From day one at our first real job, our bosses, coworkers, and mentors tell us,
“You have to prioritize!”
“You can’t do every idea you have!”
“You have to learn to say no!”
So it’s not surprising that saying no becomes our default as a form of self-preservation, resisting the stream of asks for time, guidance, and resources. It is easy for us to automatically switch to no mode. It can become our “natural” first response.
Problem! The one thing every hero maker possesses that everyone around him or her needs is permission, which needs to come in the form of a yes. If you want to multiply leaders who in turn multiply leaders, you must lead with a yes. If the people around you cannot get a yes, they will never discover the dream God has for their life or reach their redemptive potential. If your followers can’t get permission from you with a yes, they will never be engaged in the mission.
If the people around you cannot get a yes, they will never discover the dream God has for their life or reach their redemptive potential.
The great temptation is to respond with how instead of yes. But questions of how need to wait. If we reply, “How could you do that?” we sow the seeds of doubt by responding to their aspirations with a question about strategy. If we go right to, “How much would that cost?” we are responding to their dream with a question of tactics. The questions of how will come later, but the reflex of a hero maker is to be a permission giver and say yes.
Simple Tool for Permission Giving
AN ICNU CONVERSATION
Let me invite you to adopt a simple tool we have used at Community Christian Church for years, with remarkable results. It unfolds as simply as this conversation between church staff member John Ciesniewski and volunteer leader Greg Sink. Greg, a man in his sixties with a successful career, heard these words from John: “I see in you someone who could be a great campus pastor.” This conversation led Greg on a path to retire early and do a leadership residency so he could become a campus pastor at a new location of our church, in an active adult (age fifty-five plus) community.
What happened here is that one person called out greatness in another person. It’s a simple formula that helps create a yes environment. All you do is say, “I see [blank] in you.” You fill in the blank with the appropriate affirmation.
We use the initials ICNU as in-house shorthand for these conversations. We call ICNU the four most important letters of the alphabet. We encourage everyone—you don’t have to serve in any official capacity—to regularly tell others, “I see this ability in you,” “I see this gift in you,” and “I see God at work in you when you . . .”
I can’t stress enough what a difference it can make when someone you respect takes the time to see something in you and to call that out in you. Most people did not grow up in a family in which they experienced this, nor do they work in an environment where this happens. Our ICNU culture helps those who are affirmed have the confidence to step forward and ask for permission, wanting to hear, “Yes, you can do it.”
Yes to Murder Town USA
It was hearing a yes from a spiritual father that sent Derrick Parks to plant a church in Wilmington, Delaware, a place Newsweek called Murder Town USA.30 It was that same yes, accompanied by a “you can do it” from his hero-making mentors, that kept Derrick there when a neighbor was shot and killed just a few doors down from where he lived.
Derrick Parks grew up with all the challenges of being an African American male in poverty-ridden South Camden, New Jersey. He worked his way through them and became a successful school administrator in suburban Philadelphia. So what would cause him to become a church planter in a place like downtown Wilmington? It was Pastor Eric Mason who, as a hero maker, had an ICNU conversation with Derrick, and their relationship has lasted to this day. “He is my father in the ministry,” says Derrick. “I phone him all the time.”
Eric Mason had completed a pastoral residency program and then planted Epiphany Fellowship in downtown Philadelphia. Derrick, working in a Philadelphia school during Epiphany Fellowship’s early years, had gotten involved in the church. He was drawn to the vision, including the dream to plant other churches in needy areas, from Brooklyn to South Central Los Angeles. As Eric describes his hero-making vision, “We want to send out many church planters, going humbly into places that are difficult and unreached.”
Along the way, Eric saw Derrick’s potential and played a huge permission-giver role in Derrick’s life. “God has only just begun with his great work in you,” Eric told Derrick, giving Derrick both license and language to advance the mission of Jesus.
When Epiphany Fellowship of Philadelphia planted a new church in Derrick’s hometown of Camden, Derrick became an elder there. The pastor there likewise had ICNU moments with Derrick. “Dr. Eric Mason and Pastor Doug Logan were certainly permission givers in my life,” Derrick affirms. As Derrick sensed a further calling of God to bring the gospel to “other Camdens,” he did a sixteen-month church-planting residency through Epiphany. Then he too got sent out.
So Epiphany Philadelphia planted Epiphany Camden, which planted Epiphany Wilmington. Each was spurred on by permission givers. Likewise, from the first days in Wilmington, Derrick is saying yes wherever possible so God can continue that chain. Derrick says, “I am modeling the same by dreaming for the fatherless young men in my church. There are six young men that I meet with regularly to walk them through biblical manhood principles. Some of them have muted aspirations for ministry, and I encourage them to follow the Lord’s calling faithfully.”
For all these Epiphany Fellowship churches to be birthed, leadership had to let go of control and release their resources and people to take the good news elsewhere. Without these many permission givers, the story would be very different. Had pastors tried to control and keep the people God put under their leadership, you wouldn’t have a Derrick Parks risking it all in Wilmington.
