Lessons from the East

Finding the Future of Western Christianity in the Global Church

Bob Roberts

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780781413763
• eBook ISBN: 9780781414302
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What if our western view of church isn't God's view of church? That's the disruptive question church planter Bob Roberts Jr. wrestled with while connecting with top global church planters and pastors. Over time, his global experiences convinced him western believers would benefit from:

• taking our faith beyond Sunday to every dimension of life;
• shifting from a Christian worldview to a Jesus prism; and
• moving from religious leaders to disciple leaders.

Lessons from the East invites you into the larger story God is telling around the world. It just may change your view of church and the global Christian community.

Part I

Kingdom Vision and Strategy

Chapter 1

What Are We Missing?

Church leaders have been praying for revival in America, and we’ve been working hard to help our churches grow, but we’re falling behind. The Pew Research Center reports that between 2007 and 2014, the number of people who claimed to be Christians dropped almost 8 percent. In light of this decline, we might be encouraged to learn that those who identified themselves as evangelicals fell less than 1 percent.1

Outside our borders, however, Jesus is capturing hearts and the church is exploding, especially in Africa, Asia, and South America. For instance, in 1900, Africa had only 8.7 million Christians, but today, the number is almost 400 million,2 and some estimates are half a billion. In Korea, the number of Christians has grown from 2 percent in 1945 to 30 percent today.3 The Pentecostal movement is barely a hundred years old, but it has grown at an astonishing rate. Today, one in twelve people alive today has some form of faith defined by Pentecostalism.4

For years, American church leaders assumed we were the experts, we had the right theology and strategy, and we had all the resources we and the rest of the world needed. We’ve conducted an incredible array of conferences and seminars on how to lead and manage our churches. The problem is that we have a closed system. We’ve been searching for answers from each other, but not from outside our borders. We’ve sent missionaries and resources overseas, but we haven’t listened to the leaders from those countries. In the meantime, the American church has become stagnant while the global church is seeing phenomenal growth. Church leaders on other continents are leaving us in the dust. The solution? We’ve been givers, but now it’s time to become receivers. We have a lot to learn—from them, not from each other.

In my lifetime the United States has shifted from being the most prolific nation in the world in sending missionaries to being the third most unreached nation in the world. When I first became a pastor, I didn’t realize that I’d become a missionary by staying in America instead of leaving America for a distant land.

Because we now live in a mission field, we need to learn from the experts: our global sisters and brothers. Western Christians have exported Christianity to the ends of the earth. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to import! We need to be discipled by pastors from the nations where the church is exploding. To learn from them, we need a healthy dose of humility. Oh, we want to reach our nation for Jesus, but we don’t want anyone telling us how. We need a different perspective: missions isn’t something one part of the church imposes on another part; instead, it’s something we do together, humbling ourselves before one another.

If we don’t change, we’re setting ourselves up for a crisis. We need to stop looking at the world as “our mission field” and see it as a global community, a global church with global answers—answers even for us.

Let me draw a few contrasts between the American church and the church in much of the rest of the world:

• In America, we’re fighting to keep our church attendance from declining, but the church in many parts of the world is growing far faster than the birthrate.
• In America, we excel at systems and processes, conferences and seminars; overseas, church leaders have fewer resources and organizational systems, but they have far stronger relationships.
• In America, discipleship is a process people generally learn in a classroom; overseas, imparting spiritual life, values, and heart is a way of life.
• In America, we’ve taken the separation of church and state to the extreme so that many Christians seldom mention their faith outside the walls of their churches. Overseas, believers are often in the minority, so they don’t take their faith for granted. They’re light and salt in every domain of their lives: at home and at work, in their communities and in their churches.
• In America, many believers are skeptical of culture and often stand back to criticize government, schools, and every other aspect of society. Overseas, Christians are more engaged with these arenas—not as antagonists, but as allies.
• In America, church is designed to entertain the people who attend so they’ll come back the next week; overseas, the purpose of worship is to encounter the living God.
• In America, we assume we can’t have a movement of God without pure and perfect theology. In other parts of the world, leaders are far more interested in an authentic relationship with Jesus that radicalizes a person’s life. They fine-tune their theology as the relationship grows stronger and deeper. In other words, they don’t start with doctrine. They begin with the relationship with Jesus and then let the richness of the relationship define the doctrine.
• In America, pastors hope (secretly or openly) to be celebrities, and they compare themselves to those who have made it big. But in the rest of the world, some of the finest leaders I’ve ever known gladly labor for Christ in obscurity. Humility is the hallmark of their lives.
• In America, we know very little of real opposition, threats, and suffering. In many parts of the world, pastors and their followers live with these challenges. Real danger produces a more robust faith.
• In America, we often compete with each other for acclaim and attendance (the conversion rate is abysmally small, so most growth in churches is from sheep swapping), but overseas, pastors often serve at the risk of their lives, so they are very supportive of one another.
• In America, megachurches are growing rapidly at the expense of the neighborhood churches. Since 1990, the number of megachurches has increased by 1,600 percent.5 Overseas, decentralization is the key to growth at every level: for individuals, small groups, and small churches. They seldom build huge worship centers. Instead, they continue to multiply small congregations where relationships are strengthened and deepened.

