That's just human nature. It's easier to believe God for somewhere else than it is to believe God for where you are. It's easier to believe God for the past or the future than it is to believe God for the present. But I would say, if you believe God for somewhere else, and you believe God for some time else, you don't have faith at all, because the only place where faith can be exercised is right here, right now.
Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations. About the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, our guest today is Phil Moore, author of the book The Forgotten manifesto of Jesus. Phil is a former mega church pastor in London who went through a major shift during the
pandemic. See, Phil was leading this thriving church, doing all the things that we're supposed to do to grow a big, successful congregation. But then COVID hit and everything changed. Why? Because Phil started asking some hard questions. Is what we're doing really working? Are people continuing to be disciples of Jesus when all of the props and the programs aren't there, is this the way that Jesus wants us
to make disciples. What Phil discovered by connecting with leaders in disciple making movements in places like Iran and India completely upended his approach. He realized the key to mature disciples of Jesus isn't about gathering big crowds, but about empowering everyday believers to make disciples. Who
make disciples. It's a radically decentralized, reproducible model, as Phil will share when we rediscover the simple, revolutionary teachings of Jesus in Matthew 10 and Luke 10, it has the power to transform not just our churches, but the very way we think about the Great Commission. This is a conversation that could be a real game changer for how discipleship works in the body of Christ. So join us as we learn how to make disciples. That make disciples. Here is my
conversation with Phil. More. Phil, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me.
It's really great to be with you. Thanks for having me. Give me
a little bit of OF YOUR story leading up to COVID and the pandemic, and then what shifted for you in COVID?
Yeah. So, long story short, I'd been a pastor for about
20 years. I'd been leading in various churches in the UK. Most recently, I leading a church for about just over 12 years in London. We'd gone that transition from picking up a legacy church and replanting it, and going multi site and seeing rapid growth. And, you know, attending all the church conferences that many of your listeners will be familiar with, where you talk about, how do you cope with growth? How do you generate growth? And I'd kind of been in that that stream for a
long time. We'd seen God do some great stuff. It's important when you tell your story, that you remember the good as well as the bad. I think actually, God was doing some great stuff. But then you've mentioned the pandemic that for me was just an amazing opportunity to take a step back and to ask questions of myself, is what I'm doing working and to ask bigger questions of God is what we're doing in the UK for me, or in the West more generally, are we doing what
you've called us to do? God and if and if we are, why isn't it working better than it is? Yeah,
I think that's, uh, that's such an important question to ask. And what a gift that is, in a difficult situation, in a horrible time, to be able to step back and say, oh, is what we're doing working? Is this the right thing to be doing? We should be doing that all along, right? Asking God, what's going on and how are we How could we do better? But what are the what are some of the things that you that God was telling you during that time? What was the assessment?
Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's a really good question. It's important that I'm that I let you know I was really happy going into the pandemic. I wasn't thinking, hey, what we're doing is not working. If you'd stopped me, I'd have said, Really, I'm living the dream. You know, the church had grown far more than I deserved, and we were seeing lost people saved. You know, we had people come into the church wanting to learn, how do we do it? It's not like we were we
were struggling. We literally had church leaders coming to our church to say, how can we imitate what you're doing? So it's important to kind of say that up front, maybe, maybe I'm just not very. Reflective. But until the pandemic forced me to reflect further, I really thought we were doing really, really well. I guess, like many multi site churches, we'd
experienced some conflict. You know, for a multi site, you have to recruit kind of alpha type leaders who are like, yeah, they're the go getters that are going to reach communities. And then you get these alpha leaders, and you say, Oh, and by the way, you're part of this bigger thing, so you can't actually make as many decisions as you thought you could. So So I guess on one level, we'd already seen some of that, the inherent tension of multi site church. But no going into the
pandemic. I thought, hey, we're doing really well. Come on, God, stop this really annoying COVID 19 thing so that we can get back to what we're doing. But a few things happened quite early on. The first thing that happened was we discovered that a number of people, and this won't be unique to me, a number of people who are coming to the church. And we thought, Hey, these are good disciples of Jesus. They couldn't cope with the pandemic, so when we took away the props and programs, they couldn't
follow Jesus without them. And to me, it was like when you watch these kind of epic, kind of medieval movies where, like the you know, like Henry the Fifth, where you've got, like the English and the French, they fire arrows at each other often. What would happen in those battles is somebody would get killed really early on in the battle by like this, this volley of arrows. But because they were standing in battle formation between their friends, they would often stay standing for
the entire battle. It was only when the battle ended and everybody walked away, you discovered, oh, wow, this person's been dead for the last three hours. They were just packed so so tightly with others around them that we thought they were standing and were were alive and well and fighting the battle. A lot of people were like that. When the props and programs disappeared, we discovered actually, these people haven't been born again. They're not spiritually alive. They're coming because they
enjoy the program. We preach some great sermons, we tell great jokes. We're a nice community. We're a great place to bring your kids. If you are a married person with a family in our church, Hey, there. You're going to enjoy married life and being a parent a lot more. We discovered actually a load of people we thought were were disciples of Jesus, just
weren't. And when I came to God about this, and I was just saying, What's going on here, I felt that he led me to Matthew 15, verse 13, where Jesus says everything my father hasn't planted will be uprooted. And I felt like God said to me, you know, I'm just showing you what the final judgment will be like, ahead of time, I'm showing you that a lot of what you've been doing is not being spiritual. It's just been carnal. And then, on the other hand, and these people worried me even more.
