From More Than Cake
I wanted to share one quick snapshot of my early survey results for my DMin project. The project is focused on developing missional teams for church planting. To date, 43 men have taken the survey. They represent guys planting churches and men who are doing a lot of training. All-tolled, the men who have taken this survey have planted, or helped plant, hundreds of churches across the US and throughout the world. A few names you may recognize are:
Scott Thomas, Acts 29 Network - Director & Mars Hill Church - Pastor of Global Church Missions
Eric Bryant, Mosaic, Navigator
Nelson Searcy, Lead Pastor, The Journey Church of the City
I want to also share with you three of the comments from the preliminary survey, but first let me show you this crosstablulation between two of my questions: "How many lay teams have you developed and led to plant a church?"vs "From your experience, what is the biggest need in church planting?"
There is still a lot of analysis to be done, but what I find surprising is that at first blush those men with the most experience believe that training for church planters on how to lead a lay team is the greatest need. In contrast, guys who have only planted one church think that guidelines for developing a missional team culture is the most important. However, this difference may be a function of the role each guy play, so I will explore this as the research continues.
Finally, let me share just three of the responses that show some of the diversity I am getting in these results from all very qualified and experienced guys.
"The biggest challenge is getting established churches to catch a vision of planting a daughter church. The senior pastor and lay board members are often the major obstacles, but other lay people in the established church do not see church planting as a need."
Gary McIntosh, Talbot School of Theology
"There is scant awareness of practical leadership, vision, how to hear from God in a simple way - there is a culture of control present in nearly 100% of so-called planting friendly groups - that coupled with a nearly non-existent bench depth of veterans who are capable of coaching spells out a high likelihood of failure among new planters. (Case in point, of the planting books written by 'planters' upon a closer look it is a stretch to call most successful veterans - this is distressing - in the mainstream culture such 'Peter Principle' matters do not fly - in the church culture however such matters are unnoticed / unquestioned.)"
Steve Sjogren, ServantEvangelism.com
"We are seeing that prayer (e.g. Luke 10:2b
) is the leadership solution for church planting and if the Harvest Master is providing the workers then that takes the guess work out of selection and the need for specific guidelines. We are also seeing and believing that there has developed over the years an almost cult dedication and dependence on so-called training. The primary "missing pieces" for training is not workshops, seminars, manuals, but a emphasis on mentoring, prayer discipleship and teaching the lay team about who they are in Christ and opening them to the rest of the gospel, i.e. to experience their union with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. As a result of this understanding, their tendency to cope and work hard for Jesus in the flesh is put out of power and the Holy Spirit then is free to fill and flow from them with life-giving water to all of those who they live and work with incarnationally. Lastly, if the above is being experienced and understood, then the development of a "missional lay team culture" is a natural result that emerges without the necessity of specific guidelines. I know that his may sound very passive or esoteric, but we are believing that this is the crux of what it means to develop lay church planters---or any church planters for that matter." Kenny Moore, State Director Of Missions--Retired, Colorado Baptist General Convention
Keywords: Church Planting, Leadership, Research, Teams
