Eikon in the Future | 5 years from now

We are in the midst of a two week extravaganza for the ONE YEAR birthday of this blog. Week one is about my church plant, Eikon Community Church. Week two is a set of interviews with several church planters reflecting on their first 1-2 years.

So far this week we’ve had:

• Top 1o Posts from the last year
• Year Two recap of Eikon

Today is all about the future.

The last question I’ve been asking the church planters I’ve been interviewing is this: In 5 years, where do you think your church community will be? What will it look like? What has happened?

Today, I’d like to answer that question for my church plant.

As I posted yesterday, we finally have a foundation built on replication and multiplication. It took two years. We lost a lot of people, we gained a lot of people. But most importantly we’ve learned to disciple people through Huddles and that’s been the gamechanger for us. It takes at least a year, but somewhere between 12-18 months of being in a Huddle, people are ready to disciple others.

Or lead a Missional Community that will grow to a group of 20-50 people and then multiply.

It has not been a short, easy or painless process, but it’s one we feel increasingly good about, one where we have learned to listen to the Spirit of God and let him shape our community.

So the foundation is built. It’s there. We still have an unbelievable amount to learn, but we feel good about the start.

So where does this kind of foundation leave us in 5 years? What’s the trajectory?

In Richmond, it’s going to be all about multiplication.

In 5 years we should have somewhere between 30-50 Missional Communities. The way I’ve been thinking about it is this: However many subcultures there are in  Richmond is a minimum of how many Missional Communities we need. There are thousands within this metropolis of 1.4 million people. We need to seep into every crack and crevice of culture and see a Jesus community incarnated there. Because of that, these MCs will have unbelievable diversity and flavor to them.

We will become (and are already becoming) an incredibly diverse church. If we are reaching into all of these subcultures, we’re going to be seeing the poor, the rich, people with Masters and PhDs and high school dropouts; people with huge homes and people with no homes. Different races, religious backgrounds, socio-economic statuses…they will all be coming together when our MCs gather for worship. By putting the primary place of Identity within the MC and not the worship service, we will be able to bring these MCs together every-so-often to see a Sign and a Foretaste of the Kingdom because the MCs have been an Instrument for that.

It will be a slice of heaven.

It will not be easy. It will not be pretty. It will be incredibly messy. It will require massive sacrifice.

But this is the story our community wants to give their lives to.

There is more than that, though.

Currently we are multiplying disciples, leaders and Missional Communities. Soon enough, we’ll be multiplying our worship gatherings across the whole of the city of Richmond.

But there is more.

We need to start multiplying into cities.

Currently Eikon Community Church resides just outside the city of Richmond. In a little while, that will not be the case. Expressions of Eikon will spread to other cities and become a multiplying missional movement of networked churches. In the same way that we multiply and network our MCs, we will multiply and network these churches in various cities throughout the United States.

What’s started to happen is I’ve been discipling and coaching different leaders on the phone in different places in the United States and this is the question some of them are starting to ask: Could we plant an expression of Eikon in our city here?

Well…man…we don’t even know what that would mean or look like, but doesn’t that seem a bit like what Paul was doing in the Hall of Tyrannus in Acts 19?

I’m not saying this is set in stone or anything and there are tons of things to pray through, consider, details to iron out…but it’s looking like God is bringing us to a place where in the next 12-18 months we will begin an expression of Eikon in places outside of Richmond. Each of these cities will begin missional expressions of church that put discipleship at the center through Huddles and Missional Communities.

And how has this come about?

Simply by doing the same things we’ve done all along! Just disciple and invest in the people you feel God has called you to.

That’s it. That simple.

A few months back I wrote about how I would start a church from scratch if I could do it over again (you can read it here). This is what we these leaders I’ve been discipling and coaching are going to do in these cities.

So where will Eikon be in 5 years?

I expect that EikonRichmond will be learning to be a multiplying machine, with 5 years of experience under our belts in learning to multiply MCs and disciples. Having 30-50 MCs is not a pipedream. It’s the trajectory we are on simply by taking our time and building a strong foundation.

I also expect that we’ll have expressions of Eikon in 4-6 other cities, with each of them multiplying to other cities into the future.

We have said over and over that if we seriously disciple people, if they become more like Jesus, if we can discover a process that actually works in discipling them that we can replicate…well…the sky is the limit. Maybe Jesus wasn’t joking when he said, “You’ll do great things than me.” Maybe the early Church wasn’t the last time we’re going to see that kind of missional growth and multiplication over a sustained period of time.

Slow. Steady. Deep. Missional. Discipling. Spiritual. Relational. Movemental. Growth.

This is what I want to give my life to.

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