There were a load of people that when I was contacting them as a concerned pastor, saying, how you doing? Are you coping? They were saying, Do you know what? Do you know? What? Phil, I'm enjoying walking with God more than ever before. I I don't have to go to all these meetings. I'm not I'm not part of the program anymore, and I've kind of stepped off the hamster wheel, and I just feel like I'm really enjoying fellowship with God. And I think those people alarmed me even more I thought myself.
And, you know, the staff team of pastors, we're we're working ourselves to the bone to try and help these people to grow in their walk with God. And these people who are true disciples, they're actually telling me that they are able to enjoy life with God more without the program than they are with the program.
So obviously those two things together a load of people we were propping up who I don't think were really born again, and a load of people who were genuine disciples, who were actually able to follow Jesus better without what we were doing. That was just a really stark reflection.
You saw that there were people that were real disciples, and your your props and programs weren't actually enabling and helping them be disciples, and then you were propping some people. People People were just propped up. They were really dead inside and without the props and programs, then they fell over, and they weren't really being discipled. So how did you go about learning something different, learning something new, like, what does it look like then to make
disciples? When all of the programs, all the props, all the stuff is gone, they could stay and they could be a disciple, yeah,
well, again, this is just God being gracious through the pandemic. I think as church leaders, we all hated the pandemic, but God was definitely gracious, and it was a gift from God to us. And during. The pandemic, we all discovered how to do video calls on various apps. And of course, once you've made that step, it's as easy to talk to someone 7000 miles away as it is to talk to someone in the next street. And so I'm asking these questions about, How do you actually make
disciples? And I came into contact online with people in in kind of non western nations who were doing that. And, you know, I guess we'd all heard for quite some time about rapid church growth in India, in Iran, in other parts of the world. But of course, these were mysterious people. We'd never meet them. I'd flown to India, ironically, to teach people how to do
church. Great, you know, because there's some weird colonial throwback where even though the church is growing rapidly in some parts of India, they still fly people in from from the UK to teach them how to do it. Even though our churches are
declining, we're in trouble. And so I connected with some one particular church leader in India who just began to explain to me what was happening in his network of churches, how even though they're in Hindi fundamentalist and Muslim fundamentalist areas, they were seeing rapid, rapid church growth, 1000s of new churches
every quarter. And he began to take me back to the scriptures and just to say to me, if things aren't working where you are, maybe, maybe this pandemic, is an invitation to go back to the scriptures and to ask God to teach you. And so that was the
next piece in the puzzle. Was coming into contact with people in other parts of the world, and I guess for the first time in my life, developing a bit of humility to say to people in these these parts of the world, which are less developed than the West economically, but definitely are more developed than the West spiritually, and actually saying, instead of me coming in and speaking at your conferences, can I just Get on a zoom call and just listen to you, and just hear what you're
doing, and even hear what God has said to you through the Scriptures, so that I can find some lessons from what God's doing, where you are to help me where I am. Great
humility for somebody like you. You've written lots of commentaries, you've dug deep into the Bible. You've been reading the Bible for many, many years. You've been teaching the Bible for many years, and then somebody from another part of the world you're saying, Oh, just let's look again. What does it look like for us to read with fresh eyes, for discovery, to discover the truth that is actually in the
Scripture. What does fresh eyes look like, and how does that work when you have been seeped in the Bible for so many years?
Yeah, well, it's hard to do. It's hard to do although, you know, I have written commentaries on the Bible, and one of my reflections would be a lot of what we do as Western commentators is we write chapter after chapter about the disconnect between what the New Testament says and what we're
actually experiencing. So I think even in writing the commentaries, I think that had grown a bit of a dissatisfaction within me, because I really do believe that God has got a master plan for history, and I do believe it's it's not happening like he said he would in the West. Or at least, at least, I'm not seeing, you know, there's blessings and curses. I'm not seeing the blessings that God promises in the West.
