The Tyrannus Effect - Paul’s Neglected Strategy for City-wide Discipleship

How have we missed this?

Ever since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and began to use the techniques of Roman paganism (temples, priests, pagan holidays etc.) to institutionalize Christianity most people have completely ignored the methods of the first churches or the way Paul went about church planting.

Recent movements have begun to try and recapture this ancient way of doing church, believing the Constaninian transition was not an improvement, but that it was ultimately destructive to church life and practice. Many involved in church restoration see Paul’s methods as extremely simple and essentially free of structure; just encourage people to meet in homes, release gifts and live life in community. Each of these elements have been very helpful but they’ve neglected a necessary piece of Paul’s strategy which has thus far, rendered much of the house church / simple church practices virtually ineffective.

I call this missing element the Tyrannus Effect. It describes the impact of Paul’s primary church planting activity. How do you begin to plant a church? What do you actually do week in and week out from month to month, year to year? From what I’ve seen, if you don’t believe it involves the planting of a weekly worship service you believe it primary involves weekly meetings in homes. Neither was Paul’s primary activity.

In a little known passage in Acts 19 we get the clearest glimpse of what Paul spent his days doing when he wanted to plant churches in a city. Luke records that after Paul abandoned his original method of working through the local Synagogue he rented space in the School of Tyrannus and held daily discussions there for about a two year period. This is most likely what he was doing in Synagogues before this time and we know this was what he did during his house arrest in Rome (Acts 28). This discipleship center was the public and constant activity and he supplemented this by also training in individual house church meetings (Acts 20:20).

What this strategy results in is the Tyrannus Effect.

So what is the Tyrannus Effect? It is what happens when your primary focus in a city is NOT the churches themselves but is on discipleship training through discussion. And this is what happens through this shift in focus:

• Churches form naturally around those who are being trained
• Complacent converts are quickly changed to committed disciples
• The level of discipleship city-wide is continually increasing
• Unity among the churches is developed through a common discipleship process
• New believers are immediately immersed in the essential “renewal of their mind”
• Teaching and training gifts are released for the benefit of the whole city
• Disciples have a city-wide Kingdom vision vs. a preoccupation on an individual church
• Individual churches are deeply interconnected with one another and equipped simultaneously
• Discussion-based training replaces sermonizing as a means to a long-lasting, faith-building group discovery experience.
• A central base of operations (city-church) exists for recognizing elders, releasing the five-fold ministry and dispatching trainers to other localities

For the past year we’ve been experimenting with the Tyrannus strategy and have experienced the beginnings of this effect first hand. I can’t imagine what would happen tomorrow if the biblical teachers and trainers in a city came together to disciple the city. This unifying of willing disciplers is the next phase in our strategy to bring our activity in line with Paul’s method.

What should you do if you want to experience the Tyrannus Effect in your city?

1. Create a clear, repeatable discipleship process
2. Transition each lesson from lecture format to discussion-based training
3. Hold regular gatherings in an appropriate location where people commit to the discipleship process
4. Open up the training to the whole city especially to other churches
5. Keep expanding bringing on more trainers and more training modules until training discussions are happening daily
6. Dispatch trainers to other cities to begin discipleship training centers in other regions
7. Encourage discipled believers use their gifts to build up their church bodies.
8. Send 5-fold ministers (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers) into the churches to stir them up
9. Recognize city elders who can help shepherd churches (this will apply mostly to home-based churches).
10. Continually communicate and network with all the churches and ministries in your region offering this training as a means to build up the churches and expand the Kingdom

There are many unique challenges to doing this in areas that are very churched with many dis-unified denominations (this may be why Paul preferred to go to areas that were unreached). But we desperately need to create a way for the church to return to our central mission and the final command of Lord - “to go and make disciples of all nations” one city at a time.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Restructuring the Church for Explosive Growth
• Distinctives of Christian Training - Discipleship Series Part 3
• Asked and Answered
• Intentional Discipleship Training (IDT)