Neil Cole interview - Growing God's Kingdom

Neil Cole is the Executive Director and a founder of Church Multiplication Associates. Neil has been in pastoral ministry for fifteen years and is an experienced church planter, author and consultant. Neil is also a founding leader of the Awakening Chapels and of Organic Church planting movements. His most recent book is entitled, Organic Church, Growing Faith Where Life Happens.

On church growth success:

For instance we don’t care if our churches live a year, twenty years, or a hundred years. We care that while they live, they give birth. We may start a church that lasts a year, but while it lives, it births two daughter churches. That is a success. We think that if every church reproduces in that way, then the Kingdom of God will continue and grow.
But if we think that every church has to last forever, we will try to do everything we can to keep it alive artificially, and that’s not good. We find fruitfulness most often in the small, not the large.

On economics of the "Organic Church":

If we could get our leaders to learn to live by faith not by finances, then finances in the church would be a breeze. But the moment you make your decisions based on the need for security, dependence on organizational support, those kinds of things, then you are already making decisions based on the wrong things. You are not living by faith.

On words of encouragement about the "Organic Church":

I think we are making a shift from the day of the ordained to the day of the ordinary. A day when common Christians are empowered to do extraordinary things for God and they are no longer going to wait for their pastors to say, “Go.”
I think the layers and layers of decision-makers between God’s people and God will be removed, so that God can have direct communication with His people without any filters, without any middlemen to interpret. When we reach that state we will see massive global implications.
I think God is setting us up that way. Some of the trends that are happening today are global in scale. They are not just regional or national, but all across the world people are saying and discovering these things. That has never happened in history, except maybe in the first century. We are on the verge of seeing something akin to the Book of Acts happening in our day, if we are faithful to God’s voice.

Very compelling article, read it here from Next Wave. I also quoted from Neil Cole in this post about Paul's journeys.