Neil Cole and Church Multiplication

On our first show of 2011 we’re having a chat with Neil Cole. Neil is the founder and executive director of Church Multiplication Associates, which has helped start many hundreds of churches in thirty-five states of America and in over thirty other nations.

I interviewed Neil after he’d spent a day teaching on organic church multiplication. He shared some fascinating insights which really got the grey matter going.

Neil’s whole thing is church multiplication, i.e. planting churches that will plant churches. It is this, he believes, rather than addition (i.e. adding new members to existing churches) what will most effectively spread the gospel.

In order to achieve this he believes that we need to ‘lower the bar on how we do church and raise the bar on how we disciple.’ His concern is that we have made church so complicated that it requires experts and professionals to keep it running, and consequently it can’t easily be reproduced. He’s also concerned that within these church environments we’ve failed to produce mature disciples. He says, for example, that many Christians are ‘educated beyond their obedience’. Week after week experts teach us what to believe, but we’re not becoming radical disciples of Jesus.

Neil has built a church multiplication movement based on Life Transformation Groups, and organic church gatherings. So every week believers meet in twos and threes to share what God has said to them in their Bible reading through the week. They then work through a set of accountability questions, and then pray for their non-Christians friends. Anyone can do this, it doesn’t require any resources (other than a Bible) and an expert isn’t required. Every week or so three of four of these LTG’s get together to eat and share life together. Again, this is simple and reproducible, and provides an ideal environment for intimately connecting with each other and God.

So when someone comes to faith rather than being encouraged to join an existing church they form their own LTG, and then look to join with other local LTGs to form a larger organic meeting.

This simple method has led to an explosion of organic churches across the US. And it’s given me much to ponder about the way I’ve gone about forming disciples and shaping church.

Tim