EP134: Rob Wegner & Helping People Find Their Personal Mission

All right, so I'm in a text group with some digital pastors and one of them sent a graphic along. You guys will appreciate this. It's a photo of a couch. And the headline says, church on the sofa will never be the same as church in a sanctuary. And so the premise here, and it's funny, a digital pastor posted it. And then the other digital pastors, they're all boo and memes and gifs of like people booing it. And it's funny. My response was, well, God, I hope not. I hope what's happening in the physical building is not like what's happening in digital space. Because if physical is the same thing as the couch, then we're wasting the opportunities we have to reach a different type of person. Now, this was abstract thinking.

And I don't think the other digital pastors in the text group really maybe appreciated it. We'll get a chance maybe to talk with them later about it. I feel like there's something brewing as a future episode. But it comes down to this heart of, we can do something different digitally than we can physically. Because if all we're doing is the same thing, then we're really wasting the opportunity to reach a different person digitally. This is one of the reasons why I love this idea of helping people find personal mission. Established churches have struggled with this. And honestly, the calling and the mission of an established church is so big, they really don't have an opportunity to nuance, to get into the relational aspects of helping people find their spiritual gifts, their talents, their abilities, and helping release them on personal mission.

And this, this is where I think digital churches can shine. This brings us into the conversation here, because if I'm working a digital-only church, I'm trying to understand how to get people on personal mission, who am I going to learn from? Who's doing this real well? And the answer to that is Rob Wagner with KC Underground, K Kansas City Underground. Now, if you're not familiar with Rob, he's been on the podcast, man, I would probably guess three or four times at this point. So, a great guest here, a long-time guest with the podcast. But in this conversation, we really want to get into personal mission. How can the church equip people, not for purposes of the brand, but to help these people understand what their personal mission, what their calling is, where God may be leading them?

And then how can the church resource them to go and do what God's calling them to do? Now, we talk about this all the time in context of digital-only churches. You know, we've talked about church as platform, multiplying out. We've talked about disciple makers who are witnessing to other disciples, who are creating other disciples and the multiplication part of it. You've heard me talk about Seth Godin. And if we really want to reach the world, it's a matter of telling a small crowd, make the message as simple as possible and make it specific for a group of people and then ask them to own it and tell someone else. So the idea of personal mission, if we're really going to be effective in the months and the years to come, is huge, which makes this conversation so important.

Now, personal mission is key. Rob, we're also celebrating. He just published a new book, co-authored a new book, Starfish in the Spirit, with a number of other people. We're going to talk about that in the show as well. But it comes down to this idea of how can we create decentralized movements, decentralized networks of churches digitally? How's it done physically? How are they equipping? How are they resourcing? How are they training physically? And then let's take some cues from that and start to figure out. We talked about this even back with Dave Ferguson, the relationship between a micro and a digital are very close. Microchurch and digital church are very close. It's just the view of community.

Community is different between the two, but the opportunities to network, to multiply exist in the same space. So here's who we're bringing into the conversation. We're bringing in Rob Wagner, Kansas City Underground, of course. We're bringing in Chesley Lundy, lead pastor from King City Church. Now, King City's another digital-only church. Chesley's been on the podcast too, recently talking about through Stadia. He's planning his digital-only church through Stadia. So we had him on maybe a couple months ago talking about that. Rob Wagner, talking from a microchurch. Chesley Lundy, trying to adapt this microchurch strategy and do it within a digital-only expression church like King City. And of course, I'm coming into the conversation, myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital and Stadia Church Planning in a conversation that I'm calling The Starfish in the Spirit, Helping People Find Personal Mission.

Okay, everybody, here you go. Rob, tell us a little bit. I mean, tell us about Starfish in the Spirit, right? Like where did this premise come from and why should people be reading the book? Originally, I was influenced, as was Lance and Alan as well, by a book called The Spider and the Starfish by Ori Brofman and Rod Beckstrom. And Ori is a professor at Berkeley and a very intelligent and curious and thorough academic. And he had noticed kind of this pattern of leadership that was deconstructing another form of leadership. In other words, if you consider something like Napster, right? And what did Napster do to the traditional recording industry, right? It collapsed it overnight. And you could make an endless list of those examples where this form of decentralized leadership that's driven more by a DNA and distributed power and influence, a very micro power can actually take down a very mega hierarchy quite quickly.

And we've seen so many examples of that in the last 20 years in our culture. So Ori wrote a book to basically give a guiding metaphor. The Spider is centralized leadership and it's hierarchical. It's top down. And a spider, you know, has a head and a body and legs that radiate out. And there's a starfish. A starfish and a spider look a little alike from a distance, right? But if you get up close, they look different. And then underneath the surface, they're dramatically different. So with a starfish, if you chop off what looks like its head, you end up with two starfish because everything that is required to reproduce in the starfish is in every cell of the starfish. And I read that book when I was on a flight to India and I was a part of a disciple making movement that became an incredible church planning movement with literally hundreds of thousands of new disciples of Jesus and thousands of micro churches.

