Hardcore Church Planter Archives - Passion for Planting

FRIENDLY FIRE

Patrick Bradley — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 10:00:46 +0000

Over the years, New Breed asked a bunch of planters if they could do something different, what would it be? Without any hesitation, almost all of them will say that they wished they’d reached out better to the pastors of established churches before they’d launched. In dealing with criticism with other pastors, I’ve found this to be the case as well. I’ve unintentionally hurt Pastors whom I’ve respected and were like Fathers to me. I’ve scoured an area and absent-mindedly missed a guy there who started a campaign in my honor, complete with effigy’s and piñata sticks.

I would have to agree that reaching out to the pastors in your area is the best thing that you could do. Most of the people that we spoke to were gracious and understanding, even if a little nervous. Once, I had a guy start in on me two years after we started up, but I found that we were simply misunderstanding each other on the phone. He practically called me a liar, and I told him he was carnal. In the end, it’s never worth stooping beneath the level of graciousness even if the person on the other line should’ve known better. The truth is, they don’t always, and neither do I. You will always regret making a carnal response in the face of the relentless volley fired head-on into your visor.

There was a Pastor in Swansea whose father, who was also a pastor, failed to hear from me regarding my intentions to plant in the very beginning. Rather than picking up the phone to courteously ask me about it, he gossiped to the other pastors in the city about me. His son followed suit. I let it lie. I had a policy from Nehemiah 6:8, “I’m building a wall, and I’m too busy to come down and talk to you”. Unfortunately, the guy kept circulating vicious rumors. Again I let them lie, until one day I received a phone call. After attacking me for some time, I humored him, answering graciously, and pointing him back to the cross, the grace of God, and the love of mercy, to no effect. Our second round, I felt that he needed to be rebuked for his lack of graciousness as a minister of the gospel, and after he’d avoided a face to face meeting, I let it go. I’ve learned over the years that there are simply people out there that will either feel threatened by what the Lord is doing in your neck of the woods as they curiously defend “their patch” with a pitchfork. I’d imagine that when this post comes out, he’ll continue to speak about me from his pulpit. When you plant a church, you have to be prepared for the pettiness of other ministers. They will have their blind spots as you will have yours. After one or two attempts to live at peace with all people, you will approach the threshold of what Paul expected, “as far as is possible with you”.

Don’t be surprised if there are arrows in your hide, and knives in your back. Just as in any war, you must expect a certain degree of ‘friendly fire’.

On the other hand, don’t be surprised if you end up finding new partners in the work who’ve been praying for somebody just like you to parachute into their territory. They’ve been outnumbered, outgunned, and outmanned, and now you show up as fresh reinforcements to turn the tide of battle.

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.

Source: FRIENDLY FIRE

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Components of a Christ like Leader

Patrick Bradley — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 10:00:21 +0000

by Peyton Jones: Self-controlled; upright, holy, and disciplined:Together, these make a complete picture. They represent a man whose eyes aren’t darting at every boob job at church, or streaming internet porn behind the office door. In the end, you’re known for being consistent throughout your life because the eyes of God are prized higher than the eyes of man, and you value what those eyes see more than anything else. If you’re into internet porn…get help, get anti-porn software, get rid of the computer. Seriously. I’ll never forget a conversation with a young man who sat in my office. His eyes bulged in disbelief when I told him that the days of a home computer were over for him. I pointed to a scripture verse “better to enter heaven without an internet connection than to be tossed into the flames of hell”. Okay, I took some liberty with that one, but you get the point. It was meant to be blunt, forceful, and drastic. Jesus wasn’t messing around with sin when he was on the cross, and he doesn’t want you messing around with it either. Barna reports that 70% of ministers look at pornography. Don’t be a statistic.

If you continue reading the passage from verse 9 onwards, it’s obvious that Paul is telling them that they need to rebel against the culture that they’re in so that they actually have something to offer the culture. In other words, if I’m addicted to porn, gambling, alcohol, rages, or any other vice, how can I proclaim a gospel of liberation. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed, but if we’re not walking in the liberty of a powerfully Spirit-filled life, we will just be talking at them. To a pagan sin-addicted cesspool society, Paul was able to say that he preached the gospel to them “not only in word, but in a demonstration of the Spirit’s power” as the dominion of sin was crushed by the all powerful Third Person of the Triune God.

