Filter Selectively

Even though we cast vision to anyone that will listen, team leaders should filter who actually joins their team very selectively. There are a few different things you can do to find out if a recruit is the type of person you truly want for your team. This requires asking many questions to understand them more, probing into things like motivation and passion. If you’re curious or unsure, don’t be afraid to ask – it’s always better to hear a potential recruit’s response over guessing or assuming.

Prioritize character over gifting. All goers have to hit a minimum standard for spiritual maturity and character, or they will be difficult to lead in the stress of a cross-cultural field context. Do they have a rich and abiding relationship with the Lord? Do they have any spiritual bondages that they haven’t seen consistent victory over yet (generally, the minimum is 6 months of sobriety or freedom over a sin addiction before launching to the field)? Is there anything significantly lacking in their character or in bearing fruit of the Spirit? Look especially for humility, patience, perseverance, flexibility, and faith, as these are critically important on the field. Many times, agencies will have a clear standard for who to deploy, and evaluations to help determine a goer’s readiness. It’s a good idea to take their list and even add more of your own values from your own team. If your agency does not have a list like this, you can use the personal evaluation we developed as a baseline. 

Consider their experience and track record. Can they do the job or role you’re inviting them to do on your team? Ask questions looking for demonstrated competency. Anyone can answer that they are ‘passionate’ about something, but see if they have at least some proven experience in doing the main activities in your ministry (e.g. training, evangelism, disciple making, etc.).

Check their references. A potential recruit will always put their best foot forward when going through the recruiting process, not unlike the first few dates with a new person! Ask them for references – their peers, their leaders, people they’ve led – and ask thorough and direct questions about the areas that you need to check them on like character, calling, strengths, and weaknesses.

Don’t be afraid to say “No” or “Not yet.” If you’re hearing from God that they won’t be a good fit for your team, don’t be afraid to tell them that. Sometimes as leaders we feel bad about influencing such a significant decision in a recruit’s lives and then closing the door. But ultimately, it’ll be better for them and for the team to not continue on in the process if they aren’t a good fit. This can happen at any point in the process. It can sometimes be helpful to provide gentle but clear feedback about why they might not be a good fit for your team, and propose areas of development. However, once you say no or not yet to joining the team, don’t be the one to take responsibility for their development. This can cause you unnecessary burden when team leaders already have so much they need to focus on. Let them have the opportunity to work on their own development in their home context, as this is a good indicator of their humility and initiative. We’d also heavily caution you to not just take whoever your mission agency proposes – each team is different and you should do your own homework about whether the potential recruit is a good fit and has acceptable character and calling to persevere on your team. Take the agency’s recommendation as one proof point and continue to discern and filter yourself.

Discern Their Fit

Along with evaluating their character and competency, you’ll be simultaneously getting to know their giftings, strengths, and personality to see if they’ll be a good fit with your leadership, your team, and your ministry.

Role, Strengths, Weaknesses: Get to know a recruit’s strengths and weaknesses and think through what potential role they play on your team or ministry. Find giftings that are generally complementary to your leadership and your team. For example, if you have no administratively gifted people on your team and need that help, try to find those that might have that gifting. Other than just asking questions, helpful tools to discern giftings and aptitudes include spiritual gifts inventories (like this one from Robert Clinton), Clifton Strengths, enneagram, etc. in order to get a generalized view into what their strengths and weaknesses might be. As weaknesses surface, also factor them into your team makeup to see if there’s any glaring deficiencies on your team as a whole.

Responsive to your leadership: See if the potential recruit is a person who is responsive to your style of leadership. For example, if you are a hands off type of leader that expects a lot of self initiative and the recruit is a person that needs more directive and detailed leadership, that is an aspect to consider. Or, a family might have reservations being led by a single person. Perhaps another person on your team could help provide some more leadership, but ultimately you want to make sure they are willing to submit to your leadership decisions and work with your style.

Look for diversity / variety on your team: Although you’re looking for the potential recruit to be responsive to your leadership, you also want to value and look for diversity and variety on your team. Recruiting a team that all thinks and acts like you means that you will lack perspectives and giftings that could help your team to thrive or be effective on the field.

General chemistry: How is the general chemistry between this person and you and your team? Learn about their hobbies, values, family of origin, lifestyle, etc. These might not be make or break issues but it’s good to be aware of where there might be friction points. 

Let teammates or others you trust interact with them: Lastly, let your teammates or those you trust interact with the potential recruits! As the TL, you’ll likely drive the process of getting to know them, but try and set up times for teammates to get to know their potential future teammates and solicit feedback from them about the recruit. Your experience may vary, but because adding a new teammate is such an impactful event, we ask that all of our current teammates have consensus with adding them before we make a formal invite. Adding a new teammate at the disapproval of a current teammate is like one step forward and five steps back.

Pray, fast, and ask the Lord: Selection is a critical component of discipleship, as we see from Robert Coleman’s Master Plan of Evangelism. And a huge aspect of selection is hearing from the Lord. We can see Jesus model this for us in the choosing of the 12:

In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles. (Luke 6:12-13)

We set time aside to pray and fast all throughout the process of considering a recruit, and ask the recruit and our current teammates to do so as well. Don’t skip this step! There are few decisions as impactful on a team as who you recruit, so spend the necessary time to bring recruits through the process and have clarity from the Lord.

Provide Clear Next Steps and Process Overview

At each point of the process, you want to provide clear expectations and next steps as much as possible to the recruit. A next step could include praying and processing what they’ve learned, talking to a teammate, taking a vision trip, or inviting them to a ministry or team event. Remember that this is a weighty decision for their lives and calling, so clarity is kindness.