And when I read that book on the plane, it was how they say a nomadic experience, I think it is, where it was like traveling with Jesus to India, him helping me understand in a deeper way the type of leadership. And it became sort of an obsession for me. And I'd say for Lance, and of course, Alan with his work in The Forgotten Ways, it's clearly this form of leadership that is required to see a movemental form of church. So that's kind of the origin story. And what's crazy is I read The Forgotten Ways on the same plane ride as I read that book. And now both of them ended up contributing to this book. And at that point in time, I would have never imagined something like that would have happened.

It really is like a dream come true. Like, is this happening? This is real? I'm talking to Ori Brothman and Alan Hirsch, and they're both involved with this book. So that's kind of the backstory, brother. Forgotten Ways, that was, I mean, that's an older book, right? I mean, I went down on a date, I'm sorry, but- It came out the same year as Ori's book, 2006. Yeah, so I mean, it's been 15 years. What, and that's, I mean, even in book age, I think that's a long time. Like, what brought about this new way of, or this fresh way of thinking, or going back to this old way of thinking? Why write the book now? Well, for me personally, you know, since I read that book, it's been this 15-year journey to say, okay, I'm experiencing this form of the church in India, but at that point in time, I lived in Indiana.

Like, why not in Indiana? You know, I was in a very successful megachurch and began to basically experiment, repent, iterate, and saying, how do we get back to this more primal form of disciple-making, primal forms of church, and keep reproducing what you could call sort of like nodes of power in a network where it's spreading out further and further and further. And I kept going deeper into the world of disciple-making movements and church-planting movements in places like Africa and South Asia. And I started leading my teams inside of the megachurch this way and kept seeing more and more joy, more and more authentic community, more and more flourishing, more and more multiplication. And so I just kept going and learning and trying to find the best practitioners I could find here in America.

And eventually that led to what is now the Kansas City Underground. And Kansas City Underground is a decentralized network of missionaries and microchurches and networks of thereof and hubs that support the missionaries and the microchurches. So my personal motivation first and foremost is I was writing this book as a handbook for the Kansas City Underground for our leaders, for our elders, for our hub teams. But I've learned along the way when you do things in a more open source way where you're not just creating a resource just internally, but to actually be shared with the world, it catalyzes more learning, actually. As you share it, you get new insights. As you think about how you have to describe this, not just to your crowd, but to the larger world.

So for me, it's like, I need this for the Kansas City Underground and why not share it with the rest of the world at the same time? And honestly, I got invited into it. Lance and Ori had worked for probably a year or so before they invited me into the project. And, you know, when Lance asked, it was, you know, I think I prayed for about, you know, two seconds. And then I was like, yes! Ori, yes! Okay. Because I was a super fan of all of Ori's work, man. Obviously, you know, you started talking about Napster and how that was able to basically disrupt the music industry. And I'm reading Starfish and the Spider with Ori and then reading your book, Starfish and the Spirit. Do you think that the prevailing systems that digital has basically rediscovered with crowdsourcing and with these like file sharing with Napster has allowed a paradigm shift for this decentralized leadership piece to take place?

I guess a beggar question would be like, would it have been possible if that stuff didn't already happen? That's an amazing observation. You know, there's this interesting relationship between the church and technology. So if you think about when Jesus was walking, you know, first century Palestine and then the church is launched after his ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, there was the Roman road system and a messenger system that allowed for a global spread of the message of the good news of Jesus Christ. And then you think about the printing press Gutenberg's gift to the world and that worked hand in glove with the Reformation. And I feel the internet is part of what the spirit of God is doing in the world.

Like I think God is working through every sector of society including technology and there's fancy words for this like one of them is called a morphogenic field like in other words ideas begin to collate or congeal or emerge at certain times and it would be people who are distant from each other start perceiving this possibility at the same moment. For example, there were multiple people who created telephones all around the same amount of time because the technology it built and there's enough people that can do this sort of evolutionary thinking to go, oh, this is what's next. So the reason I bring that up is here we are at the greatest hour in the history of the church. Most people don't know that or feel that here in the West but outside the Western world, we have the greatest disciple making movements and church planning movements in the history of the church and simultaneously at that moment we have the greatest distribution of information and equipping that has ever existed and it does fundamentally emphasize a different form of leadership and it makes possible the starfish decentralized leadership in a way that is now multiplied I don't know by a factor of what?