And you know Jesus in John 17, when he prays to his father and says, Father, I've completed the work you've given me on earth to do well. That that therefore causes me challenges when I'm writing a commentary on Acts, chapter one, verse one, and Jesus, you know, talks about Jesus continuing his ministry today. Why is it that Jesus is able to say, I've completed all you gave me in the first half of his ministry. But I couldn't look around me in Europe and say, Hey, Jesus is completing
his ministry. That there were lots of clues to show me that something was wrong. And I think it was just talking particularly to this disciple making movement leader in India that that made me just face up to the to the fact that maybe the problem wasn't at God's end, it was at my end. So questions like, if the Great Commission matters so much to Jesus, do you really think he would have left it up to us to work out how to go
about it? Obvious answer no. And if he didn't leave it up to us to work out how to go about it, where did he tell us how to go about it? And so these leaders, you know, essentially, a big part of their message is, we call it the Great Commission, because it's not the only Commission. In the Gospels. There are three commissions. The Great Commission is Jesus saying, go make disciples of all nations. But of course, before that. He gives two other
commissions. In Matthew 10, he commissions the 12 to go in pairs to the towns and villages of Galilee, and he gives them 42 verses of really detailed instruction how to go about that commission. And then, six months later, in Luke chapter 10, he gives a second commission to the 72 others, sends them out in pairs to the towns and villages of the rest of Israel and says, here's 24 verses of detailed instruction how to go about it.
And when you read them, well, this is a repetition of what you said in Matthew 10 to the 12. And so I guess one of the big things that these disciple making movement leaders in the East would say to us in the West is when Jesus says, go make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you. There's a general sense in which that's true. To be a disciple is to be someone who obeys what Jesus
commands you. But there's also a specific sense in which Jesus is saying, hey, it's the end of Matthew's Gospel. I'm not going to give you a repetition of Matthew 10 and Luke 10, because it's not going to fit with the, you know, the ending of the gospel. I want to end here on a high but obey everything. I've told you. I've told it you once in Matthew 10, I've told it you a second time in Luke 10. Just the instructions for the Great Commission are to be found in
those first two commissions. And that was probably one of the biggest things, which I learned from these eastern brothers and sisters, is is actually Jesus has told us how to go about the Great Commission. If we ignore His commandments, we we we can't act surprised that things aren't happening like he told us it would. But if we're willing to go back and do what Jesus told us to do, maybe we'll start seeing some of the fruit head tellers we would have. So that
begs the question, what did Jesus tell us to do? What's our commission? Then
I'm glad you asked me that, because I've just published a book, as you know, called The Forgotten manifesto of Jesus. And just to reassure people, I haven't dug something up. Sometimes people write this a book saying, hey, the lost message. And like they've discovered the Book of Mormon or something, and there's all these additions to the Bible. That's not what this is. The Forgotten manifesto of Jesus is Matthew 10
and Luke 10. And I've basically tried in the book to to do justice to the people I've met in these says, mainly Iran and India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, people who are who are living this out, I've told their story. They asked me to, it wasn't my idea. They said to me, Phil, we've seen you've written some, some books. You obviously know how to write to the Western world. You're obviously all right writing English. We're not we're Iranian, we're Iraqi, etc. But please, would you tell our
story to the world? But more than that, they've really wanted me to share the insights God's given them into Luke 10 with the world. And so I, I try and explain, what does that look like. So you're asking me to put it in a nutshell. I'll do my very best. You don't have to
put it in a nutshell. We could actually just start, let's, let's go a little bit. And so as they started to unfold, Matthew 10 and Luke 10 for you, and you discovered for you. Then, then, what is the first discovery that you had as you walk through Luke 10? Well,
I guess the idea of the person of peace lies at the heart of both Matthew 10 and Luke 10. In Luke 10, Jesus refers in Luke 10, verse six, to looking for the son of peace, which it's a technical word. It's actually used. It's a Hebrew word used in the Old Testament, in the book of Jeremiah and in the psalms, to describe a key ally, or like a co worker. So when David laments in the Psalms, hey, my this guy who I shared bread with has turned on these betrayed me. The phrase he uses is the son of
peace. So Jesus says, You need to go like, pray that like the harvest is plentiful, the workers are few. Pray that God will send out more workers into the harvest field, and then his solution to the prayers of His followers is go looking for a son of peace. In Matthew 10, he calls him a worthy person. So I refer to a person of peace, because in reality, in Iran, two thirds of these church leaders
are women. So I don't want to say son of peace and and kind of ignore the fact that there are many daughters of peace out there as well. But what, what, what seems revolutionary to me is that the workers in the harvest field are actually within the harvest field. If we want to see rapid expansion with the gospel, we want to see a gospel movement reaching unreached people, then actually, the key Jesus teaches us is not just to mobilize church people
