Hawaii is a fitting place for a pastor like Wayne Cordeiro. One of the first things you notice about him is his smile: it glows like a Pacific sunset. But even in a paradise-like climate, people are in need of the Savior. And Cordeiro, 47, has devoted his life to helping people connect with Christ.
In 1994, he left a thriving congregation in Hilo, Hawaii, to plant New Hope Christian Fellowship O’ahu in Honolulu. During its first four years, the Foursquare church grew from 70 to more than 6,000 weekend attenders. Today it’s listed as one of the fastest-growing congregations in the U.S.
New Hope was founded on the unextraordinary notion of people putting their natural gifts and passions to work for the kingdom of God. But the results have been extraordinary.
Using the concept of “fractals,” Cordeiro has devised a radical yet simple model of discipleship—he calls it “doing church as a team.” LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Edward Gilbreath recently spoke to Cordeiro about his vision for building churches and disciples.
You tell pastors to become “dream releasers.” Why?
Because I love helping people discover their gifts and passions, and see them used for God’s glory.
Every person has a dream of what they can be. But too many Christians are going to the grave with their dreams locked up inside and unexpressed. Many are releasing some of their dreams in the marketplace because that’s the only place they can dance or play guitar or use computers.
As leaders of the church, we have to change that and say, “Wait a minute, that dream needs to be expended for the advancement of the kingdom of God. That’s how it’s meant to be.”
Does focusing on “my dreams” lead to a self-centered rather than God-centered faith?
Not necessarily. There’s always a personal sense of fulfillment when you can give away life. We all start, as babies, taking life, needing life, having needs. That’s just humanity. But there’s something deeply fulfilling about giving of ourselves, because God wired us that way.
Whether you’re a Christian or a non-Christian, God’s the same designer. He put the same circuits in you as he did in someone who doesn’t know him yet. But in the beginning, usually all our arrows are pointed inward. Even when we go to church, it’s still inward: “God help me.” “God give me a promotion.” “Give me this.” “Give me that.”
If we’re not careful, we can go our whole life with our arrows pointed inward.
What we as pastors do is help people turn those arrows outward, so that the person is not a cul-de-sac of God’s blessings, but a channel, an avenue through which God blesses others and brings glory to himself.
Then, as God flows through you, all of a sudden you say, “That’s why he created me the way he did.” And lights start turning on, and circuits start to work.
How do you help people discover the joy of selflessness?
I use a lots of parables and stories. Otherwise, you become a lecturer saying, “You’ve got to do this and that.” And people are tired of that.
People are not tired of the gospel; they’re tired of tired presentations of the gospel. Jesus used parables and spoke to people in such a way that they would catch deep spiritual truths. People can swallow a huge pill of truth when it’s in a compelling parable.
For example, I hold up a sponge and say, “If you put this sponge under a faucet of water, within a few minutes it’s saturated. But what if I left that sponge under the faucet for another five minutes? Will it receive any more? No.
“What if I left it under there for a whole day? Would it receive any more? No. How about if I left it under there for a whole week? No more could be absorbed.”
Then I say, “What do I have to do for the sponge to regain its absorbency? I’ve got to squeeze it out. Then its absorbency returns, and it sucks up water again.”
The point? “That’s how God created us. Some of you have become saturated. You’ve received so much you feel like you’re not receiving like you used to. Ah, I have a wonderful discovery for you. It’s time we squeezed our sponges—and that’s called serving. When you do it, the absorbency of your heart is restored. Things are not boring anymore. It’s fresh, vibrant.”
With a little metaphor like that, people’s minds click, and they “get it.”
When did you first realize your sponge needed to be squeezed?
As a high schooler, I tried to play guitar. But I was an amateur—I’d learn only a chord a month. At that rate, I figured I’d be 72 years old before I could play in a band.
Then one day a leader in a band that I had dreamed of playing in asked me to join. I said yes in a heartbeat. Then he told me that we’d have tons of summer gigs, and that I had two months to learn 30 songs—the lyrics, the chords, everything.
I was not deterred. I ate those songs up. I breathed those songs. I practiced till my fingers bled, because I wanted to do it so badly. I learned so much in those two months because I was using what I learned. Prior to that, I’d had a love for guitar, but without active involvement, my growth was minimal. I grew more in those two months than all my previous years.
Using your gifts with and for others accelerates your growth. God created it that way so that you will grow as you are serving.
You work with organizations until they run like a machine. The only problem is that machines don’t grow; they don’t mature.
How culturally diverse is New Hope?
Hawaii is a melting pot of every ethnicity there is. We have a large group of Asians representing China, Japan, and the Philippines. There’s also a huge Polynesian population. And then what we call haoles, or Caucasians—Europeans or people from the mainland.
So there’s every color in the rainbow. We love it. It pulls from every culture.