What is it? you can't even put a number on it by a million and so I do think right now we're at this transition moment in history where not just the church every form of like complex hierarchical leadership is actually crumbling in one way or the other and it's being deconstructed one way or the other there's a book it's called The End of Power which was very informative in actually writing this book and the whole thesis is there's this emergent of these micro powers that are decentralized they form around a shared idea a small set of practices you can start making the list of what those are you know like Al Qaeda you know there's positive and negative forms of this and they're they can't be controlled or stopped and they're kind of taking apart some of the pillars or foundations for the mega powers and we're in this sort of in-between state of having grown up with like kind of the era of corporations you know monolithic corporations for example and and it's it's interesting because there's like an accumulation of power by those mega powers but at the same time the micro powers are multiplying and the internet is basically the perfect force multiplier for that I feel like I'm waxing eloquent

is this helpful at all I didn't want to talk on this all day long because I do want to shift into digital churches but you've set this up really well so I mean essentially organizations are deconstructing things things are breaking apart there's this tendency for things at this point where systems are becoming decentralized or pushing themselves more towards decentralization I don't want to put words in your mouth maybe I did but it was somewhere in that realm when you have conversations with pastors leaders towards this I'm just curious like what's what's the knee-jerk reaction are they yeah you're right but are they like you're crazy what's what's the average reaction that you get when you have these I mean you wrote a book literally on this so they they know who you are they know what you're about do they like run away when you start walking up to them to go hide go talk to somebody else like what what's their response well I would say there's been a similar experience to what I think you guys in the digital space have experienced whereas a couple years ago there was you know what we're doing with decentralized leadership missionary formation microchurch decentralized networks

um I think a lot of church leaders saw that sort of as a novelty um they saw it as uh an elective like yeah it's maybe something you can add if but it's not it's not really you know central or truly important or um a lot of them thought about it more as like a new method or a technique um like oh maybe I can add you know microchurches and reach a few more people that way you know what covid has done is it's changed the conversation completely or people have um began to understand how fragile actually the centralized form of churches and what happened in covid was well you had basically two possibilities like you're in the digital space or you're in the microchurch space and I think what people are discovering is yes there was a kind of a cultural pragmatic reason to explore these possibilities but as they begin genuinely exploring them out of desperation there's been more and more church leaders that are realizing at least in my experience it feels like the number of church leaders who are now looking at um this conversation they're looking at it as an essential conversation they're looking at it as it's no longer novel it's necessary and with the microchurch conversation I think

there's more and more pastors who are looking at the scriptures again and realizing maybe the new testament really is the story of a disciple making movement that produced a microchurch movement that spread across the Roman empire and this form of church that we do it really is extra biblical that doesn't mean it's wrong but this other thing of like decentralized networks of microchurches maybe that really was what the church started with and that small groups aren't the same thing and I think there's a similar discovery happening in the digital space where people are beginning to understand the level of community that's possible in that space exceeded what their expectations were because they were forced to go into the digital space and spend a year and a half in Zoom which they would have never done and realized wow I can actually have community out here I can actually have we there's so much more presence than we thought was maybe possible and then it basically educated the entire world how to get into the digital space you know and at the exponential ventures recently one of the guys quoted a statistic which I'm going to need you guys to help me find and cite but it was like I

think he said 17 or 18 percent of the population spends more of their time in a digital space versus a physical space do you guys know that statistic no I don't remember hearing that but I can do some digging towards it to find out well that that was convicting to me it was like even if I have like a physical missionary in that person's neighborhood or network they're never going to connect with them there because they come home and they're basically it's like they're getting let's say they're a gamer it's like I'm home I'm gaming in the next six hours and all my social space is there so if I don't have a missionary in that space we won't have a gospel presence there you know and I forget who it was but when he dropped that quote it was like a light bulb went on I was like whoa that's like 300,000 people in Kansas City it's only going to go up too my kids are six and seven years old and we try to say hey no you got to go outside you got to play but it's like no Minecraft so it's just going to go up you've been using a lot of digitally savvy words by the way I've always felt micro and digital was a very similar strategy if not the exact same strategy it just looks at community

differently community being the neighborhood the zip code at a micro digital micro focus but in different nuances within it so hearing nodes of power and a network being described for a decentralized micro man I feel the same thing I don't know Chesley does in a digital context which I really would love to spit ball here for a little while Rob you've got some vision for what you think what you're now understanding maybe as a result of ongoing conversations 17-18% of people spend 50% of their time in digital man maybe we do need to do some churches in that space Chesley man you're literally launching a network of churches you told me recently you almost feel like a network just connecting these people together so both of you are experiencing some of this digital church happening tell me and I just would open up for both you guys what what is a what is a decentralized digital church network movement insert adjective what does this even look like when COVID hit none of our I mean when we were in total lockdown none of our microchurches could meet in person so we basically upgraded our zoom account and said to every missionary microchurch you have access to a zoom room and what

happened is virtually all of the microchurches there were a couple that didn't make the transition for various reasons but all of them basically transitioned to a digital space where basically through their phones through their laptops they began to connect and what was interesting is like our microchurch and this happened with a number of the microchurches like we had a rhythm of hey you know about twice a month we're gonna have like we're gonna have one party and then we're gonna have something that's about serving in our community kind of two expressions of mission or out and then we always have like we gotta have a couple what we call in expressions so for us it's like hey meet with your coach or be a part of the equipping gathering so you're connected to the larger movement you know you're you're being supported and you're connecting with eldership that kind of thing and then two up is like in your microchurch family meet at least twice a month around a meal a table for discipleship engaging the scriptures prayer planning for mission like what are we going to do for our outs this month well most of the microchurches went to meeting every week for an up so it doubled actually

