Matt Chandler - Our Place and Message

Well, good morning! It’s always good to have someone excited with me. If you have your Bibles, John chapter 3 is where we’re going to be; we’re going to hang out there in verses 22 through 36. I want to set us up because I think this text is going to answer a question that maybe you’re asking, or maybe you’re not asking, but I’m going to answer the question regardless.

Okay, so right now, the Village Church and all of her campuses are doing something that the elders of the Village Church have just called «Multiply.» Multiply, we believe, is one of the things God has led us into. We are rolling off our campuses, and one of the ways that you guys, in particular here in Flower Mound, probably haven’t thought about it, is that we are replanning as well. So not only are all these campuses spinning off and becoming autonomous, but the nature of who we are and what we’re doing is also changing in this season called Multiply. We are rolling off our campuses; we are purposefully shrinking our church from over 10,000 to probably five to six here in Flower Mound—we’ll have to see how all of that plays out. We’re going from a twenty to twenty-three million dollar budget to—we’ll see; that depends a lot on you. Simultaneously, we are planting four churches, and so in the last month, Dallas has rolled off Mosaic and East Side Community to churches there. We are sending out and purposefully shrinking in a way that does not make sense if you look at all of this through the lens of the flesh, but if you consider what God has called us to and what He has asked us into, it starts to become more clear.

Now, I want to tell you a story. About seven years ago, I met a man named Rob Daniel. Rob came to this church not because he liked my preaching, not because he liked our music, and not because he thought this would be a great context in which he could grow and fall more in love with Jesus. He followed his girlfriend here, alright? That’s what happened. He came here because what is now his wife was here, and so I know who holds the power. There were complementary elements, but right, I know how it is.

I began to sit down with Rob Daniel, and I will never forget we were sitting at La Si and a Ranch down in Louisville. He brought papers with him, and he started sharing his heart to plant a church down in South Dallas among the least of these—that was his heart from day one. He had been here for a while, and so I just said, «Hey, come join us on staff for, gosh, I don’t know—let’s just give it a run for three to five years, and then what I’ll try to do as best I can is open up rooms and doors for you to see and understand more fully how a church, as an organization, runs.»

He came on board as our Connections Minister, and I’ll never forget the first Sunday he walked in. I felt like, man, I have to pull him aside after—it’s like, «Hey man, this might be a contextual issue, but I don’t know if that’s going to stick here, bro. There are a lot of white folks; I’m just not sure that’s going to work here.» Then the next weekend, he came out, and everyone did it back to him. To my shame, I had to be like, «Ubudak, I apologize; you go get it!» For five years, Rob was the Connections Minister here at the Village Church, and man, he just grew to be a beloved part of our family.

His time here always had an expiration date, and that expiration date is whenever—this is internal language we use around our church planters—until the contractions got so great that we knew that church plant was coming, whether we wanted it or not. So we always let those guys make that call. About a year and a half to two years ago, Rob began to say, «Hey, those contractions are getting stronger! I don’t think it’s South Dallas; now God’s giving me a heart for Louisville, and I really would love to plant a church in Louisville.» We began to work on what that would look like, where it was going to be, and how we were going to come around him with some more expedited training and access, just trying to come alongside him.

One of the things I’ve thought while we’ve been in this process is how often the Village Church presumes upon the Lord. Here’s what I mean by that: I don’t think we celebrate well. One of the reasons we don’t celebrate well is God is so stupefyingly good to us that we forget just how good He is to us. That kind of dampens our celebration, because when we ask, He’s always been so good to just give to us over and over in incredible ways. Now we just come to expect it; I don’t know why we just expect it. There must have been a thousand answers to prayer for us to be able to commission Rob Daniel in Christ’s Freedom Church, and God said yes to every one.