Darryn Scheske
All right everybody, it’s time for the word of God. Are you ready? Are you excited to hear God speak to your heart today? You’re about to hear one of the most remarkable people I know. And I didn’t meet him at a conference or hearing him speak. I met him at a pastor’s retreat. Both of us were a little tired and we went to go rest and to recalibrate and I met a man that has a heart for Jesus and he was so humble and then I began to hear the story of how God was using him to plant a church in New England. Anybody heard about a great move of God in New England and Connecticut and I mean, it’s just, it’s unbelievable what God did through Justin Kendrick. And he went in there with a great heart for people and planted a church literally on the steps of Yale University. And what God has done in that part of the country is incredible. But you’d never know it because of his great love for people, he’s had his head down just serving people in his community. He didn’t go out to build his social media presence or make a great name for himself. I’d never heard of Justin. And as I sat and listened to those stories as our hearts snitched together about our love for Jesus and for people, I made a great friend that day. That was nine years ago. And I’ve watched God do something amazing through this God. You’re not going to hear this great speaker, although he’s written some great books. You should read, if you want to build a healthy staff culture, read his book called “The Sacred Us.” It’s one of the most transparent, honest, beautiful books about raising up leaders. That’s really what he’s known for is developing leaders. Maybe I’ll say it this way. First Baptist Church you know that your pastor loves to develop people. This is just a young white John Jenkins that you never heard of before. I want you to stretch your hands out towards him and pray for this beautiful man of God. Lord Jesus, thank you for bringing Justin here to share the word of God today. I pray you’d use him in a mighty way to challenge our hearts. Thank you for starting with one man multiplying to 13 churches and now touching all of us today. I pray you’d fill him with your spirit and use him in a great way. In Jesus’ name. Amen. All right, Converge, put your hands together and welcome my friend Pastor Justin Kendrick.

Pastor Justin Kendrick
Amen. Good morning, family. Everybody doing okay today? What an honor to be here. What an honor to share with you today. Just wanna take a moment. Thank you, Pastor Jenkins, for your incredible leadership, for your hospitality, for your example. We honor you, your family. So grateful for you, grateful for this house. They have been such a blessing to me. So for all the guys that have just been helping and serving me, thank you so much. And all of the leaders we’ve heard from today, you know, Paul, Steve, Darryn, Marlin, I saw Scott. What an incredible team of leaders that Converge has. Can we just take a moment and honor these leaders in the faith? We love you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the ways that you’ve been a blessing in my life and the lives of, I know thousands of others. As Darryn said, my name is Justin. I lead a church called Vox Church. We are in New England, Connecticut, Massachusetts and my wife and I started our church in 2011 and it was actually just a couple years into our church plant, maybe four or five years that I first heard about Converge and this community really has been a blessing to me, to my wife, to our team ever since. And so as I prayed about what the Lord would have me share this morning, I think that he has something special for you, okay? And so I don’t just wanna read the scripture. I don’t just wanna communicate some truth. I really believe that this morning is an opportunity for a supernatural transfer. Can anybody believe that with me today? That the Holy Spirit wants to ignite something in us, you know? And I was just reading the Converge document that was put together they were talking about earlier last night and it was encouraging, but talking about the roots of pietism in the Converge movement and how this encounter with Jesus is an essential part of our faith and of our lives that we need to learn things in our mind, but we also need to receive things in our spirit, right? Amen. Everybody doing okay? Yeah, all right I know it’s the morning session, but you gotta, you gotta get a little bit louder with me as we go. And so my prayer today is that the Holy Spirit would do just that. John chapter four, verse 35 down to 38, Jesus says this, “Do you not say that there are yet four months then comes the harvest? Look, I tell you, look, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life so that the sower and the reaper may rejoice together. For here, the saying holds true, one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap for that which you did not labor. Others have labored and you have entered into their labor.” This is God’s word, I wanna speak today under the heading New Perspectives, New Perspectives. Would you pray with me? Let’s open our hearts to God. Lord, we just receive your word into our hearts today. Thank you for the words of Christ spoken so many years ago that are relevant and that are powerful and that are transformative in our lives right now. Lord, we all come at different moments in life. Some of us in ministry, 20, 30, 40 years, some of us just starting out, some of us just serving in a variety of different ways in the church, Lord. We’re all here together because we need a touch from you. We need an encounter with you. And so would you work among us in Jesus’ name? Amen.