the number of up meetings and for our microchurch it immediately deepened the community too because we're in this crisis pandemic where there's so much fear and anxiety and then we also noticed like the connecting in the equipping gathering same thing missionaries who were coming once or twice a month now we're coming every week to the equipping gathering and then the number of missionaries we ended up equipping has just gone because we moved our equipping into a digital space we all over Kansas City rather than just in the southwest quadrant where we're located so I feel like we've been living there for a year and a half and now we're sort of coming out of it and what we're deciding to do with our equipping gathering is we're going to do an in real life gathering probably once every six weeks but the point of it will be more about worship prayer kind of like what you could call sort of like prophetic activation a chance to sort of hear the voice of God together and commission each other again and be sent again and so we're going to continue with the equipping online because now we're reaching people all over the city they're not all going to drive an hour to go to a physical

location for equipping like we'll keep that Holy Spirit to fill us again and we're going to be sent and commissioned and we're going to hear from God together you see what I mean so I feel like the Lord used COVID to transition us into that space man whether we wanted to or not Chesley what are you seeing bro I think the biggest opportunity that the church hasn't quite figured out yet is the power of influencer marketing and I believe it's the new frontier for missions in the church and this is what I'm trying to do right now right so I'm going out I'm starting a podcast I'm getting on social I'm beginning to make aware who I am not for the sake of my fame right so that's the largest difference between an influencer marketer and an influencer missionary is we're not out for our fame we're out for Jesus fame but we're going into these sectors so for me it's young professionals in business and using the influencer marketing platform by building a personal brand and then funneling them into a training like what Rob does with Kansas City Underground so that we can disciple them I know Brian Phipps and Rob you know you guys have followers made with this disciples made and missionaries

made leaders made so we're using that same system to build disciples but then launch them out to become missionaries in their own context my little brother plays with seven guys online every day for two to three hours a day they play call of duty they just went a couple weeks ago they went to you'll like this Rob they went to Table Rock Lake in Branson Missouri right down in your area to go they call it is it is they call it fish opolis and they go and fish together so I think what the church the physical church hasn't quite understood is that digital relationships lead to physical relationships but physical relationships don't necessarily lead to digital engagement and so we have to reconstruct the way we do this and I think one of the best ways to do this is what you've seen Carrie Newhoff do what you've seen I mean Charlie Di Amorello I can't even say her name well she's a Gen Z she's getting ready to be a movie star the top the top four or five most famous people that Forbes put out the last year they're all YouTube stars like they're not movie stars so if you're not online you don't even know who these people are it's not like the old days and so I think there's there's an

ability for church people for people that are Jesus followers I don't want to say church people Jesus followers to harness this influencer marketing piece create awareness there's a force multiplier that Rob's talking about what if you could do that all over the world what if I can bring a thousand people that say yes I want to start this thing but I don't know how together digitally train them to do missional communities or micro churches in their neighborhood and support and unleash them now I've got a whole digital hub without a building because I created the personal brand first man that you're going to go wild just because you're online it's a but it's a new way of thinking it's a new paradigm so that's the stuff that I'm I'm working on right now that's why I've got my lead full podcast why I have what I'm doing is because I care about finding those guys that have this missional discontent I think is what Rob said when I was with him a few weeks ago in Kansas City find those guys and then unleash them in mission and giving them a system to do so wait Rob you you were with Chesley a couple weeks ago in Kansas yeah we had a good time I gotta get to Nashville we can have

Nashville barbecue it's not as good as Kansas City but it's still good no it's not that's okay sorry Nashville friends I love you out there you know Chesley I love what you're saying as you're talking about you know that the influencer and the influencer marketing and it's it's very close maybe it's a sister to really this this idea of personal mission helping people discover their personal mission just even this week there was one of my old blogs I wrote back in 2018 somehow resurfaced and went viral and like the line that has popped up out of this that people are really freaking out about which I wrote three years ago pre COVID but it's simply church online works best not when churches do ministry but when churches empower others when they empower people to do ministry and people like oh my gosh you were thinking this way back in 2018 I was like well of course I was like that's that's how we should be thinking and evidently now I guess mid post COVID as people are going back to the building there's this sub sector of people that are like hey maybe we should pay attention to this personal mission stuff which Rob I know through what you're doing with with KC Underground there's

