Are You Called to Plant a Church?

Two weeks ago, I announced that LifeChurch.tv joined the A.R.C. Next week, the A.R.C. is hosting a church planters round table. There are five spots left. If you’re interested in starting a church, you may want to check out the event.

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LifeChurch.tv Boards the A.R.C.

About two years ago, I met Chris Hodges from Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, and Rick Bezet from New Life Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. After an hour of conversations, it seemed like we’d been friends forever.

Chris and Rick introduced me to a group of churches that work together to start new churches called A.R.C. (Association of Related Churches). I discovered that Greg Surratt from Seacoast and Dino Rizzo from the Healing Place were a part of the A.R.C.

The leaders invited me to speak at a gathering for A.R.C. church planters. When I got there, I was shocked at the quality of the planting pastors. These young leaders were amazingly gifted.

I learned the A.R.C. had already planted over 50 churches across the U.S. Many of these church plants are growing big—fast.

The more I learned, the more intrigued I became. This is one of the best church planting groups I’ve observed:

• Their assessment is top-notch.
• Their training is incredible.
• Their financial plan is wise and generous.
• Their results are as good as I’ve seen.
• The pastors are very tight-knit and have a blast serving Christ together.

After meeting more A.R.C. pastors and praying for some time, I’m excited to share that LifeChurch.tv will be joining the A.R.C. I’m grateful to the leaders for allowing us to contribute financially, host round tables, mentor church planters, and share in the joy of starting churches.

We are praying that God would allow us to plant 30 churches this year! If you are interested in planting a church, you can find out more about A.R.C. here.

I’d love to hear from any ARC pastors! Tell us who you are and something about your church.

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Kingdom-Minded 4 (of 4)

Intentional Partnerships

I’m becoming increasingly passionate about intentional ministry partnerships.

The driving question should be: How can we do more for the glory of God together?

Here are some ideas. We could:

Share buildings. (I know I already mentioned this before. It’s worth mentioning again.) When does your building go unused? Who could use it at that time? (If you need to charge them to cover your costs, do so. If you can give them a gift and let them use it for free.)

Partner in target ministries. Maybe your church can’t afford a full-time singles pastor. Consider bringing four or five churches together for monthly combined singles events. (What other areas could you partner in?)

Offer free pulpit supply. If you believe in the power of video teaching, here’s a great idea… Say a church loses its pastor, and is struggling to find another one. Your church could let them use your video messages during their search.

Give all our video teaching away to churches… for free. We’re very excited about “network” churches. These are separate churches who use our teaching. Praise God that His message is getting out. We don’t get money for this. We don’t count their attendance. We simply get to help. Yeah!

Partner in missions. Instead of all 400,000 American churches trying to do separate mission work, consider partnering with another church (or two, or 20) to make a difference in one significant place. Instead of your overseas trip not filling up and ending up canceled, maybe it will overflow and you’ll have to book a second.

Merge ministries. We’ve partnered with a few churches who decided to become a part of LifeChurch.tv. Across the country, many ministries are realizing they can do more united than they could divided.

Do a series together with other churches. Our church and three others decided to do the same series simultaneously. As pastors, we prepared the messages together. All of our churches prayed for one another. We played videos of each pastor and reported what God was doing in each church. All our people loved it and grew together in an awesome way.

Adopt a church. Find a church that could benefit from what you’re doing and adopt them. What does that mean? I’m not sure. You prayerfully decide. How can you help? Maybe your leaders can mentor theirs. Maybe you can give them your old choir robes, or your church van. You might help them find the worship leader they’re looking for. Whatever it means to you, do it.

I’ll ask it again: How can we do more for the glory of God together?

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Credit and Blame

In my early years of ministry, I was a pastor to Single Adults. Under my leadership, the attendance declined sharply.

I was feeling like the biggest failure who’d ever lived. That’s when God taught me an important lesson:

We must be careful not to blame ourselves for the decrease or we might be tempted to take credit for the increase.

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Church Planting - Part 4

Jason writes:

Hi Craig,

My main question deals with raising funds. God has brought an incredible team around us. We’ve had much success in getting the word out to our community. How do you suggest raising start-up/first year funds?

Finances are a big part of a church plant, but not the biggest part. (The biggest part being anointing, calling, passion, the work of the Spirit, etc.)

Here are some semi-random thoughts.

• My favorite model of church planting is a parent church giving birth to a daughter church. Under this model, the existing church trains leaders, sends people, and helps financially.
• If this is not possible, the best means to raise money is always “casting vision.” People generally give to vision more than to needs.
• I also believe the new church should work to be generous. We often want others to be generous to us, but aren’t generous to others.
• Some people raise all their support up front. They might have a goal of $50,000 or $100,000 before they start. Some ask for ongoing support. (The ongoing support might come from people who won’t be attending the church.) I think both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks.
• Some pastors max out their credit cards and take out loans. While this occasionally works, I recommend against it. You don’t want to have church problems and personal financial problems at the same time.
• When your finances are limited, see it as a blessing. Limited finances force you to depend on God and innovate.

(There are many important topics that no one asked about. One BIG one in particular is VITALLY important when starting a church. I’ll send a free copy of Chazown or Confessions of a Pastor to the person who guesses the topic.)

