Consulting, Coaching & Chatter

The other day I got a Twitter question from Phil Longmire, a church planter in Richmond, TX. We were talking about church planting priorities and I was saying how important it is for planters to be out of the office, away from the computer, and out in the public’s eye. So he Tweeted me and asked, “What are the top five things a planter does in the community?” I promised him I’d write on Friday, but yesterday’s come and gone … so I’m doing it first thing today.

The top five things a church planter needs to do while they’re out and about in the community is:

1. Meet new people - share the vision
2. Meet new people - share the vision
3. Meet new people - share the vision
4. Meet new people - share the vision
5. Meet new people - share the vision

Get the idea? The primary thing a church planter needs to be about is meeting new people, sharing the vision, watching for those whose eye’s light up, and building relationships with them. IMHO (and after 4 church plants), one of the top reasons assessed and trained planters fail is because they get tied up doing #6–10 instead of the top 5. And what, you ask, are #6–10? (6) Marketing, brochure and website development; (7) meetings with other Christians (think Minister meetings, etc.); (8) sermon development (in a church plant, if you spend more than 2 hours doing this, you’re wasting time); (9) worship development; (10) and most of all – doing church.

There’s an old church plant coaching joke that in short, sums it up. It goes like this:

Q: How do you get a church planter to plant a church?

A: Take away his/her laptop.

If you’re out of the office and in public with your laptop … and you’re writing, posting, blah blah, then you’re not interacting with those around you. If you’re not interacting with those around you, you’re not engaged in the top five things a church planter needs to do when they’re out in the community. I’ve done a number of debriefs and post-mortems on failed church plants. There were some common themes I noted with the majority of these failed churches. They all had  (1) a great website; (2) four color professional looking brochures; (3) creative business cards; (4) well-planned, high tech worship … and all of this was created by the church planter. When I asked how they spent their time, they admitted they spent a lot of time behind a computer screen, they attended clergy meetings, joined and participated in service club meetings (like Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, etc.), and spent a lot of time with their core team. Meeting new people almost seemed like an afterthought.

Church Planters … hear this: If you want to plant a new church you MUST spend the VAST majority of your time meeting new people in the community. Don’t waste time building online social networks - until something changes (and it well may), Internet attendees don’t fill worship spaces and rarely write checks. How much time should you be spending meeting and talking with NEW people? Six hours or more each day. Every day, meaning SIX days a week. And when do you stop doing this? When you have 350+ in average worship attendance … but not until. Okay, maybe I exaggerate a tiny bit. Take it down to four hours a day, six days a week when you have 200+ in average worship attendance … but not until.

“But I don’t know what to do with six hours a day. What do I do with my time?” If that’s the question haunting your mind, my first response is to ponder the assessment and training process you “endured” to get where you’re at. Natural church planters (and if you’re not a natural at this, the church plant is probably going to be in trouble) don’t have much problem finding new people to hang out with. If networking is a chore for you, then church planting is going to be a nightmare. But if you’re one of those who’s planting without a net, then here a couple of ideas followed by a bonafide church planter training assignment.

Where to Meet People Ideas

• The mall
• The bars
• The coffee shops
• Toastmasters (it’s not a service club)
• Book stores
• PTA
• Soccer/little league/grid-kids games
• Small businesses
• College campuses

How to Meet People Ideas

• At B&N, glance at what someone’s reading and ask, “Is that a good book? What’s it about?”
• Ask the barista “You a church-going guy/gal? [if not] Good. Can I ask you a question? What would a church have to be like to get one of your friends to check it out?”
• Comment, compliment, or ask for an opinion from someone sitting near you at the mall.

So, here’s a bonafide church planter training assignment (in case you didn’t go to CMTC Bootcamp). List 50 places to meet new people in your target community. In addition list 50 ways to meet new people (just going somewhere that people are hanging out is not the same as actually meeting new people). That’s a long list of 100 places and ways to meet people. Don’t stop until you’ve completed the assignment. It’s a killer … trust me, I had to do it. But when you’re done, you won’t have to ponder where and how. Then get busy with your six-by-six days. Six hours a day, six days a week: meet new people and share the vision.

Why is it that in a denomination with the slogan “A thousand church plants, a thousand different models” that when it comes to Anglo church planting there seems to be only one model that gets any serious conversation: The Pastor Developer Model.

Talk about so yesterday. And so expensive. .And so very, very ineffective for most church starts. It’s not that the model doesn’t work … it has good potential, it’s simply that very few mainline denominations have the funding to do it right, and so the church plant falters and seldom succeeds in becoming a vital church that is self-supporting, let alone a church that plants other churches. In today’s world the pastor developer model must fund not only a senior pastor, but in general a professional church planting team with a worship pastor and a discipleship/lay mobilizing pastor. Successful PD models often fund as many as five team members to ensure effectiveness. Each of these team members are fully assessed (beyond the pulse and breathing test) and they are fully trained and coach-supported (trained coaches, not just encouragers). When this team hits the ground, they hit it running and when the denomination pushes for an early public launch (and the denomination ALWAYS pushes for a premature public launch), the team is ready for it, ether to dig their collective heels in, or to collectively agree and push forward. And I don’t suppose I mentioned that the funding includes at least five-figures for grand opening marketing.

But here’s what the mainliners typically do (with the PD model). They fund a salary and ministry fully for the first year and then cut the funding over the next two or three years … as if the pastor needs extra funding the first year when s/he has NO worship, no church members, etc. and will need less in the second or third year when it’s most likely the church will actually be ready for a launch.
Something seems backwards to me.