nothing new here and even in digital spaces guys like Tyler Stansa who I just happened to have an hour long phone call with today at First Capital Christian Court Indiana like what he's doing digitally as well is really championing this idea strongly but tell me like at a micro because I really want to dig in here because I think the future of church if we're really going to be effective it gets to this place of helping figure out how to help people find personal mission so Rob like what learnings what understandings at the micro level at the physical level what does this look like for KC Underground yeah we have a team it's called the personal discovery team and it's there to help everyone discover their Ephesians 2 10 masterpiece mission and so the vision of Ephesians 1 is gospel saturation we join Jesus and we want to see all that Jesus is fill everything every way in Kansas City so the way we describe it is our mission is to fill Kansas City with the beauty justice and good news of Jesus that can't be accomplished apart from all of God's people being mobilized God's way like you're not going to do that with a program or 10,000 programs or bricks and mortar you know quote

unquote churches with services like you have to get into every corner of culture every sphere of society and activate someone there like who has come alive to their masterpiece mission and realized God has called me to this sector you know I'm called to media I'm called to education I'm called to healthcare I'm called to you know fill in the blank there's thousands there's these major domain domains but within them there's thousands and thousands of these like niche causes and pockets of people and what we're trusting is that Jesus is actually sovereign and if we can activate God's people in a city we could actually meet every need in a city and the degree to which we experience the fullness of Jesus in a city is directly connected with how many people have we activated into their masterpiece mission so this discovery process it's it's this fusion of art and science you know so there are assessments we've created one it's built around the analogy of GPS gifts passion story gifts are your natural abilities your spiritual gifts passion you've got a cause passion a people passion and what we call your influencing passion which is the leadership matrix from Ephesians 4 apostle prophet

evangelist shepherd teacher and then the S is story and our lives are a story that the Holy Spirit is writing and as people begin to tune in the signal of their gifts passion and story just like with GPS technology you can figure out not only as you know you best they're reflecting back to you what they see about God's calling in your life and there's the leadership of the Holy Spirit there are still burning bushes you know there's still moments of divine breakthrough and calling clarity and our whole posture is not like hey here's what we can do and you can come help us it's like what is Jesus called you to do and we're here to equip you so the whole culture of the Kansas City underground there are no volunteers there are no programs all we have is God's people being activated into their masterpiece mission and then everybody is called to make disciples wherever they're sent that's the great commission that's the primary mission we all have but within that you also have a personal mission or personal calling so it's something we're radically committed to it's just something that is a part of our culture personal calling discovery and deployment and it's a huge gap in the local

church most churches don't they have a volunteer recruitment system and there is no real calling discovery or deployment process and that's a major shift but I'm beginning to see some really encouraging transition in that area there's more and more local churches that are realizing oh volunteerism can actually be a subset of personal calling but personal calling very rarely is a subset of volunteerism like two or three percent maybe will find their calling within a volunteer system of a local church you know what I'm saying you guys get what I'm getting at totally how long is the discovery you said discovery process really go through the gps help people discover the personal calling the personal mission like is that and you're doing that now digitally I like it or as a result of covid you were doing it digitally right so like you would testify this stuff can be done digitally absolutely yeah in fact the way it works is basically talking to a guy today who's an accountant and also soccer coach and really called he's leading his soccer team like a missionary disciple maker it's amazing he's going to go through the personal discovery process so I'll send him the link and he'll go

there and it's all there it's like he'll take the gps assessment and we've created a digital platform it feeds us all his assessment results he'll do strength finders he'll do enneagram and then we have the personal discovery survey so it's basically questions and it's it's not multiple choice it's basically essays where we ask people to open up about their spiritual health emotional health relational health and financial health and people get out of it what they put into it you know so sometimes people literally put in eight word answers and it's like well I don't have much to work with on that one but a lot of our missionaries will spend hours actually working on that part of it you know sharing their story and then we have a team we pull in all those assessments and it gets put into a master report and it starts with a one page summary of their calling zone it's pretty amazing like where we take all those assessments and put it into a one page summary and then we begin to walk through the individual assessments and we use all that to create a one of a kind personalized coaching plan for that missionary and it's about a year's worth of spiritual direction actually and the people

on the personal discovery team we help them basically lead that session identifying one or two steps you know because having kind of a year of resources can be overwhelming so it's like don't worry about all of it like you'll have this report all year you can come back to it we show them actually how to use the report like how to come back to it once every couple weeks and then we offer to meet with them like hey we'd love to meet with you again in four weeks and debrief the progress you've made and let's start you know identifying the next step in the journey and so that's how it works is there ever a misfire do you like misdiagnose I don't know if that's the right word but like oh wait it's not this it's really that like give me a story yeah for sure I mean one of the things we tell people up front is like hey what we're hoping is you know when you go to the doctor and you're having your eyes checked and they go is this better is this better is this better and they click those different lenses like we're telling people listen if you think you're gonna know everything about your calling like oh there it is you know like man we're hoping this will help you get two or three clicks

