Not Mutually Exclusive

Often times I catch myself building a dichotomy between apostolic ministry and movement building. Or in our vernacular, SC and CAT. Scope and Depth. Reach and Send. Lost and Laborers. However you want to slice it, it is easy for us (ok at least me) to bully the one in light of the other. The straw man comes in handy at this point.

So first, a bit of groundwork on apostolic lingo:

• Apostolic simply means sent one. This is the basic definition of an apostle. The Greek word apostolos (throw in the Greek to impress the ladies), means a delegate, an ambassador of the gospel, officially a commissioner of Christ, messenger, he that is sent. We sometimes call this a pioneer missionary (which is not a term you find in scripture).
• The GC is a an apostolic endeavor. Jesus was sent, the Spirit was sent and we are all sent. It is fundamental to the faith.
• The apostolic makes the assumption that God has gone ahead. Moving quickly and watching God work is essential. The apostolic mode depends on God for the lead rather than determining that a ministry must exist in a certain location among a certain group.
• Nothing we do in movement building contradicts moving in the apostolic. Movement building is actually the second phase of apostolic turf taking. (in my opinion, and since I made these into bullet points, it must be true).
• The problem is not the movement building principles, but that these principles are not being applied in enough places.
  

The reality is that we need great movement building principles among those who are sent. And we need sent ones to go to places where the gospel is not (including pockets in places we have been for years). Tried and true principles of building a movement must be applied in enough places by enough leaders so that as many students hear as possible.

Couple this with the reality that these principles can actually be employed by young staff, interns, faculty members and yea even freshman (if God so chooses) and we have the making of some Godly chaos.

So do we punt the freshman strategy that has worked so well for so many years? May it never be! May it be that we figure out some way to run that bad boy on another 1500 campuses in ways that are not nearly as staff intensive as what we may have done in the past. May it be that some wise soul figures out how to run it for all the Latinos showing up at Texas A&M, or all the African Americans at UCLA. The principles are awesome, but we have to get someone (apostolic like) to the location to find the people who can run the movement building strategies we have worked so hard to develop.

For more on apostolic functioning, check out John Eckhardt's book Moving in the Apostolic. (bullet point #1 is taken from page 25).