Interview with Jay (1)

A few years ago I was interviewed by Jay Lorenzen of Campus Crusade. Jay published the audio, now thanks to Sue, here's the transcript.

Jay: Tell us a little bit about your work with now MOVE?

Steve: I’ve been with CRM since 1992 and my main work is in coaching and equipping church planters and in fueling church planting movements.

Jay: Within Campus Crusade we’ve been challenged to build movements everywhere so that everyone knows someone who truly follows Christ. So I’d like to know how you got interested in movements and became a lifelong student of them?

Steve: Well I think God had planted the seed in me right from when I came to faith. I came to faith through the ministry of John Smith, who started a movement amongst bikies. He saw these outlaw bikies were not being reached and started a ministry called God's Squad.

I wasn’t an outlaw bikie, but it was through him and his ministry and the example of their work that I realised God could change my life too.

I think most of us could look back on our Christian walk and we’d discover that the church is incredibly diverse and God is always raising up new movements to meet needs and to bring renewal and expansion to the Christian faith.

We can see the influence on movements in secular history. I was on campus during I guess the tail end of the radical student politics days and saw the impact of the movements around the world and on our campus.

A little bit later I saw the profound change that came to Eastern Europe and Russia with the downfall of communism. The beginning of that whole overturn of an oppressive movement was a group of people called Solidarity in Poland. You know. Who were they? Lech Walesa was an electrician who boasted he’d never ever read a book in his life. A group of people without a shot fired played a key role in the beginning of the downfall of communism.

I began to look at religious and secular history and see that whenever something needs to be changed people come together and a movement emerges. I studied church history and the reformation and discovered that God is always raising up new movements. Nothing remains the same.

Church history is the story of people who’d changed the world, it’s not just the history of theology, and it’s the history of action.

The next step in my development as a church planter was to discover, as Peter Wagner says, “that church planting is the most effective form of evangelism under the sun.”

I thought about that for a while and I thought, well maybe starting church planting movements or movements for evangelism on campus around the world, maybe that is an even more effective form of evangelism than just starting one new entity.

So this grew in me and I began to read and study history from the point of view of movements. Bobby Clinton at Fuller, some of his writings influenced me, and Dr Paul Pierson at Fuller: his teaching on expansion of the Christian Movement.

I did a lot of reading and I began to distill some principles especially in my work with CRM as we try and fuel church planting movements. I began to ask what are the reoccurring themes throughout history of dynamic Christian movements that have made history.