Note: This blog entry is excerpted and adapted from my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Church Planting Journey. We’ll be posting excerpts about once a month here and we’d love to hear feedback from you. We hope you are getting as excited about it as we are! And as we get closer to publication, we’ll give you the countdown!
I’ve worked with hundreds of church planters and dozens of denominations. The range includes a wide variety of communities, traditions, cultures, countries, ethnicities, histories, governing structures, and worship styles. These church plants and their leaders are all quite different. But what do they all need?
They all need principle-based tools that can be adapted to their context. Planters often know what they want to accomplish. What they need help with is the HOW. How do they get where they want to go? They need tools and they need a process to follow. That may look quite different with different churches, but there are still some underlying principles that will apply.
I’m working on a new church planting resource that introduces concepts and principles for each planting topic (e.g. planter assessment, visioncasting, teambuilding, fundraising), and then connects you to tools you can use or adapt. These tools not only help the planter with planning, but help the planter work with and process his or her team to bring people on board and train them. They include exercises and discussion questions that planters can take and use with their teams.
Many of these resources are readily adaptable. You can use them as-is, you can change the vocabulary or emphasis to fit your people or vision, or you can pare them down so you don’t feel like David in Saul’s armor. The point is to get right-sized, adaptable resources into the hands of planters that can be easily used alongside others on this journey of church planting.
Whether you are Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, or non-denominational… whether you are planting a network of house churches or a traditional congregation… whether you are partway through the planting process or just beginning… you can adapt and use these practical resources for planting churches.
Looking for more Church Planting resources? Find our recommendations here.
Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash.