There Is NO TIME

A dear friend of mine bought and sent me this book. Here is my review:

There is NO TIME is a missionary fable by J. Paul Nyquist of Avant Ministries (and now president of Moody Bible Institute).  Its purpose is to advance the idea of "Short-Cycle Church Planting." The parable begins with a war-hardened African boy soldier guarding Dave, a missionary who was kidnapped for financial gain and who was to be killed imminently. Dave narrowly escapes death and returns back to the US after only six years on the field--and no indigenous church to show for his labors.  He assumed he would have more time.

Back in the States, he reflects upon the changing world and the fact that some of the most needy places for evangelism are hotspots like the one he narrowly escaped. No longer can missionaries go "where Christ is not named" (Romans 15:20) and expect to have 40-50 years of service there.
If it takes a long time to plant churches, and missionaries cannot stay long in the most needy areas, then how will churches ever be planted?

Then re-studying the book of Acts, Dave recognized that within 15 months, a team of two missionaries planted four churches complete with elders in four different cities hostile to the Gospel.

It happened fast then; it needs to happen fast today. Why can't it be? How could it be?

To this he enlisted the help of his three old friends: Landis, a chief officer in a bio-tech firm, Ken, a senior pastor, and Todd, an expert in sales recently promoted to sales manager.  They all converged upon a cabin in Colorado to brainstorm.

At the outset they acknowledged that, with more unsaved people alive than at any other time in history, God must want to see churches started rapidly. Then they established some Biblical truths on which to found their discussion, calling it the faith context.  Inside the faith context are four elements:

1. The power of the Gospel. Self explanatory.
2. Divine serendipity, a way to describe God's sovereignty in bringing people and events together for his mission.  A tension between God's control over all and man's responsibility. Like Philip leaving Samaria for the desert to meet the eunuch.
3. God's ability, specifically that He is able to "perform everything that is necessary to establish a mature church in a relatively short period of time" (p. 35).
4. The power of prayer, as demonstrated by Paul the prayer warrior, always seeking more prayer.
   

Then they discussed the reason we need to plant churches swiftly:

1. Socio-political realities (you may be forced to leave quicker than you expect).
2. The imminent return of Jesus (a factor which should not be under-appreciated just because we've used this argument for so many years without seeing Him return ... on the contrary this point should intensify precisely because He has not come yet).
3. Numerical growth -- we aren't keeping up with the population (four people born per second). Landis compared the disparity with an assembly line ... if you can't process things quickly enough, you can turn down the speed of the machinery; however, we cannot turn down the speed of the birth rates, and it is only increasing.
4. Stewardship -- money is invested, and why wouldn't we want to see a church started in 5 years instead of in 20?  Albeit a sensitive issue, sometimes missionaries are so honored that their fruitfulness/productivity is not evaluated at all.
   

From here they set off to define a new church planting model. The traditional model often requires much time, especially the high percentages "of each day ... devoted to activity that does not move the church-planting process forward" (55).  How can it all be streamlined?

Landis the business guru provided three appropriate concepts from the business world:

1. Lean Thinking, a process identifying when value is added to a product and when time or resources are wasted (muda in Japanese). In church planting, we should eliminate waste and move rapidly from value-adding point to value-adding point.
2. Continuous Quality Improvement, a process mastered by Toyota in which you are always "looking at ways to improve yourself and your processes" (57).
3. A Team Mindset as opposed to individual heroes. Dave noted the problems team dynamics can bring, and Landis countered that most so-called "teams" are simply "work groups" of individuals led by a supervisor and doing work individually. Teams should first be carefully selected with multiple gift sets so the individuals can operate on their strenghts.  Teams should also have a common goal and agreed-upon methodology. Thirdly, teams should have mutual accountability and trust.  The group then agreed that a team should be trained together and committed to each other, even more so, perhaps than to the field itself (like Paul and Barnabas who traveled all over together).
   

The group noted that "most experts say the ideal range [for how big a team should be] is seven to twelve members" (60). They also thought that their concepts would "completely change the organizational paradigm of a mission agency" (62).  They decided to call it "Short-Cycle Church Planting," not to be confused with "short-term missions."