Amen, I remember a number of years ago, I bought a Jeep Wrangler and I’m not, I’m not really a car guy. I don’t know if we have car people in the house today, but I’m not, like, into cars, but I thought a Jeep Wrangler would be a fun vehicle to own and I was young and stupid and I didn’t have kids yet. And so I thought, “Yeah, I’ll just get this Jeep Wrangler and I’ll take it off road and it’ll be a blast.” And so for a number of years it was. It was great, but when I got the Jeep and I started driving around town, something very strange happened almost immediately. It seemed that in my community, in my town and the surrounding cities, it seemed that thousands of other people had decided to buy a Jeep Wrangler at the exact same time that I decided to buy a Jeep Wrangler. And so everywhere I’m seeing these Jeeps and so every turn I make, every place I go, there are Jeeps everywhere. Jeeps, Jeeps, Jeeps, Jeep, Jeeps. And I don’t know if you know this. Do we have any Jeep Wrangler owners in the house? Anybody here? All right, there’s a few of us. Then you know, the rest of us, you don’t know. Jeep Wranglers wave at each other. It’s an amazing phenomenon nationwide, okay? If you’re driving a Jeep Wrangler, you wave at other Jeeps. And so all of a sudden I have all these new friends who are waving at me everywhere I go. They’re just waving. You know, they’re just, everybody’s saying hi. I’m like, “Oh, hello to you. Oh, hello to you.” It was really a great experience. I drive a Volkswagen now. I wave at other Volkswagens. They don’t wave, you know? Totally different experience. They don’t have that code. But I made all these friends and it was incredible to me how so many people decided to buy Jeeps at the same time that I decided to buy a Jeep. Of course, that’s not the case, right? It’s only that I became awakened and aware of the fact that these Jeeps had already been there, but I was unable to see them. Nothing had changed in the Jeep Wrangler population. The only thing that had changed was my perspective, right? My perspective and cognitive psychologists say that this happens all the time, that people can live their lives completely unaware of what’s right in front of them because it’s not so much just about what you see, it’s also about how you see, right? We have to learn a perspective and so it’s possible to miss things that others have placed right in front of you, that God has placed right in front of you and still not see them even though they’re there because your perspective is either consistently evolving and expanding or devolving and shrinking and getting smaller. And so, you know, we’ve all had this experience where at a time in our lives we’re unaware of something and then we’re awakened to it later, right? Has that ever happened to you? You know, I know for me now, my wife and I, we have four kids. We have 19, 17, 12, those aren’t their names, those are ages and seven, three boys and a girl and, you know, it’s amazing. I don’t know why we spread them out that much. You know, that was, I don’t wanna say it was a mistake, but it was, you know, anyways, and so we have four and they’re all spread out. And it’s amazing because I remember as a kid, you know, my mom being like, “Justin, turn the lights off when you leave a room. Justin, pick your clothes up off the ground, right? Don’t leave your laundry on the floor.” And I was completely unaware. I was like, “Mom, that just slows me down. Why would I waste my life doing those things? I gotta be doing something else.” And now, what does Justin do every day? I walk around, “Hey, boys, pick your clothes up off the floor. How can you not see that, right?” Literally last week I took the light bulbs out of my kids’ bathroom because I was like, “That’s it. You’re going poop in the dark now. I’m sorry. It is what it is. You can’t shut the lights off and it’s killing me.” And so am I allowed to say that here? It’s all right. But, and so how in the world, how in the world can you just leave it on day after day, we’ve had 37 conversations, perspective, perspective, right?

Now, perspective is not just something for psychologists and not just something to manage family issues. Perspective is something that matters a lot to God. In fact, frequently in scripture, we see that when God wants to do something great in the world, he first does something new in the perspective of his people, right? That when the people of God start to see something different, when the people of God begin to expand their perspective, supernatural things occur. You think about Abraham, who God promises to have a miracle child and that through him, all the nations will be blessed. But Abraham is discouraged and frustrated and what does God have to do? God has to bring him out of the tent, right? Remember? And he says, “Abe, look up at the stars. Look up at the stars. Look how many stars there are. That’s how many kids I’m gonna give you.” He had to expand Abraham’s perspective, right? It’s always about shifting the way that we think, expanding our vision. Elisha’s servant in Second Kings chapter six, he can’t see the chariots of fire or the army of angels and until God opens his eyes, he’s fearful. But as soon as he sees, he becomes a person of courage. What changed? Nothing changed. The only thing that changed was his… Right, right. And so we see this frequently. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” You need to have a new birth so that you can have a new perspective. And so very often in our lives, it is not God that is limiting us, but rather it is our point of view, our assumptions or our thinking that has become a barrier to what God might do in our lives. You see that?