to go on a mission week. It's to go and find people within the community who already have a social network, who already have credibility. They're insiders within their. Community, go and find those people and trust that the Holy Spirit is going to make them sons of peace, allies, fellow workers in the harvest field. For me, that's absolutely key, because it it totally transforms what you're trying to
do. You move from trying to mobilize reluctant Christians on a Sunday morning to going into the harvest field, believing there are people in whose hearts God is working that has made them open to the Gospel, hungry for the gospel, and the type of people who are going to rapidly share the gospel with their network of friends, that has totally revolutionized the way I view what it means to be a Christian missionary. I think
that one of the most key verses for me that actually lifts all of the weight off of my shoulders of evangelism, which I think sometimes can be really heavy. John 644, and 45 where Jesus says to His disciples, nobody can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws them Yes. And then in 45 he says, anybody who's actually heard and learned from the Father will find me. And so it's revolutionary for me, because I get to find those people that the Father is drawing and then start to work
through them. So, you know, talking through and I think people of peace is is more of a discipleship through mentality, where we're discipling through this person of peace so that they could disciple others. And then a a typical western church is a discipleship at right? You get to gather 1000 people on a Sunday morning and preach it a good sermon, and hopefully things will will work in there, you're gathering people around
yourself. That's a That's a huge difference when you first started to see this key phrase of person of peace and knowing, oh, it's discipling through other people. What did that do to you? And what did that do to your heart,
well, it sends you into a bit of a crisis, to be honest, partly because I'm a good preacher. I love preaching. The bigger the crowd, the better. I've preached to crowds of 1000s, and I love it. And so this really challenged in some ways, my sense of identity, because I I loved being the leader of a church where I gathered lots of people to hear my voice. And as you say, this is discipleship through people. It's servant hearted. It's you
know. I mean, I, no one in history has devolved authority as much as Jesus, when He says to His disciples, you will do greater works than I've done. I mean, he's the son of God, and yet he's really clear, I've come into the world to create many more brothers and sisters, Romans, 829, my purpose is I don't want to remain the only begotten Son of God on my own, I want to create a nation of sons and daughters of God, and I want to work through them. I want to do greater works through them.
So on one level, it put me in crisis, because there I am leading a church and no longer believing that what we're putting our time, our energy and our effort into is what Jesus is actually calling us to do worse than that, actually beginning to believe that some of what we're doing is mitigating against the mission of Jesus. So again,
we're in the pandemic. And I know it's hard for us to remember back three, four years ago, but like in the UK, the British government had a had a quarantine policy where basically you had to stay inside your house. You weren't allowed to go out, because otherwise you might infect somebody else. And we used a lot of terminology that may have been used in other nations too, about the R rating. The R rating was how many, how many, how reproducible you were.
In other words, if people come into contact with you, how much are you going to infect them
with what has infected you? And the parallels just hard to shift that the devil's done a great job of taking Christians who have received the Holy Spirit, who are heirs of the kingdom of God that, you know, they really are change bringers and the devils found a really good way of basically quarantining them together in a church building where they won't just be on a Sunday morning, you know, they then they may be there three, four evenings a week, you know, at various ministries that are
going on, you know, on a on a Saturday, they may be involved in other events. You know, they may actually just be, you know, spending most of their social life with people in the church. For me, leading a church of over 1000 people, there were people in the church who really had no friends, who weren't in the church. There were enough people
in the church. Church, for the church to be their social life, and just the parallel of of the devil trying to reduce our our factor, you know, with like we weren't reproducing, because the thing I was doing in order to make disciples was stopping the disciples we had from going and making disciples. So when that happens, you're faced with a pretty tough choice, I think, as a as a church leader,
yes, it's a very tough choice. So if the the thing that you were doing was stopping the disciples from making other disciples, give me a story of something that's going on in Iran that actually enables disciples to make disciples in a in a place that is highly persecuted. The government does not want Christians around. They can't have a big church building and do these things. They have to meet in homes. What's the story
of of Iran? What are they doing so that they can enable disciple making to take place?
Yeah, well, I hope we don't have to get to this point, but I can tell you what happened. We we really believe. Romans 828, you know, God works in all things for the good of those who love Him. And in 2014 the Iranian church, yeah, was having some impact. You'd expect it to have some impact. You know, living under the ayatollahs regime is pretty unattractive. It's it kind of shows Islam in its least attractive form. So already the Iranian people were, I would say, ready for a move of God.
