary impact on future Methodism.

A culture of multiplication is present when the strategy of a leader, organization, or institution is focused on investing in others to multiply impact rather than linear growth. “Multiplication thinking” is the first “practice” Dave Ferguson and Warren Bird offer for creating a culture of multiplication. In essence this practice is about thinking big. If our dreams, visions, and goals are not big enough, then multiplication will not happen. Ferguson and Bird suggest that multiplication will only happen if it is required for realization of the vision. It is the difference between a goal of 1,000 people in average attendance and planting 1000 churches. There is a corresponding shift in how success is measured from how many people show up or participate to how many leaders, plants, ministries, etc. have been activated (this is part of Ferguson and Bird’s fifth practice they call “Kingdom Building”).

A culture of multiplication impacts the entire institution, and so is not limited to church planting. I discussed in the last post on intentional discipleship that mature disciples are those who are discipling others, that is, they are multiplying themselves (in the image of Jesus). This only happens through intentional relationships. Though Bible studies and classes are valuable, they will only support the maturing of disciples up to a certain point. Mike Breen’s process of discipling happens in what he calls “huddles”, which are small groups that follow a specific curriculum of sorts with the intent that each member will then go and lead their own huddle. It is not a course of study exactly, because Breen puts a significant emphasis on modeling by being in genuine relationships with huddle members outside the huddle meetings. Phil Maynard suggests the roles of discipleship mentors and coaches for supporting disciples in their maturing process. In any case, the emphasis is building up others with the expectation that they will invest in others in return. Naturally, this idea extends to the wide variety of leadership roles found in the local church and beyond.

Ferguson and Bird offer the apprentice model for multiplying leaders as their third practice. They note that the apprenticeship is the model that Jesus uses with the twelve disciples and that it has proven to be an effective training model in many areas such as trade apprenticeships, internships, and student teaching. Applied to church leadership, the apprentice model could be useful in addressing the common problem of filling leadership roles with people not only willing, but equipped for the role.

Many churches face the challenge of deploying equipped leaders for ministry.

Part of the problem is that many pastors and lay leaders only begin searching for leaders when someone has left a role or is beginning the transition. In a local church that practiced the apprenticeship model within a culture of multiplication, ministry leaders would be constantly in training. There is an obvious connection between the practice of apprenticeship and multiplication in roles such as small group, service and outreach, and congregational care leaders. Less obvious is the same connection with leadership positions on certain committees and boards within the typical methodist polity. Should the apprenticeship model be used for Finance chair, SPRC chair, etc? As a simple matter of leadership training, absolutely! It is much easier to take on a role if you are actually equipped to take it on and gain some experience before taking on the primary responsibilities. If each position had a corresponding “co-chair” who was being apprenticed, there would be seamless transitions at the end of terms of service, which means even small churches could have a real rotation of leadership. Soon, local churches will have multiple people trained for these positions, which will fight burnout, and also prepare the local congregation to multiply itself. As the local congregation lives into a culture of multiplication via a multisite model or other common church planting practices, there will be a pool of people with experience to take on leadership in a new faith community. We are already seeing a return to the primacy of local congregations giving birth to new congregations, and therefore, a need for this type of multiplication of all leaders.

In the U.S., the UMC is coming out of an era where church planting was centrally organized and resourced by the annual conference. While the annual conference and similar structures will no doubt continue to support multiplication, the primary focus will be on equipping local churches to live into the apostolic ministry of these missional outposts. This shift is happening in the current UMC and in other groups seeking to form into new expressions of Methodism.

The recently released “A Sacred Trust” report from the UMC Study of Ministry Commission asks the questions, “ In what ways can we imagine a renewed emphasis on lay-led apostolic ministries that remain networked with and connected to a sending church?”, and “What kinds of pathways can we create to support and encourage experimentation and innovation inside and outside local churches (learning from faith partners like Missional Wisdom or Fresh Expressions)? Likewise, in a recent post from the Wesleyan Covenant Association, Steve Cordle writes “Church multiplication is the natural overflow of churches that are multiplying disciples and groups. We cannot recruit all the church planters we need; we will have to develop many of them. Some of our future planters are in our churches right now. Others are not yet followers of Jesus, but soon will be. Encouraging multiplication thinking and practices will spur church planting… Church planting may be owned by the local church, but that does not mean they have to go it alone. Small, local networks of pastors and churches can choose to collaborate to start new churches. We can do more together than we can separately. By networking we can remain flexible and nimble.” Both of these examples make clear that cultivating and releasing apostolic ministry leaders will be essential to a culture of multiplication.

Where are these apostolic leaders now, and where have they been? Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim have the same answer for both questions; in our local congregations. In The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church, Hirsch and Catchim argue the spiritual gifts or dispositions of apostle, prophet, and evangelist have been largely restrained by the dominance of the shepherd/teacher model in the West, particularly in the mainline protestantism, but they are still available to be released within our local faith communities. Creating space for the apostles, prophets, and evangelists is explicit in the statements quoted above, but we must create the forms and practices to turn the statements into action. The spiritual gifts of Ephesians 4 are given by Christ to the church universal. The Body has what it needs for its mission, we just need to follow Scripture’s instruction to build up all the gifts that we have already been given. This is going to mean that the future Methodisms will need to make room for new or rediscovered approaches to ministry and build up some tolerance for risk taking. This may lead to continued planting as it has been done, but I believe Fresh Expressions and similar movements can play an important role as well.

Fresh Expressions is not just a method for creating new forms of church to reach people who are unlikely to participate in traditional institutional forms of church. It is also a call to reimagine the way the “inherited church” and the “emerging” forms of church will be networked together in a new contextual reality that has seemed to be a dry environment for church growth . Fresh Expressions is not a call to abandon church as we know it, but to graft onto it the emerging forms; it is a “blended ecology” of church. In Deep Roots, Wild Branches, Michael Beck describes it this way, “The tree, the inherited church, with its rootedness and depth, resilience and strength, cannot be overcome by the parched context. The wild new life-forms as the emerging forms of church in the green spaces, the fresh expressions, tethered to and dependent upon the inherited structure, are cascading into life all throughout the greater ecosystem. A life-giving exchange is happening between the inherited and emerging modes as they are grafted together…”

In his doctoral dissertation (I know, but as far as dissertations go it is rather enjoyable), Beck describes a framework for applying contextual intelligence to align ministry and community, which is at the heart of church multiplication in any form. I recommended it if you are interested in a deep dive into the relevance of contextual intelligence for engaging the “nones and dones” in our communities.

I do not believe a culture of multiplication is an “add-on” to the mission of the church. Multiplication is inherently part of the mission “to make disciples of Jesus Christ, for the transformation of the world.” Multiplication is also part of the history and tradition of Methodism. Cultivating a multiplication culture in future Methodism will take the mobilization of laity and intentional discipleship, which I have discussed in the previous posts. It will also take an openness to do things differently; to discover new ways of engaging in missional ministry and to relearn the lessons from the missional movement from which Methodism emerged. As denominational leadership transitions and emerges from our current process, I encourage pastors and lay leaders to begin conversations now about what it might look like for their local church to live into the growing multiplication movement. There will be help, but the work will be done at the local level.

In the final post in this series, I will discuss the importance of future Methodism to exist as formative institutions.