Inside Church Planting 2.2
 | Inside Church Planting September-October, 2004 Volume 2, Number 2 | ||
Contents This Issue Feature Article: Planning the Church Plant, part 2 Summary: 2004 Northwest Church Planting Workshop Kairos Church Planters Feature Book: Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age Subscribing to ICP
KAIROS CHURCH PLANTERS
Kevin and Brenda Woods Background: 24 year career in youth ministry in the Pacific Northwest Church Plant: Renevatous, a Church of the Christ in Camas, WA Launch Date: October 2005 Team Status: 8 team members committed to the plant. The team is currently conducting research and readying plans to develop multiple community groups. Contact: KevinWoods500@comcast.net
Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age by Ed Stetzer, Broadman & Holman, 2003. Stetzer strikes a healthy balance between thoughtful reflection and pragmatic action as he walks the reader through a balanced dis-cussion of the church planting process. In Parts 1-3 Stetzer describes the missional journey needed to plant churches that will be appropriate for their context. Here is where the reader will get a rapid introduction to the post-modern world. Parts 4-5 move to a nuts and bolts, timeline approach that leads the reader through a detailed description of what a planter will do to start a new church. Part 6 ends the book with a call for reproduction so that new churches will plant other new churches. Stetzer's strength is his experi-ence and expertise as a church planter. He also uses well church planting research that has ac-cumulated over the past decade. The reader needs to keep in mind two weaknesses in the book. First, there is a limited theological grounding for the church planting enterprise (let alone theological considerations to guide the selection of practices). Two, despite the title, one gets the distinct impression that Stetzer's planting experience was in plant-ing modern rather than post-modern churches. The book is still to be written that truly addresses planting churches among the emerging generations. Despite the weaknesses in the book we give Stetzer a 4-star rating. In fact, this is the book Kairos provides to all our planters.
| Inside this Issue The spirit of God has been extremely active since the last issue of Inside Church Planting. This issue begins with our feature article: Planning the Church Plant, part 2, which describes the Launch, Growth and Stabilization Phases of the first 3 years of the church plant. Next Issue: Kairos: Church Planting, a facilitating ministry for church planting churches. Editor: Dr. Stanley Granberg, Cascade College. | ||
PLANNING THE CHURCH PLANT, part 2 In the last issue of ICP we described the planting of a new church as a six phase process beginning with the inception of the idea (the call of God in the heart and mind of the church planter) and reaching the completion of the cycle by reproducing another new church.
Each phase is described in terms of a major task and a series of essential objectives which need to be met in order to complete the task of each phase. Last issue we looked at the Conception, Team Building and Evangelize and Gather phases. Here we complete the process working through the Launch, Growth and Stabilization phases of a new church. Launch Phase, 10-12 months The primary task of the Launch Phase is to begin the public celebration worship services for the new church. Up until this time the church planter has been doing the foundational work. During the Team Building Phase the planting team is gathered, the planter continually casts the vision of the church to provide direction to the team and trains the team for ministry. In the Evangelize and Gather Phase the church planter continues to build the team into the launch team, multiplying community groups and training the launch team in the basic skills needed to support the church. Now, in the Launch Phase, the church goes public. Going public, there is something scintillating and scary about launching public worship of the church. The public launch is truly a hinge moment for the new church. A successful launch builds off the successful work done in the previous stages. It also carries its own weight. Ed Stetzer's (2003) research indicates that churches which use a big launch are larger in their 2nd through 4th years than those churches that did not (p. 263). The launch moves the church into a new stage of existence, bringing the church into the public arena where it will compete with all of the other market forces calling for peoples' attention and commitment. As a worshipping community the public launch is a major confession of faith for the new group of gathered believers as they bear witness to the divine-human relationship which lies at the heart of their community. The are 4 essential objectives to achieve in the launch phase. And notice there is little time given to meet these objectives. Actually, these objectives are seeded here and will reach maturity with time and practice. 1. Multiply community groups (4-5 groups). Multiplying the small groups of the church will be a continuing element. The temptation is to let the community groups slip into a maintenance mode as the bulk of the launch team's energy flows into the public worship. If, in the previous phases, the foundations of small group life have been well laid the process for multiplying new groups should continue to work. 2. Develop the public celebration services. There are two critical aspects to keep in mind here. The first is to create integrity between the vision for the church and its practices in worship. The worship experience should reflect the core values of the church so that everyone who attends will leave with a basic understanding that "this is what this church is about." The second key aspect is to develop the worship service so that it calls to the target group the church is trying to reach. The worship practices must encourage unbelievers to consider Christ and not put forward unnecessary obstacles. As a mission church the new church must consider its worship language (church-ese is a foreign language to the unbeliever), its music, the time and place of its worship meetings, even the dress code that it portrays, just like a church must do to be effective in a foreign mission field. 