THE LIFE DEVELOPMENT CHURCH CONCEPT Leadership Lifter Rick Warren

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1 Rick Warren OUR BUSINESS: Disciple development (Matt. 28:19-20) OUR MISSION: To attract and then develop members into mature models of Christlike character and conduct, mobilized for ministry (in the church) and a meaningful mission (in the world) in each stage and segment of their lives. THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS: 1. Christianity is a LIFESTYLE! I have come that you might have LIFE, and have it more abundantly! Jesus (John 10:10) 2. This LIFESTYLE has 4 key components: A. Every believer is a member of Christ s Body. (Rom. 12:5) B. Every believer needs maturity. (Eph. 4:13) C. Every believer is a minister. (Eph. 4:12) D. Every believer is a missionary. (Acts 1:8) 3. These components meet four basic life needs: - People to live with - Principles to live by - A profession to live on - A purpose to live for OUR CUSTOMERS: (SADDLEBACK CIRCLES) 1. THE COMMUNITY - uncommitted 2. THE CROWD committed to attending 3. THE CONGREGATION - committed to membership 4. THE COMMITTED - committed to maturity 5. THE CORE committed to ministry and mission

2 OUR STRATEGY: THE POPULAR VERSION (BASEBALL DIAMOND ILLUSTRATION) 1. Bring them in 2. Build them up 3. Train them for 4. Send them out THE DETAILED EXPLANATION: STEP 1: EXPLORE Interest the COMMUNITY to investigate Christ and Christianity. Come and see. Jesus. Jn. 1:39 STEP 2: ENLIGHTEN Introduce the CROWD to a relationship with Christ (salvation) I pray your minds may be opened to see His Light Eph. 1:18 (GN) STEP 3: ENLIST Incorporate believers into the CONGREGATION (membership) In Christ, we form one Body, and each member belongs to all the others. Rom. 12:5 STEP 4: EDIFY Lead members to become COMMITTED to spiritual maturity. that you may become mature Christians and may fulfill God s will for you. Col. 4:12b (Ph) STEP 5: EXAMINE Interview people for ministry placement based on their S.H.A.P.E. profile Try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith God has given you. Rom. 12:3b (Ph) STEP 6: EMPLOY Place each person in a CORE ministry of the church that best fits. Each one should use whatever spiritual gift he has received to serve others. 1 Peter 4:10 ii

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4 STEP 7: EQUIP Provide on-the-job training each month through S.A.L.T. and C.L.A.S.S. So that the one who serves God may be fully qualified and equipped to do every kind of good work. 2 Timothy 3:17 (GN) STEP 8: ENDORSE Offer public commissioning and affirmation of all lay ministers. After prayer they laid their hands on them and set them free for this work. Acts 13:3 (Ph) STEP 9: ENCOURAGE Provide continuous support through communication, recognition, and rewards. Let us have real warm affection for one another and a willingness to let the other man have the credit and let us keep the fires of the spirit burning as we do our work for the Lord. Rom. 12:10-11 (Ph) STEP 10: EVALUATE Insure accountability and feedback to produce excellence. Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Heb. 13:17 iv

5 Rick Warren We ve been using the term "Life Development Church a lot and so today I want to review what it is. First, the business of a Life Development Church is disciple development. The Great Commission says, Go and make disciples. So that s the whole bottom line of what we re trying to do. Every business has to have a product or service. The product of the church, that we want to come out the other end, is disciples. So the question then is, how do we do that? What s the process we do? What are the evaluations we use? What are the programs and the strategies that produce this? In a more specific sense, here s our mission: Our mission is to attract and develop members into mature models of Christlike character and conduct, mobilized for ministry in the church and a meaningful mission in the world in each stage and segment of their lives. That summarizes everything we re trying to do here at Saddleback. I want to take it word by word. First, we want to attract them bring them into the crowd. We ve got to attract them first. Then as we attract them that s the evangelism part of our function we begin to develop members into mature models. When I say mature models, we want people who walk the walk and talk the talk; they are audiovisual Christians. We re not interested, as some churches, just in decisions. How many people walked the aisle? How many people were baptized? How many people can we count? But we want to produce mature models, members who are mature models of Christlike character. Romans 8:29 Those He did foreknow, those He also did predestine to become conformed to the image of Christ. The bottom line of the Christian life is to become like Jesus. God s number one purpose in life is to make me like Christ. So the number one purpose of our church is to make people like Christ, make little Christs, little Christ-ians. We want to produce that in two ways: in character and in conduct. A lot of churches produce people who have all the beliefs but they don t have any behavior to match it. They ve got all this head knowledge about the Bible but there s no change in their character. They re not really Christlike in character and conduct. So we focus on not just believing, but also behaving. On not just character, but also on conduct. We want to attract and develop members into mature models of Christlike character and conduct, mobilized for ministry in the church and a meaningful mission in the world. We define the working terms of ministry and mission this way: Everybody needs a ministry in the church and everybody needs a mission in the world. In Ephesians 4:12 is says that the pastors and the teachers are to equip the saints for the work of ministry that the body of Christ may be built up. The ministry is to the body of Christ. The mission is to the world. We re interested in both ministry and missions. A Christian, to be balanced, needs a ministry in the body and a mission in the world. We want to do this in each stage and segment of their lives. What makes the Life Development concept so unique is we want to think it through at each stage of life, each segment of life. Stages of life being: childhood, school, career, marriage, parenting, and up through retirement. And there are predictable stages. Richard Boles in his book The Three Boxes of Life says there are