Now, it seems to me that in ministry in particular, perspective can be a challenge because ministry wears you down. Every week preparing a message, every week dealing with people’s issues, every week dealing with budget issues and struggles and challenges that, you know, hinder the ministry. And oftentimes in ministry, it feels like two steps forward, five steps back, one step forward, three steps back. And so we all know this, there are pastors who are leaving ministry every week of the year in the United States, right? That thousands of pastors, not just America, but across the world are saying, “You know what? This is too much. I can’t do this anymore. I’m tired, I’m burned out, I’m exhausted.” And it’s easy. It’s easy to lose perspective. It’s easy to start thinking small. It’s easy to start thinking survival. Listen, big things don’t happen in my town. Big things don’t happen in my part of the country. God can’t move here. It won’t work here, right? We’re just holding on. I’m too old for that. I’m too young for that. I’m the wrong race. I have the wrong background. I come from the wrong community. It’s not gonna work here. You don’t understand my situation, right? What if, friends, what if the great problem facing our ministries right now is not where we are. It’s not who we’re surrounded by. It’s not the resources we don’t have. It’s not even the gifts we don’t possess. What if the greatest barrier to you seeing a move of the Holy Spirit in your lifetime is your perspective. And if the Holy Spirit, in the next few minutes, if the Holy Spirit could just touch us in a way that goes beyond a conference, beyond, you know, all of the trappings, but rather just a supernatural touch from the Lord. Whether you’re 34 or 58 or 62 or 21, wherever you find yourself today, if the Holy Spirit could just touch us, that before we leave this session, we might have a new perspective. My goodness, what could happen? What could happen? Go ahead and look at your neighbor, tell him, “I think this is gonna be good. I don’t even know who this guy is, but I think this is gonna be good.” Yeah.

John chapter four, verse 35. You know the context of this story, right? This just came after the woman at the well. Jesus meets the woman at the well. The disciples are out to get food, very famous interaction. The woman runs back to her town in Samaria and tells the whole town, “I think I might have found the Messiah,” right? Now, the disciples come back and they’re confused because Jesus has been talking with a Samaritan woman. You know the context and the cultural barrier between the Jews and the Samaritans was significant. Jews considered Samaritans half breeds. They were unworthy of God’s mercy. And so now Jesus is sitting with his disciples and that’s where we stepped into the story and he says, “Look at the fields.” He says, “Look at the fields. They’re white for harvest.” Now, scholars tell us that he was most likely referring to the common Samaritan garb of that time. They were linen robes, white linen robes and they were streaming out of the town and the city to come meet Jesus up on the countryside. And so here are these hundreds, maybe even thousands of people coming and Jesus says, “Look out at the field, it’s white for harvest” and all of their white attire. And so the disciples are looking out, right? And they’re thinking, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. We’re in Samaria. We’re Jews. You’re the Messiah. Here come all these Samaritans.” No, Jesus. I don’t know if anybody told you. These are the wrong people, right? You’re not supposed to be reaching these people. This is not the harvest, right? In this short interaction, we get a glimpse of his higher point of view. And I believe it, there’s something for you today in this little text where we see we can learn something about the people that God chooses, something about the moment that God has placed us in and something about the story that God’s writing. And I wanna explore this new perspective, this higher perspective just for a few minutes together and reflect upon how might God be challenging my perspective right now.

