This article originally appeared in the August/September 2015 issue of Influence magazine. For more fresh print content, subscribe here.

My dad was an alcoholic and a high school dropout. His addiction was ruining his life. When he and my mother learned she was pregnant - which the doctors had said could never happen - it was a shock. They had been married seven years but had not been able to have children.

My dad had tried to quit many times, and he tried again when he learned they were expecting - without success. Everyone had given up hope in my father and his many broken promises.

Shortly after learning about the pregnancy, my parents were driving home from a Fourth of July celebration. My dad had been drinking and started having chest pains. Without saying a word, he began to slow down to lessen the impact. While clutching the steering wheel and sweating, he whispered a prayer: "God, I don't know how to pray, but my mother used to pray. If You heard her prayer, maybe You'll hear mine. Spare my life to see my child. Save me, and if I ever take another drop of liquor as long as I live, I want You to poison me and let me drop dead."

Dad had never kept a promise to stay sober, but in His mercy, God looked past all the prior failures and broken promises and saved him, healed him and delivered him from alcohol addiction. From that day forward, my dad never took another drink.

Missing the Process

My father was thoroughly converted to Christ and miraculously delivered from his alcohol addiction. But the transformation didn't end there. About six months after I was born, Dad was appointed the pastor of a small church - after being saved less than a year.

He and my mother pastored that small church in Sour Lake, Texas, for 22 years. My dad started his ministry with a supernatural experience, but he carried out his ministry without seeing numerical success.

My dad had a great appreciation for the Spirit-empowered message the Church received at Pentecost. He often taught about the power of the Spirit, and while he had an experience with Christ and a message to share, he was missing something. It wasn't that he was doing it wrong; he just didn't have the whole picture.

What he lacked was a process.

I know how it feels to try so hard but feel so confused. When I became pastor of First Assembly of God in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1986, I followed my dad's example. I had been an evangelist for 18 years; I had the Pentecostal experience; and I had the message. When I shared my experience and began to preach a Spirit-empowered message, revival came.

But I was missing something.

I knew how to preach a sermon, how to bring people to the altar and how to help my congregation experience blessing, but for all that my father taught me, he didn't teach me how to take a church from where we were to where we needed to be.

Dad didn't have a process, and neither did I.

I didn't need a trendy, new process for building a healthy church. I needed to look at what God had already done in establishing the very first church. I needed a complete Acts 2 church - not just the experience and message but also a process and a plan. This realization and process changed countless lives, including mine and those of many in the church I pastored and in the Fellowship I now serve.

You may be in the same place my father and I were in. You are sincere, dedicated, committed, spiritual and faithful, but you feel you lack something.

I believe many of us have missed a complete understanding of what the Holy Spirit did in the first-century church. The Early Church impacted the then-known world, walking out God's plan and doing the work of the ministry as a chosen generation and royal priesthood. The first-century church turned the world upside down.

I'm convinced the church Luke describes in Acts 2 is the model, the plan and the process that Jesus envisioned for the Church on the earth.

The best part is that anyone can do it. It doesn't depend on the size of your congregation, your building or your town. It depends solely on our limitless God with whom all things are possible.

The Acts 2 Model

In 1988, I began to put together my thoughts on a strategic process that eventually became the Acts 2 process. I developed material that I discovered in Luke's account of the Early Church.

This process isn't something I've just read about; it's something I've lived. It's something I developed while leading a church that had plateaued for 30 years, and it all came together as I observed the five functions upon which Jesus founded the first-century church.

Jesus told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem "until you have been clothed with power from on high" (Luke 24:49). Later He said, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you" (Acts 1:8).

Then in Acts 2:4, they had a supernatural experience - Pentecost. In Acts 2:5-41, Peter went out to the inquisitive Jews and began explaining what was happening; he was preaching the message.

The content of the process God was birthing in my heart is found in Acts 2:42-47. In this passage, the Holy Spirit began to explain the process of how to move from a temple model to a church model. Before Christ, the temple had been the center of life for the Jewish people. There, God's people read the Scriptures, prayed, encouraged one another and worshipped God. It was the place where heaven and earth met, with the Shekinah glory of God dwelling in the Holy of Holies. But when Jesus died on the cross, the thick veil isolating the Holy of Holies was torn from top to bottom. The presence of God was unleashed and became available to all who believe. Then, at Pentecost, a dramatic thing happened: Those who believed in Jesus became the place where heaven and earth met! Decades later, Paul explained that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16). Freed from a place, all gatherings of believers have become the place where heaven and earth meet - and all believers are now priests who love, serve and worship God in all they say and do. Evangelism, discipleship, fellowship, ministry (service) and worship were to be the functions of an effective, Spirit-empowered church - they are the five functions upon which the Acts 2 process is based: connect, grow, serve, go and worship.