6 basically three boxes that we spend our life in. The first box is education, the second box is work, and the third box is retirement. He said we have to learn how to deal in each of those. You can even break those down into different segments of life. We want to think through, how do we help people have a ministry and a mission as children? Have a ministry and mission as youth? Have a ministry and mission as young adults, as senior adults? Then we also want to help them develop in each segment of life. We all have segments. There s a relationship segment, a work segment, a family segment, a financial segment, a social segment, a recreational segment. All these different segments of life. We want to think how does a Christian act, what s his character and conduct in each of those so that people become fully functioning, actualized, Christlike people. That s the mission. The theological foundation of the Life Development church is two fold: One, we believe that Christianity is a lifestyle. Christianity is not a religion, it s a relationship to God and to other people. It s a lifestyle. Jesus did not say, I ve come that you might have religion. But He said, I ve come that you might have life. That s why we call it The Life Development Church. Because we want to teach people how to live. In every meeting, in every function, in every small group, the bottom line is are we teaching people how to live? When you summarize it all down, there s two things a church does. We teach people how to live and we teach people how to die. And that s it. If there s anything we want to do is we want them to become doers of the word and not hearers only. James 1:22 Be doers of the word and not hearers only. We want to move people from audience to army. That they re not just listening come, set, soak and sour. But they actually go out and they re mobilized. Two, this lifestyle has four key components. We believe that every believer is a member of Christ s body. We believer that every believer needs maturity. We believe that every believer is a minister. We believe that every believer is a missionary. Everything we do, whether it s in children s ministry or youth or singles or women or whatever, these are the four key components. We re trying to produce believers who are members of Christ s body Romans 12:5 says You are members of Christ s body and each of you is a necessary part. Every believer needs maturity Ephesians 4:13 The building up of the saints until we all come in the fullness and measure of the fullness of Christ. We become like Christ. Every believer is a minister we are to equip the saints for ministry. And every believer is a missionary. Acts 1:8 says You will go and be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the uttermost parts of the world. Ever increasing segments. These components meet four basic life needs. They need people to live with. They need principles to live by. They need a profession to live on. They need a purpose to live for. Keep these things in the back of your mind as you do planning for your area, that these are the four basic needs of people. 2

7 They need people to live with. They need relationships. We all need a sense of belonging. Of course, that s what the first key component is all about. Every believer is a member of a body. There are no Lone Ranger Christians. We belong in the body in the family of Christ. That s where relationships are to be built, to be strengthened, to become Christlike. Certainly, relationships with nonbelievers don t make you Christlike. So it s the relationship in the family that teach you character and teach you the conduct and the character of Christ. Every believer is a member of Christ s body meets the need of having people to live with. Every believer needs maturity meets the need of principles to live by. So we teach people what are the principles to live by, The fact that every believer is a minister gives people a profession to live on. Their work is not just to put food on the table. Their work is ministry. One of the things we re trying to communicate in a Life Development Church is that secular work is ministry. Ministry is not just something you just do, but secular work is a ministry. Your profession is a ministry. God has gifted you not only to serve in the body but in the world. And that s your ministry. An attorney ought to be able to say, My ministry is law. A doctor ought to be able to say, My ministry is healing people. Every believer is a missionary. You need a purpose to live for. In Acts 20, Paul says (Good News) I consider my life of no value unless I use it to fulfill the ministry and the mission that God gave me to do, that mission of communicating the good news to others. The two things you can t do in heaven are sin and witness. So we re left here on the earth for a mission. We re left here to tell other people about Christ. And there is no greater purpose than to bring people into the kingdom of God. That s the theological foundation of the Life Development Church. Our business is disciple development. Our customers are the Saddleback circles and we have five kinds of customers in this business: The Community, the Crowd, the Congregation, the Committed and the Core. The Community are those out there who are uncommitted. They re not committed to anything. The Crowd are those who are just committed to attending. The Congregation are committed to membership. The Committed are those committed to the habits for maturity. The Core are those committed to ministry and missions. So just as we have these purposes or objectives there is a target group for each of the objectives. In each of our ministries children s, single s, women s, business, whatever, we need to use the circles to say there are really five groups of people out there. There are five kinds of youth youth of the Community, youth in the Crowd, youth in the Congregation, youth in the Committed, youth in the Core. We talked in the staff meeting about the questions to ask: What are their values, What are their needs? How do we position to them? Each of them have a different need so you re going to have at least five different concepts of programs to meet these people. 3