And so first we see the people, the people. We’re told in verse four of this text that Jesus had to pass through Samaria. And you probably know that he didn’t actually have to pass through Samaria. He could have gone around Samaria, right? And many Jews did because they didn’t wanna deal with an interaction with the Samaritans, but he couldn’t go around because he had a mission to reach these people. And so he had to go through Samaria in order to reach them. And when he reached them, right away, they became aware of the fact that, wait a second, we’re reaching the people we’re not supposed to be reaching. These are the wrong people to bring redemption to. But if you study the book a little bit, and I’m sure you have, you’ll find that God consistently again and again and again, chooses the wrong people to accomplish his purposes, right? I mean, you’ve seen it. There are not many wives, brothers, not many noble, right? Not many of divine and amazing gifting, right? That’s not the one that God typically calls. God typically calls the Abraham who’s too old or the Moses who has a sketchy past, right? He calls Gideon, who’s a coward, Ruth, she’s from the wrong people group, the wrong race. He calls Rahab. She was a prostitute. You look at the list and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, God has some very questionable choices that he’s made through the years, right?” And friend, you’re sitting next to one of those questionable choices right now, right? Come on, you can look at him and just tell him, “You know, you’re a questionable choice.” It’s true. I mean, you know, not many wise. You didn’t draw that straw, right? And when I look at my life, I find that, you know, I see that in Justin Kendrick. I see that in me. I grew up in 14 Barton Circle, North Haven, Connecticut, 06473. That was my address. And I grew up in a very, very average New England family. And you may not be familiar with that northeast corner of the country, but we were Catholics. Of course, we never ever went to church, but we were Catholics and, you know, and that was just how it goes. My mom’s a nurse, my dad, he painted houses. They were divorced when I was seven. My mom remarried a guy that had a real addiction with drugs and alcohol and that complicated my childhood. My older brother still doesn’t believe in God and no one in my family had ever been in ministry or even considered it. And when I go back to my teenage years and in school, I look at my story and if you looked at my report card, you would go average. If you looked at my athletic ability, you would go average, maybe slightly below average. You know, if you looked at my family, you would go average. If you looked at, I’m not kidding, every single aspect of my life, you would say, “This guy is entirely and completely average” and then Jesus met me at a well. And everything in my life supernaturally changed and I found myself a part of something way bigger than myself. He opened my eyes. He set my heart on fire and he pulled me out of a tent and he said, “Look at the stars, Justin. I want you to count them because I’ve got something so much bigger, so much bigger for your life.” Friend, that’s my story. That’s my story. And I can remember as a young man, 16 years old, having an encounter with the Holy Spirit where God made the vision for my life crystal clear. And I’m not kidding what we’re doing right now in New England, I saw this and I wrote it down when I was 16 and I actually have it on my wall at my office because in my spirit, 16 year old kid, brand new Christian, I knew this was the sentence I wrote. I said, “We’re gonna see New England changed from the least churched region of the United States to the most spiritually vibrant place on earth.” 16-year-old kid, I had no business right and things like that. I mean, I had no business even believing that and the data is discouraging, right? If you’re from Phoenix, Arizona, we love Phoenix, let’s say Phoenix and Jesus’ name. But if you’re from Phoenix, Arizona, right around 50 to 52% of people attend church on a regular basis. In my city in New Haven, 2%, and that might be generous, attend church on a regular basis. If you take the barn of top 10 leash church cities, New England usually has eight of the 10, okay? And so few people go to church, few people start ministries. Those that do start ministries usually leave, but these were my people. This is where I grew up. This is where I lived. This is who I bled with. And when I walked the cities of New Haven and Bridgeport and Worcester, I could see it. I could see people coming to Christ. I could see family trees being transformed by the gospel. I could see it.

And so in 2011, my wife and I, we started our church with seven people seven friends and we had no business starting church. I wish we knew about Converge at the time and we didn’t. We had no money and we just began to believe God for miracles and it wasn’t long, friends, weeks. It was just weeks and then soon people were coming to Christ and we baptized 100 and then 1,000 and then 1,500 and then 2,000. And we started seeing people come to Christ, and then we started a second location 13 months after our first location, like idiots. And then we started a third location 26 months after our first location and then we started a fourth location and then a fifth location and then a sixth location and we realized right away, while this is amazing, God’s doing a work. We just have all the wrong people. I think we need some people from Dallas or Denver. I think we need some people from Atlanta or Orlando. I think we need some leaders, some seasoned people. And what we discovered is every time we recruited, no offense to all those cities and beyond, every time we recruited the seasoned people, they got to New England and after about 16 to 18 months, they’d go, “Dang, y’all drive too fast, you talk too fast, you spend too much money, you’re way too grumpy. Everything’s expensive. I am leaving.” And they did. And I discovered right away that if we’re gonna see a move of the spirit, it’s not gonna be by getting people out there, it’s gonna be about raising people up in here. And that was a shift because we began at that point to cultivate an aggressive discipleship leadership program and process. We just heard about it from the Johnson Brothers where we said, “Okay, all right we’re going to commit ourselves to seeing people grow.” And very often we know it. In large churches especially, discipleship can be a mile wide and an inch deep, right? But we said, we want to figure out how do we do this in a large context in the way of Jesus, life on life, flesh and blood, doing life together. And we went deep and we began to build a theology of discipleship. How do people really change? How do hearts really transform over a lifetime? And we build what we call our working model of change. And it looks like this, it looks like, and you’ve seen this before, it looks like head and heart and hand. Do you have that for me? Bing, there it is. Head and heart and hand. We have to learn His ways. We have to love Him supremely. We have to join His mission. It happens by the Holy Spirit and it happens in community. And so we said, okay, if this is our philosophy, how do we live this out in a discipleship context where we’re growing people’s hearts to love Jesus, their heads to learn his ways and their hands to join mission? How do we do it in community by the spirit and we do it together in real life relationships. And so all of our discipleship systems were built around that philosophy. And then from there, we began to teach people habits of the heart that develop them as followers of Christ. And we listed seven. We call these our seven core discipleship habits. We spend the first hour of our morning alone with God. We share our faith every week. We obey the daily promptings of the spirit. We live within accountability of biblical sexual boundaries. We structure our life around priority percentage, progressive generosity and giving. We practice living by grace through a weekly Sabbath and we build disciples every single one of us. And as we trained people to live like this, think like this, not from legalism or law, but from grace and the gospel, what we discovered is that in two years, in three years, in five years, disciples were being made and they were rock solid in Jesus.

