Church Planters Dig Deep in the Fall
Director, Passion for Planting
Fall is the time when church planters are working hard to develop relationships, build core teams and start the heavy lifting that will reap rewards when they launch in the Spring. This is the season when you have to work with faith and belief that God will reveal his plans for his church in just six short months (or less!). Quite the challenge!
As you start to dig deep in study, prayer, planning and team building, we continue to update and build new resources to help you along the way.
We get asked a lot of questions about our organization. In this month’s newsletter, we shed a little light on what we do and where we believe we are best gifted to serve you.
It’s a lot of work, but the reward is great! Our prayer, hope, and goal is to make resources available to help you plant healthy churches all over the world. Contact us here if we can help you on your journey to plant a healthy church.
–Dale Spaulding, Director
October 2016 – Contents
- What is Passion for Planting?
- Questions We Hear Often
- Bi-vocational Church Planting
- Effective Assimilation
What is Passion for Planting?
Are you a network? Are you managing partner? What do you do?
Passion for Planting is the church planting ministry of New Life Christian Church located in Northern Virginia. Our residency program prepares future church planters to start reproducing churches in the contexts where God’s called them. Through our PlanterPlan software, we equip church planters with a project management tool designed specifically for church planters, helping you stay focused on the right things at the right time. We’ve built a tutorial on our website that we’re working to improve every week and we supply church planters and leaders with free resources designed specifically to help church planters start multiplying churches.
We are deeply involved with Exponential and work with them to present workshops and pre-conference labs on church planting (pictured above). These forums provide a great opportunity to share church planting systems and strategies, but probably the most valuable take-away are the connections church leaders make with other pastors called to plant in a wide variety of contexts. We highly recommend you take advantage of Exponential conferences in person!
We’re here to equip, resource, and encourage church planters! Read More
Questions We Hear Often
- Does Passion for Planting help start a particular type of church?
- We work with bible believing, evangelical churches. We have most experience working with churches that employ a launch large model, but our work is not exclusive to that philosophy. We want to provide support to all types of churches that make disciples that plant churches.
- What is the difference between a vision book and a launch plan? Who are the recipients of each? Do you need both?
- The vision book is a great tool for recruiting launch team members, casting vision to prayer partners, and recruiting donors (some samples here). The launch plan is designed to keep the church planter on track with goals/milestones and serves as a fundraising tool when soliciting major partnerships (samples here). Both are useful because they serve two distinct purposes. The vision book focuses on the big picture and paints in broad brush strokes, while a launch plan details the strategic action plan a church will follow in order to start well.
- Does PlanterPlan work for churches that want to plant campuses?
- Yes. At the moment, we have two template options with PlanterPlan:
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- Church Planter. This template includes the tasks most appropriate for brand new churches. The intent is the church will be its own entity, independent from any “mother” church. This FREE template will create a project with roughly 400 default tasks from a library of over 800 tasks. Phase 1 tasks (the first 44 tasks) include premium content answering not just the “What should I do?” but also answers “How do I do that?”. An upgrade is available to unlock the premium content on all tasks in all 6 phases (800+ tasks).
- Multisite Campus. This template includes the tasks most appropriate to start a new campus/location of an existing church. The intent is the new location will remain part of the existing church. This FREE template will create a project with roughly 200 default tasks from a library of over 700 tasks. Phase 1 tasks (the first 28 tasks) includes premium content answering not just the “What should I do?” but also answers “How do I do that?”. An upgrade is available to unlock the premium content on all tasks in all 6 phases.
- Can PlanterPlan be used internationally?
- Yes. While most of the legal documentation related tasks are tailored to U.S. regulations, church planters can interpret that content to fit their context. During Exponential East 2016, we talked with a group from Norway and learned how they sift through our materials and use the ideas to help them get started. Currently, we have multiple active PlanterPlan projects from Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Chile, Germany, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Norway, Poland and Serbia plus another 24 countries that literally span the globe!
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PlanterPlan Activations – Through October 2016
Bi-vocational Church Planting
Is Bi-vocational “the Future” of Planting? Yes and No.
This is an excerpt from J.D. Greear’s post. Read the entire post here.
We can’t afford not to embrace bi-vocational planting. For far too long, our strategy has been reduced to a single model. However, there are several problems with the argument that bi-vocational is “the” future of planting.
We should not suppose bi-vocational planting is going to be easy simply because it addresses several problems.
Bottom line: The future of church planting will continue to employ both bi-vocational and full time strategies. Read the whole article here.
J.D. Greear is the lead pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina and is the author, most recently, of Stop Asking Jesus Into Your heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved (B&H).
Rowing in the Same Direction — Effective Assimilation
How do you assimilate people of diverse spiritual backgrounds?
Church planter Jeff Gauss was concerned. He was observing that the very people he was trying to attract to his church were unintentionally being made to feel excluded or inferior. “There was this barrier for our un-churched people who would come in to a small group and they felt like a total tool because they didn’t know the Scriptures. Other people were talking about all these things, and they’re like arghhh! I have no idea what they’re talking about!”
Getting everyone “on the same page” is a great assimilation strategy.
