Transformation: Discipleship That Turns Lives, Churches and the World Upside Down

Community Development
Integral Involvement in the Community Culture
and Morality

Does God care about the taxes that the poor pay? God led one of our young mothers, who happens to be a very successful corporate CPA, to do tax preparation for free in an area where most people living there couldn’t afford it. One of her first clients was a lady who came in holding her children with one hand and last year’s return with the other. Last year, she paid the tax preparer $300 and received a small refund. This year, she paid nothing and was able to land a refund of over $6,000. Was God glorified? Do you think it had an impact on this lady?

What would God have a church do for a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old whose mom died four years ago with breast cancer and dad died six months ago after a massive heart attack? Leave them with their grandmother and a house falling apart? A group came together from NorthWood to do an extreme makeover on the home. Each week, they take them meals, clean the house, and do other things to help them. As those children get older, what impact will that have on them?

A public school principal accepted Christ at NorthWood and became involved in community service. One day at a board meeting, she heard two school administrators having a conversation about how a church has partnered with an inner-city school (they were talking about her church, NorthWood). They were shocked at how well a school and a church could partner to impact a community.

These are just three stories, but there are countless others. From building Habitat houses, to English as a second language courses, to carnivals, to building projects at public schools, to medical clinics, to support group ministries—it goes on and on. You are limited only by the creativity of the people you are serving.

We recently had a fall festival at an inner-city school. Two agnostic teachers were openly making comments like, “I’ve been all over this place, watching and listening to these church people … and this is a different kind of church. They’re truly out here for the community and have a desire to just love people.” This is the kind of impact we want to make.

What If a Church Turned the World Upside Down?

Isn’t it ironic that America is growing churches by the thousands each year without transforming communities at the same rate? We believe we are evangelizing people, yet not making a dent in the culture’s predominant morality. It makes one wonder, What are we really doing? In contrast, entire communities during the period of the early church and the Great Awakening were shaken to their moral and cultural foundations.

If local churches viewed themselves as missionaries, both locally and internationally, imagine what could be done! In my home state, there are approximately 5,000 churches in my denomination alone. What could God do with just 2,000 churches across the nation that really went for all or nothing? How can it be that Coke and Boeing can do what they’ve done in America and all over the world, while the church, armed with the power of the Gospel, has such little impact from here to the far corners of the globe?

Acts 17:6 says, “These men [i.e., the disciples] who have turned the world upside down have come here also” (RSV). That’s a fascinating verse and an intriguing idea. Paul and company were literally turning the world upside down. Not just in their generation, but for the next 21 centuries of human history. Christianity would not only change the eternal destiny and present condition of countless lives, but it would also be the primary contributor to the future world order. Faith and learning would soon impact science, philosophy, business, politics, government, education and nearly every other field of study.

Considering the odds of success and their limited connectedness to cultural and religious power structures of the day, it is truly a miracle that those early believers accomplished what they did. Throughout history, many good ideas and philosophies have come from better known and much more educated people than the disciples. But guess what? None of them “stuck” better than this one. What was humanly impossible became divinely inspired.

The same call to take the message and life of Christ to the world and demonstrate a new way of living that brings hope to lost humanity still exists. Yet, except for a new Christian or the hubris of the young, few people legitimately believe that they can transform a community, much less a nation. However, if we understand what it means to be a kingdom church and live in that context, we realize this is the very function of the church.

A church that learns to church the area and influence the community cannot merely be a huddle or a gathering place to say kind things to one another. It will be an entity that is alive and powerfully spreading out in all directions.

For example, the church in China is turning communities upside down. There are reports now of Chinese going to other countries and people groups to make the message known. A recent report claimed Mongolian Christians (something that didn’t exist a few decades ago) have now grown to over 400 churches strong. Genghis Khan conquered nations all the way to Afghanistan! These modern day spiritual warriors have taken on the mandate of spreading the Gospel with similar speed.

