by Peyton Jones: So, you think you know what you want to do. Whereas Paul laid the foundation like a wise and Master builder, most church planters make a fundamental mistake at the foundational level. They’ve never defined what it is they’re going to do. They have more of an impression; a gut-feeling about what they’re supposed to do; an itch that can’t be scratched any other way. They want to church plant, but they’ve never been asked, who, why, when, or how. The truth is that they’ve probably not even asked themselves. When you’ve not been asked to formulate a vision into tangible,
repeatable, words that make sense, you can often take for granted the fact that other people will understand you.
The fact is, they won’t.
If you don’t understand what God is calling you to do, then nobody else will understand you either. True, you may be able to convince them to follow your leadership, but it’ll probably be from morbid curiosity rather than God-given vision. Before you can busy yourself gathering a core team, you need to be able to tell them what you’ll be doing.
Along these lines Paul said his ministry wasn’t like a boxer just beating at the air. He knew what he was swinging for. Inexperienced church planters suffer from a myopic vision that has failed to look beyond church launching the plant off the ground. As long as the bucket of bolts gets airborne they consider it a success if it doesn’t crash and burn. Filling a room with crowds of Christians is not a successful church plant. Numbers doth not successful a church plant make.
According to statistics, fourteen out of fifteen churches that significantly increase do so by transfer growth. The risk of modern church planting is that your plant may “grow” and appear to have been successful without reaching a single lost person. A mission statement will remind you that like the Blues Brothers, you’re getting the band together because you’re on a mission from God. The mission statement will bring laser focus in defining what your mission is.
Buy Peyton’s newest book “Reaching The Unreached: Becoming Raiders of the Lost Art” over on Amazon.com. You can also download a free chapter and watch a cool trailer for the book HERE or click the image below.