If you’re serious about having them enter the recruiting process to potentially join your team, give them a clear expectation of the process and timeline. A simple one-page document outlining this can be very helpful. Also make it clear to them that you’re inviting them to start the recruiting process, which is different from an invitation to join the team!

Work together with your sending agency in terms of assessments and other logistical aspects. As the TL you will probably drive more of the personal connection and discernment parts, as well as connecting them to the right people in your agency.

Once you’ve had the initial conversations and done the relevant assessments and evaluations, we’d strongly recommend that the recruit comes on a vision trip for at least a week if possible. Interacting with them in-person and with the team is completely different than on Zoom calls. And allowing them to engage with the culture, people, and environment of your field is a critical piece of the discernment process, for both you them. Some recruits that we thought were slam-dunks came on vision trips and felt strongly from the Lord or personally that Thailand wasn’t a good fit – which is way better to know before they join the team than after!

Make A Compelling Ask

Lastly, after you’ve gotten to know them, gone through all the necessary assessments and meetings, discussed with your team, and prayed and listened to the Lord, if you still feel that they are a good fit for your team, make a clear and compelling ask! “We feel like you could be a great fit on our team and we’d love for you to join us. We’d like to invite you to join our team! Take some time to pray and consult others and let us know in the next 1-2 weeks.” If possible, try to make the occasion special through a nice meal or a gift! In all likelihood, unless they are also looking at other teams, by the time you’re ready to make an ask they are probably ready and expectant to join.

Conclusion

Recruiting is much more of an art of discernment than a scientific process, but hopefully the guidelines above give you a grid of what to think and work through in recruiting someone to your team. As a TL, there will be different seasons where recruiting may take up a lot of your time versus other seasons when it’s quieter. As you pray and plan for the future of your team, consider the resources you have – your people! – and whether you need to add more. The onramp for a recruit from when you get to know them to when they are on your team, through language and culture, and contributing as a teammate is VERY long, potentially multiple months or years depending on language learning. Even if you don’t think you need a teammate today, be open to casting vision broadly and seeing who God might bring in front of you! Remember, recruiting leaders will almost always help to multiply your team, ministry, and impact.

To bring the soup terrine story to its conclusion, this couple that first gifted us the soup terrine now leads one of the new teams in Thailand after our team expansion in 2020, and are some of our closest friends in the world. The night of Jenn’s seizure, when they heard what was happening, they immediately booked flights to be with us in the hospital without even asking me first. After 10 years on the field, our relationship with them has gone far beyond ministry teammates.

Our prayer is that the Lord would provide teammates, partners, and friends of this quality on your teams!

Questions for Reflection

• How much do you prioritize recruiting and casting vision as a key responsibility for a leader and why? How high of a priority should recruiting be for you in this next season?
• What areas of the recruiting process do you feel confident in? What areas do you feel less confident in? What can you do to improve in those areas or invite others to help?
• Do you have other potential leaders on your team that you can develop or rely on?
• Are there any specific roles or giftings that you feel that your team has a need for?
• Do you have networks of potential goers that you can recruit from? Is there someone you know from your home context that can advocate for your team and need, and find potential leads for you?
• How many leaders and teams could potentially be needed to fulfill the vision God has called you to?

One of the responsibilities of a Team Leader is to recruit the right teammates onto your team. We’re often asked many questions around the area of recruiting, including:

“How do I know if someone’s right for my team?”
“How do I cast compelling vision for someone to join?”
“Should I prioritize role fit, gifting, or character?”

We hope to answer these questions and more to help you figure out the process of recruiting and building a thriving team overseas! In part 1, we’ll address the overall process of recruiting, and more of the front end activities to find potential recruits. In part 2, we’ll talk about how to filter for the right teammates and discern their fit on your team, as well as how to close the deal and invite them to your team!

The Legendary Soup Terrine

When we first were preparing to launch, Jenn and I [Steven] were the team leaders and about to get married but everyone else on our team was single at the time. We knew for our relational thriving that it’d be important to recruit another married couple on the team. We also needed some teammates that were administratively gifted to help us navigate all the needs on the field.

One couple in particular seemed to fit the bill. The wife had been in a year-long development cohort at our church with Jenn and had developed a good friendship with her. This couple were looking to launch overseas but had several other invites from way more established and impressive team leaders than our extremely inexperienced selves.

We invited them to start the process, shared our vision with them, and even brought them on a vision trip to Thailand (one month before our wedding – much to Jenn’s displeasure as she tried to plan our wedding). And then we formally invited them to join our team, asking that they would give us a response in two weeks.

After two weeks, they asked us to come over to their apartment to talk about their decision. By then, they had already gone on another vision trip to visit another team and had three other very good options on the table. As we pulled into the parking lot, Jenn and I were sure that we were going into a breakup conversation and that they would tell us they were joining another shinier, more impressive team. “Sorry, it’s not you, it’s me!”

We trudged up to their apartment and had an hour and a half of small talk and catching up. Inside, I thought, “Just rip the bandaid off already and tell us you’re not joining!”

Finally, they said, “we have an early wedding present for you!” And brought out an enormous cardboard box that could have fit a person inside of it. As we tentatively opened it, there were more boxes and more newspaper wrapping. Finally, we opened the last box, and inside was a large soup terrine like the one in the picture below.

As I opened the soup terrine, there was a small folded up piece of paper with the text “เราอยู่ข้างใน” – of course I had no idea what this meant. And in 4 point size font in the bottom corner, the translation: _{(we’re in!!!!!!)}

Jenn immediately burst into tears as I gave a huge sigh of relief. We had new teammates! 

