I wanted to offer a short synopsis to demonstrate why I think it’s a scalable model for churches. Briefly …
1. BEING PURPOSE DRIVEN IS BIBLICAL.
The basic idea is that God has five intentions for the church—worship, ministry, evangelism, discipleship and fellowship. You can re-tool that list to be four or six or maybe seven, but the point is, God has given us a great pattern for organizing all of our ministry around His purposes. These purposes are rooted in the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, which still serve to grow great churches 2,000-ish years later.
2. BEING PURPOSE DRIVEN PROVIDES A SIMPLE DISCIPLE-MAKING PROCESS.
If you believe, as I do, that spiritual growth is incremental and measurable, then the purpose driven model provides a great way to help people grow in an incremental, measurable way. This year, we’re implementing our “class” structure, which we call a series of conversations about four words: Love (what it means to be loved by God, to love God and to love other people), Grow (the personal habits/disciplines for growing), Serve (discovering your unique shape for ministry) and Go (what it means to “live sent” and how to share Jesus).
Aside from that series of conversations, we gather on the weekends for corporate worship and we scatter during the week in small groups. So we’re simple, but not so simple that there’s no definition or direction for what it means to be a follower (disciple) of Jesus.
3. BEING PURPOSE DRIVEN IS SCALABLE.
It’s not a megachurch model. We watched our church in Kentucky grow from 45-ish to 100-ish, and most of that growth was people meeting Jesus for the first time (70 percent of our additions were baptisms). Then I was part of a church in southern California that has grown to the tens of thousands (it helps that the author of The Purpose Driven Church is the Pastor).
What really intrigues me is how many churches I see that are purpose driven and don’t even know it. I’ve run across independent fundamental churches whose purpose statement reflects the five purposes very well, and other churches that are charismatic, mainline or even non-evangelical that follow a class structure to mature people spiritually. Like Criswell’s age-graded Sunday School model, I think Rick Warren’s purpose driven model has become a norm among today’s growing churches.
At the end of the day, every church is driven by something—money, tradition, politics, fear, etc.—but I want to lead a church driven by God’s eternal purposes!