8 Those are the customers. What is our strategy to turn the Crowd into a Core? Turn the audience into an army? To produce, develop disciples. Popular version of the detailed information is the Baseball diamond. This takes them through the ten steps. We tell people in a nutshell when they ask what do we do here at Saddleback? We bring them in, we build them up, we train them for, we send them out. That s it in a nutshell. If anybody asked what the Saddleback church s all about? What is a Life Development Church? A Life Development Church does four things. We bring them in. We build them up. We train them for. We send them out. We bring them into membership. We build them up for maturity. We train them for ministry. We send them out as missionaries. See how simple that is? That s the whole ballgame in just four sentences. That s the popular version that we present in a symbol of the baseball diamond. But on a staff level you need to be aware and understand of the ten steps of bring people through that process. 1. EXPLORE The first purpose, the first step in building your ministry whatever it is, is to interest the Community to investigate Christ. That s the first step. We want to help them explore what Christ is all about. Jesus said in John 1:39, the first thing He said to the disciples was Come and see. So the first step in your ministry is what exploratory programs, events, tools are we using to get people to explore Christ? For instance, in children s ministry we have the Harvest Party, which is just an initial event out there in the community that says, "Come and check us out! Come and see that we re not freaks, we re not kooks, that there s a legitimate thing here. When Rick and the music ministry go and has an event at the Hop. That s a Come and See event. Bring people who are not even ready yet to come to church but they ll say I ll explore who Christ is in a non threatening, initial, very simple basis that it s a positive experience. We can do that through advertising, events, programs out in the community. 2. ENLIGHTEN This is the salvation step where we introduce the Crowd to a relationship with Christ. Paul says in Ephesians 1:18 I pray your minds may be opened to see His light. That s what I m trying to do every Sunday morning. All I m trying to do on Sunday morning is get up and turn on the light. I want people going out of there going, Oh! That s what life s all about! That s what Christianity s all about! That s what Jesus is all about! That s what the Bible is all about! Through the music and the message we re trying to enlighten people, build new conceptions instead of following the assumptions of I thought a Christian was and then they ve got their preconceptions that are all wrong. We want to enlighten them. I think this is a good definition of salvation. Jesus said, I am the light of the world. When the light is turned on in his life, when he s enlightened, that s as good a term as being born again. I ve been enlightened. I ve come to know Christ. I ve seen the light. 4

9 3. ENLIST THEM This is where we take the Crowd and incorporate them as believers into the Congregation. So we enlist them. We don t just want to leave them out there in crowds saying I m a Christian and I m enlightened but I m not involved in a family. Every believer needs a family. Romans 12:5 says In Christ we form one body and each member belongs to all the others. That s the next step move them into membership. You need to ask yourself about your ministry, How are we moving people who are already Christians in this ministry into membership? We have people who want to come and serve who aren t even members yet. Bob s been telling people in the Praise community (the music group), You guys need to go through 301 and get your interviews and make sure this is going to be your primary ministry. A lady came up to me in 101 and said, "I was so embarrassed. I hadn t even gone through 101 and I ve been coming for a couple of years. I m here tonight and I m so glad. I never understood why membership is so important until I took EDIFY Our goal here is to lead members to become committed to spiritual growth. We don t want them to just come to church, get on a role and that s it. That s the bottom line for a lot of churches. You re a member that s it! They just assume that if you just hang around you re going to grow. In the Life Development Church, we don t assume anything. And we certainly don t assume that people are just going to automatically grow in their Christian life just because they joined a church. In our church, growth is intentional, not incidental. We do it through intentional programs like small groups, 201, seminars that we plan. It is a process for growth. We think through, What do we want to see? What are the character qualities we want to see in people? What is the conduct? In the years ahead what we re going to be doing is actually produce some kind of qualitative survey that we can give everybody in the church once a year so we can evaluate. Is Saddleback becoming the most spiritually mature church in the nation? At the end of the year we can say, Yes. We went from 41% to 43% of the people having a quiet time. And a certain percent are saying, Yes, I ve shared Christ with somebody last month. And, Yes, a certain percent are involved in a small group. The habits that produce these things, we want to develop a standard of evaluation to know, are we getting the job done? I m not satisfied by saying how many people showed up at church. But are we getting the job done? Are lives really being changed? After we begin to edify them and they become committed, step five is to move them from the committed into the core. 5. EXAMINE Interview people for their ministry placement based on their SHAPE profile. Take the 301 class and then we give them step 5. Try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith God has given you. Sane estimate. We help people evaluate. I m probably more excited about this step than any others because nobody else is doing it. It s a step that people say, 5

