EC – “Visioning for an Apostolic Movement Locally & Globally” [Bob Roberts]

EC = exponential conference

Bob Roberts is pastor of Northwood Church in Keller, TX.  I’ve read a couple of Bob’s books, including The Multiplying Church, which I just finished a few weeks ago.  I’d highly recommend any church planter familiarize himself with Roberts’ work.  Northwood is doing some fascinating things in the area of partnering with other nations to serve them, which then opens avenues for gospel and church.

In this session, Roberts moved quickly.  That, combined with the fact that he’s one of those extremely bright individuals who is always quite a few steps ahead of you, made it difficult for me to keep up.  So…my notes are fairly random and scattered.  If you want more from him, check out his books:

• Transformation (on discipleship)
• Glocalization (on globalization and the church’s roles and opportunities in this new world)
• The Multiplying Church (on being a church-planting church)

With that long intro, here’s the highlights from the session:

• within the 1st year of your church, you should be involved in planting another church (even if you’re not doing it yourself).  This will help set the DNA of your church plant as a church-planting church.
• When Northwood plants, from day 1 the new church mobilizes to work in a hard place in the world.  (According to Roberts, there are no closed countries.  We just approach them in Western-church, non-indigenous ways.)
• Converts grow a church; disciples change the world.
• Every Jesus movement so far (after the early church) has been tied to a specific tribe/country.  Because of globalization, we’re coming to the end of this and could see the 1st truly global church planting movement.
• the grid for God’s operation in the world is society, not the church (nations).  [Abram became Abraham when he became the father of nations.]
• Society is formed by…(picture concentric circles moving outward):  individual;  family;  tribe;  city;  nation.  In all these domains, faith is present when a disciple is present.  In other words, religion/church is not a separate domain, but the disciple functions naturally in all these domains, impacting society with his faith.
• Therefore, when we start our missional thinking with the church, we’re off the grid that God has designed – the society.
• Christianity began as a Jewish movement; it will conclude as a Muslim movement.  (This one has me still thinking.  He didn’t have time to really flesh this out, but to the best of my understanding, here’s what I think he was saying with this:)  We’re currently seeing great expansion of the gospel in S. America, Africa, and Asia.  The Muslim portion of the world is the last great unreached people.  When the gospel penetrates the Muslim countries – particularly when it reaches Muslim leaders – we will see an indigenous gospel movement inside these countries (much like we see in China today).  These countries will be reached primarily from the inside out, i.e. “a Muslim movement.”

Again, Roberts and Northwood are models of much of what is going right in the church.  They’re doing a great job of reaching out glocally (locally and globally).