clearer because calling usually comes in the process of the going instead of like the calling doesn't come in the meeting reading the assessments usually like you get clarity you get themes you get but as you're walking on mission that's where the Lord confirms the calling and brings greater and greater clarity and yeah there's definitely been misfires where you know the assessment didn't turn out right or the way we read their survey didn't turn out right and we tell people it's like hey this is going to be flawed it's not it isn't a science it's an art but I will say I think we everybody's on the team does it with a real sense of reverence and humility and so and I think we set the expectations in the work of the Holy Spirit and also kind of long-term obedience in the same direction not like hey you're going to know everything at the end of this two-hour debrief you know does that make sense I mean is that what you're getting at that's the beauty of digital with all of this too is that we don't we don't really have a lot of infrastructure to keep a machine running so we don't have the volunteer pieces that you know a physical church would have and so you now have to make a

decision what's the point is the point content or is the point equipping and then you know obviously the majority of us on digital it's about it's about equipping and so we don't have to we don't have to wrestle with that nearly as much from a digital platform perspective as somebody who has a mortgage and is in a physical location in a community not that those things are bad I think some of that I think those things are good those are going to shift but from the very beginning we can focus on what is it like to equip people for mission 100% and once people discover and really start getting clarity on their masterpiece mission they walk in the power of the Holy Spirit they're internally motivated and which is way different than like oh man I've got 150 volunteer slots I need to fill and I really hope I can motivate everybody to get in there and fill them up and that can really feel like a grind I've been there where you're just like oh man this never ends and I'm all for those programs within the life of the church but if those become the end zone we will have accidentally domesticated God's people and maybe actually really delayed them from getting to their masterpiece mission

you know and that was the revelation that hit me you know maybe 10 years ago where I was like whoa I didn't mean I didn't mean for this to happen but I realized we've created a ministry or mission mobilization pathway that just dead ends into a cul-de-sac called the church like the church program you know and Lord I didn't mean to do this like I really did want people on mission so how do we how do we you know change the end zone of this thing from church programs to actually and not just like well now we're going to send them to the homeless center to volunteer there that's kind of what the next step a lot of churches do it's like we got to get people on mission so now we're going to get them in a program in another non-profit in another building somewhere and it's like well that's good we do need to do that actually but what we ultimately need to do is realize Jesus and his genius has given everyone a masterpiece mission and if we activate them and equip them that's how we're actually going to get we're helping people find personal calling we're getting them activated we're getting them on on mission at what level does that now they're you mentioned the word missionaries earlier

to term these people you've got missionaries in in south Kansas City southwest Kansas City and oh you've got them all over Kansas City thank you very much the reach of the internet going beyond what you can do in physical I'm just just saying it's true we've got three hubs now that have launched you know and I know it's connected to this kind of digital spread talk to me a little bit because for me the question I wanted to ask was like how do you how do you multiply so you've got a missionary how does that missionary become two missionaries in micro space in digital space you're working with an influencer how does that influencer become two influencers like how do we multiply this idea Rob you told me and I'm famous I quote you every time you got to start at the beginning DNA level one has to be multiplied you have to have multiplication set from the beginning so I know you got a strategy what does that look like maybe in a more practical sense and I know you're going to get there how do agencies fit in yeah so you know we have what we call our missionary pathway and it's this equipping pathway to help ordinary folks become loving missionaries and for us missionaries like it's

someone who's planting themselves deep into like a neighborhood or an affinity group and really learning how to love their neighbor well and then also how to pay attention to what God is doing and join him and so they plant themselves plant the gospel and then they make disciples and and then what happens is disciples begin to to you add disciples and then eventually if you keep adding multiplication can happen and so phase one of the missionary pathways extraordinary prayer and fasting phase two is live as a missionary phase three is plant the gospel phase four is a microchurch emerges and then phase five is multiplication now we actually overlap phase five and phase one because you bake in multiplication from the very beginning so what I mean there you bake in multiplication in a number of ways so one is you start in prayer and you're praying from the very beginning for the kind of multiplicative spread of the gospel then you're and you're trying to multiply prayer you know like today I found out this week this is so exciting like in the last I'd say I think it's four months we've doubled the number of people that are praying and fasting on Tuesdays that's multiplication man

like we it's not times 20 but it's times two and I'll take it you know and that means we have twice the amount of force in the heavenlies you know what I mean and then you have to multiply then people who are living as missionaries that's phase two and the way that happens is it's a ground war it's you know like the way I describe it a couple quick stories like I use it as an exponential like Corey this guy was volunteering in the jail system started having spiritual conversations with the guy who was a person of peace starts a discovery Bible study with him this guy meets Jesus the discovery Bible study Corey didn't say now bring all your friends to my discovery Bible study he said I'm gonna you're gonna start a discovery Bible study with your buddies you know and I'm gonna equip you to do that and guess what Vincent did and then guess what Vincent did the buddies he led to Christ he's like you guys are gonna start a new discovery Bible study like he did what Corey showed him to do right and in a matter of months there was a discovery Bible study in every pod in that jail system you know because we're teaching people from the very beginning this is what we do like when you do