Do you minister to multiple cultures at once? Or do you identify a particular culture and use that to embody the gospel?
Some say you’ve got to use a certain culture’s mores and style in order to reach that culture. And I guess there is a Polynesian culture here in Hawaii that everyone joins into no matter their background.
We have no problem drawing from all the different cultures. We use the dances of the islands. I’ll sometimes speak Pidgin’—a Creole language that we use in Hawaii. Other times I’ll switch to Japanese.
I think a lot of times Christians go into a church, look around, and say, “Not enough Asian” or “Not enough whites” or “Not enough blacks.” But the Lord never said to go to a church where everybody looks like you; he said go to a church where everybody looks like him.
I’m Japanese, Portuguese, and Hawaiian. And with this ethnicity, I have a gift for reaching Pacific Islanders. I believe the reason he gave us different skin colors is because we each have different assignments. You’re going to reach different people than I am. And so God gave you a different earth suit, as it were. But on the inside, we’re all from the same hometown.
What if your “assignment” is to people who don’t necessarily look like you?
When I got to Honolulu, I asked the Lord to give me the keys to this community. Because you can go through a door with a blow torch, or dynamite, or you can find a key. All the above will work, but I’d just as soon find the key and minimize the damage.
And so I said, “Lord, help me to find the keys to Hawaii.” And he began to reveal some things that would help me speak a language the people understood.
In my studies, I learned about one of the first missionaries who came to Hawaii back in the 1830s. A huge revival broke out under this man, Titus Coan.
He came to the Big Island and settled in Hilo, which was a sleepy town of 10,000 people. He loved the people and wanted to bring the gospel to them so much that he learned the Hawaiian language and spoke his first sermon in Hawaiian in three months.
When the Hawaiians saw his attempt to speak in a way they could understand, even though he would make funny mistakes, it so touched their hearts that they began to come in droves.
Within a few years, sleepy Hilo had swelled to 25,000. People were moving there just to hear the gospel in their language, in a way that they could understand.
I was reminiscing about that as I was standing by Coan’s grave in Hilo one day. I looked up to heaven and said, “Lord, help me to do the same thing, to speak your Word in a way that the people of Hawaii and the Pacific Rim understand.
“I don’t want to be answering questions nobody’s asking. Let me hear the sound of the people’s hearts and speak in a way they understand.”
One of the most unusual cultural forms used during worship services at New Hope is hula dancing. What meaning does hula have in the Polynesian culture? What message does it convey?
It’s multi-faceted. Traditionally hula was used as a welcome. When ships would arrive, the dancers would come out and do a welcome hula. When the kings would come, they would be honored with hula. Yes, it would also be used in worship to native gods. And at times it would be used with sexual overtones.
Well, when the missionaries settled in, fearing those associations, they banned all dances, throwing the baby out with the bath water. At that point, the people of Hawaii began to feel their identity was being taken away. It wounded them. And so, even till this day, in some history books missionaries are not viewed in a very flattering light.
So, we decided to take the hula and redeem it for the King of kings and use it to welcome the people who are on a journey in search of the Lord.
Another core aspect of making disciples at New Hope is doing church as “fractal teams.” Where did that come from?
I had been to many seminars on organizing church leadership, and much of it was borrowed from the marketplace, which generally implies you work with organizations until they run like a machine.
The only problem, I found, is that machines don’t grow; they operate, they require grease, but they don’t mature. I wanted to have a church that I could grow with, that would grow beyond me, and that I did not have to worry about, because it would be in order.
The Lord uses the body as a metaphor for the church. And if he chose that as a metaphor, I think it behooves us to study that carefully. It’s a brilliant metaphor.
As I looked at human anatomy more closely, I noticed something: from brain cells down to your fingernails, the DNA structure is the same throughout your body. There are repeating patterns in certain cells that, if you look at them under a microscope, look like little triangular shapes or oblong rectangles that just continue to repeat again and again, up to infinity.
When I mentioned this to my friend Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth With a Mission, he told me he had heard a speaker talk about something called fractal patterns. There’s actually a mathematical equation for these repeating patterns.
It’s like a fern. You’ll notice a fern has a stem and then singular leaves off the side, left and right. Now if you take one of those singular leaves off the left or right, you’ll notice there’s a major stem with singular leaves off each of them. You see the same pattern repeated over and over. Likewise, your body has major arteries and smaller arteries off of those. Everything repeats.
I wondered how I might apply this fractal pattern to leadership. So I organized our church in a repeating pattern, where growth is downward like roots from a plant. We started building teams in groupings of five (up to ten if team members are married).
You are not a cul-de-sac of God’s blessings, but a channel, an avenue through which God blesses others and brings glory to himself.
How do fractals work in a church?