If the Gospel were to spread at that clip in every community in the United States, what would it look like? One thing for sure, it wouldn’t look like anything we’ve seen in the Western church to date. While we are building gymnasiums and coffee bars, fighting for the church’s place in society’s culture wars, others are spreading the Gospel like wildfire and having an impact on how people are living.

Essentials for Impact

I believe five core elements are key descriptors of a church that will turn communities and eventually the world upside down. These things cannot be programmed; they are as organic and core to church identity as they are in China and other places in the world where the Gospel is touching entire communities. We will look at a couple of them here in Community Development and the rest in the next chapter.

1. A church that turned the world upside down would look mystical.
2. A church that turned the world upside down would look glocal.
3. A church that turned the world upside down would be multiplying.
4. A church that turned the world upside down would be collaborative.
5. A church that turned the world upside down would be filled with ecclektricity.

A Church That Turned the World Upside Down Would Look Mystical
When I say “mystical,” I mean experiencing God won’t just be a course in a Sunday school class, it will be a lifestyle. Things will happen that you never would have dreamed of, planned for or expected. The church today is paralyzed by one small word: wait. It calls for prayer meetings when it needs to take action. We see God moving around us daily everywhere we are, everywhere we go; the needs, the opportunities are there. We need desperately some Isaiahs that will say, “Here am I, Lord, send me.”

In the Old Testament and New Testament, prayer seemed to mobilize the people and lead them to make a difference. For some strange reason today, instead of being a power source, prayer is the excuse for not doing anything, always “waiting on God” to do something, but it never happens. “Wait” always wants more information to delay pulling the trigger. The church of the future will be characterized by a different word altogether: risk. Powerful worship empowers us to go where no one wants to go and do things we ordinarily wouldn’t do. An inner dimension of worship takes place within the lives of believers that moves them into a direction of incredible risk, courage and action.

By mystical I also mean miraculous. God will bring opportunities and resources into your hands simultaneously and from the most unexpected places and people. I am always amazed at the resources God has put in my hands. The miraculous nature of God moving the world is undeniable (Matthew 9:35; Acts 5:12–16). However, it generally isn’t the “charismatic style” and message of the Western church. It isn’t a mystical prosperity focused on health and wealth. In fact, that’s foreign to these people. Most of the stories circulating today in the East are about how God met a need in a divine way and touched a whole village.

A Church That Turned the World Upside Down Would Look Glocal
Most people think the Great Commission focuses on what is overseas; not so! It’s both local and global—it’s glocal. Len Sweet uses the word to describe culture. I use it to describe expansion and geography.

The traditional idea has been to first win your backyard, then focus on your own country, then go overseas. A Transformed World operates in all dimensions at all times. The Great Commission was not sequential steps, but dimensions we operate in simultaneously. It’s not Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria, then the uttermost parts of the world. But Jerusalem, and Judea, and Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the world. Locally, we do all we can as a church to reach the lost. It also means we acknowledge our style alone will not reach them all, so we start other churches to hit the other segments of the community. We also operate nationally in church planting and work overseas by adopting an unreached people group. We operate simultaneously in all the dimensions. At no other time in history has this been easier to do. Remember, it is doable!

Glocal also means both showing the love of Christ and sharing the love of Christ. It may mean doing a medical clinic in Laos and building a Habitat for Humanity House in your town. It may mean door-to-door evangelism or it may mean Meals on Wheels. It’s showing and sharing the love of God wherever you can.

A word of caution. Not everyone is going to operate in all dimensions, nor should they. However, every church should mobilize its people so that every member is operating in one of those dimensions—locally or globally. The people who get upset about all the overseas “missions” going on generally aren’t involved in that dimension at all! They talk about “not neglecting our own fields,” but they aren’t building the Habitat houses, much less being intentionally evangelistic with their neighbors. A church will never balance what it does stateside and what it does locally to some people’s satisfaction. The only answer is to stay on your face before God and then respond to what he puts in front of you. It then becomes less of a balancing act and more of a natural response to what God does.