The fact is, there really are a lot of different models for church planting - even in the mainline. But I keep hearing misguided and misinformed denominational leaders say, “We can’t afford to try an experimental model - we MUST have a success” as if their under-funded PD model without effective assessment and coaching somehow guarantees a success.

So … what other models are there? The denominational slogan has it right: there are literally thousands. But let me offer a couple quickies. First, there’s the meta-model - a church of small groups (not a church with small groups). This model begins much more slowly than the PD model, but costs less in the long run. The assessed and coached planter begins by building a small group of genuine seekers that they’ve raised up in the field (not a collection of disgruntled formerly churched retreads recruited by the denomination). BTW, if a planter can’t raise up a group of seekers in month or two, what are they doing planting a church? They’re obviously not suited for it. These seekers are discipled from the beginning and within a couple of months have multiplied their small group at least once … oh, and the planter should have been able to launch at least one new group of seekers during that time. And so it goes until there are at least ten small groups with at least ten in each group … with each group having at least a couple of identified future leaders. Only then is the church ready to begin the public worship process.

The second model, and in some ways the most effective and price conscious model, is for a healthy local church to enter into the multi-site process. In this case, a healthy church simply starts an off-site service that is indigenous to a particular target in the community. The new service launches with a worship sevice designed specifically for that target audience, complete with music, technology, and hospitality in the style and of the calibre expected of the target. The multi-site doesn’t need a preacher, but it does need a host pastor who will be the face of the off-site church and who will do follow-up and be in charge of ensuring effective pastoral care. The founding church generally provides the “sermon” via a feed or a DVD (or USB Flash Drive). There are lots of reasons why this kind of start works, but not the least of which is that the two sites share the resources of the founding church. The key to success here, however, is that the founding church MUST BE HEALTHY, and there are so very few healthy mainline churches that there are many cities, let alone towns, that could not pull this off even if they wanted to. And for those who are thinking it takes a large church to do multi-site, consider that it is reported that churches with less than 200 in worship are successfully launching multi-site churches.

There are many, many more models out there. House church networks are finally seeing some success.
Marketplace driven churches are being launched here and there. And “factory” churches (churches based within an industry, including the hospitality industry) are starting to pop up here and there. The sky’s the limit … but we have to get the lid off of the Pastor Developer Jar first.

On top of being a transformational church consultant and involved in spiritual leadership development and training, I also wear a hat called the New Church Department Chair. In that role, I lead a small group of Christian leaders in the NE Area of Missouri who are committed to developing church planting. We’re currently seeking indigenous church planters and developing the assessment tools for selecting appropriate candidates. We could, of course, leave our denomination to do the assessing for us … but several of us on the New Church Department have had first-hand experience with their work and we’ve become committed to doing our own assessment. Not because we want to reinvent the wheel or because the denomination doesn’t have a good heart. But, like most mainline denominations, there’s suddenly a push to plant a bunch of churches and it’s very, very difficult to raise up highly qualified leaders. And so, rather than start fewer churches that might experience success, there’s a move to approve even marginally qualified people to start churches. I suspect the rationale is that by starting a lot of churches, that at least some will succeed. Those that don’t are simply acceptable losses.

The problem is, those “acceptable” losses are bankrupting middle judicatories as well as those churches and organizations who are funding failure after failure. And that doesn’t even take into account the carnage being wrought in the lives of the failed church planters and those few that they managed to gather to start a new church. I’ve repeatedly seen failed marriages, moral failures, and much stress-related disease ransack these poorly assessed “acceptable” church planters.

An effective assessment process is all about behaviors, not willing canon fodder. When we assess a candidate, we’re less interested in getting the candidate accepted and a lot more concerned with whether or not they have the behavior patterns not only to start a church, but to stay the course. The premise of the assessment process is that the best indicator of future performance is past behavior (Charles Ridley).

For instance, one of the questions that we ask is for the candidate to tell us about a time when they were responsible for gathering a crowd (of almost any size) for an event. If they’ve never done that, there’s a good chance it’s because they can’t do it. Most of us have had opportunities to gather a crowd for some sort of an event … birthday party, dinner party, backyard barbeque, etc. But doing it just once isn’t enough. We’re looking for patterns of behaviors. Do they gather crowds as a matter of course, or did they only do it once or twice. Patterns. Lifestyles. That’s the key to whether or not a candidate can do a church plant.

Other questions include asking them to recount times when they intentionally started a conversation with a stranger. If they don’t do that as a pattern, they can’t plant a church. We ask them about sharing their faith with others. If they aren’t doing that they can’t start a church. If they don’t behave as an entrepreneurial, crowd gathering, faith sharing, not-afraid-of-strangers kind of person, they’re not going to make it as a church planter I don’t care if you put them in a room with 1,000 spiritually starving seekers.

The reason so many mainline church plants are struggling is because their assessments appear to be based on education, desire, and whether or not the person is breathing and has a pulse. We’re so desperate for people willing to endure the difficulties of church planting that we’ll approve almost any candidate who is willing and “qualified,” typically meaning seminary educated. Of course all bets are off when it comes to ethnic minority candidates … apparently we don’t think that a seminary education is all that important for ethnic starts (hmmm, there may be a reason ethnic starts are significantly more successful and less expensive than Anglo starts in the Mainline).

What we’ve learned and experienced is that there are a number of church planter wannabes who “think” they could start a church. “How hard can it be? If I didn’t have to deal with the board, the deacons, and all the politics, it would be so easy to ‘run’ a church.” What they don’t realize is that if they can’t work through difficult people or if they can’t “sell” their vision to an existing church board, they probably don’t have the skills that will carry them forward in church planting. It’s just not that easy. If they can’t grow a church, if they’re not doing adult baptisms, if they spend more time behind their computer than with people, give them a miss. They just can’t do it.