I read somewhere that the first person to do a “mic drop” was Eddie Murphy in 1983. Maybe. I believe the first mic drop should have happened on May 25, 1961.
That’s the day President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress and announced that America would land a man on the moon before the decade was out. I want to jump in a time machine, go back to that moment, and tell JFK, “Drop the mic! Just trust me. Right now, drop the mic!”
The mission he gave was bold and audacious, and in the middle of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union already ahead in the space race, it seemed nearly impossible.
NASA’s engineers got to work. But they hit a wall. The math simply didn’t exist yet to plot a trajectory to the moon and back. One miscalculation, and astronauts would burn up on reentry.
That’s when Katherine Johnson enters the story. If you’ve seen Hidden Figures, you know her—one of the Black female mathematicians NASA hired as human “calculators.” They were brilliant, and they were overlooked. In one scene, Katherine is mistaken for a janitor.
But it’s Katherine who makes the breakthrough. Staring at a blackboard full of equations that wouldn’t work, she has a realization: everyone has been searching for new math, when the answer was old math all along. That shift—not a total overhaul, just a shift—unlocks the problem. A few years later, we land on the moon.
An Even Bigger Mission
Jesus stood before His disciples and gave a mission of His own: “Go and make disciples of all nations… And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:18–20).
Sadly, there was no possibility of a mic drop, as it happened about 1,840 years before the invention of the microphone. It was a revolutionary mission, and many would have called it impossible, especially because Jesus gave it to a motley group of very ordinary people who would later be called unlearned and ignorant “idiotai” (read: idiots) (see Acts 4:12).
These Bad News Bears got to work and made miraculous progress.
But can I suggest that 2,000 years later we’ve hit a roadblock? Look at the numbers, and you see the church—especially in the West—is not growing. The number of disciples seems to be regressing. For a people who believe everyone needs to hear the good news, that is the worst news possible.
We have the right desire, but is it possible we’re not doing it the best way? The question isn’t whether our strategies are wrong. It’s whether there’s a better way—a shift, not a revolution. I want to show you that shift. But first, let me tell you my story.
“I Don’t Need You”
In college, God began pulling my attention off the United States and onto the nations. I knew I was an idiotai, but I felt called to the most unreached places on earth. At a missions conference, I got on my knees and prayed, God, I don’t care if I’m in Haiti for fifty years or a gas station for five minutes. I just want to be used by You.
I didn’t expect an answer. I got one.
God whispered, “Josh, I don’t need you.”
I was stunned. I’d just surrendered my life to His call—what did He mean He didn’t need me? I had assumed God had a massive task and needed my help to pull it off. That day I realized He doesn’t. He’s God. He’ll raise up rocks to praise His name if we won’t.
Then came the second half of that sentence, the part that changed my life: “I don’t need you. But I need you to know that I want you.”
For a lot of us, pride convinces us we’re God’s solution—that our ministry, our church, is the answer. It isn’t. Jesus is the answer. The moment we stop believing we’re needed and start responding to being wanted, everything changes. That’s what sent me, eventually, to India.
A Math Problem in India
About ten years ago, eight of us sat in a room dreaming about reaching 1.3 billion Indians with the gospel. (India could lose a billion people and still be one of the five largest nations on earth.) Every day, at least 25,000 people in India die without knowing Jesus—over 150,000 worldwide. That number broke our hearts.
Someone floated an idea: “What if we reached 100,000 people a year? That would be incredible!” I did the math. At that rate, reaching India would take 13,000 years. Add a zero—a million people a year—and it would still take 1,300 years.
Addition, even addition on steroids, was never going to finish the job.
So we got on our knees. We fasted. We asked God to show us another way. A few weeks later, I stumbled across a book by a man named Ying Kai, who moved to South China and, instead of adding people to his own church, focused on multiplying disciples and mobilizing every believer he could into the harvest. In ten years: 200,000 churches started, a million people baptized.
I closed the book in tears. God, if You did that in China, You can do it in India.
From Addition to Multiplication
Our team decided to make the shift—from addition to multiplication—and it changed nearly everything about how we operated:
- Our job description flipped. We went from players to coaches. Our job wasn’t just to do ministry, but to train everyone else to do it too.
- Our structure flipped. Leaders moved from the top to the bottom—lifting and supporting, not commanding.
- Training became universal. If you were breathing, you were being trained to share the gospel and make disciples who make disciples.
- Sunday morning changed function. Instead of treating our gathering as “the game,” we started treating it as the locker room—where the team gets equipped to go play the real game all week.
- We released control. And in exchange, our influence multiplied exponentially.
Multiplication became our filter for every decision. Pastors sometimes ask me when we split a house church into two. I tell them: that’s addition—maybe even division. We’re after multiplication. We don’t wait for a group to hit thirty people and split it. We cast vision and train every single person to reach their own friends and family, make disciples, and start their own house church.
Last year, our movement started 11,525 churches. Not churches we have—churches we launched in twelve months. That’s 960 a month. 221 a week. 31 every single day.
That’s not us. That’s God. And it’s the power of multiplication.
Here’s one more piece of math. Say I’m the only believer in India, and I disciple one person this year. Next year, we each disciple one more—four of us. The following year, each of those four disciples one more, and so on. How long to reach all of India that way? About thirty-two years.
Addition at 100,000 people a year: 13,000 years. Multiplication starting with one person: thirty-two years.
When it comes to the Great Commission, multiplication is the only math that actually works.
The 45-Degree Shift
Picture a plus sign: +
Now turn it 45 degrees.
You get a multiplication sign: ×
Not a 360-degree overhaul. Not even a 180-degree reversal. Just 45 degrees—and the output changes completely. 100 + 100 = 200. 100 × 100 = 10,000.
What if the shift your ministry needs isn’t a total demolition and rebuild, but a 45-degree turn in how you think about disciple-making? What if a few small shifts in mindset could produce an exponential increase in your results?
They can. I’ve watched it happen in a nation of 1.3 billion people, through a team of ordinary, unreached-minded believers who decided to stop adding and start multiplying.
Are you ready to make the shift?
Josh Howard is the co-author of The 7 Practices of Disciple Making Churches (Renew.org, 2026). The book profiles the seven principles shared by every Level 5 multiplying church in North America—and shows how any church can begin the journey.