Don’t squabble about which dimension is the most important; they’re all important. However, the more people that a church involves overseas, the more local impact in terms of giving and service results. Why? Those involved globally will come back changed, looking for a way to influence their world locally. In other words, the global must define the local or we will never get there, as Carol Davis once told me. I never understood that until I began to work globally. I thought they were two different things. They aren’t. When we stretch way out, what is closest to us is forever changed.

When Local and Global Merge

Occasionally, the two dimensions merge where local and global become the same. When that happens, it’s usually supernatural and always powerful. One summer after returning from an extended time in Asia, I discovered two families were involved in a local exchange-student program and expecting two students to live with them for the next year. The only problem was that they were from the very area we were working in—a “closed” country. It was a sensitive area, and we’d heard many stories and even knew of some friends who had faced difficulties there for being Christians. To make matters worse, we soon discovered the prospective students were from families who happened to be high government officials. One student’s father was almost as high up as one could go!

I was concerned because we talked about that particular area from the pulpit frequently to promote it among our people. Were these families willing to leave the church for a year in order not to threaten what God was doing? Nope, they weren’t! They felt as if God had called them to do this. So we came up with all these rules and said we’d experiment with it, but if it didn’t work, they’d have to visit another church. Some Sundays, when we had a special emphasis on that part of the world, these two families planned to leave on vacation with their exchange students! We even took down a lot of the art from that part of the world in our church so it would not create too many questions.

“We Never Felt God Like This”
The students weren’t required to go to church, but they did! The first Sunday in the States, they sat together on the front row sleeping from jet lag! I was carefully dancing around them, petrified I’d say the wrong thing and mess up things. One Sunday they announced to their host families that they wanted to meet me! I met them and spoke as briefly as possible. To my surprise, these guys then started going to all the youth functions! They went on every youth retreat and never missed worship.

One Sunday, however, things shifted, and I’ll never forget it. We were singing in worship, and the Spirit was moving. I glanced over at the youth “section” to see several were raising their hands. When I looked closer, I recognized one of the students lost in worship was the student whose father was a high government official, and his friend was next to him doing much the same. Their hands were stretched to heaven with tears streaming down their faces. My first response was, “Oh God, what if these kids become believers?” That was also my second response, “Wouldn’t that mess up our work?” Ultimately, I lost it. I fell on my knees and began to pray for them and their families.

Another Sunday after worship, they came up to me and said, “You know, we’ve gone to the temple all our lives, but we never felt God like this. He is real.” A few months later, one of the students said, “I told my father I wanted to be a Christian, and he told me I must think carefully and know what I am doing.”

A Key Conversation
My heart skipped a beat, and I told him we should sit down and talk at length. As God would have it, someone on our staff from that country was interning at the time, so he and his wife joined my family and the student at our house for dinner. We spoke for hours about why we believed there was one God and why we believed Jesus was the way to God. We shed many tears.

Finally, the student asked me, “Have you been to my country?” I had always avoided similar inquiries before. Finally, I couldn’t ignore it anymore, and I conceded I’d “passed through” it.

“I thought so,” he said self-assuredly. “I wondered how you could know so much about my country and why there were others here from my country. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I explained I had understood that people went to jail sometimes for being Christians in his country. “With your dad in the government and all, I didn’t want to go to jail!” I said.

It was getting late in the evening, but before he left, I drew a circle on a piece of paper and used the salt and pepper shakers to illustrate my question. I picked up the salt and placed it inside the circle, “This is you with Christ.” I then left the other shaker outside the circle: “And this is you without Christ. Where are you?”

He took the saltshaker and put it over halfway there. I asked him, “What is keeping you from getting all the way over?”

Perfectly matter of fact, he replied, “If I believe that, then I have condemned my family. I must go back home and spend my life telling them about God and how Jesus loves them.”

He was getting it. It wasn’t just his salvation (that incidentally would happen only a month later), it was the salvation of his family and country! If only Americans understood that connection. This is not Las Vegas. What happens here does not stay here.