But actually there wasn't rapid turning to Jesus until 2014 but what happened was the Ayatollah suddenly became a bit alarmed by what he was hearing about, even even the the level of church growth that there was before 2014 and he issued a fatwa in 2014 basically decreeing that every church In Iran must be
shut down. It became illegal overnight to hold a Christian gathering, though there were western style churches, you know, the traditional denominations, even kind of American style denominations in Iran, overnight, they were shut down, and the Christians were forced to go underground. And when I talk to leaders of the house churches in Iran today, one of the most striking things they said to me was name the greatest evangelist of the last
25 years. And I'm like, was it Billy Graham, or is that kind of after his time? You know, who was it was a Reinhard bonker. And they were like, No, without any doubt it was the Ayatollah, because he did for the church what no pastor had been able to do. He forced the church out of its buildings. He forced the church out of you know, the kind of evangelistic strategy which most of us are pursuing in the West, which is essentially, invite a friend to come to
church on a Sunday. Well, they couldn't do that, and he forced the church to its knees, and Christians began pleading with God, you know, the church is going to die in our nation. What's the strategy? Show us what we should do? And it was through this that God led them to Matthew 10 and Luke 10, the so called forgotten manifesto of Jesus in my book. And so that lies right at the heart of happening in Iran, that they are not trying to invite people to church on a Sunday. They don't
have church on a Sunday. They're meeting anytime in the week in a house or, you know, even a public space, right under the noses of the authorities. But their plan is they, they will actually, you know, I've talked to them about, how do you invite people into what you're doing? And they say, we don't. We will meet a person of peace, and we will encourage them to gather their friends and their family to go on a journey of discovery through the Scriptures with
them. And yeah, if story 234, a friend of theirs says, I want to join them. Fine. We say you can join, so long as you know you help your friend to catch up, because we're going from creation to Christ here they they need to have read the stories you've read, otherwise they won't understand the story of the scriptures. But by story 5678, if a friend says, Hey, can I join your group? I hear you're getting to know God, the answer is no. The Iranian believers say no, no, you wouldn't understand
we've gone too far. But I'll tell you what? If you gather your friends together, I'll come to your house and we'll start the stories with you and your friends. So the whole thing is not about inviting people in. It's all about inviting yourself in. So it multiplies quickly. Nobody is saying, Come and join my church gathering. Everyone is saying, Can I come to where you are and gather your family and take you through these stories
from the scriptures? So that you can come to know God better for yourself, and as a result, Muslims that they would never cross the threshold of a church. Because everything instinctive about the way we do evangelism is to say to the non believer, come into our safe space. Come into the place which is going to require you to make a big change. Instead, they're going into the non believers safe space and saying, let, let me do the changing. I'll fit in with
you, and we'll see what. We'll see what will happen with you and your friends.
It seems like one crucial thing that we have forgotten century after century after century, is that in the Old Testament, God told the Israelites, I want to make you a nation of priests, meaning I want all of you to be priests with my presence and Peter, it says you're a nation of priests. We then forget about it. We have, you know, we have 1500 years of the church. Martin Luther says we need the priesthood of all believers, we actually then forget about it
for 500 years. What does it look like for us all to be priests? What is the priesthood of all believers look like? And how are we all disciple makers? How do we carry the presence of God with us so that we can make disciples? What is, what is the importance of the priesthood of all believers in all of this, yeah,
yeah, it's vital, isn't it? I mean, if you were the Devil attacking any one doctrine, this would be the one you'd attack, because the idea of a multitude of people truly stepping forward to become royal priests in the order of Melchizedek, you know, united with Jesus Christ taking the gospel to the world, the devil shakes in his boots at the idea of that. So what does a priest do? Well, the Old Testament describes what a priest does.
They go into the presence of God carrying the names of the people of Israel on their heart and on their shoulders. That's what we read. And so I've learned so much, actually, about the importance of prayer. I used to pray before getting about the work. What I've realized is no
no prayer is the work. In fact, in both Matthew 10 and Luke 10, Jesus says the harvests are plentiful, the workers are few, therefore pray actually, his, his, his main response for the believer is become a priest, coming into my presence and praying. So I'm learning, even now, I'm learning about what it really means to bring somebody into the presence of God as a
priest. And so, you know, I could tell you some stories about prayer, but it also means to go out from the presence of God feeling like you are equipped to be a priest, that you don't need the authority of some denominational leader to do basic Christian tasks. So, you know, talking with a friend of mine last week, he he's a disciple maker in Iraq, he met a person of peace in an Iraqi
village. Began reading stories with this Muslim who came to faith, who then started sharing with his family, with his friends. Actually, there's about 15 of them in the village who've now come to faith and say, phoned my my Iraqi friend, and said, Guess what? The 15 people in my house church all want to get baptized. Will you come and baptize them, please? So my friend said, of course, drove to the village. They went down to
the river. My friend baptized the leader of the house church, and then got out of the river and said, Now I've baptized you. You baptized the members of your house church. Like I've just never been involved in something like that, where in order to do the baptisms you, you, you don't need to have gone to Bible school or seminary. It's, it's really like John three, where it says Jesus was baptizing people. Brackets, actually, Jesus wasn't