And so something started to change. I can remember year one looking around going, “Nah, we have all the wrong people. Year two, we have all the wrong people. Year three, we still have all the wrong people. Year four, wrong people, year five. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Something’s happening now. Wait, something’s starting to turn.” Today over 90% of our staff are homegrown. We’ve grown them up, probably 95% are grown up from within. And you know, our pastors, if you look at our last three pastors that came on staff, one was a gym teacher, one installed Frontier internet in people’s houses, one worked for ESPN. Those are the three most recent guys. That sounds like a really great anointed bunch, doesn’t it? And that’s who now leads our churches and we now, right now we have over 200 people in that leadership pipeline. You know what we found that the only way to have the right people for a move of God is to believe that God uses the wrong people for his greatest work. That’s how you have the right people. And so I just wanna challenge your thinking a little bit today because you might be looking around and you’re going, “Man, all my people like C+ at best.” Like I got a bunch of like kinda… I want you to look again, look again and stop asking yourself, how do I find the right leaders and start asking yourself, how do I build the right leaders, right? This is when God begins to do miracles. Just think about it. Jesus announces the harvest has come and at this point, only one Samaritan woman has believed, right? Because he understood that the seeds of a move of the spirit are always hidden in the one, in the one. And so I begin with the one and then it becomes five and then it becomes 10. And I believe that as we learn to see the wrong people as the right people, something catalytic can begin to happen and we step into our moment, right? Look at verse 35. He says it like this. “Do you not say there are yet four months, then comes the harvest. Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest.” Now, harvesting a crop is one of the most predictable things on earth, okay? Life is full of surprises, but harvesting a crop is actually generally functions on a very consistent linear timeline. You sow and then a number of months later, you reap. And they had it all timed out. They knew four more months and then the harvest. But what Jesus is saying here is he’s saying, “Listen, if you want to be my follower, you must understand that I have come to radically disrupt the natural timelines of the earth. I have come to fast forward some things and by his death, his resurrection, the future kingdom has already broken into the present reality, right? And the prophet Amos told us that this would happen. He told us of a day where the plowmen would overtake the reaper. In other words, that the harvest would come in faster and we would see supernatural increase, right? And so Jesus is saying, “Hey, the kingdom has arrived in me. And so I’m here to inaugurate the new era of humanity, right? I am here,” Jesus was saying, “To introduce the dawn.” That’s how John the apostle describes it. The sun is already rising, though we can still see the moon. And so we live right now in the now and the not yet. We live in the time between the times where we still see hardship and difficulty and suffering and pain, but we also see miracles and healings and salvations and deliverance. And so this overlap of the ages requires a certain perspective. You must see the potential for the miraculous, right?

And just as the disciples had a kingdom opportunity where they could literally see Samaria transformed by the gospel. So today we are living in such a unique time. I think in some ways that the apostles would even say, “Man, I wish I was alive now. The opportunity is exponential.” You may not realize, I don’t know what town you come from or what your background has been, but you may not realize how God is moving on the earth in our day, friends. We are right now in the greatest move of God in the history of the world. I don’t know if you know that. I mean, you look at the data, it is incredible. 50 years ago, there were only a few hundred thousand Christians in China. Today, there are over 100 million Christians. This is exponential. Just 100 years ago, there were less than 10 million Christians in the entire continent of Africa. Today there are about 800 million Christians in the continent of Africa. The world is being changed, technology, transportation, communication. They are changing the way the gospel spreads. Like no generation before us, we are living in a time where we could see every tribe, tongue and nation hear the good news of Jesus Christ. This is incredible. It’s incredible. But largely, the American church has been sleeping, right? Sleeping through it, a half a step behind, disconnected. But friends, even now, even now, something is stirring in our time. The Lord is waking up his church in America right now. You might not know this. 2021, church attendance among young people since then has doubled in five years, okay? Among young people. We just did our annual survey at Vox across our 13 locations, thousands and thousands of people. Our largest demographic of all demographics, it’s 18 to 29 year olds. That is the largest demographic in our church; well over half our church is under the age of 40. And so there is a supernatural hunger and these kids did not grow up in church. They did not grow up with Jesus. They are learning Jesus now at 22, at 21, at 26, at 18 for the first time. I’ve been discipling a young man in the last three years. His dad is a scientist at Yale. His mom is an attorney. He’s a brilliant kid. His life, he’s on fire for Christ. He’s like my fourth son. He just got accepted to Harvard. He’s going to Harvard as a gospel witness in the city of Boston. This is what’s happening right now. I mean, it’s amazing as we’re seeing this. In the last two years sales of Bibles in the United States has skyrocketed. You probably know this, the New York Times recently came out with an article that said that 92% of Americans now say they believe in God and they’re open to learning more about Christ, 92%! Barnard Research says that, that there’s been a 12% increase nationwide in commitments to Christ. And here’s the amazing thing. Check this out. In the next 20 years, over $124 trillion is expected to change hands in America. They are calling it the greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world and with that wealth transfer comes an unprecedented opportunity to complete the work of the gospel around the globe. That’s the day that we’re living in and we have to see it that we’re not here by accident.

