It should come as no surprise that I’ve been thinking about church planting lately.

My friend Dave Rhodes and I have been talking about it every now and then the past few weeks and one of our conversations turned to the Core Teams people are starting churches with.

Here’s what I want to ask: Is it possible that WHO we are planting our new churches with is far, far more important than our finely tuned thoughts on WHAT this new church is going to look like?

There’s been a long-standing thought in church planting world that you need to build a team out of scratch and there main job is to help get the church off the ground. However, they are usually called “scaffolding” (no joke) because they are often the scaffold that gets the building up, but then the scaffold disappears. In fact, I’ve read a few books that suggest you should expect about 80-90% of your Core Team to disappear after the church is started. Their primary role is to execute your vision and then, as long as your vision was taken care of, who cares if they leave?

But clearly we are in a new world.

My observation, lately, of some really successful church plants thriving in post-Christian contexts is that the people who made up the Core Team were far more important than the amazing plan the planter had come up with. And here’s why: All the maps for church planting in post-Christian contexts virtually no longer work, so it’s more important to have the right team with you than the right plan because “The Plan” is going to change, morph and adjust almost the second you begin. You need a team who you like, who you believe in, who won’t leave when it gets hard (because it will), who are willing to learn as they go, who are willing to lead and aren’t always looking to you, who can be flexible and who know how to do extended family well.

When I planted our church 4 years ago, I don’t think I would have had the discipline or wisdom to wait starting the church in order to put together the right team; one that I’d want to go into the trenches with and come church plant failure, hell and high water…they’d be people I’d want to do life with. I think I’d assume the original plan would carry the day and would arrogantly believe I was gifted enough to make it work.

I guess here’s my question to church planters:

1. Are you willing to wait for God to bring you the right team? Are you willing to put your plans on hold for a year or two so that when you go to the missional frontier, you’ve got the people you want to really do this with?
2. If you have been waiting and you don’t see a team coming around you, what is this telling you? Do you need to change something? Are you not good at developing leaders? Are you not called to church plant?
3. How firmly do you believe your plan and detailed vision is what will win the day? I promise you, I PROMISE YOU…it will change. Things never work in reality like they do on paper. Do you have the team with you who know that going in, expect it, and adapt with you as you listen to the Lord?

This past weekend I get to speak at a fairly large worship service.

That’s not really terribly significant or novel, but more to the point, I hadn’t done this in over a year. Sure, in my work with 3DM I’m regularly teaching groups of leaders, but it’s not really content I’ve developed for a specific Sunday, from a specific passage, for a specific group of people. I really enjoyed it quite a bit and it was a reminder that it’s one thing I miss doing on a regular basis. That being said, I’m quite content with the season God has me in right now.

But it did get me thinking about how I learned to teach in the first place.

You see, like every pastor, there was once a time when I never regularly taught in front of large groups of people. But somewhere along the way I had to learn a skill set that was slightly unfamiliar to me and over time, it was one that I got better at (and hopefully continue to develop even now). But as I was thinking about it this weekend, a few things stood out to me:

• I learned to teach by listening to one particular pastor quite a bit. This particular person had a teaching that did a lot in bringing me to faith and opened up the Gospels and the narrative scriptures and ways I’d never seen before. Their rhetorical style was different. Their diction was different. The way they told jokes, structured the sermon, even moved on stage…everything about it really captivated me. And this was the person that I started to sound like when I began to teach.
• The more I taught, the better I got. I know, this isn’t a terribly revelatory statement. But it’s really true. What Malcolm Gladwell says about putting in your 10,000 hours really does work. For the first 5 years I was a pastor (maybe even longer), I was teaching between 40-50 Sundays a year. The first teaching I ever gave, my sister stopped counting the number of times I said “like” at 46. (Yes, it’s humiliating even now, all these years later.)
• People recognized someone else in me. The first few years I was teaching, people would often say, “Wow, you really sound like (insert name of person I was listening to a lot).” That got really annoying. But they were definitely right.
• But I found my own voice. It took some time. It took a lot of practice. It took being exposed in large doses to a few other really gifted teachers. But eventually, I found a style, a structure, a process and voice that was truly me. But funny thing: You can still hear the traces of that first teacher, even while hearing a teaching that is definitely “me.” And now…honestly…I don’t really care.

What I came to see is that a very simple process was at work, but one that people have been using in the Church for thousands and thousands of years to pass down certain skill sets.

• First was information: I read books on rhetorical theory. Commentaries. I asked lots of questions. Researched. Critiqued. Found out who the people were I thought were worth getting solid resources and information from about this skill set.
• Second was imitation. I found someone who truly embodied what I was looking for. I studied him. Listened to him. Practiced like him. Prepared like him. Read the same books. Copied his diction and style. Even used a few of his teachings, from soup to nuts.
• Last was innovation. After building a solid foundation, I was got to a place of competence in the skill that allowed me to innovate on all that I had learned and imitated and I developed a voice that was true to me. And actually, the fact that there are traces of a few people in me that people can recognize every once in a while speaks to a lengthy process of healthy development.