Please jump in…

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Church Planting - Part 3

Michelle writes…

Hi! I am a newly ordained Minister. I am starting out from scratch and I mean from scratch. I live out on an acreage in the country on the edge of town. I have no members yet. I ponder how to start? I’m thinking of doing some volunteer stuff around my community. Maybe advertise in the local paper. Say something in the paper like, “Newly ordained Minister looking to start a new church. Feeling rejected or pushed out of your current church? Feel like all churches want is your money? (or maybe something like)… How do I bring them in? I’d really like to see people blossom in their relationship with God.

Michelle, I like your passion. I’ll do my best to offer some insight. Others may have more wisdom.

You mentioned volunteering about the community and advertising. In my opinion, getting out in the community is MUCH more valuable than advertising. So many churches are doing marketing today that I think many people are becoming numb to our message. (Numb may be too polite. Bored. Skeptical. Angry also comes to mind.)

I don’t know very many people who have marketed their way to a church.

Here is what I do believe:

• The people you bring in early are very important. If you start with the wrong people (meaning those who are not mission minded or don’t really buy into your vision), you are in trouble.
• The best way I know to find the core is one by one.
• New Christ-followers are often better in helping start churches than miserable church members.
• Starting a church off a church split generally doesn’t work for anyone. (I know you’re not considering that, but I just wanted to say it.)
• When you plug in new people to ministry, ask them to serve for 3 months in an area (or 6 months). What you don’t want is for people to camp out in an area. If God blesses your church, you may need to move them to another area.
• A church doesn’t have to be 150 people, 700 people or 3000 people meeting in a building. Your church can be 12 people meeting in your home on Tuesday nights. (If God directs you that way, just don’t let it become a group that insulates itself from the world and adopts an “us four no more mentality.”)
• I like what Wesley said, “Light yourself on fire and people will come from all around to watch you burn.” In other words, get so passionate for Jesus that people want what you’ve got.

Others… jump into the discussion!

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Church Planting - Part 2

Robert writes,

I am currently a pastor (not the senior pastor) at a church in the midwest. I believe that God is calling my wife and I to plant a church in the same community, It has nothing to do with splitting the church or having hurt feelings. We are in great standing with the church and congregation, but feel that we could impact a different segment of this community with a different style of church. So my question is,

“How should we approach our senior pastor with the idea, and ultimately our congregation?”

Robert, this question hits close to my heart because I was in the exact same place.

To give you context, I was an associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City. I was planning on starting a church about 20 minutes away.
Here are some questions that might determine how you should approach the situation:

• Is your church a Kingdom minded church? (Meaning, do they care more about all of God’s work or just their own ministry?)
• Is your church a church planting church? (Have they started other churches before?)
• Is your pastor secure or easily threatened?

If the answers are the best case (secure, planting, Kingdom minded), I’d talk very openly and ask for support.

If you think (or know) that your desire would be met with opposition, I’d suggest you proceed a little slower.

• You will need to be honest and have a soft, investigative conversation. Instead of saying, “I’d like to start a church in September.” You might say, “God has given me a burden to start a church one day. Would you be open to praying about that with me?”
• If your pastor is supportive, you’ll want to offer extreme flexibility. You can offer to help find a replacement for you and offer to train your replacement. You might offer to stay on longer to help with the transition.
• You need to be prepared for things to get ugly. It is not because you’re dealing with bad people… you’re just dealing with people.
• Don’t recruit people from your current ministry unless you are blessed to do so.
• If you’re told, “No, you can’t do it.” You will hopefully have prayed through what your response will be. I can’t tell you what that should be.

When I left, it was hard on my pastor. We worked to stay close, but the relationship was strained for a couple of years. Through prayer and hard work, we are very close again today.

Work hard to handle everything truthfully and with integrity.

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Swerve community project on church planting

I found something interesting when I was working on putting together a list of websites/blogs that provide great/useful content for church planters.

Wikipedia’s entry for “Church Planting” sucks. Or let me clarify… it is vastly underdeveloped and incomplete.

Since there are an army of web savvy pastors and church planters out there and many of you who follow this blog fall into that category…why don’t we remedy that and create an appropriate wikipedia entry as a free resource for those that might be searching for help in church planting?

Some of you are talented writers and are probably already editing wikipedia entries. Others of you know of resources that would be helpful, but will probably not be active in editing the wiki. And there are still others of you who are asking what “wikipedia” and a “wiki” is. The good news is that all of you can contribute and/or learn.

Let’s have a short-term (this week) community project that we all participate in.

First…if you have a website/book/blog/organization or other resource that you have found is useful or helpful specifically for church planting…respond to this post with the name/link to the resource and a concise description.

Second…if you are not familiar with wikipedia or how to edit wikipedia you can learn or read more about that here.

Third…if you are a writer or have skills in organizing written content (and are or have become familiar with wikis)…please consider taking the resources mentioned on this post and organizing that content along with anything that would be helpful to church planters on wikipedia. You can see/edit the entry here.

I figure in a week or so…we should have a pretty good entry of information and resources that church planters can reference for free.

Thanks

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