In our last two posts, we’ve defined what the “apostolic” is, and 5 essential elements of an apostolic leader. An apostolic leader needs to have all 5 elements of big vision, risking faith, foundation setting, leader developer, and surrender to God.

If you can find a clearly apostolically gifted, mature, national believer to partner with, that’s awesome! But, someone that gifted and experienced will likely already have many ministry responsibilities and it may take time to build trust with that leader in order to partner.

However, we are often looking for leaders with latent apostolic giftings that have not yet fully emerged. For one, I think apostolic leaders are relatively rare – there’s no research around this but talking to other CPM practitioners, generally the number is <10% of believers, if not <5%. Secondly, a fully mature apostolic leader is rarely available.

It may feel like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. But our encouragement is this: It only takes one.

All it takes is one national ‘Paul,’ with the vision, faith, giftings, and surrender to catalyze a movement that will change the trajectory of a nation.

In the early 2000s, the president of Campus Crusade in Thailand, Pastor Nok, used his significant influence to gather 80% of the pastors in Thailand in a Congress to ask the question, “What will it take to complete the Great Commission in Thailand?” From that, they formed the National Plan to see the gospel go to every district and village in Thailand. The churches that our team currently work with came through introductions from leaders within the National Plan.

I asked one ex-pat worker who knew Pastor Nok well, “What is his story? How did he come to faith?” He told me that Pastor Nok was the first Thai Cru staff ever, and that he was led to faith by one American Cru staff member named Chip, who only managed to win and disciple one Thai person to faith in 10 years in Thailand. That was Pastor Nok.

It only takes one.

But how do you find that one? How do you discern if they have the elements to be an apostolic, multiplying leader? What do you do with them to develop them and help their gifting and vision emerge?

Barnabas: Recognizing Hidden Apostolic Potential

Out of anyone in Scripture, Paul was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to be transformed and used by Jesus for his purposes. Often the apostolic leader may emerge from the most unexpected of places. Barnabas saw the latent giftings in Paul – that he had a miraculous transformation from a persecutor of Christians to a chosen instrument to bring the gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 9:15), that he immediately and boldly shared the gospel with the Jews in the synagogue (Acts 9:20), and that he needed an advocate before the disciples in Jerusalem that didn’t trust him (Acts 9:27). Eventually, Barnabas spends a year with Paul in Antioch discipling others (Acts 11:26), likely identifying and developing Paul’s strengths, before the Holy Spirit sets them aside for the first journey in Acts 13.

When everyone else saw Paul’s evil background, Barnabas saw his new transformation and calling.

When everyone else didn’t trust who Paul said he was, Barnabas advocated for his faithfulness.

When opportunities arose for new ministry, Barnabas went to recruit Paul, developing his giftings and maturity.

And when the Holy Spirit called them to be set apart to start a new work in new places, Barnabas was beside Paul as he stepped fully into his giftings as an apostle.

We need to be like Barnabas, to have the eyes to see the potential in latent apostolic leaders, and the ears to hear from the Holy Spirit how to help them fulfill their calling.

Indicators of an Emerging Apostolic Leader

When we are looking for these apostolic leaders, we are certainly checking for the 5 essential elements. We’ll ask them questions like, what is your vision? How did you come to faith? What does your ministry look like? What obstacles are you running into? And we’re listening for big vision, willingness to risk, methods that look like multiplication or at least are different from the norm, leaders that they’ve developed, and signs of surrender. But a latent apostolic leader may not have had the chance to step into pioneering ministry, and therefore may not yet exhibit some of these elements. Apart from directly evaluating these 5 elements, we’ve observed some other hints of someone having an underlying apostolic gifting.

They don’t need to have all of these indicators, and just having one doesn’t mean that they are certainly apostolic leaders. But if you see some of these, it may be worth building trust and listening to the Holy Spirit about helping these leaders emerge into their calling and gifting.

Black Sheep – Often, latent apostolic leaders can be seen as black sheep that don’t fit the mold of their church. Other words could be non-conformist, oddball, contrarian. They are still part of the flock, still a sheep, but different from the rest. Sometimes church leaders don’t know what to do with this person who rocks the boat and may have a lot of new ideas that others aren’t willing to do. Whenever someone in Thailand tells me that another believer is interesting / weird / eccentric / not like the others – my radar immediately pops up. The latent apostolic leader is dissatisfied with the status quo, and it can cause friction with people in the church because their drive and desire is to pioneer, though they may not have personally clarified that vision yet.

Failed Entrepreneurs / Not Afraid to Start Things / Flexible Methodology – “failed entrepreneurs” was often a phrase that we were coached to look for in identifying apostolic leaders. That desire to set foundations, without a clear vision of their calling, can result in starting a lot of new businesses, ministries, and start ups. This boldness and risk-taking demeanor could be indicators of an apostolic leader. When we meet new leaders, we also want to see if they’re willing to be flexible in their methods or if they’re strongly tied to some kind of program or curriculum. If they’re willing to try new things to pioneer, that’s a good sign. If they’re wanting to simply grow their own ministry flavor, we would probably move on.