So here’s my thought: If that’s what it took to learn to teach well…what would that process look like for other things? Like building teams and multiplying leaders? Discipling people? Reproducing missional communities? Planting churches? Starting reproducible movements?

In case you haven’t read it yet, my good friend Ben Sternke wrote a killer blog post along the same vein, but with some really keen insights about movements. Definitely have a look.

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post that caused a bit of a stir called “Could we plant churches with a 90% success rate?”

I’ve got a webinar coming up on May 1 where I’ll outline a few of the thoughts from this post, expand on it a bit, put out some new content and then open it up for some extensive Q + A and discussion.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting if you follow exactly what I’m saying you’ll hit 90% success rate (how arrogant would that be!). But I AM asking, “Could some of the things mentioned get us a much higher % of successful churches?”

If you’d like to register, click here.

At the end of November I really sensed the Lord was asking me to give up a few things for 6 months. Not bad things, but some things that were taking too prominent a role in my life and that were increasingly things I found myself not wanting to give up.

One of those things…soda.

Words cannot express my great love of that wonderfully carbonated, caffeinated, sugary beverage. A little after college I switched almost exclusively to diet soda (though on a special occasion, every once in a while, I’ll splurge for a Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew). My usual poison of choice of soda is Diet Coke.

Before moving to Pawleys I had soda regularly, but nothing too outlandish…maybe one a day (sometimes more, sometimes less). But in moving to Pawleys Island, something spectacular happened. Suddenly, I found my office only 20 seconds (literally) away from Sonic. Now I’m not a big fan of their food, but they have the best ice in the business and specials throughout the day where you can buy a Route 44 (yes, that’s right…44 ounces of diet coke goodness) for .99.

Clearly you see where this is going.

Me getting 2-3 of those drinks a day.

And I’m not gonna lie…I enjoyed every single second of it. It always delivered. Never came up short.

So when God made it clear I needed to give up soda for 6 months, those first two weeks were no picnic (to say the least). But here’s the interesting thing: Four months into, after the cravings had pretty much subsided, they’ve come back even stronger. I’ve never wanted soda more in my life than I do right now.

Had a chat about this with a few people and this looks to be what’s happening: The sugar substitute in diet soda, while not containing sugar, actually makes you want it more. In other words, you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul because you end up getting the sugar fix from somewhere else. Well I’ve also been fairly disciplined in what I’m eating in the last few months so at about the 4 month mark my body is starting to look around and say, “Wait. Are you serious? Is this for real? This wasn’t just a little something to try out? Honestly man…you’ve got to get me some sugar NOW. No more playing around!”

You would not believe the cravings.

So yeah…I was thinking this might go to some spiritual place but clearly it isn’t right now (at least not at 11:18 at night).

But all this leads me to the question I’m starting to ask: When the 6 months ends…what happens next in my long and gratifying relationship with soda?

I got to spend a couple of hours with a church planter today from Sri Lanka. Because of the political and religious climate of the country, he asked that we not publish his name, church name or any pictures. But it was a fascinating and inspiring time and I wanted to share a few things I picked up from my time with him.

First, a little background on the church and cultural climate of the country:

• Sri Lanka has about 21 million people.
• About 2% of the people are protestant Christian. The majority are Buddhist, followed by Hindu, Muslim and then non-practicing Catholics.
• Just three years ago, a Civil War ended that raged through the country for over 30 years.
• In the last few years, more than 100 pastors have been killed, 300 churches have been burned down and this particular pastor regularly receives death threats (hence the anonymity of this post).
• This church was planted 11 years ago with 12 people. Today there are 1700 people in the church (which has a scattered and gathered approach), they’ve planted 7 networked campuses, 12 independent churches and are looking at planting 3-4 just this year.

So there’s a little background.

Here are some things I noticed that really stood out to me from this conversation:

• This pastor and his team approached leadership, church planting and ministry very simply: “We read through the Gospels and the book of Acts and asked, “OK, How should we plant a church?”
• It was amazing to see how similar they were in practice to what 3DM does in training leaders. In a really really positive way.
• This is how they plant churches: Often families were driving quite a ways to get to their church. If they were committed enough and had been through some training, they would send one of their core leaders from the missional center out to this family and they’d start plowing the missional soil together. Then, they send in an insanely gifted evangelist who would only stay for 6 months and reap a harvest of of families coming into the Kingdom. So, in real life, the church they are about to plant is one where they sent a gifted evangelist for 6 months and he’s coming back to this missional center now, but this burgeoning church plant that started with a core leader and one family now has FIFTEEN families that have come to faith in Jesus. And that’s how the church started. Doesn’t that sound eerily similar to how Paul did things?
• They have figured out how to “staff up” in terms of full-time pastors who train the members of the church. So they have a pretty large staff that trains the congregation, but here’s why: “The harvest is plentiful and we won’t want to not have enough workers.”
• Every leader is held accountable through a G12 leadership group. You’ve probably heard of G12 before, which saw quite a lot of success in South America. They have taken a lot of the ideas and tweaked them and are seeing explosive growth. He believes all of their missional growth is based on discipling people well. Again, sounded very much like what I’d call a Huddle.
• They have just started House Churches of 20-50 people who meet on Sunday nights that seek to reach out to their neighbors who don’t go to church. This is their principle to those in the community: “You can come here on a Sunday morning for a church service, but that means you have to help start one of your own for people who won’t come here.” And yet again…it sounds strangely familiar to this thing we call Missional Communities.

