Copyrighted material; page 4 of 9 pages ASSIGNMENT: ARE YOU READY TO PLANT A CHURCH? Kaz Sekine planted a successful church in the heart of Tokyo. However, from the start, it was not easy. Unable to find space to rent, he set up folding chairs and held services outdoors in Shinjuku Park, which is near thousands of coffee shops and nightspots that attract a myriad of young adults. On the first Sunday, a typhoon hit, but they went ahead with services. Thus the church was born under umbrellas. Eighteen months later, the congregation moved into a nightclub. On the last Sunday in the park, like the first, umbrellas were needed. This time they popped up to protect worshipers from a snowstorm. Innovative thinking allowed my friend and his congregation to prevail where others would have failed. Not everyone can plant a church. New ventures contain the risk of failure and demand a high level of operational faith. A journey in uncharted waters requires resourceful and flexible people who have lots of team support. Sometimes it even requires umbrellas. HOW DO YOU MEASURE UP? Planting a church is not that difficult. If you are reading this book, you probably have the right tools and temperament. Most likely you have assembled plans and a team that will ensure success. God is certainly on your side as His plan centers on the birth of new congregations. My goal in this chapter is to ask you to review the areas where you will be vulnerable to Satan's attack. A careful assessment of your own position is a great defense against unguarded failure. LET'S EXAMINE YOUR WINESKIN Jesus likened the work of the Spirit to new wine that is stored best in flexible new wineskins (see Matt. 9:17). In this analogy, He was talking about religious systems. We can think of a church as a new or an old wineskin, depending upon how long it has existed and whether it has become encumbered by tradition. But this might be a misleading approach. Have you ever stopped to realize that a church is usually a reflection of its senior leadership? If this observation is true, then it would be possible to plant a new church that functions as an old wineskin. The issue is not age as much as flexibility. Do you embody newwineskin flexibility? If you are contemplating a church plant, your leadership style should be Copyrighted material; page 5 of 9 pages malleable enough to meet challenges ranging from scarce resources and an ever-changing culture to typhoons and snowstorms. Let's take a little test. Are You Flexible? How do you respond to unexpected changes? If you are flexible, then sudden challenges will not blow away your plans. Instead, you will see the hurdles as opportunities to be creative and to establish the unique personality of your church. In Hawaii, we negotiated an agreement to lease an entire floor of a new office building. Two weeks before we were to arrive, the company that managed the facility reneged on its verbal agreement. My partners and I immediately flew to Oahu to make new arrangements. We searched everywhere, but public schools, parks and even a Chinese restaurant that had a banquet room turned us down. Determined not to accept defeat, we eventually planted our new church under a tree at the beach. The litany of rejections simply made the task more exciting. We chose to be flexible and enjoyed watching God provide an innovative solution. What would you do if you had to find new facilities on very short notice? Are You an Original Thinker? Can you embrace innovative ideas and new paradigms? Do you look at processes from a variety of different angles? If you can, you will be able to differentiate your new church from every other congregation in town. A fresh approach gives people something positive to talk about. Each time we plant a Hope Chapel, I try to stimulate the leadership team to rethink every potential activity in light of two questions: • What are we trying to accomplish? • What is the best way to do it? When I ask these questions, I always hope the church planters come up with better ways of launching their ministry than the ones they learned from me. And whenever they do, I copy them. For example, I learned from the former youth pastor at my church. Mike Kai took the task of leading a dying congregation we had planted on the other side of the island. He placed radio spots on mainstream stations to announce the changes. In six months, the church grew 700 percent! You can be sure that future Hope Chapel church plants will include radio advertisements. What can you do better or more ingeniously than your mother church? Do You Have What It Takes? What fruit have you borne that makes you think you will be successful as a church planter? Planting a new congregation is all about leadership. You will need to gather a group of strangers and mold them into a team capable of recruiting others to follow the Great Commission. It is not advisable to try this in a new and perhaps hostile environment until you have proven your ability to succeed in the relative comfort of a well-established congregation. As I write, Kaala Souza and his wife are preparing to plant a church in Honolulu. They want to attract young adults and have secured a nightclub for their services. Kaala is another of our former youth pastors and has overseen our worship department. Working bivocationally, Copyrighted material; page 6 of 9 pages Kaala has recruited and organized a smooth-running team, operating it as a network of smallgroup Bible studies, and all along he has maintained a successful career as a marketing strategist. Both his past and current track records recommend him as a church planter. What have you done that is predictive of a successful church plant? Are You Driven by a Vision? Do you possess an unavoidable urge to start a new congregation? If you can live without this project, you probably should. The best church planters easily qualify for Peter Drucker's descriptive, "monomaniac with a mission."' They are driven by a call similar to the ones given to the apostle Paul and the Old Testament prophets. These are the people who can run their blood pressure up 10 points just by poring over a map of potential meeting sites. One time I spent an hour with an ex-convict who became a Christian while in jail. He knew of me from a daily radio broadcast. For him, prison became a place of nurture and discipleship under the tutelage of an excellent chaplain. Upon "graduation" he joined one of Hope's daughter churches and eventually felt a call to plant a new church in a drug-infested neighborhood on a nearby island. His eyes filled with tears as he showed me a map on which he had marked all of the crack houses and shooting galleries. The man literally lives to take the gospel to people whose lives are being stolen by Satan, the destroyer. This former inmate is a monomaniac on a mission. What do you live for? Is Anyone Listening? How well do you lead in your present circumstances? Do your ideas and observations carry weight with your peers and elders? Can you sell your ideas well enough to rally a team and take them into uncharted territory? A leader is defined by his or her followers. Are they enthusiastic? Or are they satisfied with the status quo? Or are they a gang of malcontents? The American Revolution was led by the latter. A hard look