baptizing anyone. It was his disciples or one Corinthians, where Paul says, oh, yeah, I baptized people in Corinth. Brackets, I can't actually remember baptizing anyone, but yeah, maybe the house sort of Stephanus, but I don't really think I baptized anyone else. Yeah, that's not how we operate. And yet Jesus said, Go and make
disciples, baptizing them. So rapidly, giving giving authority over like last week, one of the house churches that I've been able to plant since I was on this journey, I was able to sit in the room. And just to say, Guys, who's the leader in the room here? That isn't me. You know, I have an exit plan, like as a traditional church leader, I didn't have an exit plan. I had a retirement plan. But, you know, the church owned part of my house. They paid my salary. There was no way I was going to
leave. At church. This was all about how I would stay and the church would get bigger. But everything I'm doing now, like I'm a temporary fixture, I'm scaffolding. I'm helping this building to be built, and the sooner I can be gone, the better. And so I'm able to sit in the room and say, Guys, I'm scaffolding. You know, I'm not, I'm not the long term leader here. God's called me to go plant other churches. Who amongst you, you who've come to know Jesus in the last two,
three years? Who do you think the leader in the room is? And praise God, they all said exactly the same person. And it was also the person I was planning to lay hands on and and commissioned to be the leader. So everyone agreed. And so by the time I left, I was no longer the leader of that house church. That's the kind of radical, uh, multiplication that I learned from the Indians and the Iranians. And if we're going to read reach the post Christian West, it's what we need to start
learning again. So
you're starting to see, see some things now you're actually there doing this work in London. You're trying to see this happen. You have this out search. You're giving away leadership already. You're trying to see multiplication take place. We have a lot of people in the West say, hey, that's great that it works over there, wherever there is, but it's not going to work here. What do you say to those people as you're actually entering into the work? Can it work? Is it working here? What's
really interesting is, in order to write the Forgotten manifesto, I talked to like I talked to house church leaders in so many different countries, some in the West, but most of them in the Islamic world. And what was really interesting is one of the guys in an Islamic country, he's a Western missionary and and he said, When I came to this Islamic nation, and, you know, I started telling the few believers that are here that this is how God wants to work. They said to me, this will never
happen in our country. It may happen in the West, but it will never happen in our country. And now I've seen disciple making movements in this country. I go back to the west and tell my sending church and other people in my sending country, hey, this is what God wants to do here, too. And they say, Oh, well, of course it happens in the Islamic world, but it will never happen here. I just think that's just human nature. It's easier to believe God for somewhere else than it is to believe God for
where you are. It's easier to believe God for the past or the future than it is to believe God for the present. But I would say, if you believe God for somewhere else and you believe God for some time. Else you don't have faith at all, because the only place where faith can be exercised is right here, right now. And so I would say anyone who's saying this wouldn't happen here. Listen to yourself. You are just like the
disciples. When Jesus said, open your eyes, why do you say four months more and then the harvest? I tell you, the fields are ripe for harvest. This is what Jesus kept on saying. But at the same time, things take time, and I want to be really honest, and I am not seeing movement in London, I'm beginning to see movement in
London. But if I were after short term growth, I would probably have seen more people come to know Jesus, if I'd carried on leading the traditional church, I've seen people come to faith, and actually, personally, I've seen many more people come to faith, but, but I I'm a drop in the ocean at the moment. Um, but everyone I've talked to who's seeing rapid disciple making movement around them, they talk about this gestation period.
They will say, No, actually, it's taken 234, even five years for us to begin to see movement, partly because God has to work in us. He has to sift our motive. He's not going to entrust movement to us unless we can be trusted. I think it's partly a prayer thing. We have to learn to pray in a different way. I think it's partly just like a habit thing I've had to unlearn so much, and I've constantly found myself falling
back into old habits. So I wouldn't want anyone to think, hey, Phil, seeing movement in London. No, I'm a couple of years into seeing movement in London, but I'm seeing enough green shoots for me to think I'm on the right lines. But I I I really think no one is going to see disciple making movement if they think, hey, Fillmore has written a great new paper back it looks like a great church planting method. I'm going to try this for a couple of years. You will. No, no, that's not a
good enough reason. The only reason for doing what I'm doing looking for people of peace. And expecting to see disciple making movement, the only legitimate reason to do that is a conviction that it's what Jesus tells us to do. And I've lost count of the number of times that I've grown discouraged in this battle, and I've found myself saying to Jesus, Jesus, I'm not doing this because it's a quick fix. I'm not doing it. I'm looking for for some easy
results. I'm doing this because you've told me to do this, and I'm either going to obey you or die trying. And so that's just a clear reflection of where I'm at. I'm seeing some amazing things, but I'm not seeing movement yet.
Well, I think what a beautiful place to be is say, okay, Jesus, I'm going to obey you. I'm going to say yes to you. I know Neil Cole says this. I thought I said it first, but Neil Cole always says, just listen to Jesus and DO what He says. And it's the thing that I go back to the most in my life and everybody, when they ask me different, complicated questions. The answer really is, listen to Jesus and DO what He
says and follow Him. And radical obedience is, is, is the key to move, move us forward.
You mentioned, you know the simplicity of the command. I think it's John, chapter two, verse five, isn't it? Where? Where Mary says to the servants at the wedding in Cana, Do whatever he tells you to do. I've really come to a conviction that that that is a missional verse, because, you know, if you read the detail of that story, Jesus is obviously doing more than solving a catering disaster like that, the
water jars he uses. We're told specifically, these are the water jars that were used by the Jewish rabbis for purification rites. In some sense, they represent the Old Covenant. And we know that Jesus teaches later about, hey, new wine must go in new wine skins, you know. And here we are, Jesus providing the greatest wine. And then the the the comment of the master of the feast is, wow, you've saved the
best wine till last. This is a missional versus basically saying to us in the West, you've got your traditional structures. If you want to see the new wine of the kingdom of God, something's going to have to happen. Those old wineskins are gonna have to be somehow transformed by a miracle of God into a new type of wine skin. And so this command, do everything Jesus tells you to do is not a throwaway comment. I really believe it lies at the heart of the Forgotten manifesto
of Jesus. Jesus saying to people, just do what I told you already, and you will see, you know, the fruit that I promised you you'd have.
I know that every context is a little different. Around the world, right? India, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, London, you know us here in Kansas City. I we were doing this type of work in Jordan, with Syrian refugees and seeing some some sparks of movement happen. Every context is different. But as you're hearing stories, what are there any common themes that are emerging? How is God drawing people? What is he doing? Are there any principles that we could extract that are are more universal?
Yeah, I definitely think so. I what I see in Luke 10 and Matthew 10, and what I really discover when I talk to people that are involved in in fast growing disciple making movements, is that they're not trying to do blanket evangelism. They are looking for the person of peace. And so this has changed the way I try and reach people. I'm not trying to reach everyone. I in fact, I don't
care if people reject me. It actually makes my job a lot easier if they reject me, because if someone's obviously close to my message, great, phew. I didn't have to read the Bible with you six times before I discovered that you weren't open. Now I'm looking for that person in whose heart God is working. That seems to be a really big factor, that these these people, they are willing to do what Jesus said and wipe the dust off their feet and move
on. So my perception on friendship evangelism in the West is it's a lot about friendship and very little about evangelism. And if you proclaim the good news to someone and they're not interested, you stick around because they're your friend. Stay friends with them, but but don't consider this evangelism anymore, because you evangelized and they said, No, you need to wipe the dust off your feet. Doesn't mean you
don't love them anymore. Doesn't mean you're they're not still your friends, but you have to go elsewhere. So I've just got used to saying to people, oh, well, you know, I've explained this to you. You're obviously not open right now. Here's my number. Anytime you're interested, contact me. I'd love to talk a little bit more, but I've told you this good news and you're
not interested. Interested, I'm going to go and tell someone who is I'm really up front with people and and we don't do a lot of that in the West like we are forever evangelizing the same people who've told us they don't want to be evangelized. Whereas I move on, and sometimes after I move on, months later, people get in touch with me. So let me give an example, just from
today. So there's a bar, a dive bar, near where I am, and it's, it's the kind of place where you go if your life isn't going very well on a Friday afternoon, if you're drinking in that bar, Matt things, your life has not turned out well. And so a few months ago, I felt, well, I want to go there every Friday afternoon. I'm going to go
there. I'm going to get myself something to drink, and I'm going to sit there, and there's a group of guys and men and women who basically just while away their Friday afternoons and evenings. I'm going to go and I'm just going to I'm not going to preach from a from like, one of the bar stools, but I'm just going to get to get to know people. And so I did. I kind of befriended them, got to know them, got to know their names, got to know about their lives.
One of the guys seemed a bit more open than the rest, so I I eventually did share a little bit of God's love with him. And really, I said to him, Hey, I've got these stories from the Bible, and I think they are exactly what you need for the struggle you've described to me. Would you like to read them together? And he was like, Nah, really, he made an excuse. And so in the end, I just said, you know, I said to him and the other guys in the bar, you know,
I I'm off. It's been, you know, it's been great spending time with you, but I want to share with some other people, I'm going. And last week, he got in touch with me, and he said, it's really interesting. I've been thinking about you, not seeing you in the bar. I've been missing our conversations. I had a dream the other night. It was about God, and since then, I've started reading the Bible, and I don't really understand it, but I feel like I should reach out to you and ask if we could read
those stories. He told me about so that was last week. Met with him. This week, I met with him a couple of times. He's, he's come to know the Lord. It isn't me,
it isn't me. This guy's this guy's heart was closed to the gospel, and something has happened in the intervening months that has opened his heart to the gospel, and we were literally sitting down together just just now, before I came to talk with you, we were in the bar, reading the scriptures, talking about what God's doing in his life, and talking about how he reaches all the other people in the bar. And we made a
plan and a commitment. I said to him, I'm not going to be in the bar tonight with the friends. I'm going to be at home praying for you. You're going to be in the bar because you're the Insider. You're the guy with the credibility. Here's some ways in which you could share with them. So this is what God does when we look for the person of peace. That's
awesome. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Phil, this has been fantastic. This has been great. I want people to go out and get the Forgotten manifesto of Jesus, because the stories are incredible. Walking through Luke 10 is is really essential for us to get these principles down, to be able to make disciples. Who make disciples. But what is your hope for the people that pick up your book and read the Forgotten manifesto of Jesus,
well, my hope will be that they'll be blessed by reading it. And Jesus gives us a definition of what blessed means. He gives a lot of teaching to His disciples, and then he says, Now that you know these things, you'll be blessed if you do them. So I'm not after it being a best seller book, although, hey, I wouldn't mind that I'm I'm less interested in how many books I sell and how many people read it, and I'm more interested in what they do
with it. And so I guess when I came into contact with disciple makers in the east, I was a, you know, I was a traditional church leader, basically thinking this is a great evangelistic method that might help to grow my church a little bit more. And I think if people read it as an evangelistic method that might grow their church a bit more, I think they're missing the point. I think fundamentally, the book
is a call to repentance. It's a call to sit at the feet of Jesus and to say, Jesus, we've been going about the Great Commission wrong, which is why we're not seeing the fruit you promised us we'd see and like the Pearl of Great Price, like the treasure in the field, we're willing to give up all of our cherished traditions in order to do what you've actually told us. And so that would be my prayer, not just that people would buy it and read it, but that they'd read it with that kind of heart.
