Ten Negotiable Core Priorities
Along with the one primary objective and seven non-negotiable pillars there are 10 priorities that acknowledge differences in church doctrine, polity and mission field (affected community). Regardless of your tribe affiliation, you need to define these 10 priorities for yourself.
A short list of the ten includes:
New Measures of Success (L5 vs L3)
Liberated Financial Systems
Minimal Ecclesiology
Level 5 Leadership within an Apostolic Atmosphere
Kingdom-centric/Geo-centric Focus
Everyone a Missionary
Sending Impulse
Easily Accessible (everyone gets to play)
Bias to Yes
Relational Affiliation to a Tribe, Family or Network of Churches
Let’s stretch our thinking by expanding on these ten. Please understand that each of these 10 negotiables requires decision-making on your part. It might be wise to read the next few pages with a journal in hand. Jot your thought as you read, then formalize them into a working document that you can use to disciple your most promising leaders.
1. New Measures of Success/Scorecards (L5 vs L3):
Do you seek to grow a single congregation or to disciple nations my multiplying disciples and churches? Do you seek to create the best possible “come and see” environments AND “go and be” environments or are you captive to the Level 3 “come and see” bias?
What gets measured gets done! If you measure conversions and baptisms, you will get them. Measure church attendance and you will figure out how to make it grow. But you need to measure more to disciple a nation.
At Level 5 a church will measure how many people are involved in active disciple making. It will look at what proportion of the budget went into church multiplication. It will keep its members focused on the possibility that they could involve themselves in multiplying a new church. It will celebrate the number of churches stemming from itself and it will make heroes of the people who took new territory for the kingdom of God by planting those churches. A Level 5 church will want to know what percentage of its church plants reproduced themselves.
2. Liberated Financial Systems:
Whenever money is involved, things get sticky. This requires a redefinition of excellence away from perfection toward multiplication. If you spend all your funds perfecting a Sunday morning performance, you grow addicted to money and find it difficult to invest, significantly, in the world outside your congregation.
A multiplication movement places a higher priority on multiplication than it does on presentation. This means that you consumer Christians either mature into fully surrendered Christians or they become uncomfortable in church. One handy tool for this is a statement of mission on your church website. If you make it clear that you intend that every Christ follower learns to live life as a mission, you can begin to filter out “consumer Christians” or spectators.
By reconstituting our priorities around disciple making and church multiplication, we drastically reduced our overhead while expanding the Kingdom at a much higher rate. Remember that if you build a beast, you must feed it. I would rather feed a menagerie outside our walls than a monster within. A liberated church can afford to invest heavily in church planting, especially when planting overseas. Or a liberated church might stick with business-as-usual while planting a movement of microchurches at almost no cost. Whatever pathway you take toward multiplication, can you liberate your finances (change your spending priorities) to the point that you could invest a tithe of your church income to church multiplication in your community, across the country and overseas?
3. Minimal Ecclesiology:...