at your disciples will tell you volumes about whether you should start a church. I know one man who is a very good Bible study teacher. He leads people to the Lord and disciples them. But his followers never lead others to the Lord. Therefore, they would not make a good church-planting team. My advice to him would be to remain involved in the large church and continue to provide useful small-group ministry leadership. What are the characteristics of the people who follow you? Are You Connected? Do you have a church-planting team in place or the ability to build one? Is there a parent group or church where the corporate culture will lend itself to help you? The New Testament presents church planting as a team affair. The team members may not all move to the new location. Some will support the new church from afar. Wherever they live, your team should stand with you in prayer, fellowship and financial support. My wife and I planted our first church with the help of a dozen people. We had little financial support other than our personal savings. We survived by God's generous grace. Do your close friends support your vision? Are you connected to a peer group of leaders who will stick with you? Will these people lend you ideas and support you when you feel overwhelmed? Are they willing to move into the adventure and stand by your side? Copyrighted material; page 7 of 9 pages Can You Lead into Unknown Territory? Are you comfortable with a break from tradition? Can you carry others into the uncharted waters of an inventive new church culture? The most successful church plants differentiate themselves from both the existing churches in the community and from the ideas most non-Christians hold about church. Joshua and Caleb knew how difficult it is to break from tradition. When they returned from their spying trip, they were unable to move the Jewish people forward with enough faith to counteract the risk of invasion-40 years later they were up to the task. During those intervening years, they developed new leadership skills through hands-on experience. As 80-year-old men, they had grown in the competence that they had lacked on the first trip into the Promised Land. Are you seasoned enough to undertake the task of planting a new and different church? Simply put, are you ready? Can You Hold Your Own Under Fire? Has your personal experience prepared you to confront problems and bring undisciplined people into fruitful service to our Lord? A new church can be a magnet that attracts disgruntled Christians who have a history of conflict in other churches. My observations over the years tell me that more new churches fold from an inability to confront disruptive people than from any other cause. My own life was miserable until I learned to confront in love. I would avoid talking with difficult people. This failure on my part inadvertently gave them free rein over the church. I learned to overcome this with the help of Don Stewart, whom I had hired to join our church staff. I was impressed by his loyalty, but intimidated by his management skills and employment experience. He had worked on the executive design team for the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. At our church, I was his boss on paper, but he was mine when it came to me waffling over confrontation. He held my feet to the fire whenever I complained about a difficult person. Inevitably, he would look me directly in the eyes and ask, "What have you done to solve this problem? What did you say to this person?" I gradually began to take on difficult issues I had once avoided and, to my surprise, I found that many of these "problem people" simply lacked direction and boundaries to channel their passions. Don taught me to confront strong people and to set our church free to embrace them as potential leaders. Are you comfortable enough in confrontation to be in a position in which it will likely happen? Do You Take the Longer View? Do you stick with the projects you start? Do you turn over leadership to others too soon? What do you do when a project fails? The Bible often notes perseverance. Joseph remained steady in prison. David never abandoned Samuel's prophecies about him while on the run from Saul. Jesus continued with the few while the many abandoned him. The apostles continued to preach, even while they were being persecuted. Paul remained faithful even though the crowd in Jerusalem did not appreciate his message. Good planning and hard work still lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty (see Prov. 21:5). I once knew a man who loved starting ministries in a growing church. He had great ideas. The efforts he launched always touched a nerve of human need. The only problem was that he would turn over the new ministry to one of his disciples several months before that person was actually ready for the task. Most of these ventures failed. My friend abandoned them in the name of empowerment. But really he had eyes only for the short-term. Copyrighted material; page 8 of 9 pages A few years ago he called to tell me that he was leaving his job to plant a new church. I asked him if he planned to make a lifelong commitment to the new congregation. If he did not, I suggested that he help someone else plant a church and keep his job. He assured me that he would be in the new church until he retired. Instead, within two years he became bored with what was a quite successful church plant. As he had done in other ventures, he handed the church off to an ill-prepared follower, leaving that person to oversee a demoralized congregation. The people felt abandoned by the leader they had chosen to follow. Last I heard the well-intentioned church-planting pastor was trying to get his old job back in the secular marketplace. Helpful Hint: If there is one predictor of success, or at least a common characteristic in church planters, it has been that the good ones are voracious readers. Well-read people tend to be able to find a solution to any problem and they always seem to have a fresh supply of ideas. Some of my best church-growth ideas have come from secular history and science texts. Contrast that story with the young man who started a congregation in a New England town only to watch it fail. He merely moved 15 miles down the road and started another church, capitalizing the project with the last of his personal funds. Seven years and three daughter churches later, he is a marvelous success. The only difference between these two men is the ability of the second man to stay focused on a single goal for a longer period of time. To which man do you relate? 1. On a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself as an original thinker. 2. On a similar scale, rate yourself in terms of flexibility. 3. List three confrontations in which you faced an adversary and prevailed with a win-win solution. 4. Who follows you? List the 12 people who are most influenced by your life. Prioritize the list. 5. What is the shortest time you have held on to a new project? Would you have enjoyed greater success if you stuck around for a longer time? Why did you leave the project when you did? Note 1. Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence (New York: Warner Books, 1982), p. 225.
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