This is not just a great evangelistic technique that might grow your church a little bit more. No, this. This is a call to radically rethink what we're doing, to say to Jesus. Uh, if you know the question I started with, if the Great Commission matters that much to you, Jesus, Surely you've told us how to go about it, and if you have told us how to go about it, everything's on the table. I'm just willing to change anything in order to do what you've told me to do. That's my
prayer. People will be blessed by not just being hearers of the word, but doers also
Amen. I'm pray that that happens, and many people pick it up and go do it, put it into practice. Phil, a couple quick questions. One, if you go back your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Well, I would, I would ask them to read this book. And I so wish I had. I really wish I had. I feel like I wasted so many years, like doing something Jesus didn't tell me to do. But at the same time, I actually think my 21 year old self wouldn't listen. I think I would have been too proud. I thought I knew what I was doing. And you know what? I wonder if maybe there's actually a time where God has brought us, not just me, but us as a western church, to a place of humility.
I I think when I was 21 I think we still thought if we could make our churches a bit more seeker sensitive, hey, revival will come. That never happened. You know, I had such a Field of Dreams mentality, even to the church I was leading. If I build this amazing thing, the loss will come. I think God's been working in our hearts these past 2030, years, and he's brought us to a collective place of humility. So I would tell myself to read this book. I think I
wouldn't listen. And I think God has been at work in our hearts. And I really hope that together, and there'll be some 21 year olds listening to this podcast, I think maybe there's a greater humility that we even have as a body of Christ right now, I feel like this may be a moment where God has got us ready to say, Yes,
amen. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend,
oh, all sorts. I've been reading a book by Steve Smith called spirit walk. He's a disciple making movement leader. He died a few years ago. But before he died, someone asked him, would you write down, like some of your biggest lessons? And essentially, what he writes is, is, is, you know, no matter how much you learn from League 10, If all you've got is methods, then it's just a method. The Holy Spirit is the the hidden mover behind every
movement. And if, if, if you want to see the methods become more than just the methodology, get to know the mover, the mover behind movement. And I've just found Steve Smith's book, spirit walk, so helpful. That's
fantastic. I love it. I will probably now just pull it off my shelf and give it a read again, because it's so good. It's amazing. Phil, how could people go out there and get the Forgotten manifesto of Jesus? Where else would you point people to? How could they connect with you? Yeah, if
they want to connect with me, I've got a website, fillmorebooks.com which will give them my contact details. So if people read, you know they're listening. I need to talk to Phil. That's how to get hold of me. Fillmorebooks.com there's a contact form. I'm pretty good at replying to emails most of the time. In terms of finding the book. You know, all good
booksellers will have it. If you can't find it in a secular bookshop, it will be on a you know, your your favorite Christian bookshop, but certainly you know, the number one place that people are going to for books in the West. I'm not going to say their name, it's on there. They can go and buy it.
Perfect. Well, Phil, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for your humility. To step back and to ask a question, what has been going on in my church, and is it working? Is what we're doing, what God is asking us to do, and then going and having the humility to learn from the global church and seeing what is happening. How are they making disciples? What is the move of God and the Spirit of God doing
around the world? And then, how can I actually see scripture with fresh eyes, and how can I look at what Jesus did and gave us in the commissions so that we can go out and be a part of the Great Commission and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded. And guess what? He's with us through the whole thing, which is amazing. And so thank
you for this. I really enjoyed it, and I hope people pick up your book, but then put it into practice and actually do this and disciple through people. Find those people of peace, see where the father is drawing people, and then start to work through them. And not just gather them to yourself. So thank you. It was fantastic.
Hey. It's been a pleasure. Great being with you.
You.