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If all we do is start a church to reach that unchurched community, that's nice but it doesn't get us where we need to go. We need to see the community transformed; we need to see the world transformed.

If our goal is transformation of the community or a city somewhere in the world, evangelism is the strategy, not the endgame. That's crucial. If my focus in church planting is just reaching a lot of lost people, then I can have a big building and when 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 people show up, I've done my job. But if the endgame is kingdom transformation, then I've got a whole lot more that I'm calling them to do than just, Come and hear me preach; now that you're converted, be nice and be moral.

So we're not really starting a church for Keller; we're starting a church for the world. Now to start a church for the world, it's got to be effective in Keller. We've got to build a base, which creates resources and connectivity and all that.

I don't think any church is a legitimate church if it's not engaged with the whole counsel of God, and the whole counsel of God is the whole world. When you say we're just here for our community, then basically you've said we're just a holy huddle. That's not a church. I don't think a church has the complete DNA of what God has for it if it's not engaged with the rest of the world.

Engaging the world sounds like a good thing for megachurches, with all their resources. What can smaller churches do?

When God does something really cool, he generally takes something small and someone unheard of and little-bitty nobodies who never dreamed that they were going to be names or anything else. They were just moving in obedience, but they were powering their lives into it because they believed in it. Here's what I've discovered. Guys with ten talents sit around showing them off all the time. Guys with five talents feel too comfortable. If all you've got is two talents, you're going to play those babies or starve. So you take what you've got and use it.

I want to win the whole world, but I will not win the whole world as an individual or even as a single church. That commission wasn't given just to me or just to my church; it was given to the whole body of Christ. What we've [too often] done is taken the Great Commission and vocationalized it or financed it—which means you've got to be big or well-known [to accomplish anything]. We've taken it out of the hands of most church members and definitely most churches, which are smaller.

Here's what we tell our new church plants: "In the first year, I don't care if it's just you and your wife, as the church planter, you are giving 20 bucks a month to some new church. And if you're a year old, and you've got a year's worth of counsel and encouragement that you can give some other church planter, you can meet with him once a month."

Furthermore, in that first year we want them to identify a place in the world to work. We don't want them to go to easy places or open places. We want them to go to hard places. We want the pastor and the laymen to get on a plane and take a trip to one of those places. And from there it begins. Generally they start doing one thing, and then it evolves into a lot more.

Aren't "hard countries" by definition almost closed to Christians?

There are no closed countries, but some are closed to our methodology. There's not a nation in the world where Christians can't go as servants to society. If they want to go and pass out tracts—no, that's not going to happen. If they want to be underground missionaries—good luck in some of these places. But if they are willing to serve, there's not a country on the face of the earth that you can't go to as a humanitarian. And here's what's cool. Generally health, education, and social services—those are three things represented by members in every single church, even smaller churches.

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July 2007, Vol. 51, No. 7