Maybe…just maybe…it isn’t a fad or a way of doing church that will pass but a way that the church has been living out for thousands of years that we see pretty clearly on the pages of scripture?

Mike said something to me a to me a few years ago that I thought was really quite profound, but I forgot it. (Clearly an indication of how profound it was for me at the time!) Then, last month, I was talking to a friend very similar to me and he had gotten the same advice from him and I wanted to make sure to capture it.

This was it:

Your job isn’t to be a mastermind. You’re job is to lead people.

You see, for me, I like the idea of coming up with the perfect system, with the perfect chess game, to lock myself into a dark room and not come out until I have all the answers, with everything in perfect alignment. I don’t want to enter into the fray until everything has been thought of to perfection.

Yet this is a complete joke.

1. I will never be able to come up with the perfect system that works in reality.
2. Systems that work well tend to spring from thoughtful planning, but more importantly, attentive observation, reflection and discussion with a team after some testing has been done in real time.

There are times when my desire to mastermind something overshadows the real need of my team: For me to lead them into the unknown and to reflect and piece it together…together.

For all the talk on theory behind Missional Communities, the question I hear asked most often is HOW. This webinar is about how to start, grow, disciple people within and multiply Missional Communities. In it, I’ll build on the 3DM field guide, offering ideas and insight, as well as answering questions on missional community strategy.

If you want more details or would like to register, just click here!

If you have any questions about the webinar, ask away!

We’ve probably all heard the quote a million times: The most segregated place and time of the week is Sunday morning church services.

But I want to push it a bit further. We value what we celebrate and we celebrate what we value. And perhaps the biggest, most aggressive way the evangelical church celebrates things is through conferences. Who gets put on the main stage? But time after time, to almost every conference I’ve ever been to, all I see us celebrating is the hero (male) pastor of churches reaching white, middle-to-upper-middle-class people.

This isn’t 100% true (because all conferences do their best to throw in some racial diversity if they can), but by-and-large, I think this is a hard thing to argue. Almost all the people we highlight on stages are white males reaching mostly white people in an upscale hipster urban context or posh suburbia.

Yet I know of a number of really successful leaders who aren’t white and who are able to and are reaching the last and the least. They are doing unbelievably innovative things, are thinking outside of the Sunday-centric church box and have arguably as many people (or more) as some of the people we celebrate on main stage. I’d even say they are providing a glimpse into the church of the future: More de-centralized, more diverse, less Sunday-centric, more laity-driven.

Are we so segregated even in the leadership of the evangelical church, on such distantly remote islands, that we have no way to connect to what the other is doing? Or is evangelicalism, as it currently stands, really just a bunch of white people?

I guess here is my not-so-subtle question: Is there an undercurrent of racism happening even in who we choose to celebrate for conferences?

Basically…is there some sort of subversive point system that is buried deep within our subconscious where we think reaching white, middle-to-upper-middle-class is more valuable, more worthwhile (like somehow they are Ahab’s great white whale) and we think these people are worth celebrating more than those we’re reaching others who don’t fit into this box? 

Read an interesting post this weekend by someone who planted a church that now has 5000 people and is leaving it all to go plant another. I know nothing about this guy or his church so I couldn’t possibly speak to whether his church is a place of true discipleship and mission. But he had a couple of reflections on his last seven years as most would consider him “very successful” and this one really stood out to me:

For the last couple years, I have been living the dream. Our church has seen explosive growth, people be saved, baptized, and join groups all the time. We have four campuses, thousands of people, and a great staff. Finally, all the toil of church planting has paid off and the prospect of megachurch stardom was a reality.

Most of us want some version of this in ministry. I finally reached the promised land, and I can report that it’s just OK. Don’t get me wrong: there were parts that I loved, but at the end of the day there is always more to do, always another idea, hill to climb or battle to fight—it never ends.

After several months of reflection, I can honestly say that I will miss the people whom I have grown to love over the last seven years far more than I will miss big budgets, assistants, buildings, speaking gigs, or any of the perks that come with megachurch life.

I encourage you to make goals and strive for them but keep in mind that it’s your relationship with Jesus, your family, and the people you minister to who really matter.

The impotence of political and social systems to bring about real change is one reason Jesus didn’t send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today. These organizations inevitably convey some elements of a human system. Instead, his disciples were to establish beachheads of his Person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life by fully living in the kingdom with him.

Dallas Willard

Interesting take. Do you think this is semantics about “church planting” or is it something more Willard is getting at?