Elephants and Rabbits: Two Models of Church, One Great Commission

This is Part 5 of an 18-part series drawn from Kurt Olson's book, The Endgame of God. New posts publish every Wednesday at  GoMultiply.org/blog.

Elephants are magnificent animals — but impossible to reproduce quickly. Rabbits are ordinary — and they multiply beyond counting. Which one is your church most like?

Let me give you two animals to think about, because they depict two very different forms of church, and only one of them has the capacity to actually finish the job Jesus gave us.

Here is why the rabbit wins, in plain arithmetic. Households around the world average about five people. So imagine multiplying by five. One group of five starts five new groups in a year — twenty-five new disciples, plus the original five, is thirty. The next year those thirty each start a group: a hundred fifty new, plus thirty, is a hundred eighty. Year three, each of those starts a group, and you pass a thousand. Keep that going and a single group can grow past one million disciples by the seventh year.

That is not fantasy math. It is simply what multiplication does when every disciple makes disciples. And because it is decentralized — no single building, no single leader to arrest — the rabbit model even persecution-proofs the church. The elephant is too expensive, too slow, and too fruitless to finish the Great Commission. Mathematically, the rabbit is the only system that has the potential to do so.

Let me show you a real life example of this happening in recent history. In 1974, a communist government seized control of Ethiopia. For about a hundred years before that, one denomination had done faithful, traditional, elephant-model work there — erecting buildings, starting seminaries, training pastors, gathering people for Sunday morning services. In those 100 years, they had only grown to about four thousand members. That is an average of just forty people a year.

Then the communists violently took power in what is called "The Derg." They killed the pastors. They imprisoned the elders. They burned the church buildings and seized the seminaries to teach communism. So what was the rest of that denomination going to do? They had lost their pastors, their bishops, their elders, their buildings, and their programs — but they had not lost each other or the Word of God. So they went underground meeting in secret in their homes, reading the Bible, worshiping, sharing with others, and helping one another obey Jesus. Then, ten years later, that communist government fell. And during those ten years underground — with no seminaries, no professional clergy, no buildings, and no Sunday services — they multiplied from less than four thousand to more than forty thousand.

Read that again. A hundred years in the elephant system grew them to just 4,000 members. Ten years in the rabbit system and under persecution grew them tenfold — in a tenth of the time. That is the power of the New Testament rabbit church system.

Once, when a fellow missionary shared this story a fellow joked, "So I guess we should just get rid of all our pastors, buildings, and seminaries then." Everyone laughed. But it is not really a laughing matter, because the eternal destiny of millions of souls depends on which operating system we choose.

No, I am not saying we should bulldoze every building, dismiss every pastor, or sell every seminary. I am asking a different question: are buildings, seminaries, and a professional clergy class actually part of the New Testament church you find in the Bible? They are not. So instead of eliminating our buildings, let's convert them into equipping centers that make disciple-makers and send them out — and let's turn our clergy into disciple-maker coaches who train and release ordinary believers to reach and disciple the nations. That is exactly what Paul did. In Acts 19:8-10, he used the lecture hall of Tyrannus as a base, holding discussions there daily, "so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord" (Acts 19:10). The building was utilized as a training center and a launching pad, not a destination.

In the end it comes down to this: are you trying to make church, or make disciples? Jesus said, "I will build my church" (Matthew 16:18). That is His job. Our job is to make disciples His way. If we will give ourselves to making disciples, He will take those disciples as building materials to build His church His way. But if we pour our lives into building our church our way, we usually end up with neither disciples nor Jesus' church.

If your church building disappeared tomorrow — no meeting place, no programs, no paid staff — would your ministry quietly multiply in homes, or would it cease to exist? And what does your honest answer tell you about which animal you most closely resemble? Rabbit or elephant?