Funny enough, three years later, we found out the Thai was completely wrong, and translated more to something like “we’re inside [the box]” but that just makes it funnier. As we recruited more teammates or current teammates got married, the soup terrine was gifted to 5 more couples over the next 10 years! And of course, no one has any use for it and it refuses to fit in any normal cabinet. It’s simultaneously an annoyance and a heart-warming reminder of how God has blessed our team not only with great teammates, but life-long friends.

Recruiting is (kind of) Like Dating

When you’re looking for a new job in the for-profit world, many times there’s an application and one or two interviews before you start at a new job. That’s not very much to figure out if someone is a good fit at a new job. But there’s always the option of firing them if they don’t fit!

Recruiting someone to an overseas missions team is very different from hiring for a job. In many ways, it’s more akin to dating than hiring! Unlike marriage, being a part of a missions team isn’t “until death do us part.” But it takes a lot of momentum and cost for a new teammate to go through a process of preparing, selling everything, saying goodbyes, and transitioning to the field. And it takes the team leader and the team a lot of energy to welcome a new teammate and go through another round of Team Formation (forming-storming-norming-performing) with every new teammate. Just one teammate that is not well prepared, relationally difficult, or a bad fit can cause a ton of sideways energy on an otherwise healthy and effective team, or in the worst-case scenario, cause enough carnage to send the whole team home. We unfortunately know more than a few stories of friends that were on teams like these.

At the same time, it’s critical that a team leader knows how to identify, discern, and compellingly invite new teammates to the field. For one, there’s so much turnover and attrition on missions teams for various reasons like unstable visas, health emergencies, or unavoidable circumstances – though hopefully not for team conflict or character reasons if a team leader does a good job recruiting the right people. Secondly, the vision that God has given you should outpace your own ability to see it to completion! That requires recruiting leaders and teammates to either add to your team, or to help expand and multiply to start new teams that own a piece of that vision.

For those of you that are married or who have friends that are married, how many dates did it take to pop the question? Obviously, a recruiting process can’t be that robust. But we’d encourage team leaders to take recruiting as a process, and not just a one-and-done event.

In our time as team leaders, we’ve onboarded 20 new teammates, had 30+ go through our recruiting process, and had initial vision casting conversations with 75+ people. Below are some of the guidelines and lessons we’ve learned in the process of recruiting new teammates to overseas work.

Recruiting Guidelines

Always have a mindset of recruiting leaders.

If it wasn’t clear, this is a blog about leaders. In our experience, the greatest bottleneck of seeing expansion and health in your team and ministry is a lack of leaders. Our recommendation would be that every TL have someone on the team that they are developing to either replace themselves or to expand to a new team. Part of that is redundancy if you have to leave the field, but it is also the potential to grow into new opportunities that the Lord provides. Even if you feel that your team is “full,” always be willing and open to receive more leader-type people.

Connect with networks to recruit from.

In order to even begin recruiting and casting vision, you need a pool of potential goers to recruit from. Many times, being a part of a missions agency will provide that pool. Find local churches that are passionate about deploying goers, or keep an eye out for other missions-related networks like conferences or prayer groups. Having a home-side advocate keep an eye out for potential recruits can be a huge help.

Cast vision broadly and specifically.

Cast vision broadly to anyone who will hear, but also cast vision specifically to the audience you’re speaking to. When you meet potential goers that could join your team, cast vision broadly! As a leader, you should always be casting compelling vision for the need and opportunity in your ministry to anyone who will listen – they may end up being interested as a teammate, or a supporter or advocate.

Sometimes casting vision will be to a group of people, and other times it will be 1-on-1. Try to shape your vision casting to your audience. You want to be a “sniper” not a “shotgun” in your vision casting; cast vision to the desire you hear in them when they share (e.g. impact, purpose, community, etc.). What does the person you’re talking to value in a team or ministry opportunity?

In order to cast vision specifically, listen well and ask good questions:

• How did you come to start following Jesus?
• How did you get involved or feel a call to missions?
• Where have you felt God has been leading you recently?
• What types of spiritual gifts or strengths do you have?
• How has your experience been in preparing to go overseas?
• What passions do you feel like God has given you? (What makes you “pound the table?”)

Listen well to how they answer these types of questions, and craft your vision casting to their passions and values. Listening to what they value also helps you to discern their fit on your team.

Ways to Cast Vision

How do you cast vision? Here are a couple of methods:

From the Word.

It’s always good to have a few verses that are your key convictions for the vision God has given you for your ministry. Many times, these Scriptural convictions could be shared by the other person. Some of our go-to verses are Matthew 28:18-20, Revelation 7:9-10, Matthew 24:14, Acts 19:10, Psalm 2, and Isaiah 45 among many others.

Sharing About the Need of the People and Place.

Hudson Taylor would constantly write and speak about the need among China’s 350 million people without the gospel. In his 54 years of ministry in China, he ended up mobilizing nearly 800 long-term workers to China’s Millions and influencing countless others to go. Is recruiting important? Hudson Taylor seemed to think so. In that 54 years, he took 10 round trips from the West to China and back, totaling 11 years(!) on a ship, with his 11th and final trip at age 73, which ended up as a one-way trip as he died in China in 1905. 

For your ministry vision, how many people don’t have access to the gospel? What are the spiritual needs among your people (addiction, spiritual bondage, social issues)?

What is God doing among this people and place? Tell stories of God answering prayers, people coming to faith, critical events that open doors to the gospel.

Describing the Role You Envision Them Playing.

Many people can get easily excited about the need and opportunity in most places among the unreached, but what they really want to know is – what’s my role in it? How can I make an impact in that? Cast vision about the role you could see them playing on the team and in the ministry – how do their gifts and values align with what your team is doing and what God is doing? Again, this requires listening to them well first.

Lastly, let your own passion and conviction come out when you cast vision. God has called you to give your life to see the gospel go forward among the unreached. Whether it’s a verse, or a story, or an experience that moved your heart to say yes to God, let that come out! People are drawn to the passion and emotion that a leader expresses when sharing about their vision.

Now that you have a decent pool of potential recruits that are interested in your team, it’s time to focus on making sure they’re the right quality and fit for your team. More in part 2!

I: Be Barnabas – Intro + Mint’s Story
II: Why Be Barnabas?
III: Who was Barnabas from the Bible?
IV: Be Barnabas – What is a NAV?

V: Be Barnabas – How to Find a NAV?

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In our previous post, we introduced how a goer might start the process of networking and finding potential NAVs to partner with. Many times, goers will have some initial connections but find themselves stuck with the question – “How do I know who I should spend time with?”

So much of it is listening to the Holy Spirit about who we should spend our time with, but in this post we’ll share a process that our team created to filter through contacts, develop relational trust, and eventually partner closely with multiple different NAVs in our country towards catalyzing movements.

NAV Partnership Process and Scoreboard

As our team started networking with different national leaders, as well as asking each one if they could recommend 5 others to meet with, our list of potential NAVs quickly ballooned to 20+ leaders. And we were asking the question above – who do we spend time with? Who are the people that God has prepared to multiply and that we should invest in? We needed some kind of way to evaluate our fit with each of these leaders, and a process to narrow down who we should eventually partner with.

The image above is of the NAV Partnership Process Scoreboard. You can download the entire template with this link and start filling it in with your contacts. This is a great process to go through together with your teammates as well to share with them which leads you all have. Some of the goal-setting language is from the 4 Disciplines of Execution, which basically helps you to focus in on a goal to have the highest impact, and set up some processes around it to help you be accountable to the goal you’ve set. If this kind of thing floats your boat, there’s a shorter book summary you can read here, or just buy the book, but it’s not necessary to understand the NAV Partnership Process.

The process follows three stages, from bottom to top.

Identify Stage

The Identify Stage is largely where you’ll network with leaders and have initial conversations asking questions like we mention in the “How to Find a NAV” post. The three steps include:

1. We know each other – whether from cold contact at a church or an introduction from a mutual connection, the local leader knows your name and you have each other’s phone numbers, hopefully with a time to meet together in the near future. There might be certain leaders who you know about but you’ve never met, but we’d have a hard time counting them among our potential NAVs list if we’ve never even met them and they don’t know who we are!
   
2. Two-way vision cast – You’ve asked the all-important question, “What is the vision God has given you?” and have heard them share. And you’ve also been able to share about who you are, why you’re there, and at least some about your heart for seeing multiplication happen.
   
3. Fulfills NAV qualifications – this may take several meetings to discover and is somewhat subjective to your personal evaluation of each of these qualities. We expanded on what most of these mean in the “What is a NAV” post, but ultimately, it will be up to your insight, discussing with teammates and coaches, and listening to the Holy Spirit to decide if these potential NAVs fulfill the qualifications. And we’ll often use a red-yellow-green framework in evaluating, meaning green is that they clearly fit that quality, yellow is “we don’t know yet”, and red is a clear barrier.

A couple of things to note about evaluating someone’s NAV qualifications: don’t be too narrow in your interpretation of these qualities and cross someone out too quickly. We’ve given some short example stories of how different goers have found their NAV partners, and hopefully you’ve gleaned that partnership with a NAV can happen in a lot of different and unexpected ways. For example, some goers we’ve coached have initially excluded certain leaders because it wasn’t immediately clear that they were excited about CPM methodology. However, those national leaders had a desire to make disciples and plant churches. Be patient! Giving that vision for multiplication may be exactly the thing that God has you there to help them with! CPM approaches could be a relatively new idea for some leaders. If they are a clear red and have barriers to partnership in a certain area, then mark them as such, but it can take time to get to know someone’s heart after that initial meeting, which is why we encourage you to take this as a process.

On that note, a newer leader could also emerge as a NAV as you spend time with them. Even if they don’t initially have a big vision but have some outward focus, they could have their vision and faith stretched as you spend time training them and showing them God’s heart from the Bible. Or, they might have some dormant apostolic giftings that aren’t apparent and will come out when given an opportunity to enter the harvest and pioneer some new works.

On the flip side, be discerning with leaders who seemingly say all the right things initially. More than a few times, we meet charismatic leaders that are excited about multiplication, that seem excited to partner with us, and want to introduce us to a lot of people. But as we invite them to be trained or to implement some movement tools, they end up not actually wanting to for whatever reason. Just like in the Bible, sometimes God brings an amazing leader out of nowhere, and those that look shiny and charismatic have different barriers that keep them from embracing multiplication. As you meet people, continue to listen to the Holy Spirit’s guidance!

Access vs. Implementation NAVs

In the Identify Stage is also where we’ll mention that we will distinguish between two different types of NAVs – access NAVs and implementation NAVs.

As our team was looking for national leaders that had these qualifications, we started running into two different types of leaders that both fulfilled the NAV qualities but looked very different and were able to help us in different ways.

An Access NAV is someone who fulfills the NAV qualifications and is excited about the vision of multiplication, but may be too busy with current leadership and ministry responsibilities to begin directly implementing CPM tools. However, they will have influence over a large network and give you access to be able to train those under them. They are the gatekeepers who open the door to networks of believers, where you can begin training and looking for the Implementation NAVs that will practically engage with catalyzing multiplication. Many times, these access NAVs will be high-level leaders and pastors over a large church or a large ministry, be great visionaries and recruiters, and can be more obviously charismatic and experienced leaders. These types of leaders are essential to build relational trust with, as open doors from them greatly increases the trust you have with those you’re training and even provides a layer of filtering / recruiting from their influence that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

An Implementation NAV is a NAV who is willing to start implementing CPM tools and training, both personally and with those that they lead. They will not only come to a training, but begin to enter the harvest, share the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches. Sometimes these are newer or under utilized leaders who have the vision and faith to multiply, but have not yet stepped into a position with significant influence or have not yet been equipped to make disciples and multiply. Ultimately, you’re looking to find these Implementation NAVs who will dive in and do the work of multiplying disciples and churches!

As an example, the church network that we partner with has both of these types of leaders in different roles. After spending the first few years doing some simple disciple-making trainings with college students and casting vision with leaders, we finally met the head of church planting over their network, Pastor W. Since we had spent the time and relational investment gaining trust with other leaders in the church, we established trust quickly with Pastor W.

Pastor W had been in church planting ministry for longer than we had been alive, and he famously would run his cars into the ground and have to switch cars once every two years because of how often he would drive around rural areas visiting different church planters and church plants. He told us, “I know how to plant churches, and I know how to disciple people and send them out. But I don’t know how to get them to disciple others! In 30 years of church planting, very few of my church plants have been able to plant another church.” He had the vision, the gifting, and the experience that far surpassed anything our team could ever hope to have, but our small role was to bring some simple, biblical tools and come alongside Pastor W and the faithful church planters in his network.

After casting vision for CPM, Pastor W was excited and immediately gave our team access to two of his best church planters who he said we should start piloting with. One of those was Mint, who was a pretty new church planter but had started as the church secretary! We share more about Mint’s story in our first Be Barnabas post. Initially, it wasn’t clear that Mint was a NAV, but Pastor W was clearly an access NAV and we were excited to start piloting CPM implementation in rural areas. But as Mint’s fruitfulness went from one church of 15 people to 5 house churches of 80 people in 6 months, we started to realize that she was an implementation NAV! As we had the opportunity to empower her and cast vision, the latent apostolic giftings and big vision that the Lord had given her had an opportunity to come to the surface! Fast forward a few more years and she is currently the regional leader of church planting over the least reached region of Thailand, and has discipled and sent out church planting teams to 11 other provinces!

In short, both access NAVs and implementation NAVs are important. An access NAV gives you access to a group of believers to train, and an implementation NAV will begin practically using CPM tools to catalyze a movement.

Develop Stage

After the initial Identify Stage, you want to continue investing time and getting to know these potential NAVs in the Develop Stage, where you’re developing trust and relationship and trying to identify the best candidates to partner with. You may not know if a potential NAV fulfills the qualities you’re looking for until late into the Develop Stage.

4. Two-way ministry involvement – this simply means that they’ve come to a ministry thing that you’re doing, and you’ve gone to a ministry thing that they run. For you, it could be as simple as attending the church service or a small group at their church. For the potential NAVs, it would be something like coming to a training you’re running, or going out into the harvest together. This step is important because it helps you see if there’s actual commitment to multiplication in what they do in these ministry settings, as opposed to potentially saying the ‘right things’ in a coffee meeting but not being willing to implement.
   
5. Willing to pilot with us – If you’re 80%+ sure that they fulfill the NAV qualifications, you’ve prayed and listened to the Holy Spirit, and you’ve been in some ministry settings with them, then you can offer to run a pilot training with them and / or the people in their network. We highly recommend a pilot training or even a series of pilot trainings, because this is truly where you’ll be able to see if this NAV or their network is the right fit to partner with. If there’s significant buy-in, engagement in the harvest, and even initial multiplication fruit, you know it’s a good sign that they are the people you’re supposed to work with! If there are significant barriers, then at the end of the pilot, you can have an honest conversation with the leader about whether it’s right to continue on or not. In this step, you should offer a pilot training, explain to the leader what the training will look like, how long it will go and how often you will train, and what kind of expectations you’re expecting from the group that’s being trained (e.g. enter the harvest x amount of times, try to obey the goals that are set from the training, etc.). For our team, we offer a pilot of 4 trainings that happen once a month, that each last about 3-6 hours depending on the context:
   • Training 1 – God’s Heart for Multiplication (Matthew 28), Multiplication Cycle, Entry (Luke 10), Simple Sharing Tool (411)
   • Training 2 – Abide in Christ, How to lead someone to faith, Discovery Bible Group Tool
   • Training 3 – Review, New Believer Discipleship, Baptism Tool
   • Training 4 – Simple House Church Training, Team Meeting (3/3s), Vision for Multiplication

This training outline is where we’ve landed after probably hundreds of trainings over the last several years, and has gone through a lot of different innovations from the amount of time (over 10 or 12 weeks vs. once a month), trainings in an afternoon vs. a 3-day training camp that includes going out into the harvest, and many different topics! Figure out what works for you, but in general, it’s important to start with a vision for multiplication and tools for entering the harvest and sharing. From there, it depends on what the Lord decides to do with the group! If you’re interested in taking any of our training or tools to use in your context, please reach out and let us know at contact@missionsleaders.com! There’s also a ton of other CPM tools available, some of which you can see on our Resources page under CPM.

6. “Bought-in” and willing to partner – After the pilot trainings, it should be pretty clear whether this is a good group to partner with and continue training. Even if there isn’t a lot of fruit, you can usually tell if the group is excited to make disciples and obeying, or if there’s a lot of push-back and it may be time to move on for now. Part of it is just practical – if you’ve given them initial training and they haven’t done anything with it, it doesn’t make sense to train them with tools further in the process. If they’ve tried things and they’re not effective, then it’s a good idea for you to bring different tools and approaches to try to address these barriers.

Partnership Stage

Finally, after you’ve completed the pilot trainings and evaluated them with the leader, you can mutually decide to partner together towards catalyzing multiplication! The entire NAV Partnership Process will take more time in the initial stages of your ministry, especially as you’re continuing to improve in language and learn cultural cues. Again, the timing of things is dependent on the Holy Spirit – you could meet your key partner in one of your first meetings, or it may take several years of training and networking to meet the right partner. But hopefully, this process gives you and your team some clear focus and potential steps to find and filter for a partner.

As you find an initial NAV to partner with, hopefully as you invest time with them, your relationship and trust with them and your vision for multiplication will grow! Especially as they begin to see fruit, they will connect you with other leaders and networks and you’ll operate out of the trust they give to you through that connection. The process of subsequent trainings and partnerships will probably go faster.

To answer the question at the beginning – “how do I know who I should spend time with?” – we asked other experienced movement practitioners this same question almost every time we had an opportunity. This is an important question because as a movement practitioner your most limited resource is your time.

One experienced worker told us, at the beginning, as you network with a lot of people, be willing to spend at least some time with anyone who would obey something. Even if that was as simple as sharing a testimony, or obeying an “I Will” statement from reading the Bible, some sign of obedience meant that it was worth it to explore if they were the Faithful, Available, Teachable (FAT) type of person that he should invest in. In my opinion, a new believer that is FAT and obedient to the Word is honestly preferable to a charismatic leader that says all the right things but isn’t willing to do anything.

As people see more fruit and multiplication moves forward, you should focus your time on the most fruitful while being willing to help everyone else. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, as many times leaders tend to want to help the lowest common denominator and don’t give the fruitful few the help that they need. Chapter 1 of the classic book, Master Plan of Evangelism elaborates on this, that Jesus selected from his followers the 12 Apostles (Mark 6:13-17), and even within them spent focused time on the three, Peter, James, and John. As Coleman points out, “Jesus devoted most of His remaining life on earth to these few disciples. He literally staked His whole ministry upon them.”

All it takes is finding one faithful National Apostolic Visionary leader that God has prepared in order to literally change the eternal trajectory of an unreached people or place. Are you willing to invest the time, effort, and servant-hearted posture to find these men and women that God has prepared? Even if it takes years of time, countless coffee meetings, and dozens or even hundreds of trainings and times modeling going out in the harvest to find this leader, will we stake our whole ministry on a single NAV that God wants to use to catalyze a movement?

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Now that we have learned some principles from Barnabas and know what we’re looking for in a National Apostolic Visionary (NAV), how do we find one? From here, we’ll start to get into the practical steps of what you might do to filter for and find a NAV to partner with in pursuing movements.

The process will generally follow this order, but different things can happen simultaneously or there might be some back and forth. CPM methods are often presented as a step-by-step manual for the sake of clarity and confidence, which is important, but the reality is that any kind of ministry – especially CPM – is messy, random, and frequently not what you expect or plan!

So you’re bought in to pursuing CPMs among the unreached, you have an understanding of CPM methodology and have received some training, and you’re on board with a ‘Be Barnabas’ approach of finding a NAV to partner with in catalyzing movements. Now what do you do?

Learn language and culture

To us, this is still an essential component for goers that want to live and serve among the unreached! In a few places in the 10/40 window, English may be commonly used, or perhaps working through translators is a standard method of ministry. For most goers, this won’t even be an option and learning language will be a necessity. Although there are benefits to the translator approach (e.g. don’t have to spend time learning language before entering into ministry, automatically have an insider to help train and hopefully develop as a leader), there are also shortcomings and limits (e.g. immediately brings a paternalistic relationship / power dynamic as you are the one paying the translator, limits your understanding of what’s happening in the other language and even in cultural interactions). 

Even if working through a translator might be a faster way to get started in ministry, our personal experience is that it can really help in a partnering relationship to speak the heart language of your partner. Conversely, not speaking the heart language can potentially become a limiter over time. It’s a way we can serve our local friends by not making them speak our heart language at the cost of their discomfort, as we are there in a Barnabas role to support and encourage them. Additionally, language learning leads to cultural learning, as deeper concepts relating to life, spirituality, family, and ministry will not directly translate to English and a Western worldview. 

We’ve heard from more than a few goers about the confusion that can happen in working through translators. CPM practitioners will often hear reports through translation that don’t line up with what is being reported in the local language. Sometimes it’s an unintentional translation mistake, but other times a paternalistic situation or cultural components might cause a local partner to over or under report or otherwise miscommunicate for the sake of saving face with the outsider who is paying them.

There’s an abundance of other reasons to learn the local language, including your own thriving in the culture, the ability to deepen in relationship and fellowship with local believers including your partners, and at least some ability to help national partners contextualize tools and lessons used in ministry.

This does not mean that you cannot engage in the process of connecting with potential NAVs until you’ve mastered language! For local leaders that do speak English or that you can fumble through conversations with basic language, you can still spend time connecting and networking. Meeting leaders is also a great way to stretch your language learning and motivate yourself to improve by preparing for those types of meetings in a different language.

Network With Leaders

Whether you’re starting to learn language and need to have initial conversations in English, or you’re advanced in language and able to communicate fluently, the next step is to network with many national or near culture leaders. These can be local pastors, ministry leaders, or lay leaders, but the emphasis is on connecting with leader-types, as we are looking for NAVs! These leaders might be potential NAVs themselves, or might connect you to other leaders who are NAVs.

How do you meet these local leaders? This can range from cold-contact showing up at a church (if possible) to having other expat missionaries connect you with local believers. Conferences and trainings can be places to meet many leaders in one place. One CPM practitioner we know moved to a new area and decided to contact nearly 200 churches on facebook in his region with a simple message about desiring to learn from their church about what they do in disciple making. In Thailand, we had a long-time missionary connect us with two main churches when we asked, “Who has a vision for disciple-making and church planting? Could we learn from them?” These are still our team’s main two partners after 9 years!

Obviously, if you’re in a creative-access country, you’ll need to be much more discerning in how you meet these local leaders, for the sake of their safety. Additionally, there will be areas in the 10/40 window that have a very low number of local believers, but very few countries that will have none at all. You could potentially find near culture believers from a nearby country in the region that has a larger number of believers and more available access to them. As the world is increasingly globalized and peoples move from place to place, mobilizing near culture believers to some of the least reached places could be an extremely effective approach, or at least likely to be more effective than Westerners entering these closed countries. Whatever your situation, think creatively about how to connect with national or near-culture leaders. Of course more connections is a bigger pool of leaders to filter, but remember – you only need to find 1 NAV, one ‘Paul’ in order to start a movement! Even finding one or two local believers to partner together with in the work can greatly increase your effectiveness.

When you get connected with these leaders, have a posture like Barnabas! Humble, others-focused, serving. If you’re younger or newer to a country, you can lead with, “I’ve heard amazing things about your church or ministry – I would love to buy you a coffee and hear your story and learn from you!”

Once you’ve secured a meeting with them, here are some things you can do during that meeting. This is just an outline, so follow the Holy Spirit’s guiding! You’re looking to see if that leader has the characteristics of a potential NAV, but in particular you’re looking for a vision to make disciples or plant churches. Even if the other characteristics are not apparent or possibly have yet to emerge, it’s likely that a leader with outward vision can connect you to other outward-focused leaders that they know.

Ask Questions to Learn About Them and Their Vision

After short personal questions and introductions, we almost always lead with the question, “What is the vision that God has given you?” One pastor that we asked this question to in southern Thailand said, “I’ve met many missionaries, and you are the first to ask me what vision God has given me. They normally want me to join them in their vision!” It may come out of a personal excitement or vision for CPM that God has given them, but many earnest missionaries may lead with sharing their own vision instead of coming in with an empowering approach. This can result in national leaders not wanting to work with us! 

We’re looking for outward focused ministry visions, not just a desire to add to their own church or ministry. For this particular pastor, he said, “I want to see a church planted in every province in southern Thailand – I believe God has given me the responsibility to see the gospel go to all these places!” Good start! Another Muslim-background believer (MBB) NAV that we partner with said, “I want to see 1 million Muslims come to faith in my lifetime!”

When we asked this question to the head church planting pastor of the network we partner with, he literally pulled out a multiplication table from his pocket. The Lord had given him a vision for multiplication to see 33,000 churches planted throughout Thailand. For context, there’s only about 5000 churches currently in the country. All of these are great examples of potential NAVs with big vision! Some of these leaders with great vision ended up being ready to receive training and help towards catalyzing CPM, and others decided to pursue different paths. That’s fine and not every leader with a big vision will end up being someone you partner with. But having externally focused vision for God’s glory – in evangelism, making disciples, multiplying churches, or reaching peoples and places – is a necessary component that we’re looking for during this investigation process.

Other questions you can ask include how they came to faith, about their current church or ministry’s history or current goals, asking about their family or hometown, or about a mutual connection that you have. In general you’re trying to learn how God is moving in their lives, get to know them in general, and build rapport and relational trust along with discerning if they have an externally focused vision.

One more note about the Barnabas approach is that our personal conviction is to honor the local church and generally try to preserve unity with other Christian leaders, even if we don’t end up partnering with them. Other leaders have legitimate and wonderful ministry visions from God that might be to rescue women in sex trafficking, start schools for marginalized children, develop online ministries, raise up more worship leaders, or any variety of visions, and these are all great! We don’t chastise or shame them for goals that God has given them. But we are looking for these apostolic type leaders that want to explicitly pursue the Great Commission, who have a Romans 15 vision to bring the gospel where it is not known. Again, for earnest and apostolic missionaries who are excited about CPM, we can sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot by perhaps unintentionally shaming other leaders that don’t have a similar vision to us. But as 1 Corinthians 12 tells us, no part of the body can say we have no need for other parts. And that the local church is the bride of Christ who is to be cherished (Eph. 5:29-30). We see in Scripture and we find in our experience that honoring all the parts of the body, including the traditional or ‘legacy’ local church results in a good reputation with leaders that leads to opportunities to partner with others. In short, don’t burn bridges! We’ll have a future post about how to “speak church” and communicate in an honoring way with leaders in the local church about CPM.

Share About Yourself and Vision Cast for Movements

While every conversation will be different, we’d encourage you to mostly ask questions, listen, and learn from potential leaders, at least for the first couple of meetings. However, you should share at least some about who you are, what God has called you to, and your vision for movements! In vision casting, we recommend that you listen well in order to shape your vision cast to the things you hear that they are passionate about. If they’re passionate about sharing the gospel, vision cast about how CPM helps believers sow broadly. If they’re passionate about raising up leaders, share about CPM is focused on empowering and developing lay leaders. After hearing their vision, we will ask a follow up question – what’s your approach or plan to get to that vision? How is it going? From their answers, we are looking for a felt need that we can meet with CPM training.