To Timothy Paul says almost verbatim what he’s said to Titus, but then adds one more tick box to the “noble task” of eldership.

Not Quarrelsome:

Do you like to argue? Do you read a book and then think you’re an expert? Driscoll describes what he calls a “cage phase” for young ministerial students who start getting ahold of theology. At this phase they should be locked up in a cage because of all the damage that they do in their crusade for “the truth”. Although Jesus had some intense dialogue with the pharisees it wasn’t for a theological point on secondary issues. Isaiah says that “he shall not quarrel in the streets.” He was locked in a life and death struggle with them for their souls. Beware: internet trolls reigned even before the advent of the world wide web. Paul said “Don’t feed them”.

Well, you’ve gone from maggot to private, and enlisted to OCS. If you made it through OCS, jumped through all the hurdles, and completed your required training, then there’s only one thing to say…

Welcome you to the humble yet daunting task of leading a squad of God’s commandos on a jump. They’ll be looking to you, and we trust that you won’t let them down.

Source: Components of a Christ like Leader

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The Scandal of Church Planting

Patrick Bradley — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 09:00:33 +0000

by Peyton Jones: Stop and think about the implications of this. Everyday believers who had their gifts awoken, and were living in microchurches found it no challenge at all to organically plant a church when all you changed was their address. When you moved them geographically, they became little seeds of the gospel, proficient in planting without the presence of leadership, simply because they weren’t dependent upon the gifts of their leaders, but rather active in the Spirit’s working through their own gifts and passions.

How is that for scandalous? Microchurches were so effectively discipling believers that churches were being planted organically. This doesn’t happen when believers are trained to be spectators. It’s absent in churches where believers opt to be pacified instead of becoming participants. The first church plant out of Jerusalem was so scandalous that the apostles send Barnabas as an emissary Northward to check it out, inadvertently kick-starting Paul’s ministry. Because microchurches focus on the gifts of others, instead of on the gifts of the leader, they are able to multiply and infiltrate a community naturally, without any of the big fanfare that we depend upon today. Instead, they function more like a guerilla band, low to the ground, and subtle. They begin to saturate a community with their own transformation, and witness the transformation of others in the process. In addition, they function as smaller churches within a larger gathering or church. Because they function as a smaller cell within a church they can function on their own when taken out of it. This was the secret to first century multiplication and helps explain why the gospel spread so fast. Put simply, they are easy to plant. They aren’t expensive. They don’t take a seminary grad to lead them. They don’t have a bunch of hierarchy. Think of a microchurch as an embodiment of Acts 2:42.

What would happen if we released people into the mission field in small clusters to reach a cross-section of the community? What if instead of gathering everyone together, we were more concerned with scattering them outward? How would our people grow and mature if they were allowed to feel ownership of the mission on a smaller team?

Source: THE SCANDAL OF CHURCH PLANTING

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Church Planting With No Worship Leader

Patrick Bradley — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 09:00:43 +0000

This week Peyton Jones and Pete Mitchell sit down to talk about Church Planting With No Worship Leader. To get straight to listening click here and to download in iTunes click here.

A lot of us have a preconceived notion in our mind of how our worship time should be set up. For many of us, services are started with 20-30 minutes of singing. Whether it’s a choir, the congregation, a soloist or a mixture of those. But what happens when you are planning your plant and you don’t have anyone that can do those things? You might be wondering how to fill that sizable time slot. Not to fear, we go in depth on some ways to mix things up to make sure your service still flows smoothly.

Go ahead and click here to listen to this podcast or click here to head on over to the apple store to listen and download this and previous episodes in the Church Planter Podcast series!

Source: Church Planting With No Worship Leader

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Church Planting with no team

Patrick Bradley — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 09:00:19 +0000

I talk a lot about the importance of having a team around you when you start your church plant. In fact, I recently did a series of newsletters about the importance of a team, how to build and how to lead your team effectively. (If you aren’t signed up for my newsletters be sure to do that HERE and clicking the sign up for the newsletter tab on the right).

So it does help to have a team but what do you do when you don’t have that team around you? It may be more difficult in some way but it can still be done and we talk about some ways to do it and make it work!