Now, think of it like this. In the midst of all of those statistics, God has quietly positioned a 170-year-old movement of churches united together called Converge. I don’t know if you know the history. It started small 1852. A few friends in Rock Island, Illinois. About 25 years later, there were 65 churches. In 1888, the movement spread off of the shores of America to Burma and more churches were started, more people were reached, and it became a gospel-centered movement, a diverse movement of churches of all different kinds with that center on Christ. Today, over 1,700 churches are Converge churches across over 180 missionaries in 35 countries and it growing and growing and growing and growing. And God has quietly positioned this movement in a place where you and I could be a part of seeing something supernatural in our lifetime right here. And so what’s your plan? What’s your plan? I mean, what are you dreaming about? What are you believing God for? We just heard from the Johnson brothers about that call to multiply, but I think for a lot of us, we say, “Well, I don’t know about that.” Maybe you know about Converge and the 312 church plants in five years that they’re aiming for, that the whole movement is aiming for. What are you aiming for? What part will you play? How will God use you and you think, “Oh, Justin, that’s not for me. I can’t do that.” Well, maybe even now, the Holy Spirit would plant in your heart a divine dream for multiplication that stretches your perspective.

I can remember a number of years ago, I ended up in a room with Dave Ferguson, who’s the founder of Exponential, pastor of a church in Chicago. And I told him about my dream to reach New England. And I said, “When I was 16, God gave me this dream to see New England changed from least church regions, to the most spiritually vibrant place on earth.” And he said, “Well, what are you doing about it?” I said, “Well, we’re starting churches that, you know, a multi-site movement and we’re experimenting with some new things.” And he asked me, he said “Well, let me just, can I just be really straight with you? What kind of plan would you need to actually make a dent in New England?” And so I went away and I kinda did some math and I said, “Okay, what would we need to do?” And I said, “All right, if we wanna reach just 1% of New England’s population, we’re gonna need to start about 400 locations.” And I thought, “Okay, that’s a little ambitious.” And so they then said, “Okay, why don’t you build a plan that gets you to 400 in your lifetime?” And I mean, I can remember when he said this, like, my head was spinning. I’m like, “This is stupid. We can’t do this. It’s not gonna happen.” And so we began to dream together and we built what we call our campus to campus model. At Vox, our goal is that every Vox church starts a Vox church every four years. And so every one of our churches has nine different benchmarks that they’re trying to reach in order to launch a new church. In 2027, we have four that will be ready. In 2028, we have five that will be ready. In 2029, we should have about eight that will be ready. Now, how many will we launch? We’re gonna see. We’re gonna pressure test the system. But what we realized is that, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you start doing the math, the math starts mathing and things start to multiply because if you start with 13, that’s what we have now, building our systems, getting things structured. In four years, we could be at 26. And then four years after that, whoa, whoa, we could be at 52. And then four years after that, wait, we’d be at 102 and that’s only 12 years from now. Wait a second, when churches start churches and it’s not just centrally driven, but it actually launches from the edges. Now we can stop thinking addition and we can start thinking multiplication. And so rather than just planting one every couple years, we can start thinking far beyond that where we could plant five. And wait a second, if we could plant five healthy, vibrant churches and the least church reach of the United States in one year, then why can’t we plant 10? And if we could plant 10 healthy churches in New England in one year, what might God do in a generation?

