Church Or Social Club – How Churches Can Multiply Churches

Today we’re gonna talk about the question: Is your church a church or is it a social club?

In two years, you can find out.

I was out there searching on YouTubes, looking at different disciple making movement guys and watches of videos, and I came across a Zoom teaching where the man himself, who basically created Disciple Making Movement Training, David Watson, was doing an interview. During the interview, he said something pretty shocking to me. Let me just go ahead and just play you this clip from the video. I found this on YouTube. I’ll link to the actual YouTube interview. You can watch the whole thing down in the description below, but let’s go see what David says.

Davit Watson: 

You’re not a real disciple if you’re not making disciples. That’s the bottom line. And it’s just like, a church that doesn’t reproduce is no longer a church. In our statistics, we look at churches, they have a lag metric of two years. That’s the timeline. They haven’t started a church in two years. We changed the name from “church” to “social club” because the nature of a church is to reproduce. That’s the nature. So you can’t just say, “I’m not going to do that,” when in fact, the nature of the church is to reproduce. And at what point do you say, this has become a social club of Christians, rather than a place that makes disciples and reproduces churches. And I’m perfectly happy to reassign the name. 

Now we don’t go around and tell everybody, “You’ve been redefined as a social club rather than a church.” In our minds, we recognize they’re dead-ended. They’re not reproducing. They have no fruit. They’re not going to have fruit. And the most common trigger of that happening is paid pastors. The second most common trigger is building a building. And when they did those two things, it became inward looking rather than outward working. Because to maintain a building or to maintain a salary for a pastor in most of these areas is significantly hard. But we see. Every time we saw that happen, we knew that that line of work was done. It’s not going to go any further.

That’s pretty crazy, right? In two years, if the church hasn’t multiplied and reproduced another church, then the church is just a social club. Wild. And of course, he’s not trying to be negative, but he’s just saying healthy disciples multiply disciples, healthy churches multiply new churches. 

Now, how the heck can we get to this reproducing, this multiplication? 

Now, I think the first thing is you got to look at it like a funnel, right? A funnel. Up at the top of the funnel, you got to be planting seeds of the gospel. You got to have people out there that are preaching the gospel, throwing seeds, and throwing them wide, right? So field 1 is all about figuring out, helping people know where to go. 

Field 2, preaching the gospel, the kingdom, planting seeds over, over, and over and over and over again. So you’ll train a bunch of people to preach. And if you’ve looked at our 2% video, the very few will actually go out and do it. So you train a bunch, a few will actually go out and preach, right? But not everyone that you preach to will actually get saved, right? So you preach, some won’t believe. Then those who believe, you have to train them to go and reproduce themselves. So some that you train will actually go and do what you teach to train and disciple them to do. 

So like, you preach to a lot, a few believe. You disciple all the believers, some will actually go and do it. You gather the disciples in churches and raise up leadership, and some will multiply. So it’s like a funnel. You start off wide and get down.

Now, one of the things we realize in what we’re doing is the church is saying, young people aren’t coming to the church anymore. And it’s interesting because if you ask those churches, how many young people are you going to, right? Because Jesus never said, “Come to church.” The church is always supposed to go to the people. 

So how many young people is your church actually going to so that they can hear the good news of the kingdom, and then start the process of discipleship, which gets them into the churches and then multiplies churches? 

So, if you look at field 1 – figuring out where to go, field 2 – preaching the gospel, field 3 – discipleship, field 4 – multiplying churches, we draw it in a nice four-square box like this, right? But in reality, the first one is real wide, the second one, a little bit smaller, third one, a little bit smaller, fourth one, even smaller.

If we’re going to multiply churches, healthy churches have healthy people in the churches. Healthy churches multiply when you send out people to multiply other churches, with an idea that, “Hey, when you come–” so, in my church, we used to say this, “If you got 20 people in your church–” the pastor is not the shepherd, and those 20 people are the sheep. No, no, no. The leader of the church is just the shepherd raising up other shepherds. So if you got 20 people in the church, you got 20 other shepherds with potentially 20 other churches. You got 200 people in your church, you got 200 shepherds.

Now, I think it’s really interesting that in this video, David Watson said the two things that are most common to stop the reproduction of churches are what? A paid pastor and building a building. What? Basically, that’s churches. I’ve known it for my whole entire Jesus life. But if you have the normal ordinary people out there preaching the gospel, discipling, and gathering, and sending out to do the same, that’s how you can multiply churches in less than two years, man. And not to think, man, we’re going to go find a professional pastor who we’re going to set them up in a building. Nothing against paid pastors and buildings. I used to be one of them. You know what I mean? 

But man, we have to realize that the goal is not to get the world into the church building, but to get the church, the ecclesia into the world, multiplying and spreading the good news of the kingdom and seeing the gates of hell destroyed by getting churches in the midst of the gates. 

Can I get an Amen? Amen. Amen. Go be great!