Advice for a New Church Planter

The thought of giving advice to a new church planter is a bit silly for me since I have been a church planter for the whole of 15 months now.  The well of my church planting wisdom goes about two inches deep.  Many days I feel like I barely know what to do.  Nevertheless, I was recently asked by my buddy Carlos Griego, to answer the question, "What would we do different and what would we keep the same?" in reference to our church plant.  In a few months, Carlos will be planting a new Acts29 church in the Albuquerque area.

Here was my "off the cuff" response in no particular order:

1.  We started from day one with three solid elders. Not flying solo has been the biggest blessing for us. I don’t know how guys can do it as a solo pastor.  Crazy hard.

2.  All three of us work a part-time job. It’s been hard but having a context to share our faith that is structured into our lives has been huge. Our people know that we can relate with them. Our mission is not just talk. They know we are attempting to live it out. We have stories to tell about our unbelieving friends.  Do your people know your “mission” talk is not just talk? 

3.  We spent 9 months before we launched raising a ton of money. Money has not been a stress and that has helped quite a bit.

4.  We have been ruthlessly redundant about our mission (Gospel, Community, Mission). And since we have three elders who are all very visible on Sunday morning there has been zero threat thus far from people trying to hijack our vision. One dude is way easier to take out than three.  Again, a strong team is key.  

5.   You should never bend excellence (relative term, I know) because you feel desperate to delegate. God will provide. Be patient. Get to know potential leaders as well as you can and then empower them by faith. But don’t feel desperate. You aren’t.  God will provide.

6.  Emotionally speaking, have dudes that you trust who you can pour your heart out to. The emotional burden will probably be something you have never felt yet. You need outlets to vent this safely, biblically, and often. This goes back again to the power of a strong team.

7.  Fight hard to maintain healthy relationships among your leadership team. If your elders/leadership team goes down, the church goes down, but if your leadership is strong, apart from God just taking you out, nothing will stop you. Invest in those relationships. Don’t let people in too quickly and guard the fit on your leadership team. Let no bitterness grow up. Name it and deal with it quickly. Satan will attack your relationships with those dudes.

8.  Regularly submit yourself to evaluation by those who are close to you, know you, and love you. Your wife, your elders, etc. Ask for it. Don’t make them come to you. In our elder meetings we have a weekly evaluation of whoever preached at the last service. It has been really helpful. Way too many pastors suck as preachers and they don’t even know it because they don’t seek feedback about their sermons and their life.

9.  We have a simple church model. Just know that some people are not going to like that and as you grow there is going to be the constant challenge to become more structurally complex as a church.  Fighting to stay simply helps you guard the mission of the church. Help people see that they don’t have to “use their gift” in an official church ministry but rather use it with unbelievers in the community. So if you want a youth ministry why not invite a bunch of unsaved kids over to your house and start hanging out with them a lot. This way, you are doing “youth ministry” and it totally fits the mission of the church but you don’t have to start a whole new church program. We are trying to help our people see that but it can be a tough sell for many who come from highly programmed churches. We don’t really know what we are doing with this philosophy, but is sounds good right now in theory! :) 

10.  We started right out of the gate preaching through Ephesians and we didn’t do any “preview” services. We just started having church and inviting people to come join us. Word of mouth was huge for us and A29 was huge for us in terms of getting people in the door. Ephesians was a great book because it has such a strong ecclesiology and it hits many core issues like Reformed theology, gender issues, parenting, community life, etc. I would strongly recommend that book for a first preaching series for a church plant.