Go ahead and click here to listen to this podcast or click here to head on over to the apple store to listen and download this and previous episodes in the Church Planter Podcast series!

Source: Church Planting with no team

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Balancing Family, Work and Ministry

Patrick Bradley — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 09:00:39 +0000

by Peyton Jones: I hope you enjoyed this series on the real life factors of becoming a bi-vocational minister. If you missed any of the posts you can find links back to them here.BALANCING THREE FACTORS

Types of Employment

PERSONAL FINANCES

In summary, Ninjas have catlike reflexes. They can move smoothly, and effortlessly like a cat, and always land on both feet. Relationships, family, work, and ministry are hard to juggle, and when trials hit, it’s always like that ball too many that causes it all to collapse. That’s why you can’t assume that you can do everything. Life tragedies hit. People die. Life goes sideways. If you think you can keep it all in the air, you’re right for a while. And then you’re wrong. Very wrong. But you don’t realize it until it all comes crashing down.

Source: BALANCING FAMILY, WORK, AND MINISTRY-Thursday

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Personal Finances

Patrick Bradley — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 09:00:31 +0000

by Peyton Jones: Once you’ve earned the money, you need to manage it effectively. Bi-vocational ministers can’t afford to have much debt, no pun intended. There are a few more factors to balance in your personal finances so that you don’t get in over your head finanacially.

Designation – It is important to keep your personal finances, the church’s finances, and your business finances completely separate. Bi-vocationalism does not mean that you rob Peter to feed Paul, or that you dip into funds that your family needs to survive. If you find yourself bailing water in one area of finance, you must resist the temptation to pour resources from one bucket into the other.

Debt – The most important factor in managing your personal finances is to get out of debt and keep out of it. It’s considered good practice in general to postpone church planting and starting a business if you’re in debt. Debt is the major liability that can tip the scales towards bankruptcy in your personal finances, or that of your business. There are multiple ways to eliminate debt, and remain out by adopting a lifestyle of not living beyond your means. Visit www.daveramsay.com for more information.

Savings – Many people are so busy paying off credit cards that they don’t have a savings. Once you’re out of debt, it’s considered good practice to have the equivalent of 3-6 months of income stashed away in a savings account. At a bare minimum, you should have 2 months. Managing your finances well also means having money set aside for inevitabilities such as car repairs, or emergencies.
Taxes – If you’re considering being self-employed, there are other factors to consider. Each of the States have their own tax requirements for a business owners, but you will need to be familiar with them. On the federal level, you will need to pay self-employment taxes in the form of filing quarterly returns. You will need to set a percentage of your income aside to make these payments four times a year.

As you can see, developing an aptitude of financial management involves many moving parts, but navigating them effectively will help to ensure that you are able to effectively sustain and scale the bi-vocational lifestyle.

Source: PERSONAL FINANCES

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Balancing Three Factors

Patrick Bradley — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 09:00:31 +0000

by Peyton Jones: Ninjas don’t have a lot of decisions to make. They don’t get to pick what color to wear. For ninjas black is always the new black. However, to a bivocational ninja there are career choices to be made. There are three factors of choosing a career path that will greatly affect your quality of life as a bi-vocational planter:Balancing these three factors in different combinations will produce different results in your personal life, and ministry. It could be argued that one can never have enough of all three, but sometimes the bi-vocational planter must prioritize one over another in order to accomplish a different result. In the movie Twilight Samurai, a retired warrior was enlisted as an assassin because he possessed the ability to fight with a short blade instead of the traditional long blade katana. Sometimes your mission will require you to fight differently.

Consider my dilemma as a barista at Starbucks. Working 40 hours a week as a barista at a popular coffee shop won’t put much money in the bank account. It will also demand much of your time for little financial return. Therefore, a barista job fails to maximize your income or your time. One thing it does do however, is maximize your exposure to people. In a barista job, you are encouraged to talk to customers, and build relationships with them as you make their drinks. You get to know regulars and become a pillar in the community.

On the bi-vocational maximizer scale, your life looks like this

Job	Income	Time	Exposure
Barista	–	–	+

The trade off for maximum exposure to the community was that I made minimal income, and my time wasn’t optimized. This isn’t always ideal. I was poor, but I reached tons of people…and every month my debt grew just a little bigger. Living debt free most of my life, this was not a sustainable situation.