3. Mobilize celebration ministries. Who is going to plan and carry out all the tasks of the worship meeting? There are greeters, set-up and tear-down crews, children's ministries, sound system, record-keeping, and a hundred other tasks that must be done EVERY Sunday. These tasks can be arranged into ministries which will develop systems to get done what needs to be done every week. 4. Activate a comprehensive assimilation process. A comprehensive assimilation process begins with the target people in their natural environment (how does the church become an option among people who do not yet know of it?), moves them into the sphere of the church, calls them to commitment and trains them for life-long discipleship. If you're expecting visitors at your launch (isn't that the object?) you need to know what you're going to do with them from that very first day. Growth Phase, 13-24 months The primary task of the Growth Phase is to build a healthy body of active believers. This phase can be thought of as the "experience" phase; it's where the church begins to mature through continued practice of all its ministries. Four essential objectives are part of the Growth Phase: 1. Continue to multiply community groups (7-12 groups). 2. Communicate your vision and values. Every new person who enters into the church will come with his or her own background, expectations and agendas. Horror stories abound of church plants that were hijacked or stalled by competing visions. New Christians need orientations to the new life they are building as well as to their new community. This is not the time to be timid with the vision God has provided, but bold (2 Tim. 1:7). 3. Train for ministry involvement. Thom Rainier in Surprising Insights form the Unchurched and Proven Ways to Reach Them (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001) found that involvement in ministry (62% of those responding) is the top reason why unchurched peoples stayed in churches during their first two years as Christians. Bob Lewis of Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, Arkansas describes how their church has had a profound impact in changing their community by calling everyone in the church to be a minister for Christ (The Church of Irresistible Influence. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003). 4. Multiply ministries. Training for ministry will go nowhere unless new ministries are created and existing ministries re-energized by the influx of new Christians. Rick Warren's philosophy for the Saddleback Church of being purpose driven is reflected in their highly visible 301 training classes and ministry creation demonstrates that new people bring new ministry possibilities with them (see http://www.saddlebackfamily.com/). Stabilization Phase, 25-36 months The primary task of this last phase in the three year church planting process is to structure the church for long-term health and growth. This phase is the least discussed phase in the church planting literature, but cannot be overlooked for the long-term success of the church plant. The following are the five essential objections of the Stabilization Phase: 1. Continue to multiply community groups (12+). 2. Build effective communication systems. The general rule of thumb is that effective communication occurs multiple times using multiple communication avenues. The more important an item is, the more often it must be communicated using a wider variety of communication means. Effective communication also includes feedback, otherwise how can you know what communication people have actually received! Develop a communication plan which identifies 2 or 3 primary communication methods (i.e., e-mail, internet, weekly bulletins, mailouts, etc.) and 2 or 3 secondary methods (phone calls, letters, personal communication, etc.) The primary methods are used for all general communication. The secondary methods are used for specific purposes. Then train your people to look and listen! 3. Initiate intentional leadership development. The #1 indicator of a good leader is the ability to call and develop other good leaders. Church planters are often not good at developing leaders because of feelings of personal threat, lack of time, and it is just plain easier to do it yourself than to train others to do it. Developing internal church leadership involves dealing with congregational polity, lines of authority and accountability and the willingness of all leaders to practice mutual submission as well as authoritative leadership. Despite the complexity of developing leaders it is a biblical command (2 Tim. 2:2) necessary for church health. 4. Develop leadership and administrative structures. Who will make what decisions? How will those decisions be implemented? Who keeps records and accounts and what records and accounts does the church need to keep? Church planters are seldom the detail people who are interested in administrative issues, but ignoring the need won't make them disappear. Some key areas needing attention are incorporation of the church as a legally constituted organization; financial record keeping and accounting; hiring, work evaluation and termination process; and security screening for ministries with minors. 5. Launch a daughter church plant. One of my mentors, Wendell Broom, speaks of terminal churches and germinal churches. Terminal churches live for themselves; germinal churches live to reproduce. The common experience of church planters in reproducing churches is that daughtering the new church plant is more demanding and sacrificial than beginning the mother church. What this implies is that daughtering a church will not be an accidental process. It must be in the plan and part of the DNA structure of the mother church. | |||
2004 Northwest Church Planting Workshop About 75 people attended the 2004 workshop at Cascade College. The PowerPoint presentations for the workshop are available for viewing and downloading at www.kairoschurchplanting.org.
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