Who Gave Ralph Permission?
You met Ralph Moore in chapter 5. I believe he’s one of this country’s best examples of a hero maker. For the past five decades, he has practiced permission giving with the leaders God has brought around him, and that has resulted in twenty-three hundred new churches and counting!
Ralph’s story is not about a big church but about a big dream. He has pastored only three churches in his life, and all of them were small when he arrived or started them. But Ralph repeatedly demonstrates two values: multiplication thinking and permission giving. When the church he currently pastors was about two hundred in attendance, he announced, “Even if we never grow past two hundred people, I believe that in the next twenty years, we have the potential to plant thirty churches that each will plant other churches. And if we grow beyond two hundred people, then I believe we should increase that twenty-year goal.”
One of Ralph’s strategies for starting those new churches is to encourage bivocational ministry, sometimes called tentmaking (from the apostle Paul’s practice31) or marketplace pastors. “My assumption is that these everyday missionaries are heroes in the making who need affirmation more than anyone else,” Ralph says. “Every Christ follower is a missionary, and pastors need to give more permission than they do and make heroes of them.”
In fact, says Ralph, “From my experience, the greatest potential for growing God’s kingdom lies with the people who will remain in their career while establishing a church. I know a doctor, an architect, a private school administrator, a U.S. Marine gunnery sergeant, a furniture store owner, a copy machine salesman, a BMW distributor, a bio-geneticist, and several others who have successfully started new churches. And I’m only naming the ones that I’ve worked with recently!” Many of those are modern-day tentmakers, part of a rising trend in bivocational pastors.32
Who gave Ralph permission to release all these people into various levels of ministry? “Though no one ever discipled me,” he says, “I did have significant mentors who were hero makers to me.” One mentor was Robert Schuller
, founder of what became the Crystal Cathedral (not too far from the location of Ralph’s first church), who took Ralph and his wife Ruby under wing. “Ruby and I had been the youngest and newest church planters to attend his annual pastors’ conference. He encouraged us and met with us personally on several occasions. He assigned one of his staff to meet with us monthly, in restaurants where we couldn’t afford to eat on our own. Eventually, he invited me to speak at his pastors’ conference on an annual basis, which gave us further interaction with him and his wife, Arvella. Toward the end of his ministry at Crystal Cathedral, I got invited back to speak at the conference. After we moved to Hawaii, one of his daughters joined one of our daughter churches in Maui. Different as we were in theology and style, he is still one who gave me permission to do much of what I’ve done.”
Ralph knows firsthand what happens when someone you look up to believes in you and says you can do it. That’s what he experienced, and that’s what he’s done with others. Ralph describes how he has implemented the ICNU conversations: “I’ve made it a point to make disciples, whom I constantly encourage to achieve more than they believed was possible.” Ralph explains the power in these personal conversations: “I think the spiritual gift of encouragement is at work in these encounters.” He has tried to emulate what Schuller did for him. “An hour spent on the phone with someone I met at a seminar can help a younger leader feel that someone they see as significant believes in them. I do this at every opportunity.”
“I Am for You, Even If You Are Not in Our Denomination”
One of my favorite examples of a permission giver is a United Methodist pastor named Jerry Sweat, who had many ICNU conversations with a very gifted staff member named Joby Martin. “I want to help you plant a church, even if it’s not United Methodist,” Jerry told him. Here’s what happened, in Joby’s words:
Jerry Sweat and Joby Martin
THE CHURCH OF ELEVEN22
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA
In only four years, a new Jacksonville church became a permission-giving center for more than six thousand weekly worshipers while planting seventy new churches.
Just three short years after launching the Church of Eleven22, we celebrated salvation number three thousand. That’s three thousand lives eternally changed!
I (Joby) trace a lot of those spiritual victories back to an ongoing series of conversations with my former senior pastor, Jerry Sweat, at Beach Church, a United Methodist congregation in Jacksonville, Florida. His passion, to use his words, was “to raise up people and help them live out their calling.”
I had the incredible opportunity to serve under him as his youth pastor and executive pastor. At one point, he encouraged me to start a weekly worship gathering to reach people ages eighteen to thirty-five, the lost generation—the unchurched, the dechurched. We held the new service Sundays at 11:22 a.m. (the reference to the time stuck, so Eleven22 became the name of the church).
Three years later, we had grown so much that Jerry proposed another idea: he would support sending me and the majority of people who called Beach Church home to start a brand-new church. Most senior pastors would be intimidated by this idea. Not true of Jerry Sweat. He embraced the growth. In fact, he initiated the decision to expand the reach of Beach United Methodist, and rather than split, to launch it into two brand-new churches. That meant Beach Church would cease to exist as it had been known.
When he told me that idea, he says, he felt peace—and I felt nausea!
