Needed, A New Way to Meet #2: Rediscovering the Biblical Church

You ask one of the apostles, what is the church? They hardly even understood the concept…but they understood sitting around with the Lord and fellowshipping with Him. In some way, on the day of Pentecost, they broadened that fellowship to three thousand people. It started with three: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It enlarged to twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. How many are there? Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Actually, of course, you know it’s larger than that. There were probably around one hundred, one hundred fifty people around him, and they were all touching the Life of God.

I’m telling you, I’ve already said everything I want to say for the rest of this meeting. Element: it takes a church planter, and it takes a church planter who will leave. He is itinerant by nature, and that’s what Jesus Christ was. And by the way, He left physically, and everything became internal, and all of the elements are there. As I grow older, I marvel at what the Lord did when he chose those twelve men.

May I get off the subject here at the very beginning and tell you that I’m learning something, and this is what I’m learning, and that is that I want you all to listen to this because this is understanding for me that’s new. I don’t really get a whole lot of new insight as I go along in life. My commitments, visions, and understanding will be clearer, but I missed one thing.

Recent psychological studies and sociological studies of individuals have proven something. I don’t like what I’m about to tell you, but it’s turning out to be the absolute truth: leadership is genetic. Boy, I hate to say that. That just galls me. It’s genetic. You got it, you got it. You ain’t, you ain’t.

My brother said to me, but Gene, when we get saved, is there not a divine genetic? I think there is, because I don’t feel like I was ever a leader, but I am learning that leadership in the church is a very, very rare thing. And I can tell you, there’s another symmetry behind it: everybody thinks he’s one of those rare things… and he wants to be made one of those people.

I want you to know something. I don’t know why you people are sitting in this room watching me and listening to me. I have no idea why. I don’t feel like a leader, but I have faced it, and it’s taken me years, and I am still wrestling with it every day. I don’t like leaders; my brother was a leader, and he only had one follower, and he was by protest. But, oh, he was a leader. He wasn’t a leader; he was a demagogue. He was an outright dictator, and he led me, and man, I fought every inch of it. I don’t like leaders.

I marvel at God’s choosing of twelve men who can lead, and they are rare. I’m increasingly driven to believe that in one lifetime on this earth, we will rarely see more than ten, fifteen, or maybe twenty church planters in a century, all nations combined. I may be off a hundred. I may be off one hundred, but I don’t think so. If I’m off one hundred, it’s one hundred, one hundred twenty. I haven’t found them. Do you want me to tell you all the church planters I know who have risen on this earth in this century? I can name them quickly. Watchman Nee, Bakht Singh, and Prem Pradhan. They are the only three I am absolutely certain of, and that’s in this century.

What about these guys who started these movements? Uh-huh. That’s my whole point. A church planter will not start a movement. He’s humbler than that. No matter how arrogant he looks, he’s humbler than that. I have been able to count seventeen in the first century, and that was, by the planet’s population, an all-time high. There are not many of them.

The church of Jesus Christ is suffering from their absence, and the church of Jesus Christ is suffering from the lack of people seeing the desperate need for them. I’m telling you, I don’t want to tell you this. I wish I could give you a simple way of talking about this. I started this conference by saying that what we’re going to talk about may take one hundred to two hundred years. I don’t want to repeat that. It may take that long before we see this take root. Until we get back to the concept of church planters, we won’t get anywhere, saints.

And I have to say to you that a church planter is itinerant. He will not stay in one place. If he does, he’ll goof up everything. He’ll mess up everything. He’s rare. I want to say he ought to be followed, but boy, I tell you, most of the men who fly under the flag of apostle or church planter are just frightening people, people who will destroy your life. They are usually leaders, but they are going to have a movement. They are arrogant men who will start a movement. Jesus Christ turned over the world and left; He turned over everything to twelve men. And their concept of the church of Jesus Christ at a meeting was Jesus Christ and them sitting around with Him, fellowshipping with Him. That was their concept.

The concept of worship was not there. The concept, particularly of sharing, was not there. The concept of preaching was not there. The concept of Christ was the main thing on their minds. Can you please grab hold of that? Twelve men could do what He did. I used to think He just took the common, but Jesus Christ looked into those men’s lives and found a kind of leadership that rarely emerges on this earth. He worked with those men. He broke them. He broke their natures, and then He used them.

May the Lord forgive me. I got saved when I was seventeen. I was preaching at eighteen before I ever ‘surrendered to preach’; that’s what Baptists do. By the time I was twenty years old, I was living in Europe, and I had a fellow named Knut Kweister. He was an Austrian. The seminary gave us a car to use on weekends, and we went out, and we started Baptist churches in southern Germany. That’s what I was doing at the grand old age of nineteen. When I became a pastor at twenty-one, I went out, opened doors to abandoned church buildings while I was pastoring, and went from farmhouse to farmhouse in East Texas, gathering people who used to belong to abandoned churches and starting those churches over again.