Who knows? Maybe I’m right.

Sometimes you never know how significant a year is until centuries later. 1776, 1492, 33… those were all big years but nobody living in them understood how big they really were at the time they were living in them.

I do know that 100 years from now when our great grand kids are talking history, they might at least refer to 2008 as the year the AG turned a corner. Here are some reasons they might think that:

1. In 2008, the Church Multiplication Network was formally conceived, approved and launched as a General Council initiative to leverage the scale and assets of this fellowship to work together to reach as many Americans as possible through vigorous new communities of faith started all over America.

2. 10 BootCamps were held and hundreds of multipliers were trained to start new churches and help existing churches learn how to multiply.

3. 43 churches were funded and launched through the efforts of the AG Trust and the CMN matching fund project.  These 43 churches have connected with over 70,000 previously “un” or “de” churched individuals, recorded 955 confessions of faith, baptized 189 folks in water and are giving an average of 11% of their income to missions.

4. The initial leadership team for the Church Multiplication Network has been selected and activated. I’ll be announcing our “starting lineup” in a blog post in the near future. Suffice it to say, God’s blessed us with a great team and we are ready to for what’s next!

I’m extremely grateful to the visionary executive leadership team that God has given the AG fellowship. It is an extraordinary privilege to work with George Wood, Alton Garrison, John Palmer, Doug Clay, Zollie Smith and John Bueno. Along with the Executive Presbytery team, these outstanding leaders have taken a bold step in facilitating and financing the creation of the Church Multiplication Network.

Tomorrow, we all start another trip around the sun. By God’s grace, it’s going to be a good one! 

Multiplicity was undeniably powerful this year. It was amazing to observe a group of speakers who had not collaborated and who had very little guidance from us end up basically reinforcing some common “big rock” themes. Now that I’ve had some time to digest what I heard, here are the key points it seems that God wanted us to hear.

1. The centrality of Christ- Hirsch reminded us that the foundation of everything is Jesus. We need to know Jesus accurately. Then we will get His Mission right. Then our ecclesiology will be right.

2. Making disciples is what we are called to do. Not disciples of us, but rather disciples of Jesus. We are all on a journey of yielding to the Holy Spirit as He conforms us to the image of Christ. It’s a journey that never ends and making disciples basically boils down to helping each other look more like Jesus.

3. Bob Roberts (a great Southern Baptist friend) made it clear to us that his observation of how church multiplication movements happen is that they always start with people who expect and actively pursue the empowerment of the Spirit. His equation for the emergence of a church planting movement was Spirit, pragmatics, theology… in that order. All three must be present in that order. He stated that he is unaware of a church multiplication movement that was catalyzed simply by theology. First and foremost a church multiplication movement is catalyzed by the Spirit and by people moved on by the Spirit. Pragmatics are the systems and organizational dimensions that channel the activities of Spirit-led people toward disciple making relationships and anointed missional activity. Sound theological foundations keep the organic structures that result from going out of bounds from the perspective of truth. These same ideas were reflected in comments made by every other speaker. 

Those are some of my initial and admittedly imperfect reflections on what I heard and experienced. I’m aware of at least a couple of blog sites where the authors have posted their own reflections. John Van Pay’s thoughts can be viewed here. Trinity Jordan shares his thoughts here. If you are aware of other blog reflections on Multiplicity, let me know and I’ll post them on this blog as well.