The fact that I wasn’t raised United Methodist and wanted to align with the more Reformed Acts 29 church-planting network didn’t bother him. He even championed that to his superiors. That’s right: a United Methodist church birthed a brand-new church with a large number of tithers who will not be United Methodists. And it happened with the full blessing of the district superintendent and bishop!
When the church launched, Jerry’s message to me was powerful: “What you’re about to do isn’t new; it’s just your turn.” I am forever changed because of all his permission-giving, ICNU words like these. Jerry was my hero maker, he has been my greatest cheerleader, and he also spearheaded a three-year campaign to raise six million dollars between our two churches.
At one of those events, he said, “God has done amazing things. In three years, more people have been saved between the two churches than were attending the one church when we were all together! If we can just get ourselves out of the way, God can do even more amazing things.”
Joby’s hero maker tip: If you want to move toward Level 5 multiplication, then put priority on talking about multiplication. I started talking about multiplying at our very first staff meeting, the morning after we formally launched as a church. We didn’t know how, so we partnered with people who were already doing it. We surround ourselves with people who know how to shift those gears. But those conversations have already led us to help plant more than seventy churches so far. Who knows what will come from multiplication conversations that you begin!
ICNU Leads to More Disciple Multiplication
Let me be clear: Leading with a yes does not mean that you will fund their idea. In fact, in most cases you absolutely should not fund their ideas. Yes does not mean that you will assign a staff person to oversee it. Sometimes that makes sense; often it will not. Yes does not mean that it gets announced at a weekend celebration service. Yes does not mean that it gets space on the website. Yes simply means that you are giving others permission and blessing to be used in the Jesus mission.
Remember my summary of Jesus’ Great Commission: “Here’s the mission. I’m giving you my authority to do it. Use it to make disciple makers. I’m with you all the way.” If you do that with others, you will soon see an increase in the number of people being discipled and multiplying themselves through others. As you use ICNU to become a more joyful, affirming, creative leader, you’re ready to learn the next step in becoming a hero maker. That’s what the next chapter is about.
Hero Maker Discussion Questions
OPEN
• Tell about a life-transforming ICNU affirmation that you’ve received. Tell how you felt and what has come from that experience.
• Describe an ICNU conversation that you’ve initiated with someone else. How did you feel as it happened? What happened in that person’s life or ministry?
DIG
• Read John 1:44–51, which describes Jesus’ call to Nathanael. In what ways is that an ICNU conversation?
• What impact do you think it had on Nathanael?
• What do you think Jesus meant when he told Nathanael, “You will see greater things”?
REFLECT
• Prayerfully select someone you can approach with an ICNU affirmation. Ideally, pick someone you haven’t ever (or recently) affirmed at this level. Who is it? What will you say?
CHAPTER 7
Disciple Multiplying
Big Idea: The practice of disciple multiplying is a shift from sharing what I’ve learned to add followers to sharing what I’ve learned in ways that multiply disciples. Disciple multiplying requires that we do life with other leaders with the goal of four generations of multiplication and use simple tools like the five steps of apprenticeship.
When I was four years old and my brother Jon was two, my parents moved our family from rural Missouri to Chicago to start a new church, which they led for the next thirty-seven years. Growing up, I saw lots of people find their way back to God; I saw our church start a new site and plant new churches. God has blessed me with great parents and a great upbringing in my home church.
Somehow along the way, though, I came to believe the half-truth that the more committed I became as a disciple of Jesus, the more I would focus on me. My discipleship focused on questions like these:
• Am I having a consistent devotional life of Bible reading and prayer?
• Am I learning more about my faith from the youth group, Sunday sermons, and even the music I listen to?
• Am I looking for opportunities to
tell others what Jesus has done for me?
• Am I inviting God to enter every area of my life to make me more like Jesus?
If you’re looking to find a problem in those questions, you won’t. They represent vital practices taught in the New Testament.
The problem is what’s missing. I misunderstood that being a disciple or apprentice of Jesus was primarily about me in the sense of my relationship with God and my relationship with others. I knew it also included my building up the body of Christ, my loving other people, and my telling the world—including my friends—about Jesus. But note the direct connection to me in each case.
One day I realized that something on the fringes of my faith needed to be at the core of my Christian growth. This is the third practice for becoming a hero maker. One test of whether we’re a hero maker is whether we’re reproducing and multiplying other Christ followers, who in turn do likewise.
One of the most mentioned commands of Jesus is the Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
One test of whether we’re a hero maker is whether we’re reproducing and multiplying other Christ followers, who in turn do likewise.
It’s firmly planted in our heads but not in our lives.
I now understand that Jesus’ command challenges that I haven’t really made a disciple if the person hasn’t begun in turn making other disciples. I need to be mentoring disciple multipliers into multiple generations. After all, isn’t making serial disciple makers the only way to “make disciples of all nations”?
Maybe you’re ahead of me, and you’ve already applied that verse personally. If so, you are definitely ready for the big idea of this chapter: you become a hero maker through the practice of sharing what you’ve learned by discipling leaders, and not being satisfied till you’ve seen it multiplied to the fourth generation.
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