discovery Bible study you know the last question is who are you going to share this with you're building in multiplication reproduction like when we teach people a new tool in the missionary pathway part of our teaching is who can you teach this to this week like you you take simple practices so it starts with a mindset and it starts with prayer and then you turn it into simple practices and eventually it becomes cultural you know so it's got to be in your mind it's got to be in your prayers it's got to be in your language and it's got to be built into your tools and your training and eventually it becomes normal like people just go this is just what it means to be a follower of Jesus like you you obey and you share and you equip and you multiply and you know we've seen that you know in our neighborhood too where you know we've got families that now are following Jesus and a couple of those families are now like official missionaries in the underground you know like they signed the missionary covenant you know I was like yeah you know so we went from you know we tripled the number of missionaries and went from two to six and then there's nine families that are following Jesus and

I know more of them will become missionaries you know saying it's just a matter of time so that's how we do it man it's not complicated it actually is pretty simple and that's the good news anybody can do this Chesley I know you love this philosophy what does that look like you know as you're planning this church King City and moving forward with that like what does multiplication look like for you with King City yeah for me as I'm getting the word out and you know we have the podcast I've been on social we're starting to get people in that are saying hey this is this is resonating with me and I would like to be a part of that well you know you gotta have the steps you gotta have the pathway and so you know if you have eyes plagiarize right so so I have I just took like what Rob and Brian and a guy named Bruce and like I'm like hey let's not try to reinvent the wheel let's do what's been done for you know decades generations before us to help equip the church and so we're taking those systems and we're running through those with them so that they can become a missionary in their own context you know I'm a brand nut I like marketing so we don't call it missionaries we call them

city builders but yeah we don't that's actually great that's a great brand brother and it's we're actually be our phrase long term or if it's going to be problematic yeah I just for me I'm trying to rid myself of the connotations of all the church words that have been out there you know evangelical used to be a theological construct but I can't go online and say I'm an evangelical that would be a bad day so you know from a theological perspective that what that term used to mean I am that but not not from a present day cultural perspective I am not that so and their terms win the day because I'm trying to reach them and so I've got to create some terms that some terminology that's not politically loaded and so you know King City you know I'm not trying to say we're a church you know we're a church to everybody inside the church but King City is just King City we're a bunch of people that love Jesus and I'm not trying to deconstruct the whole emerging church movement back from the early 2000s that's not what we're trying to do at the end of the day we are trying to make sure that we create an environment that outside people say yeah I want to be a part of that yeah I want to learn

how to do that and city builders made sense to us you know it falls in line with the King City brand anybody can be a city builder I don't have to say leader because you know my Enneagram nine wife like I'm not a leader it's like well you can be a city builder and she gets that she can hang out with her mom moms that have kids so it's shifting it reminds me of you know Jeremiah's prophetic call to God's people where he's like build homes and plant gardens and work for the shalom of the city and there's this image you know in the book of Revelation of like you know come out of Babylon you know but and that's important there's ways that we do need to come out of Babylon but there's also this image of like Jeremiah's like build a city within the city basically like build Zion inside of Babylon and as that city flourishes the whole city will flourish you're stealing all my branding bro it's all from Nehemiah so yeah it's so compelling man we're building up Zion and as we're building Zion Babylon will flourish as a result of it let me ask this okay so we want to activate missionaries or city builders or whatever the term is we are missional leaders love that so we want to create

missional leaders now there's people listening to the podcast some audience is digital only and so let's say digital only church planners digital only churches I think there's a clear path towards creating these missional leaders and empowering them to be the missional leaders within their digital and or physical or both context so like I think that path is clear we got to figure out the how I'm going to go sleep on Rob Wagner's couch one day get all the secrets and we'll figure out how to do digital it's going to be awesome let's but there's another person that's in the audience here that that I want to let's just spend an homage to yeah so there are people that we're currently call them staff call them high-level volunteers high-level leaders in you know established churches that maybe are operating on a different model than what Rob Chesley what we've been talking about here today maybe it's not a lead from the second chair position maybe it's a tech director digital pastor that's got marching orders or there's an elder board somewhere that's not a fan like we've all heard stories in this mid post COVID season so we know who we're talking about what advice do you give to these

people you see the world differently it's it's not a biblical you mentioned it earlier it's not necessarily biblical model but that doesn't mean that it's bad what advice would you give to somebody that wants to get to this becoming a middle leader or resourcing a movement like this but just isn't at that right church right now I would say the Lord will honor you as you honor as best you can the leadership that you're currently serving with and so I would I just encourage you to try to be a person who finds meaningful ways to establish your credibility through faithful service and I assume most people that are listening they've already done that I just mentioned that because if you're kind of like the quarter the armchair quarterback church leaders get that all the time so just make sure you're really in the game and I assume that's who you're talking about people that are in the game they're serving they're helping they're contributing try try to do a gentle invitation to that the person who's got kind of the decision making power like hey let's read a book together or hey would you be willing to watch this webinar with me to give them some exposure to what is possible and try to

