But Jesus was a down-and-dirty organizer. It’s true, we don’t get a detailed play by play of Jesus’ organizing model. But we do get some glimpses.

First, he methodically laid a foundation for his movement by creating a buzz by preaching and healing in many villages. All that happened before he kicked things up a notch in Nazareth, the event that I usually hear described as the beginning of his ministry. After strategically planting those seeds, he then had huge crowds traveling with him.

I think the most common image in most of our minds of those crowds following Jesus is something like Monty Python’s Life of Brian: massive, unthinking, unorganized throngs. But there were apparently many leaders in those crowds. Jesus deputizes 72 organizers from that crowd and sends them to go do advance work in the villages and towns that he wanted to visit next. He even sent them in pairs, as any good organizer would.

Some of my learned Christian friends tell me that seventy-two (or 70 as it appears in some manuscripts) represented the elders of Israel — i.e. political/spiritual leaders. Whether the number is a real historical number or symbolic, the message is that Jesus was systematically engaging a political nation on a national scale. (Maybe today, in America, he would have sent a team to each congressional district.)

Regardless of the symbolism of the number 70 or 72, we get a glimpse there in Luke 10 that Jesus worked meticulously to build…yes build…a movement. Luke even shows us Jesus debriefing his organizing teams when they’ve finally regrouped (Luke 10:17-24). There are few places in the bible where Jesus is as happy as he is during that debrief:

At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure….

Then he turned to his disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.” (Luke 10:21, 23-24)

In Jesus for President (here and here), Shane and Chris (who I’ve been using as my example text in this series) talk a lot about how Jesus’ ministry was all about the “small people” — the least being the greatest and the last being first in the Kingdom of Heaven. But that rarely happens by accident. It almost always happens because of meticulous work and planning by those “small people” — just the kind that is modeled all through the Bible by Jesus, the disciples and so many characters in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Every organizer knows that joy that Jesus felt when he saw those “little children” accomplish and comprehend what the “wise and learned” sitting in their ivory towers could never hope to. (But don’t call the people you’re organizing “children” unless you’re God.)

Another really interesting tidbit in this part of the story is this: In Matthew, it is Jesus’ national organizing program that tips off John the Baptist that Jesus is the Messiah:

When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matt 11)

After Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the organizing only got bigger. Disciples and new converts crisscrossed the empire, methodically starting new Christian communities everywhere. We only get glimpses of a few of these efforts in the Bible. We know there were so many more that we never recorded.

Did the disciples haphazardly plant these communities as seeds and then walk away to let God make them grow? No, in fact most of the New Testament is made up of communications by them — sort of like inter-office emails—constantly worrying, pushing, pulling… doing anything they could to help the communities grow and strengthen the best they could.

Why would Jesus start up this kind of movement if he didn’t mean for us to continue on the same tradition? He knew where it was going.

He knew all the infighting that was coming. He knew Rome would soon co-opt the movement. He knew all the violence that would eventually be carried out in the name of the movement. So, shouldn’t we conclude that Jesus believes its worth it?

That those bad consequences are like the weeds among the wheat — that there will be no harvest at all if we stop organizing on a large scale because we’re too afraid of the unintended consequences? Isn’t Jesus calling us to keep building movements, warts and all?

[For the previous installments of "Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers", here's Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3]