Josh Hunt's blog

Chris Thixton has created four classes since 1999. He is a poster teacher for the Double Your Class philosophy. His adaptation of the plan is Pizza on Sunday He grew his class, the first time I met him, from 4 to 40 in nine months. How did he do it? Pizza on Sunday. Then, I came back a second time. He had just started a new class–he and his wife and two other couples. I asked him to check in with me, "When you get this group doubled, send me an email." Six months later, he sent me an email. "Just checking in. Next month we will send out 25 people to start a new class. We will have 35 in our class." He went from 6 to 60 in 6 months. How did he do it? Pizza on Sunday. He called me summer before last. "I am back up to 40 again. I want to divide my class, but here is the deal. We are having a hard time finding preschool and children’s workers." (Sound familiar?) "So, here is what I want to do. Instea...

This kind of thing has happened before. How are we to think about such things? It should make us sad A brother has fallen. A brother is hurting. I will promise you, he is enduring unspeakable, unbelievable pain. Does he deserve it? Yes. But, so do I. We are all sinners. We are not fundamentally better. We are not fundamentally different. We are not above. We are not better than. Oh, our sins are not the same and that is what creates the illusion that maybe, just maybe his sins are down the food chain and I am a little different, or a little better and he is just getting what he deserves. Deserve. If we ever really thought about that word it would change our lives. What does Ted Haggard deserve? He deserves hell. Just like me and just like you. Thank God, Christianity is not about getting what we deserve. But, but, but, I don't know that he is adequately repentant. He is probably not. He may be still a little self-justifying. I probably have not been as repentant as I shou...

I heard a gospel presentation the other day and found myself getting a little uncomfortable with the pitch. I have felt this way before, but dismissed it on the basis that this is the one thing you don’t mess with. You can disagree with just about anything in evangelicalism, but you can’t disagree with the plan of salvation. If there is one thing that is sacrosanct, it is the message of the Four Spiritual Laws. Don’t mess with that. You don’t want to go there. Still, I couldn’t deny this uncomfortable feeling. Being saved sounded a little too much like setting up a reservation for heaven. It sounded like making a deal, conducting a transaction, buying an insurance policy, signing a contract. “Getting saved” sounded a little like a legal-spiritual transaction that, if you did it, all was well. If you didn’t do this legal-spiritual transaction, you were in trouble. The legal-spiritual transaction was all that matters. I get the idea f...

When I was growing up, the kids pretty much tagged along. The adults did what the adults wanted to do and the kids just tagged along. I don't remember my parents asking me, "Where would you like to go for supper?" except for special occasions like a birthday. Families were oriented around the parents and the kids came along. Not so much, anymore. Anymore, families are oriented around the kids. The kids are much more at the center of families. Evenings are dominated by soccer schedules and kids' stuff. Parents cart the kids around like taxi drivers to do what the kids want to do. The parents' needs, wishes and desires tend to take a back seat. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss the relative merits of this approach, or to explore why this trend came to be. I just want to point out it creates an opportunity that many churches are taking advantage of for the cause of Christ. Do not preven...

Dr. Larry Richmond, DOM for St. Louis Association, Illinois asked me over supper the other night if I had any advice for him. At the time, I didn't, but the question got me thinking. I think this is a great idea. You might want to pass it along to the leader(s) of your Association. Why not have a celebration dinner for all the teachers in the Association who have birthed a group in the last year. Make it a big deal--held at a nice restaurant with all the trimmings. There are three reasons I think this is a great idea: You grow a Sunday School by creating new groups. Sunday School 101 states, "You double a Sunday School not by doubling the size of each group but by doubling the number of groups." If you have a Sunday School of 200 people, it will have about 20 groups. It may be 18, or, it may be 22, but it will be about 20. If you want to grow from 200 to 400 you don't do it by going from 20 groups of ...

