Guardrails: Six Principles for a Multiplying Church - Softcover

Briggs, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1631464353 ISBN 13: 9781631464355

Verlag: NAV PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

An estimated 4,000 churches are planted every year. An estimated 3,700 churches close every year. It’s not easy starting or sustaining a vital Christian witness of any kind. It’s even harder when there’s no structure to support the good work you’re doing. Guardrails offers structure to your good impulse to follow the great commission to go and make disciples right where you are.

Guardrails provides six principles that allow for sustainable growth in a church’s mission, for the health of God’s people and the sake of the world.

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Church Growth ? Church Health
Every impulse to share the gospel and make disciples is a good impulse. But without a structure to organize our impulses and focus our vision, the great commission can drive us straight into burnout. Healthy church growth is measured not by full schedules or even packed seats but by a steady multiplication of disciples of Jesus.

That happens when we organize ourselves around discipleship that is simple, holistic, adaptable, regular, reproducible, and positive.These six highly practical principles will give life and momentum to any ministry.

Read Guardrails and find your ministry better organized, more sustainable, and more fruitful.

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GuardRails

Six Principles for a Multiplying Church

By Alan Briggs

Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2016 Alan Briggs
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63146-435-5

Contents

Foreword, xi, 
Introduction: How We Stayed Afloat, xv, 
PART ONE: Foundations, 
1. Chaos in Search of Order, 3, 
2. The Kingdom, 19, 
3. The Great Commission, 31, 
4. The Apprentice, 53, 
PART TWO: Principles, 
5. Discipleship Must Be Simple, 69, 
6. Discipleship Must Be Holistic, 75, 
7. Discipleship Must Be Adaptable, 83, 
8. Discipleship Must Be Regular, 97, 
9. Discipleship Must Be Reproducible, 109, 
10. Discipleship Must Be Positive, 123, 
11. Applying Movement Principles, 135, 
12. Roadblocks and Missing Ingredients, 151, 
Epilogue, 161, 
Appendix: Apprentice Culture Assessment, 163, 
Acknowledgments, 167, 
Notes, 169, 
About the Author, 172, 

CHAPTER 1

CHAOS IN SEARCH OF ORDER

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

We cannot create movements; only the Spirit of God can. But we can align ourselves, raising the sails of kingdom-oriented ministry, so that when the Spirit does blow, we are ready to move forward.

STEVE SMITH

Discipleship and disciple-making is foundational to any movement. No matter which movement you observe you will find that they are obsessed with discipleship and disciple-making.

ALAN HIRSCH

It was an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. I was meeting with a church planter at a local coffee shop. For some reason, church planters and coffee go together like Portland and weird. After catching up a bit I asked a familiar question: "What is the next hump your church is facing?"

His response was simple. "If we just get over the one- hundred- person mark, we are going to be fine."

At the time their church was wrangling about forty folks into a Sunday worship gathering. He was wishing to more than double the size of his church. So my next question was, "If God brought you sixty people tomorrow, what would you do with them?"

It was obvious he had no idea.

I have had this exact thing happen at least three other times! Unfortunately, most churches have no idea what they would or should do with the people God brings them.

We often see people as solutions to our problems: Add sixty people and our church plant is out of the woods. God sees people differently — sixty people he created in his image; sixty people harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. God knows the plans he has for those sixty people; why would he trust us with them if we don't?

Just a few months later, this conversation would come back to haunt me. My heart cry is to influence leaders who are hungry to live like Jesus and multiply disciples. I meet with as many hungry leaders as I can. I create as many equipping venues as I have the influence to put together, which can lead people into a sustainable life of mission. Each day at 10:02 a.m., I pray as Jesus commanded in Luke 10:2: "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."

The problem with asking God for something is that once he gives us what we've asked for, it becomes our responsibility. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak and the calendar is already full. At a certain point I started feeling completely swamped, maxed out with no solutions on how to ease the load of administration and equipping leaders. My list was long, and the margin for error was minuscule. We had just adopted two kids from Ethiopia who didn't know our language, I was working an extra job on top of full-time ministry, and my wife was getting her master's degree in the evenings. We slept occasionally.

In the midst of this frantic season, God put two new men on my mind. I was convinced I didn't have time to insert these two new guys into my life: I was already discipling people in the early mornings, over lunches, even at my house after my kids went to bed. But I also knew that saying no to God wasn't acceptable. How can I turn down God's answers to my prayers because I'm "too busy"?

I sensed God echoing a similar question back to me that I had asked the church planter just a few months before: "If I sent you ten hungry leaders tomorrow, what would you do with them?" I had no good answer.

My realization: I was the bottleneck to my own prayers. My desire to disciple others, to equip everyday folks to join God's work, was clouded by unsustainability. My systems were maxed out. I either needed to change my systems or change my prayers.

When our paradigms shift or even bust, God goes to work on us. People who have lost fifty pounds will tell you about the moment they looked in the mirror and had a wake-up call. When my friend almost died in a motorcycle accident, he realized how selfishly he had been living. Billionaires hit a moment where they have no idea what to do with all the money they have been sprinting after. Such points of holy frustration and deep wrestling beckon us to reexamine our lives. They leave us utterly humbled. They remind us that we have limits even as they provide fuel for the fire of the Divine.

Perhaps you are experiencing one of these moments right now or sense that you are heading toward one. These moments leave us feeling helpless, but they ripen us for change.

My crisis moment forced me to find a framework to lean back on. It wasn't out of my own brilliance; it didn't come to me in my favorite coffee shop, on a spiritual retreat, or on a 14,000-foot Colorado peak. God forced my hand, and then he pointed me toward the most freedom I have ever experienced as a minister of the gospel. I found a process where I could work smarter, not harder, to help unleash God's people around me. I have never experienced this kind of fruit before with so little weight on me and such immediate reproducibility. These principles formed a simple grid to engage hungry leaders, and it has made all the difference.

LIVING IN THE TENSION

In Acts 6 we are given a front-row seat into a crisis moment in the early church. The viral, grassroots movement of "the Way" was thriving. The church seemed to be capable of taking over the world as it expanded — until now. Now there was conflict, and as church leaders rubbed up against it, they realized more of the same was not going to work.

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, "It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables."

ACTS 6:1-2

What was the issue here?

• They needed to preach the Word.

• They needed to meet tangible needs.

• Their existing systems could no longer serve both.

So they came up with a great plan in the tension of this moment.

"Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word." And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NAV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1631464353
• ISBN 13: 9781631464355
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar