Planting Space

…because you might just get it.
Vision statements, when lived out rather than left on a shelf, have a way of almost taking on a life of their own. When other people hear it and become convinced that it really is God’s vision for your congregation, they will multiply the vision by convincing others of it [...]

I recently talked to a planter about making sure that he honored his family by taking his allotted vacation time this year. His initial thought was to postpone any vacation until after launch because of all the business that happens up to launch. I reminded him that it only gets busier after launch because of [...]

Pre-Launch should be a time of dreaming and strategy, vision and planning. Most planters are big on the dream and small on the details and implementation. That is how it should be, as most people who are ‘maintainers’ don’t have big enough dreams, or at least the moxie to go plant a church.
That being said, [...]

I just never get tired of top 10 lists.
Here’s a great one with some insight into church leadership. Of course they don’t all apply, but the top 3 really struck me:

[New Leaders] persist in still doing their old jobs, rather than their new ones. As a result, they don’t delegate; they burn themselves out while [...]

It can be dangerous to make church too much like a business; there are still, of course, some important lessons to be learned. I read an online article at cnbc.com about the 10 biggest mistakes small business startups make. All church planters should pay attention to these things that bring a new business down:
#8 The [...]

Developing leaders is a common struggle for church planters. I learned a good lesson in leadership development last night. While in Charlotte at LifePointe, I worked really hard on a particular group of people. I baptized most of them, took ownership in teaching them, and frequently challenged them to leadership. I [...]

Sometime in the last year I heard one of those ministry stories that may be evangelical legend, but makes a good point:
2 teams of relief workers arrived on site in a famine-stricken third-world area. Both teams were immediately pressed by crowds as they got off the plane. The first team, seeing the need, started handing [...]

Have you ever had anyone in your church who comes to you and says, “I’m just not being fed. I’d really like to see…”? We all have. Honestly I can say that I didn’t like the church I planted. I would have preferred the sermons to have been 45 minutes long [...]

I just finished reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. It’s a really interesting read about the strengths of flat decentralized organizations versus hierarchical centralized organizations. When I think of the difference between a regular business (where there is a CEO who calls the shots from a national [...]