Therefore, when considering a job that requires a maximum amount of time, you must ask two questions:

Will this job pay me what I need to sustain my family household?
Will this job expose me to the people I’m trying to reach?

If the answer to question one is yes, it will provide me with enough income to support a family, then the second factor to be considered is whether or not it will put me around the people I’m trying to minister to. If the answer is no, then perhaps the job may not be a good fit. For example, a job tucked away in the back of a warehouse sitting at a computer screen may not be the best place for an apostolic leader who is gifted at creating community. He now has very little time to do it, and meets very few people to do it with.

In the case of the barista job, the bi-vocational planter is sacrificing money and time for exposure to the target community. Another way to say this is that the planter is sacrificing economic margin for evangelistic reach. Thankfully, this does not always have to be the case. There are jobs that will maximize the planters time, money, and exposure to the target community.

Consider the job of window cleaning in a community that has lots of weather. People usually neglect cleaning their windows, and will gladly pay somebody else to do it. Contrasting the window cleaning job with a barista position, we will see that the window cleaning job will require more physical labor, but the payoff in the three areas of time, money, and exposure is very different.

A window cleaner works much fewer hours to make the same amount of money as a barista. If the window cleaner really hustles, he can work two days a week, instead of five, and make double the income he would as a barista if he lives in an area that has wet weather. The bonus is that although he works two days a week, he has an excuse to knock on every single door in the city to acquire clients. There aren’t many businesses that can boast that! Thus, the job of a window cleaner maximizes time, money, and exposure to the target community. The drawback however, is that the window cleaner may find that conversations as a barista are more meaningful, because the barista isn’t selling something while he’s talking. Therefore, some planters may still opt to become baristas, instead of becoming window cleaners.

All of these factors must be weighed and considered. Consider the contrast of the two jobs discussed.

Job	Income	Time	Exposure
Barista	–	–	+
Window Cleaner	+	+	+

One additional factor to consider is the health of your family. Some families require more time than others, and some spouses may resent a bi-vocational lifestyle if the planter is always absent from the home, with little return on the investment. If there is little money coming in to pay the bills, and little time for emotional connection, a spouse will soon begin to resent the sacrifices being made with seemingly little to show for it. A wise planter will discuss these things with their spouse in order to establish expectations, and be clear about what is being sacrificed for what end. A spouse will frequently sacrifice one of these at any given time to accomplish the mission, but not both. Not for long anyways. Therefore the emotional temperature of the home must be maintained as well.

Source: BALANCING THREE FACTORS

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Urban Church Planting Through Theater And Community Gardens: An Interview With Deb Walkemeyer

Patrick Bradley — Sat, 19 May 2018 09:00:20 +0000

by Peyton Jones: Welcome to Season 8 Episode 12 of the Hardcore Church Planting Podcast with Peyton Jones and Pete Mitchell. In this episode, I interviewed Deb Walkemeyer. To get straight to listening Click Here and to download in iTunes click here.Deb serves as Co-Pastor of Light & Life Christian Fellowship in Long Beach, CA – a large multi-ethnic urban church that has focused on planting churches locally and globally. She also leads the Light & Life Community Center that is assisting in transforming the neighborhood through various initiatives. As a Master Gardener she pioneered the first Community Garden in Compton, CA where she grows vegetables alongside gang members and prostitutes.

Go ahead and click here to listen to this podcast or click here to head on over to the apple store to listen and download this and previous episodes in the Hardcore Church Planter series!

Source: Urban Church Planting Through Theater And Community Gardens: An Interview With Deb Walkemeyer

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On Being A Blessing To Your Community

Patrick Bradley — Tue, 15 May 2018 09:00:15 +0000

First thing’s first, what does it mean to be a blessing. In my view it means, what can you you do to give to your community with no strings attached. Not everyone’s blessing is going to be the same as everyone else’s, but by keeping this key part of it in mind you will be amazed at how strong of an impact you can make.

Go ahead and click here to listen to this podcast or click here to head on over to the apple store to listen and download this and previous episodes in the Church Planter Podcast series!

Source: On Being A Blessing To Your Community

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