The Five Functions

A biblical, comprehensive and strategic plan requires the empowerment of the Spirit to produce spiritual fruit in the lives of people. The plan is based on the five functions. The words describing the functions in Acts 2:42-47 are nouns, but because this is a process more than a destination, we converted them to verbs. These changes don't violate the mandate of the functions; in fact, they release the functions into action steps:

Connect - fellowship and evangelism
Grow - discipleship

Serve - ministry gifts, outreach, building up the Body, caring for the community
Go - discipleship, evangelism, missions

Worship - corporate praise, prayer, teaching and singing

Let's take a quick look at each of these to frame our understanding of them.


1. Connect. Connection focuses on the vertical and horizontal relationships in life. It begins with the process of salvation and continues through building spiritually strong relationships. The vertical relationship focuses on the process that connects people to God in all aspects of life. The horizontal relationship creates an atmosphere for relationship building person-to-person. Horizontal relationships consist of connections in every facet of life: family, church, local community, and global community.

2. Grow. Growth is about discipleship. It's how your church promotes spiritual formation in the lives of individuals, ministry teams and the congregation. It's about answering the question: How do we grow to be more like Jesus?

Growth centers on belief and behavior, while connection is about the relationship.

3. Serve. Churches of every size need to move laypeople from sitting in the pews as spectators to becoming involved in the ministry of their churches. This is where the service component comes in. As we help people learn about their gifts and abilities, we can connect them with opportunities to serve God and others - in ways that fit them. Service is about giving people outlets for using their gifts and abilities and helping them find their places in ministry.

4. Go. Going is evangelism - reaching out to those who are next door and on the other side of the globe. The evangelism component prepares and equips people to share their faith and accept the God-given mission for them and the local church. Going not only brings focus to the power of evangelism, but it also offers missional direction for individuals and the church body. It puts a great deal of emphasis on relational evangelism. This is where your church becomes more outwardly focused instead of staying inwardly focused, a transition that is incredibly important.

5. Worship. Worshipping focuses on the intimacy and reality of the presence of Christ. Through worship, leadership teams and the congregation see the character and power of Christ connecting to individuals in their daily lives and, corporately, through the church family. Worship involves far more than music, although that is a component. It includes prayer and powerful preaching.

These five functions provide the framework necessary to help us discover God's plan for living out fellowship, discipleship, ministry, evangelism and worship.

It Isn't One or the Other

These five functions were the heart of God's original plan for the Church. He had a plan - a process - but the plan was always, and only, to be carried out with His Holy Spirit's power.

Some leaders mistakenly assume it is an either/or proposition - either we are strategic and have a plan or we are Spirit-led and spontaneous. That's not correct; it's both/and. Some pastors don't like to plan, so they gravitate toward spontaneous spiritual expressions. Other church leaders become so focused on their plans that they don't leave room for God's leading. For a church to be what God wants it to be, both are essential.

Every church - small or large; urban, suburban or rural; American or international; and with whatever blend of ethnicity - needs both the power of the Spirit and a process for growth. Spiritual experiences are wonderful, but without a plan, you'll find yourself wondering how to take your church from where you are to where it needs to be.

The Acts 2 church had Jesus as its foundation and the Holy Spirit as its force. If we are to have healthy churches today, we need the same foundation, Jesus, and the same force, the Holy Spirit.

If we want healthy churches, we must embrace the Source of power that enabled the first-century church to explode in the midst of fierce persecution. As it embraced these five functions under the empowerment of the Spirit, the Church experienced exponential growth. As we have focused on these same functions, we have seen churches reinvigorated across the country. We have refined our own understanding of the process by working with hundreds of churches through what we call Acts 2 Journeys, multiweekend experiences for pastors in which we walk them through the Acts 2 process. We are seeing great results as pastors grow in confidence because they feel better equipped, their teams come together behind a unified vision and their churches experience a profound impact.

The Acts 2 process is for pastors and members of their "dream teams," to help them understand the process that my father and I and so many other pastors once lacked.

The process God revealed to me out of Acts 2 is biblical, transferable, and replicable. It will work in rural and urban areas, as well as in suburbia. It will work for large churches and small ones, healthy churches and unhealthy ones. Why? Because it's the model Christ originally used. It worked for the church I pastored, and it has worked for many others.

It can happen in your church, too.

This article is adapted from chapter one of the book A Spirit-Empowered Church: An Acts 2 Ministry Model (Influence Resources, 2015).