see if you can secure enough permission to do some experiments don't try to propose sweeping change basically say can we just create a little R&D project over here on the side and I just want to start with 10 or 15 people and I don't need much budget and I would like to report in monthly what's happening and try to build the new alongside the old because actually the practice of the new the embodiment of the new is the best critique of the old now you have to go into eyes wide open because sometimes you do that and it's fruitful and it still doesn't convert people you know they there's a paradigm blindness and if you find that's true if you actually run the experiment and you've had good results and you were faithfully reporting them back and you find that it's not welcomed and you're called to it it's probably time to begin to pray about what's next you know it's like because if that if and that was something they have to my wife and I you know we've been in this church for 22 years and we had got a ton of permission to run all these experiments and we did it was like amazing fruit but it was clear institutionally for that church it was never going to be an A priority it was

going to be a be probably a C priority but for Michelle and I was like well this is our calling this is an A priority for us and it was heartbreaking it was difficult but it was like this isn't the place for us and it's okay you know and you have to know when to do that like you have to have the courage to trust God's call in your life and go okay so that's what I recommend and I'm recommending it because that's what I did and I felt like God actually honored that Jeff you know that's exactly what I did too so like in the beginning of this process like I you know I was a youth and young adult pastor and I saw everything that I've been thinking for five years come to fruition with COVID and so I went to my pastor church that's been around you know for 50 plus years and I said hey I think we should try this you know Jesus says don't put new wine into old wineskins otherwise you'll lose both the wineskin and the wine and so it's like let's do something new alongside but let's not try to kill the old in the process because there's still people that we've got and so I will say this I'm not trying to be controversial but I know it will be you're called to die for Jesus not a corporation

and at the end of the day you honor and you care but if God's called you to do something you don't have to work at a church to make disciples you can get out of your office go to your local coffee shop do grab some of Bruce bugby stuff to help equip people for the work of the ministry learning how to do character and calling and equipping people with their gifts of the spirit do that on your own time you know I know in church they don't hire you to be a good Christian they hire you to run an organization you know but start being a good Christian on your off moments go start making disciples when you're not on the clock and God will honor that too and if it's time to move it's time to move don't try to burn bridges along the way though it's funny we're gonna this this that part of the conversation actually hit very much close to home haven't publicly said this in the podcast actually doing a podcast with Ray in a little bit but Ray stepped out of his job Ray resigned from Ray DeArmas co-host here with the church digital podcast he's going to be on a podcast talking about this he stepped down at the heart of why he did it he spent four years getting his masters of divinity he spent

four years of his life in his early 30s he's 10% of his life getting a degree to go be the pastor and he's going back to school to spend two years studying to become a medical technician not a nurse the heart of this Ray feels like his mission field is now a hospital Ray felt called to become the missionary to be the influencer missionally at a hospital that he gets assigned to that's where his calling is taking him and so he resigned from a digital pastor church job following his heart to do ministry effectively to build relationships in a hospital and there are people when I tell that story there are people like that is the coolest thing that I've ever heard by the way I can probably tell you a half dozen other stories like that in recent months where people are stepping away from full time staff jobs to go after the idea of missionally relationally connecting with people and taking jobs somebody just a good friend of mine just took a job as a realtor because he wanted to spend more time meeting people he's still doing ministry he's still doing a microchurch movement he's just doing another job so they can relationally meet people that aren't already attending a church so I

think you're seeing more and more of those and I think that's going to be more and more a topic here on this podcast as just even trying to figure out how we can influence these people how we can help people gain their influence and maybe even discover what their personal calling what their personal mission is so I've loved this conversation this has been great hey Chesley real quick landing the it doesn't take much to step out of the boat you don't have much to lose to go and be around people that need Jesus yeah the paradigms are different yes from physical church to digital church and everything that Rob's talking about but at the end of the day if you'll step out of the boat and meet people where they're at the Holy Spirit will show up and it'll be more rewarding than the last year sitting in a cubicle love it Rob any closing thoughts while we're landing the plane here I'm grateful for the work you guys are doing and that you're bringing the centrality of Jesus and his mission into the digital space thank you guys and I'm learning a lot from you awesome hey yeah it's Rob it is always a pleasure in the leadership potential of churches and organizations so thankful for this book

love the starfish and the spider like you said 15 years ago and unpacking and applying this towards the church realm is awesome creating creating movements of people on personal calling to become missional leaders is more awesome so thank you for that thank you for setting a standard here that are allowing you know to be completely blunt digital churches have meaning and purpose beyond broadcasting just on Sunday okay maybe God is providing the purpose but you are paving the road so that that digital churches can follow suit with that so hey we're going to great for Chesley for Rob this is Jeff with the church digital stadium church planning thanks for joining us here at the pod and we'll see you next time on the show have a good day