ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Of course, every person I mention here is a gift and creation of the Lord. Ultimately all the gratitude and honor is due to Him. He is the source of every good thing.

My wife, Debie, is the biggest earthly influence on me and my best friend. She is my complement in so many ways and a support and encouragement in a variety of ways—both obvious and unnoticed, visible and invisible.

My parents modeled lives that showed they were serious about stewarding their lives for the Lord. That was a great foundation.

My children and grandchildren (present and future) are another major influence in my life. Much of what I have learned about being a child of God has been shaped by my own experience of being a father and grandfather.

My editors, Bruce Barron and Mark Aspinwall, provided very practical assistance in helping me structure and communicate the message of this book more effectively than I ever could have done alone. Bruce took the first swing at it, and his kind but firm guidance was much needed. Mark provided invaluable input too, as I tried to figure out how to prioritize input from others and make the application sections more usable. It was also extremely helpful that he is an accomplished practitioner of the approaches covered in the book. He made it more readable as well.

I appreciate the Kingdom heart and loving service provided by the folks at William Carey Publishing, including Denise Wynn, Melissa Hicks, Andrew Sloan, Katie McGaffey, and Mike Riester.

I am grateful for the many hundreds of partners in Kingdom advance whom I have trained, mentored, and co-labored with. These men and women, who invest their lives in making disciples and planting churches in literally every nation and territory on earth, have been my friends and encouragers and have continually spurred me on to greater love and good works. Collectively they have been used to catalyze about one thousand movements, resulting in over five million house churches planted and over eighty million people baptized over the past thirty years. It has been an honor and privilege to know and work with them.

I will call out one name, the late—Steve Smith—to represent this entire group, because he typifies them. We were about the same age. I got to know Steve as I was training him at a one-month Strategy Coordinator training event in Asia back in the 1990s. I then mentored him for a while, but he quickly became a coworker and an accomplished practitioner, trainer, leader, and author. (His last book, Spirit Walk, written in 2018, addresses similar issues to this book.) Our families vacationed together. We worked in the same country for several years. We cheered one another on from a distance.

More recently, as Steve launched the 24:14 coalition to help coalesce many of the movements that had emerged from common roots in the early 1990s, we began spending more time together again when he asked me to serve as a co-facilitator. As soon as it was launched his cancer was discovered, and less than eighteen months later he passed into glory. He will be sorely missed by many of us whom his life touched deeply. He was a hero of the Kingdom.

Finally, I am thankful for those of you who are reading this book. I am honored to be given the opportunity to speak to you through these pages. To the extent that you apply the lessons contained in this book and pass them on to others, it will bless me; and for that I am grateful.

Curtis Sergeant
March 13, 2019