Obviously, I’m making broad, but accurate, generalizations in these contrasts, as well as in all the contrasts I’m drawing throughout the book. There are, of course, many exceptions to these observations, but the patterns are clear. These descriptions aren’t merely academic theories or philosophical assumptions. I’ve seen the difference. I have the privilege of calling more than two dozen amazing leaders from around the world my friends. All of us are church planters because multiplying leaders and churches runs in our blood. These amazing leaders think small and multiply. One of them has planted churches that have an attendance of over a million people. Others have networks of cells and congregations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. These aren’t megachurch pastors; they’re gigachurch pastors! We call our gathering the Global Collaborative Community, and we meet twice a year. Most are from the East—Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—but a few are from Europe, Central America, and South America. Only two Americans are in the group. I’ll tell much more about these remarkable leaders to illustrate particular points in this book, but for now let me introduce you to a few of them.

Eddy Leo is the pastor of Abba Love Church in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is a different kind of megachurch. It has had about thirty locations, providing about seventy services. Recently, it divided into ten independent but connected churches. These congregations are spread all over the city of ten million people. A few years ago, a number of psychologists met with Eddy, and together they heard the whisper of the Spirit inviting them to care for people in the city who were homeless and mentally ill—“the least of these” if there ever were any. They began a church for people who are mentally ill, with people who are mentally ill, and of people who are mentally ill. Today, the church that was birthed out of caring for people living on the streets has grown to about two thousand.

Joseph Maisha has a church of seventeen thousand in the predominately Muslim area of Mombasa, Kenya. They have also planted 110 churches throughout the country. His church sponsors a full array of social services for the community, including schools, a college, orphanages, and leadership training for people in business and government.

Jossy Chacko is a successful businessman who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from India, Jossy converted from Orthodox to Protestant, and he realized God had put him in position to make a difference in his native land. He has planted thousands of churches by selecting visionary leaders, giving them each a bicycle, and telling them to begin by serving their communities. Today, this network of small churches includes more than two hundred thousand people.

Dion Robert is a pastor of a church of 250,000 in the Ivory Coast of West Africa. During a political coup and resulting conflict, his church became a hospital to care for the wounded from both sides. Other pastors might have been afraid of being accused of taking sides, but Dion solved the problem with a powerful blend of personal strength, inclusive grace, and tangible medical care. Do you think people in the country heard about his church? Do you think they were amazed at the love demonstrated to those who had tried to kill each other just moments earlier? Do you think his church is now positioned to be a powerful force for reconciliation in that troubled land?

For all of these leaders—and the rest of my friends who are like them—the goal isn’t to build big churches, and their strategy isn’t to make their worship services the most attractive in their cities. Their goal is to make multiplying disciples, and their strategy is to serve selflessly in the places where unbelievers live and work, see whose heart God touches with the gospel, and then start a gathering of believers who believe community involvement, evangelism, and deep relational connections are the heart and soul of the Christian life. To them, everything is about the multiplication of small, heartwarming, difference-making units.

As I’ve gotten to know these remarkable leaders, I’ve realized their churches aren’t growing because of their systems, processes, marketing, or expertise. What they’re doing isn’t as important as who they are and how they serve. Their compassionate hearts, strong values, and humble service enable them to lead in a way that multiplies their vibrant faith in God.

Three Expressions

In Acts and the New Testament letters, we see three distinct expressions of the church: the cell, the congregation, and the universal church. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul explains that the role of leaders is to help people “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Eph. 4:13–16). How does this kind of growth happen? Not by sitting side by side in a worship service, but in the give-and-take of dynamic relationships in which people love one another, forgive one another, accept one another, rebuke one another, and encourage one another. This can happen only at the level of cells of about four to a dozen people.

The congregation is the expression of the body of Christ where cells gather for teaching, training, direction, and visio...

Table of contents

• Introduction: A New Way to See
• Part I Kingdom Vision and Strategy
• Chapter 1 - What Are We Missing?
• Chapter 2 - A Bigger Picture: From Church Focused to Kingdom Focused
• Chapter 3 - The Purpose of Sunday Morning: From Hero Pastors to Hero Disciples
• Chapter 4 - Family Connections: From Sterile Institutions to Authentic Relationships
• Chapter 5 - Redefining Small Groups: From Optional to Foundational
• Chapter 6 - The Public Square: From Withdrawal to Engaging Culture
• Chapter 7 - Engaging Other Faiths: From Afraid and Isolated to Loving and Involved
• Chapter 8 - No Limits: From Exclusive to Inclusive Leadership
• Part II Kingdom Hearts
• Chapter 9 - Abandoned: From Safety to Radical Obedience
• Chapter 10 - The Neglected Source: From Pragmatics to Supernatural Power
• Chapter 11 - Prayer: From Expendable to Essential
• Part III Kingdom Action
• Chapter 12 - Radically Restructure Your Church
• Acknowledgments
• Notes