Well, let’s take children’s ministry as an example. In doing church as a team, my first step is not to jump in and start working with the children. Instead, it’s to build a team of four leaders, with whom I will serve. That gives us a team of five people with similar passions and gifts.
Each of these leaders will then do the same thing in whatever their specific area of children’s ministry is. So, for instance, the nursery leader finds a team of four people with whom she can serve. The first- and second-grade leader finds his team of four. And the pattern goes on and on.
As each leader does this, it just keeps multiplying. The leader disciples downward, but he or she is also being discipled from above. The growth continues, and it falls naturally into discipleship groups.
How has this changed your ministry?
Even now, at about 7,000 people, I have less stress overseeing that size of a church than I did when we were overseeing 300 and I was chaotically trying to control everything. Now we can grow. Everyone has a small group, and they’re serving and being served; discipling and being discipled. And everybody has a place in ministry and the same DNA. What I do with my four, they do with their four, and so on. The DNA keeps filtering down.
Do you intentionally introduce specific content into the system? Or is what filters down generally intangible?
I will introduce intentional teaching in the area of discipleship and spiritual growth. But what’s primarily inculcated are values, the core values that we hold as important to the church.
You’re going to have different tints and colorations of ministry, and you don’t want to dictate or control that. That’s just a natural part of what the Spirit is doing. But if you and I have the same core values, then you can have a whole different tint in your ministry, but the same DNA will be going through it.
How do you keep your goals in line with what your people can realistically accomplish?
It depends on whether I’m trying to get them to serve my purposes or God’s purposes. If I say, “Just do my thing,” they’re going to get tired, and they’re going to do it out of respect for me or just to placate me. If I’m not careful, though, I may end up trying to make them in my image. And that’s dangerous.
The best thing a leader can do is ask: “What are your gifts? What has God called you to do?” The shelf life is greatly extended when you place people where God wants them to be and where their gifts and passions flourish.
The traditional way, of course, is you’ve got a thing that needs to be done and you just need a warm body to help. People are excited to jump on the bandwagon, but soon the waves can crash. I want them to be fueled by the Holy Spirit, not merely by adrenaline or loyalty to a leader.
How do you get the menial tasks done? Nobody’s ever had the spiritual gift of stacking chairs, but somebody’s got to do it.
If you ask my 12-year-old daughter what she wants to do when she grows up, she might not know yet. But as she grows she begins to figure out a bit more about her gifts and passions, and she moves to computers or teaching or whatever.
As people come into the church, there’s what the Bible calls going to “the foot of the table.” Don’t go to the head of the table. Go to the foot and be willing to serve, be willing to do menial tasks. Although God wants you to ultimately have a very specific and significant kingdom ball to carry, the character necessary to carry that ball has not yet been developed.
And in the course of serving in these tasks—stacking chairs, sweeping floors, whatever—you’re going to burn off some dross and develop that necessary character.
Statistics show that most people think they’re too busy. How do you get people who already feel overbooked and overcommitted to a point where they willingly offer their gifts to serve God’s kingdom?
Yes, everyone is busy, even the kids. But you’ll notice that if there’s something that you really like to do—say, fishing—you make time for it.
I play soccer. I still play in a Tuesday night league. I love soccer. I can be busy as can be, but I’m going to play soccer on Tuesday night. What we have to do is increase the value of the kingdom in our people’s hearts. And once an activity’s value is increased, they’ll make time for it.
How do you do that?
In the traditional way of doing church, it’s “You just got to put in time” or “It’s your duty.” Well, in that model, church becomes one of the many responsibilities that I have to contend with every week. We can’t do that anymore. That kind of leadership doesn’t work in today’s environment.
Instead, we have to find out how people are wired and then help them become what they want to be for the sake of the kingdom.
Once you line up a person’s gift with his or her ministry role, then you get people who love doing what they’re doing. They’ll want to make time for that.
Does this model translate to smaller churches?
It’s really the same. We did it right out of the blocks when we were planting this church. We started with about 15, went to 30, and just kept people involved.
You might not have the fractal pattern. That could come later on, but you can start with the same mindset of building leaders. You can do that with two people. As it grows, you’ll need more organizational structure, and that’s when the fractal concept may be helpful. But before that, no matter how large or small the church is, it’s the heart of the leader that says you are incredibly important to the kingdom of God and you’ve got gifts inside of you that need to be released.
So in a sense, the pastor is an interpreter of dreams, and a developer of teams that can fulfill those dreams.
That’s it—for God’s glory. Their dreams might be caged in through character flaws, insecurities, or maybe past woundedness. But I’ve got to somehow untangle that web. That’s why I’m called as a shepherd. That’s my role—to untangle that mess so that their dreams and gifts can be released for the sake of the kingdom. And when people are moving in their area of giftedness, there’s maximum effectiveness and minimum weariness.
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