Now you might be listening to this and you’re going, “Yeah, that’s stupid.” It’s a little crazy. Well, remember, Jesus illustrates this entire moment in John four through or in the context of a harvest, right? He says the harvest is coming in. And every farmer understands that a single seed of barley can grow into a plant. Just one seed can become a plant. And for every pound of barley that grows on that one plant, 14,000 barley seeds can be produced. So in other words, God understood that in one seed, he already put in one seed enough food to feed the whole world. I mean, that’s how God’s way of thinking works. It’s not always our way of thinking, but just as a farmer has to develop a system to bring in the harvest, so you and I must become people who build systems not just to reach people but to reach cities and regions and nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ. He always chooses the wrong people. Congratulations you fit right in, right? He always calls us to something bigger than ourselves. But the question is, what do you see right? What do you see? I love Leonard Ravenhill who said that the opportunity of a lifetime must be seized in the lifetime of the opportunity. What do you see? And you might be thinking right now, I see a young man who is making some ridiculous claims. And you might say, “Hey, listen, I live in a small town. Hey, listen, my church hasn’t grown in years and years and years. I’m trying to survive.” Like, right? We’re having budget arguments right now. You know, and planting more locations or going multi-site or starting a new church or whatever the philosophy might be, and I’m for it all. Anything that reaches Jesus, I think is, yes, reaches people for Jesus, I’m for that. But if you think about that and in your context, it feels overwhelming. That might be because it is overwhelming, right? Dreaming dreams for God often leaves us frustrated and broke with results that we didn’t expect. If you’ve ever tried it, you might know. And of course, when we look at redemptive history, we see that this is true Abraham, how many years he waited, David, how long before he became King, Joseph in a prison and on and on and on. And you might say, “Well, Justin, if I dream big dreams and we say our church is gonna start 10 more churches,” or we say our church is gonna start 100 more churches, or we say our church is gonna multiply and reach our whole city with the gospel, what if it doesn’t happen? Well, it might not happen. And I think that’s the biggest perspective shift of all. I think the biggest perspective shift of all is that it’s not actually about what we accomplish, how big our churches grow, how successful Converge becomes. It’s not about how many churches we plant or how many missionaries we support. And I think that’s the real point of the story in John chapter four. Jesus wants his disciples to see what life is really all about. That far beyond our big plans, God is writing one great story and life is about a woman at a well.

See, this isn’t the first time two people met at a well in the middle of the day. If you know your Bible, you know that this has happened before. And the woman at the well story in John chapter four is what theologians call a type scene. It’s a repeated story that occurs multiple times, always follows a specific pattern and carries with it a specific message. This particular type scene was one of the most famous type scenes in the scripture, very well known at the time. It first began in Genesis 24 when Abraham was seeking a wife for his son Isaac and he finds Rebecca at a well. Then years later, there’s Jacob who meets Rachel at a well. And then of course it’s Moses who meets Zipporah, his wife at a well. The meeting at the well is one of the most common repeated stories in sacred literature and the type scene always has four distinct movements. In part one, a man arrives from a distant journey and he is tired. That’s part one. In part two, a woman meets him at the well and water is drawn. In part three, the woman rushes home and tells her family and invites the man to stay. And then in part four, the man and the woman fall in love and they’re betrothed to be married. Those are the four parts of the type scene that occurs again and again in sacred scripture. Now, John, the author of the gospel of John, knew this pattern and he tells the story of Jesus at the well in this framework for a very specific reason to get our attention and to expand our perspective. And so first, Jesus arrives alone, weary from his journey. That’s part one. And then he meets a woman and water is drawn. That’s part two. And then there’s this departure, right? Where we go, hold on, hold on, the story’s breaking down. Because rather than meeting a noble woman like Rachel or Rebecca or Zipporah, he meets a Samaritan woman, a half breed, a sinner, a social outcast who’s trying to avoid the crowd, right? And yet still, even though he meets the wrong woman there, he invites her to have living water, not because she’s so lovely, but before she’s made lovely, right? She believes in this living water and her heart is changed. She rushes home and she tells everyone in Samaria about this man and then they invite him to stay. That’s part three of the type scene. And so we can identify part one, part two and part three of this common pattern, but then you get to part four. And it’s confusing because in part four, the two fall in love and are married. That’s what happened to Jacob and Isaac and Moses. And of course, Jesus isn’t gonna marry the Samaritan woman. So why would the writer follow this pattern? Why introduce it at all? Unless, of course, this is all about a bigger story. That Jesus had come looking for a bride, right? And that the Samaritan woman represents the broken people. The Samaritan woman represents the half breeds, the half holy, half sinful, the flawed, the unqualified, the unworthy bride. The Samaritan woman represents me, 14 Barton Circle, North Haven, Connecticut. It represents you. She had five husbands. She was living with a sixth man making Jesus the seventh man in her life. God’s number for a perfect completion because Jesus came as the perfect completion of our heart’s deepest cry. He came to rescue us from sin, to bring us into holy union with God through grace so that he might make us his bride. He came crossing heaven and earth to find us. And when he found us, we were not lovely like Rebecca. We were broken like this lady lost, ashamed, hiding in our own little world, in our own little dysfunction. That’s how he found me. And rather than casting us aside, he offered us living water. And when he died on that cross, blood and water flowed because his shed blood is the water of life that satisfies my great thirst, establishes peace with God and changes us into the bride of Christ, right?

