Posts tagged “church planting”

Dear God, please stop calling pastors

Posted on February 9th, 2012

Dear God, I know we talked earlier, but I have something important that I’d like to ask you so I thought I’d send you a letter. I usually do better thinking through thoughts when I write them out. Don’t think that you need to give me an answer right away, but I’d sure love an answer sooner rather than later. So, here’s the deal: I’d like to ask you to stop calling “pastors” to the ministry. As I understand it (from that awesome book of yours) the word “pastor” is drawn from the word “shepherd.” The purpose of the shepherd is to protect and provide for the sheep, to feed them well, and keep them healthy. To be sure, sometimes this means that the…

Categories: Church, Evangelism, Leadership

Tagged: church planting, evangelism, evangelists

The New Evangelism

Posted on January 30th, 2012

Last night I found a pretty cool docu as I was cruising Vimeo. It’s called Influencers: How Trends and Creativity Become Contagious. Here it is: As I watched, my mind naturally went to the idea of “pastors as influencers,” mostly because, well, I self-identify as a pastor. But the more and more I thought of it, the more I realized that I had an opportunity here to explore an area I feel compelled to gain a depth of knowledge and wisdom in: EVANGELISM. Confession: I have a visceral reaction to the word and idea of “evangelism.” I am not joking. It makes my skin crawl, and I start to feel a little sick. I am not joking. In the Fundegelical culture I grew up…

Categories: Evangelism, Leadership

Tagged: church, church leaders, church planting, discernment, influencers, mainline church, networked culture, open source, plant a church

Church planting by way of socialism?

Posted on January 20th, 2012

The smartest kid in school, Carol Howard Merritt, asks us some very simple questions in her latest post: Can we imagine a church where we can share resources? Where our definition of “church” does not depend on financial independence? Where a community’s status as a “congregation” is not based on how much money it has? In her post, she wants to establish that financial stability is truly the measure of whether a church is a church. And then she dismantles it. Here’s the deathblow: The problem is, in our church and in our society, there’s a huge financial crisis negatively impacting full-grown adults and churches. Complete financial independence is no longer possible in our current economic climate. I agree with most, if not all,…

Categories: Church

Tagged: church planting, landon whitsitt, plant a church, socialism

Why new churches fail

Posted on January 19th, 2012

I think there are two reasons new churches fail.* Just Do It For folks in the circles I typically run in (read: postmodern young adults) anything that seems like it comes from the immediate past era of church work is anathema. This especially includes strategic plans, goals, and objectives. We don’t like quotas. We don’t like benchmarks. We don’t like deadlines. And, because most of us want to do something fun and creative, we incensed at the idea that our funding will get shut off after 3-5 years. “They can’t expect us to be ‘self-sufficient’ in 3-5 years! This new kind of church doesn’t work that way!” The way churches begun by this kind of person usually gets started is the “Nike Method:” just…

Categories: Church

Tagged: church planting, landon whitsitt, mainline, plant a church

Plant a church, but don’t do it alone. That would be dumb.

Posted on January 18th, 2012

One of the perils in communication is that you will neither communicate everything you intended, nor will everyone receive what you did communicate accurately. One of those two things happened last week when I encouraged “Young(ish) Mainline Pastor Type People” to plant a church. I got two basic responses. From old(er-ish), more established pastors the response generally was, “Yeah! Right on!”, while the future pastors in the crowd generally said “No way! We’re not taking the responsibility for this on our own.” (I was talking to a friend today and we both noted that, really, no pastors in their late 20′s/early 30′s who have had a call for 4-5 years said anything. Hmmm….) I would like to address a fraction of that second response.…

Categories: Church

Tagged: church planting, educational debt, landon whitsitt, mainline, mainline church, plant a church