Here's Part 2 of this unusually honest piece from an anonymous church planter in a large North American city. (Be sure to read Part 1 for context.) Dirty secrets you'd like to share? The comments section is right down that way . . . – Paul
Dirty Secret #4: Internal victories lead to external victories, not the other way around.
If the spouse of the church planter has not bought in, the project should end immediately. There's a direct link between the integrity of the church planting marriage and the integrity of the church plant. Why should the church planter ask others to join the work if their spouse will not follow them?
Early partnerships make or break the church’s mission. A healthy church plant depends on shared trust, sacrifice, and resolution with ministry partners.
Early partnerships make or break the church’s mission. A healthy church plant depends on shared trust, sacrifice, and resolution with ministry partners. If the denomination, sending church, friends, family and funders can rally behind a church plant from the earliest days, it’s often a harbinger of a fruitful mission. If a church planter has to parachute in and be a lone ranger, it’s highly unlikely that they will impact the community with the Gospel.
Resources attract more resources. It’s not fair, but it’s true. The more money you raise, the more money you are likely to raise. No one wants to be the only investor, and no one should.
Forget the haters— every church plant has them. Some people “on the outside” are secretly rooting for the church plant to fail. This special class of people includes Satan, other insecure pastors/planters that are threatened by the initiative, and people whose advice went unheeded. They can say hurtful things, make noise and distract. Ultimately, they have little to do with the long-term fruit of the church. The gospel frees every church planter to ignore them and spend their best energy on the people on the team.
Dirty Secret #5: Your beautiful ideals will be broken by reality.
Many church planters are rightly burdened by the racial divide in our country. They see the potential for their church to be sign of the coming Kingdom, where Jesus brings together people of different races, cultures and socio-economic backgrounds to become a unified, if messy, family. This is always a miracle, and we are called to fast, pray, sacrifice and pursue this reality. That being the case, people are naturally attracted to other people who are like them. Church planters who scorn this reality on principle do so to their own peril.
Homogenization works both ways, and when you are church planting, it gives you something to start with. Let this be a sign that it is ultimately the blood of Jesus brings the new family together, not the church planter. When you grasp this truth, you are indeed free to love your community without hating yourself for who doesn’t show up.
With that said, Jesus will build his church with unlikely bricks. If you are following Jesus, the people he will bring you are not the people you would bring yourself. They will bring need, not validation; they are sheep, not notches in your belt.
Most church plants stay “planty." There’s an old wives tale that “3 out of 4 churches don’t make it.” Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird did some research and demonstrated something less dramatic but perhaps harder to swallow: "most church plants start and remain small” (page 9 of their study). If you don't break 100 within a year of launching, you probably never will. Perhaps it will feel devastating and be the best thing for your soul all at once.
The 10 year impact of the church plant will likely be greater than its one year impact. Church planting is kingdom work, which is by definition eternal in scope. When we think about our church’s 10, 20, and 30 year impact on our community, it frees us. We can resist the urge to burn bridges, rush the process, burn ourselves out, burn our wives out, and burn our leaders out. It is protection against the jarring disconnect between our dreams of our church and the early reality of our church. Because the eternal impact of our church plant will become clear long after launch Sunday.
God has not called us to be a bonsai artist, who shapes fruit in advance through master engineering. He has called us to be a sower who scatters seed.
So if you’re planting a church, it will probably look very different than it does in your imagination right now. That's good. As one of my mentors told me: God has not called us to be a bonsai artist, who shapes fruit in advance through master engineering. He has called us to be a sower who scatters seed. The fruit of God is never planned in advance, but only tasted in reverse. Passionate leaders with little experience are usually too idealistic.
God has already decided that he will use your failures to produce kingdom fruit. Rejoice in this and rest in him! God may awaken realities in your imagination that never seem to materialize in the mundane and unexciting. Yet this is still of the Lord. As the master church planter, Jesus will take your mundane work and make it part of his surprise ending to history. By grace you will not see how exactly it all fits together now. The beauty of Jesus will be revealed in the end, and by grace it will encompass your life and your work and your team. By grace he will crucify you and offer you up as a sacrifice to God, holy and acceptable.
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It shouldn’t surprise us that planting a new church attracts both the wise and foolish, the genuinely called and the self-appointed, those ready to give all and those who need too much. It has damaged some and brought others into healing.
The dirty secrets of church planting didn’t make me a survivor; they revealed the grace of God to me.
Church planting has encouraged leaders to embrace calibrated “kingdom” risk and others to step into foolish, non-calibrated harmful risk. It has birthed healthy churches . . . as well as sickly churches that struggle in the ICU for years. When Constantine converted to Christianity, the movement was so popular that the leaders of Christendom had to find ways of dealing with the weeds and the wheat that was sprouting side by side in its garden. We need to replace our self-excusing Christianese language about sending, being called, God’s new thing, taking risks—and find honest, even repentant language instead.
Yet no matter how honestly we speak of these dirty secrets, we will not find life in them. They give way to the grace of God in Christ. The grace of God is what every church planter needs, what every church planting network leader needs, what every launch team needs. The grace of God in Christ is what the movement needs. The life of Christ is there in abundance for both the healthy and the not-healthy not as an excuse for our ecclesiastical sin and mess, but as a cure for it. When you have bought into church planting, it's a temptation to make it a false savior. It is grace when that savior fails us, as it primes us to turn to the real Christ who can save our souls and churches in the process.
The dirty secrets of church planting didn’t make me a survivor; they revealed the grace of God to me.