With all these philosophical considerations behind them, they got to the tough question, "What principles will this team use to establish a mature church faster?" The five principles would unwittingly--by "divine serendipity" (or the author's creativity)--form the acrostic "S-H-O-R-T."

S - Simultaneous Activity, as opposed to sequential activity. In other words, instead of learning the language, THEN developing relationships, THEN sharing the Gospel, THEN discipling them, THEN gathering them, etc., you can do all these simultaneously. Even from the beginning, before the language is mastered, seeds can be planted and potential leaders recognized.

H - High Trust.  Missionaries never leave because they do not trust the national believers, or perhaps more accurately because they do not trust God's Spirit to lead them. Yes, there are dangers in leaving a church quickly, but Paul knew them and left them to God's hands anyway. Yes, he visited them and sent people to them to help establish them, but he trusted them early.

O - Overt Witness. Much time can be wasted in developing relationships that "bear no fruit." In a short-cycle paradigm, you assume you have no time. Overt Witness "seeks to sow the seed as broadly and early as possible in order to identify those who respond to its message. While it seeks to be culturally appropriate, it does not shy away from being direct and even confrontational" (72). If your mind set is short-cycle, you will not hold back for fear of offending the people you will live with the rest of your life ... because you're not going to live there forever!  Hopefully early on the missionary will reach locals who will be better equipped to reach their own people.

R - Restricted Scope, restricting the scope of the missionary's activities only to those which do not create dependency.  In other words, the missionary should only do things that ONLY he could do. In pure pioneering situations in which there are NO national believers, this scope may be wider at first. Then it should get more narrow as the new work grows.

T - Tactical Advantage, or leverage. Like using a pulley for lifting heavy items, missionary teams should look for things that give them tactical advantages. For example, a Muslim country's fascination with Old Western movies could provide an opportunity ... or a secret believer in a government position could help them sidestep harassment. Even political unrest or natural disasters could provide leverage, shaking people up to more eternal realities.

The book concludes three years later with Dave on a short-cycle church planting team getting initial results. The team had been born and then trained together, went to a highly unreached location, and established a five-year plan with an aggressive goal of planting two reproducing churches. Two influential people came to Christ. The team trusted the national believers for tough decisions. The second church was being launched and they had started dreaming about the next place they would go to plant a church rapidly.

My brief reaction: A good read.  A quick read.  An inspiring read.  Well-presented as a story.  Excellent "big idea" of getting into a quick-plant mindset and exploring ways to trim fat and become more efficient. One of the greatest benefits of the book is identifying this as a need.

I'm not a big fan of the language of "completely changing organizational paradigms" or touting "new church planting models" and indirectly pitting them against "traditional methods." I fear we can create  unnecessary tension based on semantics and give zealous young people a silly idea that they are going to revolutionize missions. 

Oddly, although I'm not too happy with some of the semantics about "new" and "completely changing," I actually think the book's big ideas are old--merely revisited, or rediscovered, or reapplied, which is a good thing.  Paul and his partners did "short-cycle church planting"; therefore what is being touted as "a new model" is not really new at all.

Inconsistently, the book refers to Dave's studying Acts, which is the biblical catalyst for advocating short-cycles, but then cites unidentified "experts" recommending 7-12 team members as the ideal number of team members. Paul and Barnabas of short-cycle fame seem to suggest the ideal number is two. But this is not nitpicking. I don't think the Bible prescribes any specific instructions about the ideal number, so I am fine with twelve. I just would hate to see churches, Avant, and other agencies holding teams back because they have not yet met the "experts'" ideal minimal requirement of seven.

The bottom line: I really like the book's big idea of doing our church planting faster.  I love the book's reasoning for it and the principles of efficiency it preaches.  I love the author's humble spirit and tacit recognition that he is merely onto something big, though he doesn't have all the puzzle pieces neatly in place. Like the book of Acts which ends with the "Acts-ion" still ongoing, this book ends with a short-cycle team in action ...

I look forward to seeing how Avant's short-cycle models develop.  I want to learn more from these people. And I want to incorporate these excellent principles into my philosophy.