The Launch Season of Planting

Kairos coaches around three seasons of planting:

1. Groundwork sets the foundation for planting.
2. Launch initiates the basic church processes for evangelism, discipleship, and worship.
3. Grow develops the systems practices that help the church break through early growth barriers.

Each season has a critical set of activities and goals that must be accomplished for the new church to move ahead. If for some reason one of those critical tasks is skipped or underdeveloped the planter will pay for that over and over again. In fact, that weakness may become embedded into the DNA structure of the church and always be a weak point.
Most planters are ready to move from the Groundwork to the Launch season in about a year. By this time he should have his vision developed, his funding in place, have a good support and prayer team, and be in a good coaching rhythm. At this point the planter has developed his root system for the new church. Now it's time to move into the next season of planting: Launch.

​We're making two primary assumptions for the Launch phase. One, that the model for the new church will be congregational, this means larger than the single cell, family style context of a house or "organic" church. The goal is to get the new church above the crowd point of 80 people at its launch so it will have the resources to grow. Two, the church will have two primary structural components: missional communities for discipleship and service and a central worship experience for vision and energy. It's the gravitational effect of these two structures that provide the staying and growing power for the new church.
These two assumptions define the goal for the Launch phase: launching the regular worship experience in a way that allows it to average 100+ attendees at its first anniversary.
There's one other assumption we're making in the Launch season: you won't have 100 people you can migrate immediately to jump start the church. If you have a mother church that can do that for you--go for it! Don't be shy. But most planters are going to have to build from the ground up; you can't count on a "just add water" approach for instant church.
The five tasks of Launch season are designed to help you start a church from scratch. Look at the photo above and let's briefly run through each piece.

1.  Seed Team. This is 4 to 6 individuals, couples, or families who will form the initial work force. The seed team should be committed Christians who have enough experience to provide work funds through their tithe, networks of people to invite, basic leadership, and empowering support for the planter. Yeah, gathering these people is hard. But the alternative of not having them is doing all the work yourself.
2. Administration. At this stage all we're talking about is a two-person financial team. This team will manage the finances of the seed team. One person will manage intake and the other outflow. As simple as this sounds we've found implementing the financial team one of the first, critical leadership tasks the planter must successfully accomplish.
3. Growth Engine. How does a church grow? It grows from the power of its growth engine. The basic growth engine has four cylinders, listed here in order of implementation for a new church: spiritual conversations, missional communities, service activities, and the gathered worship experience.
4. Missional Communities. The MCs serve multiple functions for the new church. First, they provide a simple, numerically feasible structure to give the church some form, some activity that people can discern as a church. The MCs also provide opportunity for the church to serve, to worship, and to grow in discipleship. MCs also provide a context for developing leaders. The goal of the Launch phase is 3 to 6 missional communities with 70 people committed to the life of the church. These people form the launch team for the final task of the Launch season.
5. The Gathered Worship Experience. It's not that the growing church has not been worshiping, even worshiping in gathered formats. But now the gathered worship experience will be instituted as one of the two basic structures for church life. If the hard work has been done to this point and a good invitation strategy employed the grand launch should gather about three times as many people as are on the launch team. By the end of the year the new church should be averaging twice the launch team number. That means if you've successfully gathered 70 people into your launch team you'll have over 200 at launch and average about 140 at the end of the first year.

The Launch season is full of hard work and high goals. But imagine all those people gathering together, enjoying transformed life, and demonstrating the coming kingdom of God within your community.

Stan Granberg, Kairos Executive Director