More Than Acts of Kindness

This is glocal community development. It’s here, it’s there. It’s here and there. It’s back and forth and all over the place. It’s modern dance, not what we call the Texas Two-step! What often slows down the tempo is that Western churches think in terms of measurement units they can understand. We in the West equate building family life centers and church libraries with credibility in the community. Buildings relate to our infrastructure and give us significance. However, if these endeavors are merely giving our own members other opportunities to shelter themselves even more from the world and not affecting the community, what is the merit? Ray Bakke proposes that churches can actually flow out of ministry! Now that’s novel.

There are two approaches to community development: Start the church, or impact the community first through believers. This is the power of Steve Sjogren’s random acts of kindness. I’d probably encourage you to do more than just wash windshields. Look at long-term things that can affect the community.

Once I was at a brainstorming meeting about “missions” at a significant university where I am an adjunct professor. I made the statement that we needed to be not “missions minded” but “missional.”

Someone piped up with, “We’re doing some mission trips.”

I responded pointedly, “I’m not talking mission trips. I’m talking missional in core and in strategy. If you want to be mission-minded, give international students scholarships; otherwise they won’t be able to go to school. If you want to be missional, then start a campus in that country and help those people.”

That was the last I thought I’d hear about it until the president of the university called me into his office. He asked me if I’d be open to using my relationships with the two students from Asia to explore the possibility of beginning a university in that country. I agreed. I called the father of one of the students, who had come to dinner at my house that night, made the arrangements, and headed over.

Once I was in Asia, the authorities greeted me and treated me with great respect. They all knew I was a pastor. The student’s father asked me why I had never told anyone I was a pastor. I explained to him that I was afraid of being put in jail. He said we could keep doing humanitarian work in his country and talk to individuals as they asked questions about God. He gave me his card and told me if I had any issues, just show someone the card and there would be no more problems.

Something in our spirits and hearts knit—this was a good man who was curious about God. I felt I was with someone somewhere between Agrippa and Cornelius. Since then, we keep in touch via e-mail and have become friends. Not only did his child receive a scholarship to the university; he has opened doors for us if we wanted to open a school there, too. That’s another book on how we are structuring it! But one dimension of it is that we are going to try to educate as many of their nationals here as possible for them so that they can go back and teach in their home country. The students who come to live with our church families are in church every week!

The high schools are aware of the educational goals we have for these students, and many parents and teachers have opened their homes, too. What is happening here in our community has monumental potential for changing an entire country. It’s glocal!

Missions in Your DNA

When churches think of themselves as “the missionary,” it changes everything within the church. These are not churches that do missions; they are missions. It’s in their DNA. Churches must be willing to risk making mistakes because they are moving in a direction that the church hasn’t moved in since the church first began! What a great place and exciting journey! We are not merely growing a church and building buildings. We are growing the church through local churches reaching their community and impacting the world simultaneously!


Questions to Think About and Talk About

1. Why do you think people today view the church as “taking” from the community as opposed to giving and contributing to it?

2. What is the biggest need in your community that your church could address in order to make the biggest difference?

3. Has your church had a special service to recognize community leaders or won any special awards or recognitions for service? What might you do to increase this?

4. If you asked someone in your community who doesn’t go to your church what your church is “known for,” what would they say?


Bob Roberts Jr. is the founder and senior pastor of NorthWood Church in Keller, Texas, which has planted 130 churches in the United States and provides a variety of international development projects. The church’s ministry in Vietnam was featured in the September/October 2010 issue of Outreach magazine. He blogs at Glocal.net and has written multiple books, including The Multiplying Church: The New Math for Starting New Churches (2008), Real-Time Connections: Linking Your Job With God’s Global Work (2010), and Transformation: How Glocal Churches Transform Lives and the World (2006), all published by Zondervan.

This excerpt is from Transformation: Discipleship That Turns Lives, Churches and the World Upside Down. Copyright © 2010 by Bob Roberts Jr. Reprinted by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Zondervan.com.

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