One Caution About Starting Movements Where It Is Easiest

Schools, Prisons, and Military Bases may be the easiest places to start, but have one huge caveat

I was reflecting on my post that I wrote in January about the easiest places to start if you are trying to catalyze a church planting movement. The three places are: prisons, schools, and military bases.

I was thinking deeply about this and I realized that there is one huge draw back to disciple making in these places. People are only in these environments temporarily, and when they move on, it doesn’t always go smoothly.

My Experience

I came to Christ and became a disciple maker in college, so I was in one of these three environments. I graduated a semester earlier than most of my peers and within two months I was sitting at home waiting to get hired while they were still going to class. I felt very lonely.

I felt like no one wanted to hang out with me, I spent a lot of time by myself, and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I tried to tell my friends what I was going through, but they didn’t see it. I didn’t have a full grasp of what I was experiencing, so I had a hard time communicating why I felt the way I felt.

I still lived in the same house right by campus, was the same person that I had been a few short months earlier, so my feelings of isolation didn’t make sense to me. What I didn’t realize is that I had stepped out of one culture and into another that I had never been a part of before. I was no longer a student, but a young professional.

The way I made friends had to change. The amount of time I could commit to them had to change. My goals, values, and responsibilities had to change.

Now, over a decade after graduation, I have had dozens of conversations with friends graduating who hit the same point as I did. I’ve talked with so many people about this that I’ve started calling this life inflection point the “community crisis”. I think it was more mainstream for Millennials to call this distressing time in their lives a “quarter life crisis”, but it’s more or less the same thing. It’s the point where you either adapt or drown.

As I grasped the life changes I would need to make, I realized that the way I made disciples needed to change too.

Life Transitions are Culture Transitions

Hard to Adapt

The free world is different than jail, the real world is different than school, and the civilian world is different than the military.

Time and again, I have witnessed disciple makers in one of these three environments move to the next stage of life and hit massive road blocks like me. In each of these shifts, your culture gets flipped on its head.

I had to learn to meet people, share the gospel, and gather as the church in different ways. It took a lot of failing forward alongside friends who were in the same place as me to make the switch. I’ve met a lot of people who never did.

Crissy

Crissy came to my wife and I adamant that being in a house church was the best way to grow in Christ as the structures of the institutional church held people back from living out the fullness of the Christian life. She made a friend at her Christian college who was trying to start a church in her dorm and taught Crissy about being the church in a simple way. Crissy grew up in a traditional church, but now was trying to convince her believing friends that there was a better way.

She met us just after graduating and was clear that she wanted to do what she did in college now that she was a software engineer. And she was all for it. At least for a few months. That’s when it started to get hard for her.

She stopped coming around as much and my wife and I knew something was up. We stopped hearing from her until we got a voice message saying she was having a tough time so she started trying out different churches and found one she liked.

Doug

Doug slammed his fist on the table, red in the face and declared, “I’m never going to believe anyone will keep walking with Jesus after they leave prison!”

Doug had been in jail for a number of years where he came to Christ and learned to multiply disciples. He got out then started going back to minister to inmates and train them to multiply. The ministry had grown and spread to other prison units, so Doug spent his days driving to and from state institutions following up the dispersed disciple makers who started churches in their different units.

As people got to the free world, Doug was often the one there to pick them up and drive them home even if that meant driving 5 hours, and turning around to drive all the way back. These guys had changed lives in prison, but to a man, they all fell back into their old sins once they got back to their hometown. Many didn’t make it past 6 months before they were arrested again.

Rob

“Whatever happened to Rob?” I asked my friend Camp. I had met Rob a year or two earlier at a training. He had started a church in his home with his wife and kids. It had multiplied and I wondered what happened to him.

Camp replied, “He got burned out and stopped. He knows he needs to obey the Great Commission, but is too tired right now.”

Rob learned movement principles while in the military, and tried to replicate the exact methods once he moved onto a new career. He tried to keep up the pace he had while living on base with the exact same rhythms of life and ministry. It wasn’t sustainablee for him or his family, so he felt he hadd no choice but to quit.

The Lesson

Each of these true stories—with changed names—have a common theme: these individuals hit a barrier where they couldn’t be disciples or make disciples in the same way as they could when they started. They had to adapt.

The problem is that their adaptation in response to stress and burn out involved sin, shifting away from movements, and quitting being on mission.

There is a way to adapt that involves still running hard after Jesus and his mission. Doug did it and I’ve seen others like Mike do it too.

Mike

“You know, I’ve always seen the two church principle in the Bible, but I now think there are some other biblical ways to multiply churches,” said Mike as we were catching up over the phone. Mike came to Christ in college and immediately began multiplying disciples and churches. Since then he has graduated, handed off the university work to other leaders, and started ministry work out in the community.

Not only that, but he has gotten married and had a baby.

“Yeah, the two church principle worked in college, but it’s not working with young families, so we went back to the Word. I think we’re going to switch some of these practices”

The underlying principles for multiplication stayed the same for Mike, but some of the ways they were doing church changed. He was honest about he and his family’s capacity and made changes through prayer and going back to the Word.

Hold Tightly to the Word, Not Methods

Mike was able to make the cultural switch without giving up on the mission. His example teaches a good lesson. We need to hold tightly to the biblical principles while being open handed with tools, processes and practices.¹

We can foster this by creating a culture of genuine wrestling through the Word alongside other disciples. In a learning environment like this, everyone is allowed to discover what it says for themselves and come to personal convictions from God. This is a slow process involving a lot of discussion and prayer.

The faster, but less fruitful method is to give the answers you want someone to see in the Bible. I’ve done this and seen plenty of others do it as well. I’ve brought up the Word, asked what the answer is, but only have one thing in mind. If they don’t get what I want them to get, I tell them the supposed right answer (as in, my answer). Once they superficially agree with me, I move on quickly before the truth can sink into their heart.

Slower is faster. If you teach someone to dig into the Word for themselves in a learning community, they will learn to listen to the Holy Spirit and make plans based on what He leads them to. If you just give the answers, you’ve made them dependent on you to understand the Word and solve any problems they may face.

In the former case, they will have the skills to adapt their methods in any different environment they encounter. In the latter, they’ll hold tightly to the methods they learned and be unable to adapt. Mike learned to adapt to a new environment by going back to the Word. Crissy, Doug, and Rob did not.

The Hope

I’m trying to highlight this reality to provide a caution, but not to dissuade. I know of many believers who learned to make disciples in college, prison, or the military who continue following Jesus and fishing for men with great passion in their hearts after they move into the next stage of life.

The key to making sure this transition happens smoothly is to train disciples to form their mission strategy from the Word and not from methodologies. If you can do that, then prisons, universities, and military bases turn from being merely great harvest fields to being training grounds for the next generation of disciple-makers.

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1. Pheaney recently made a good post about this