Anointed / Fruitful – Even before Paul started on his missionary journeys, he was faithfully sharing and discipling in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Antioch. He boldly and powerfully proclaimed the gospel and made disciples. Many times, we can meet a person that is saying all the right things – that they’re excited about multiplication, that they have a vision to pioneer – but the fruit of their lives doesn’t reflect that at all. It could be that they’ve never been empowered or equipped, and then there is an opportunity to help them live out that vision. But often, there is a lot of exciting talk without the actual faithfulness and fruitfulness indicative of a leader that God desires to use. Given the choice between someone who says the right things versus someone who has the fruitfulness of disciples and a godly life, I am taking the latter every time.

Character Immaturities – I’d imagine Paul was pretty rough around the edges when he first came to faith. Although he was certainly humbled by his Damascus road experience, there was still much of his old life – the prideful, highly positioned, well-known persecutor of Christians – that needed to be transformed. Though some of the disciples in Acts 9 were afraid of Paul, Barnabas came and advocated for him, eventually recruiting him and developing him into the minister to the Gentiles that he was called to be.

Similarly, a developing apostolic leader probably has some character immaturities that might be signs of opportunity. Sinclair says “self confidence, overassertiveness, and independence” along with stubbornness and overcontrol could be some character issues that an immature apostolic might struggle with. Miley adds impatience and being overextended in their commitments. You can see in these developing leaders the innate vision, passion, and drive to accomplish great things for God, but without the humility, testedness, and surrender needed for them to succeed. 

An immature apostolic has probably had many people in their church exhort them in their impatience and roughness, probably almost condescendingly so – “you’re young so you don’t get how things work.” “It’s nice that you have big goals and new ideas but we have to be realistic.” Increasingly they can balk against authority because of their internal conviction and what the Spirit is stirring up. When someone validates the vision they’ve received as well as challenges them to grow in their leadership to meet that vision, we’ve seen apostolic leaders respond with eagerness. There is a great opportunity for a Barnabas-type leader to say, “I see the potential in you and love your vision. I’d love to walk alongside you to help you grow in your ministry and your walk with God to see those things happen.”

Jack of All Trades / Multi-Gifted – For a yet developing apostolic that has started some new ministry, you may see that they are at least competent, if not gifted, to do many different types of ministry – evangelism, leader development, teaching, shepherding, mercy, administration, etc. In the pioneering environment, it may be necessary for an apostolic leader to play a lot of roles to get things started and God empowers them to do so. But the opposite pitfall for a multi-gifted leader is to hold on to control because they are so competent at so many things. Which leads us to…

Releasing Authority – The apostolic leader is willing and quick to release authority. As new disciples grow in their maturity and gifts, the apostolic leader is quick to empower every disciple to step into their authority to make disciples and serve God. Over control by leaders is a major barrier to multiplication. Apostolic leaders understand that they will play an important role of spiritual parent to many leaders, but they are also active in helping disciples step out in faith to grow in their dependence on God. If a leader expresses too much hesitation in letting disciples take simple steps of obedience like sharing the gospel or leading a discovery Bible study without them, that could be a barrier.

In coaching movement practitioners, identifying a national partner with apostolic gifting is one of the most complex and difficult parts of the process and something we get the most questions about. How do I know if it’s worth investing in this person? Should I spend more time with person A or person B?

Going out to share the gospel takes boldness but it’s relatively simple and straightforward – people are interested to know more about Jesus or they aren’t. But getting to know believers, building relationship with them, navigating language and culture, discerning their words, their actions, their vision, and their character is an art, not a science. It takes a lot of prayer, getting to know people, trying new things, and failing forward repeatedly before you might find someone. Sometimes, we’ve partnered with people for 3, 4, 5 years before it becomes evident that they are missing an essential element of an apostolic leader. And that’s OK. We don’t think of that time as wasted, but as time invested in trying to find a pioneering leader and learning what that might look like in our culture and mistakes to avoid. It’s also never a waste of time investing in local believers to grow in their disciple-making.

Hopefully, knowing the 5 essential elements and some of the potential indicators of a latent apostolic leader will help you in the process. Some practitioners we know met their apostolic partner in their first ever training – hooray for them, really. We were relatively fortunate and found our partner after about 3 years of ministry, 5 years in country. Some people we know took 10 years and hundreds of trainings and relationships to find their partner. It’s up to the timing of the Lord.

But remember – it only takes one.

Reflection Questions

1. Do you have a personal bias toward or against any of these indicators? Why?
2. Consider the local believers that you know. Do any of them display these indicators or essential elements?
3. Do you know local believers that seem to “say the right things” but lack demonstrated faithfulness and fruitfulness? Why do you suppose that is? How should you continue to engage with this believer?
4. Where are some networks or communities that you could build relationships to get to know potential apostolic leaders?

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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.