What can a movement pioneer do in a city of 6.5 million?
How do you reach a city like Houston of 6.5 million people?
That was my first question to Ray Vaughn, a movement pioneer just after congratulating him on marrying Sara (photo).
The headings are mine, the quotes are taken from his interview for the Movements podcast.
1. Begin with the end in mind—reaching the whole city. If you act like a team leader you’ll only see what you and your team can do.
We’re starting out with a macro strategy and then moving to a micro strategy. What that means is I could take my team of full-timers and just plug into an apartment complex and say, “OK, let’s go sharing, let’s try and start groups and churches and see how we can get those to multiply and increase,” but then that just makes me a team leader. As a team leader into one area that’ll be a good start but that’s not going to reach the city or see movement.
2. Train and mobilise existing believers, existing churches and form them into teams.
Instead, what does it look like, on a macro level, to start training as many people as we can on every spectrum that we can, whether it’s African Americans, Spanish-speakers or Arabic-speaking churches or people or groups, just any possible person, we’d like to train them and start mobilizing multiple teams into the harvest—that is our macro strategy
So for these next one and a half years, we’re really going to be just training, training, training any person that we can, just to get them into the harvest in a particular area, sharing the gospel, to where that becomes the norm for the culture here, as well as not just sharing the gospel and getting them to Fields 1 and 2 (connecting and sharing the gospel), but then Field 3—discipling them in their homes, in their workplaces or coffee shops or wherever it is and then, of course, forming churches around those people.
3. Keep leading by example
So that’s the clarity that’s in my head as far as how we’re attacking the city of Houston right now. We’re training existing networks, existing churches, pre-existing believers and of course we’re also simultaneously in the harvest every day, sharing, looking for people of peace that are brand new.
There’ll be more to come from my interview with Ray. Thanks to Janet for transcribing the podcast!