As we mentioned in the ‘Why Be Barnabas’ post, many times as believers from the West we have a low credibility in evangelism, but a high credibility to other believers as a trainer or leader. Our experience among Thai believers is that they are drawn towards our story of how God called us to be a part of the Great Commission – leaving our families, jobs, homes to obey God and see the gospel go to every people. Share your story!

Also share briefly about movements and gauge their response. As you hear about what their felt needs are in pursuing the vision God has given them, you can share about what you’ve learned in Scripture about multiplication and about what God is doing around the world in movements. 

As a reminder, when we meet with these potential NAVs, we are looking to see if they fulfill all or at least some of the NAV Definition: a National Apostolic Visionary who is willing to be flexible in their methodology and is surrendered to God. If we meet a leader with big vision who is a die-hard Alpha Course or G12 advocate, they might not be a great fit yet to partner with. If we meet a leader who has external vision and is open in methodology but he and the people in his church are too consumed with executing the Sunday worship service to have time for evangelism and disciple-making, we’ll keep the relationship with them but we might spend more time with other leaders who are more open.

As an example, here are some points that we’ll share in the vision casting component:

• Share briefly about how God called us to go overseas.
• Emphasize that we believe that Thai believers are the ones that will be best in reaching their own people, and that we believe our role is to support and come behind them.
• Introduce movements: “Before we moved to Thailand, we learned about an amazing thing that is happening all around the world through multiplication called Church Planting Movements. It follows the principles from Jesus’ ministry and the book of Acts, and it’s bearing much fruit in many different places around the world.” Here we’ll share a brief story of some movements that we know and the impact that it’s having in multiplying disciples and churches.
• Explain that we have some simple and Bible-focused training to help believers make disciples and plant churches in a simple, reproducible way.
• “Would this be something you’re interested in?” And gauge their response!
• If they want to learn more, we might draw a framework of the process and explain it in more detail – we use a framework called the Multiplication Cycle, and others might use Four Fields.

Connect with Other Leaders in Their Network

After hearing from them and vision casting, we’ll ask – “Who are 5 other leaders that you know who have a vision to multiply and might be interested in this? We would love to connect with them and learn from them as well.” After a few meetings, hopefully you will have a potential NAVs list of one or two dozen people to meet!

Build Relational Trust

A key learning we’ve discovered in trying to find and develop relationships with NAVs is that Trust = Relationship + Credibility. When we find a potential NAV who we think is someone that we could partner with, we want to build enough trust with them (in both directions – us trusting them and them trusting us) to engage in a new type of ministry and be given the opportunity to train them and their people. If you have high credibility, whether from previous movement experience, seminary degrees, or even just being older and experienced, you don’t need to build as much relationship. If you have low credibility, you’ll need to spend more time and effort to build relationship with these leaders to gain their trust. For many new goers to the field, you’ll likely have low credibility, so be willing to build relationship through spending time with these leaders and their people or church, through humility in your approach, and through serving like Barnabas! 

In the early days of trying to build trust with our current partners, we were 25 year olds who didn’t have seminary degrees and hadn’t seen much movement fruit, so we spent significant time as learners and in relationship building. This was primarily during our language learning season and according to people’s bandwidth, but we attended small groups, helped serve in various ministries in the church, and had a lot of meetings (and hundreds of texts!) with leaders to learn and vision cast. Over time, as our partners have seen fruit, we are increasingly invited and requested to meet with other local leaders who are hearing about what God is doing through our partners. Thai leaders will now quickly invite us to train them and we have to be discerning about how we spend our time, which is a good problem to have! As our credibility has gone up, mainly through our partners, other leaders are quick to trust us.

As an example of building relationship to gain trust, we heard a story of one CPM practitioner who knew of a national ministry leader that oversaw 400 church planters in India. Over a span of 10 years, whenever he was in this national leader’s city, he would ask for a meeting and ask how he could help. He would assist with various needs like providing educational materials, medical supplies, or Bibles, but whenever they met, this goer would have a posture of humility and heart to serve, knowing that this church planting ministry leader was clearly a NAV. After nearly 10 years, the national leader asked, “I know you want to be involved in church planting but you have never planted a church. How do you think you could help me?” The goer replied, “We have some simple methods for church planting we’d like to try – give us your newest, most immature, most troublesome church planter and let us try partnering with him for 18 months.” Through that ‘immature’ church planter, they were able to catalyze a movement – and he ended up inheriting the leadership role of the national leader and overseeing the entire ministry.

Especially if you are starting out in trying to find new partners, be willing to serve and do anything to gain trust if you meet a key leader who you think is a NAV. Pray and discern from the Holy Spirit who you should spend your time with! The above story is not to say that it will take 10 years to build enough relational trust to partner with someone, but that it’s all dependent on God’s timing! You can’t control if it’s in year 1 or year 10 that God connects you with the NAV that He desires to use to multiply. But you can control your approach and your posture of humility and serving. One of our CPM coaches told a story of how they invited their main partner to an early CPM training. Our friend literally ran into this national leader on the street and said, “Hey! We are doing a training about church planting this weekend, would you like to come?” Later on, the national partner shared with this practitioner: “Honestly, when you invited me, I thought – what do you have to teach me about church planting? I have planted several churches and you haven’t planted any. But because you were kind to me, I came to your training. And God revealed a way to multiply churches through this training!” They are now seeing exponential growth and multiplication all throughout their country.

Conclusion

Hopefully these are some helpful steps and examples to help you begin to connect with potential NAVs and build relational trust with them. In our next post, we’ll share a general process and scoreboard that will help you filter down to the best NAV candidates to begin partnering with.