I got my first SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera when I was in college and have been a photography hobbyist ever since. When digital cameras came along I was an early adopter. We just bought our fifth digital camera. I got hooked on digital photography right away but wanted the power and flexibility of an SLR. When digital SLRs dropped under $1000 I was the first kid on my block to get one. I love it. One of the things that makes digital photography great is that with digital photography you can take substantially better pictures and eliminate all crummy pictures. Imagine looking through a photo album and not one single picture is out of focus, or badly framed, or contains red-eye, or someone blinked. This really is possible with digital photography. Here is how. Decide about how many pictures you want for a particular outing. I took the kids to the county fair the other night. For an event like that, let's say I want tw...

It occurred to me several years ago that we know how to grow a church. If you don't know how, I could recommend a dozen or so books. Read them, and you will know how to grow a church. It is a well-documented, well-researched body of knowledge. We know how to grow a church. What we need to know more about is how to grow a group of churches--how to grow an Association, how to grow a State Convention, and how to grow a denomination. The sad reality is that many growing churches are growing while all the other churches in their area are declining, so that the area is not becoming any more Christian. I have a vague memory that I read a George Barna statistic that said there is not one single county in the United States where the percentage of the population that is church-going Christians is increasing. Not one. That is a problem. We know how to grow a church. What we desperately need to figure out is how to reach a people....

I start my Double seminars these days this way: "My goal today is to infect you with what Seth Godin has called an Ideavirus. An Ideavirus is an idea that is so compelling, so intriguing, so infectious, that once it gets in your brain, you just can't keep from thinking about it. I have been infected with the Ideavirus for a long time and I just can't quit thinking about it. I can summarize the Ideavirus down to one word: double. The double Ideavirus is interesting for three reasons: It is possible : doubling a class every two years or less translates into 40% growth, or, it means the average size Sunday School class or home group going from 10 to 14 in a year. I have never met a Sunday School teacher that didn't think they could get that done if they really wanted to. (I sometimes ask, "Could you get it done if I offered you a million dollars to do it?") Everyone coul...

I love being a Christian, don't you? I love spending time with God--just me and God--in the mornings. I love walking with God through the day. I love relying on God's wisdom from the Bible. I love the comfort that comes during difficult days--and there will be difficult days. I love the sense of meaning and purpose that following God gives me--the feeling that I am part of a Cause that is bigger than I am. I love being a Christian, don't you? If we do all love being a Christian, why doesn't the message of Christ naturally and unavoidably spread? Why the coaxing of people to share their faith? Why evangelism strategies and programs? You would think that if we all love it, we would just naturally tell and they would naturally want to hear about good news. People love to talk about things they love. They love to talk about their new IPOD or their latest vacation. Why doesn't the idea of the gospel spre...

I will never forget the day I first met Chris Imbach. I was in Florida conducting a Double Your Class Conference sponsored by the Florida State Convention. The Convention had recruited a number of small group leaders to lead discussion groups around the idea of Double Your Class. I was to present the plenary sessions, but most of the time was spent in the small groups. Chris was one of those small group leaders. We were all staying the the same hotel, and Chris and I ran into each other on the elevator. He introduced himself and flashed that infectious smile, extending his hand to shake mine. Thus began our friendship. As it turns out, Chris has done a number of conferences on how to double your class. More importantly, Chris has done it. I have kept up with Chris from time to time over the years. We talked again last week. He told me he now has great-great grand daughter classes. They have gone from one groups to eight in fo...

The single biggest turning in my life came at the end of a Lay Witness Mission. I have heard rumor that Lay Witness Missions have taken on quite a wide variety of forms, and there have been some abuses, so allow me to tell you about my experience. Here is how a Lay Witness Mission worked for me. On-fire-for-God laymen where invited in for the weekend to help us with the Lay Witness Mission. (They paid their own expenses.) The weekend consisted of a mixture of activities--large group times, small groups times, discussion and testimonies from the people who had been invited in. Lots of testimonies. The testimonies went like this: I was rocking along, attending church, living a decent life, but not really sold-out to God. Then, we had a Lay Witness Mission in our church. I heard testimonies of people like myself, except that they were actually living for God. It changed me. I dedicated my life to God and...