The Multiplying Effect

The 2004 Ashton Klutcher movie The Butterfly Effect drew from a chaos theory idea that a small event done in one place could have a much bigger effect somewhere else, such as a butterfly flapping its wings in South America could effect weather in Central Park. We're seeing what we should call The Multiplying Effect in church planting.

We're always faced in life with limited resources and unlimited needs and possibilities. This is particularly true in our service sensitive culture where serving others is one of the few agreed upon "good deeds" in our society. So, when a church is presented with the opportunity to fund and support a church planter the response we hear often is, "There are too many needs here at home for us to spend our precious resources somewhere else." The problem with this thinking is it ignores God's multiplying effect.

In just the past few weeks I've heard reports from church plants in the Kairos network providing two million meals (that's not a misprint) in Zambia, starting churches and schools in India, providing helping services to over 350 needy families and organizing recovery groups for people coming out of slavery (yes, this is not a misprint either) and human trafficking here in the US.

So, what if the churches that helped finance these new churches had said, "You know, we have too much to do here at home to help a new church start somewhere else?"

What do you think?