10 We re going to help you become what God wants you to be. Rather than taking the institutional approach that says, We ve got all these ministries, let just plug them. Go out and get a nominating committee. We need more Sunday School workers. We need more children s workers. We start with the person and say, What has God made you? And then help them find a ministry that makes them become what they want to be because the bottom line is not to plug programs but to develop disciples. The programs just helped them develop disciples. 6. EMPLOY After we ve interviewed them, examined them, helped them discover their SHAPE, place each person in a core ministry of the church that best fits who they are, best fits their shape. Each one of you should use whatever spiritual gift he has received to serve others. Notice that the purpose of a spiritual gift is not for my own benefit but for the other person. 7. EQUIP THEM We want to provide on-the-job training each month through SALT and CLASS. 2 Timothy 3:17 So that the one who serves God may be fully qualified and equipped to do every good kind of work. That s the next step you have in your ministry. As you examine people, move them into your ministry, employ them, your job as a staff member is to equip them. Your job is not to do the job yourself but to equip other people to do the job. Circle on-the-job-training. One way that we re real different here at Saddleback is we don t have a lot of pre-service training. We believe that on-the-job-training is much more important than pre-service training. The person who willingly signs up for a thirty-week course before they start serving, we don t want. Because they re not a minister; they re just a professional student. Most churches, when they do set up training, they ve got all these hoops you can jump through but by the time the person gets there, they ve lost all their fire. If a guy comes and says, I want to start a ministry, and we say you ve got to go through thirty weeks of training first, they re going to lose it. On top of that, they don t know the questions to ask until they re in the ministry. Once they re in the ministry then they re more teachable, they re more willing to learn. So we get them in the ministry. We believe that all you need to start a ministry is a SHAPE. Your very SHAPE has equipped you to start in the ministry your gifts, your heart, your abilities, your personality, your experiences. That s enough to get started. The training comes on-the-job as you sharpen your skills. After we equip them and that s a lifetime task. 8. ENDORSE THEM We offer public commissioning and resourcing of all lay ministers. We re going to be making the commissioning a monthly feature, that we will end each SALT with a monthly commissioning, where we recognize them, present them with their name tag and their lay ministry listed underneath it. There s a laying on of hands and a personal praying for people. It was really neat last month. People were crying and weeping and really touched by that. We affirm them. We re 6

11 going to end each SALT with a commissioning service of the people that month who are being moved into the ministry and moved into CORE. 9. ENCOURAGE THEM Provide continuous support through communications, recognitions and awards. Let us have real warm affection for one another and a willingness to let the other man have the credit and let us keep the fires of the Spirit burning as we do our work for the Lord. That s part of your job keep the fire of the Spirit burning in those who serve in your ministry. 10. EVALUATE That is to ensure accountability and feedback to produce excellence. Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. That verse says that you, as a staff member, are going to give an account to God. As a church leader you re going to give an account to God at how well you cared for the souls of those under your ministry, those who are serving with you. That s an important task that we can t take lightly. People deserve feedback. The only way we learn is through feedback. We don t learn any other way. They need good feedback, they need negative feedback. People, when they re out in the dark, are more nervous than when somebody s being honest with them. Train them through feedback. Those are the ten steps. Those are the ten steps that you need to know. The whole church doesn t need to know that. They just need to know Bring them in, Build them up, Train them for and Send them out. That s the popular version. But you as a staff person need to constantly be saying, How am I fulfilling these tens steps in my ministry to produce disciples, to move them from audience to army. The context that we do this in is the church paradymns I talked about a couple months ago when I talked about how most churches tend to get stuck on one step. Some churches all they do is emphasize the Crowd. Some churches, all they do, is emphasize the Community. Some churches, all they do, is emphasize the Congregation. We want to emphasize all five levels and the objectives for each ministry. 7