Friends, this, this is the big story of the gospel. Martin Luther famously called the cross the supreme moment of God’s self-revelation. The cross is where the heart of God is most vividly on display, where we can see it clearly, right? And it’s revealed to us the eternal, perfect, spotless motive of the one that we worship. And his motive screaming from the cross is love. Unstoppable, unfathomable, supernatural love. Not that we are so beautiful that he chose us, but that in choosing us, he made us so beautiful. And when we see it and when we believe it and when we take hold of it, it changes you, right? It changes you. It creates in you new desires. It creates in you a new perspective. It humbles you because you go, “Me, you chose me?” And it exalts you because you say, “He chose me. He chose me and so I’m loved by one that I could never be loved by.” And at the same time, I find identity, security, substance, confidence because of that love. And so what does it do? What does it do when the gospel really gets in you? Oh, it melts our egos, right? It allows us to stop worrying about how big my church is, how big my thing is, how much my kingdom matters. It captivates our affections and it moves us beyond our church’s success or our size. And it compels us to just say, I want to give my life for one who loved me like that. And that friends is where we find the new perspective. See, if my church grows, thank you, Lord. I’m grateful. But the truth is, I am reaping where I did not sow. That someone else came before me and he sowed and she sowed and I am reaping a harvest. And so don’t, don’t strut. Don’t walk like you’re a little taller. Just be grateful that the Lord has enabled you to reap where you didn’t sow, right? And if my thing doesn’t grow, well, that’s okay too because I’m sowing and future generations will see a harvest. And it is not about me anyways, it’s about him. And so I am going to give myself fully to sowing with my whole life because the Lord has called me for such a time as this.

And friends, here’s what I believe when we think like that and when we live like that, nothing will be impossible for this move of God. Nothing. There’ll be no financial boundaries. There’ll be no church planting barriers. When we think like that, when we get over ourselves captivated by the one who loved us now, now miracles can happen. What is Converge? We are a movement. We are a movement of churches that sees people the way Jesus sees it. A movement of churches that seizes the opportunity for exponential impact in our lifetime and a movement of churches that are radically devoted to the one who loves us and that love is progressively changing us to love in selfless ways just like he does. And the truth is that 100 years from now, if Christ hasn’t returned, maybe Converge will be forgotten. Maybe the name of your church will be forgotten or my church will be forgotten. The truth is 99% of you don’t remember my name, right? Already forgotten. That’s fine. That’s the point, right? The truth is that if I could just live my life so that his name won’t be forgotten. Who knows? Who knows what the Lord might do with people like that? Who knows what the Lord might do in our lifetime through our efforts? Oh Lord, would you give us a new perspective? Would you pray with me today? Bow your head, close your eyes, open your heart. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit right in our seats to just speak to us. Maybe you’re here this morning and if you’re honest, you’re a little discouraged kind of going through the motions. I wanna pray right now that the Lord would do a revival in your heart. You know your story, you know the details, you know what you’re struggling with. If you say, “Man, I just keep sowing and sowing and I am not reaping and it is just frustrating and discouraging and I feel like I’m inadequate.” You are inadequate and so am I. But your seed will not be sown in vain. And even now the Holy Spirit is coming upon you with a spirit of encouragement and strength. He is giving you endurance. He has entrusted this to you. Maybe you’re here and right now the love of God feels distant. The revelation of the bride of Christ feels like a far away theological concept, much more than a lived and vibrant reality. I wanna pray for you right now that the spirit of Jesus would meet you with a new perspective. Let’s pray Father in Jesus’ name, would you walk among the aisles today? Would you encourage the discouraged one? Would you ignite fresh dreams and fresh fire in the hearts of every person old and young? Would you expand our point of view that we might see the people around us as the right people, that we might see the opportunity placed before us as the right opportunity? And then we might see the cross as the vivid display of the heart of God. Holy Spirit right now, I loose in this house a supernatural encouragement and faith to endure. New perspective. In Jesus’ name amen.