Matt McComas’ comment on a post earlier this week made me think of the phenomenal “Principles God Honors” article by Jim Sylvester (possibly the world’s longest “article” at 145 pages!).
Matt works with Cru in Portland and commented “Totally dealing with the drift toward ease [in discipling whomever] with our staff. Especially in light of launching a new ministry and selection is pretty limited.” I can only imagine, in a city with very few Christians, it would be easy to settle.
Here’s Jim’s brilliant insight:
Here is an important Concept: “More happens in five years that I could ever imagine, but less happens in one year than I would hope”.
When developing a new staff member who is beginning a brand new ministry, or someone who is opening up a new campus, I would often explain that the first stage is to simply find one person. That will be a successful step forward. It may take you a whole year to find one person, and that is okay. This has been a marvelously successful year if you have found someone who shares your love for the Lord and your heart to see the campus reached. Your second step is to find a second person. This will also be a marvelous step forward if at the end of this period of time, be it a year or more, you have found a second person who is on board. This person shares your vision for turning lost students into Christ-centered laborers. He or she wants to be a part of it and is willing to make sacrifices to do so. The next step is to find a third and fourth person, and the step after that is to find the eighth, then the sixteenth person. Frankly, I believe the next step is to find the fortieth person.
As I’ve observed, it takes a ministry as much effort to go from one to two as it does to go from two to four, from four to eight, or from sixteen to forty. It seems like each of those steps involves the same amount of time and effort to grow at that pace. You can see how this relates far more to a long-term plan that builds upon itself in consecutive years as opposed to a short term plan.
I’ll try post more thoughts from Jim’s article in the coming weeks. So much gold in there.