What McDonald’s Taught Me About The Great Commission

Today we’re going to talk about what McDonald’s taught me about the Great Commission.

I don’t know about you. I was in high school, I needed a job. I actually needed to pay for myself to be able to go to church camp. So I thought, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go to McDonald’s and get me a job at McDonald’s.” I think I was 15 or 16 years old. 

You know what I realized about McDonald’s? McDonald’s is like one of the biggest businesses in the world. They are all over the place. One of the reasons that McDonald’s works is because a guy named Ray Kroc, years and years ago, he ran into the McDonald’s brothers who had a hamburger business. Now, they weren’t the best hamburgers in town, but you know what they were really good at doing? getting hamburgers to people quickly. They could just knock out a bunch of burgers and get burgers to people quickly. 

Ray Kroc saw this and he thought, “Man, if I could just take the McDonald’s brothers system, I can have McDonald’s going all over the world.” And that’s what he did. I realized Ray Kroc, he died in the eighties, I think he died. And guess what didn’t stop when he died? McDonald’s. Why? Because McDonald’s had so systematized every process in the McDonald’s that Ray Kroc could die and the systems will still work. 

So, what in the world does McDonald’s have to do with the Great Commission? This is it. Man, Jesus says that we’re called to disciple nations by teaching them to obey everything he commanded you. 

Two questions: (1) Do you know all the things that Jesus commands you to do and, (2) Do you know how to teach someone else how to obey them? Because that’s how we’re going to be able to finish the Great Commission. 

So I started to do something. I realized that a lot of what McDonald’s was doing was because there was a power in the systems. Systems make something easily digestible and easily reproducible. So a teenager can run McDonald’s because someone had figured out a system. There was a system for making fries. There was a system for making burgers. There was a system for everything. 

What if all the things that Jesus commanded us to do, what if we’re able to build simple reproducible systems around each one of those commands? 

Now, this is one of the things that I’ve been devoted my life to for the last 15, 20 years – look at a command of Jesus, ask myself, “How can I obey that? And then finally, how can I teach someone else how to obey it? How can I create a simple reproducible system so that I can teach them the system and they can go and teach it to someone else?”

Now, I always feel ridiculous teaching systems. We have a five-step healing model that we teach people where you follow these five steps. This is how you can train someone how to heal the sick. Seven steps to doing Luke 10, reaching entire cities and discipling nations. Seven steps. It always seems a little bit ridiculous, but if you can learn these systems and you can teach it to someone, someone like a child can take that system and go and teach it how to do others. 

There’s another training or another video I did. She was then nine years old. I had planted a church and was running a church because she learned a simple system of what a church is and how to run it and how to multiply it.

So ask yourself this question: How can you take the things that Jesus commanded us to do? How can you create a system around it so that you could teach others how to do it? Ray Kroc died, McDonald’s didn’t stop – this is what we want to have happened. We want to have people continue to obey and teach others how to obey the things Jesus told us to do, even when we’re dead and long and gone. 

So, what are the commands of Jesus? How can you obey them? How can you create simple systems around those so that you can train others and they can take that same training and go and do it themselves?