Reaching Archives - Passion for Planting

SABOTAGE

Sean Cronin — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 09:00:40 +0000

by Peyton Jones: In France, the efforts of the French Resistance were significant enough to make a significant impact on the outcome of the war. They dismantled tank treads, put sand in the grease of vehicles, and stole ball bearings.

Sabotage.

It’s the enemy’s oldest and favorite tactic. He sabotaged Eden. He infiltrated the children of Israel by seduction when Balaak’s army couldn’t defeat them in a head on confrontation. In the early days, his tactic is to sow tares among the wheat making it clear that “An enemy has done this.” He is trying to derail the carriage of the troop transport off course. In WW2, my grandfather who served in the 101st airborne was delayed from crossing the Atlantic, but the ship he was originally scheduled to be on was sunk by a German U-boat.

In the early days, you’ve got to chart a course, set your face like flint. Like Jesus heading towards the cross, set your face steadfastly towards Jerusalem…and lock your sights on Calvary.

ILL FITTING ARMOR

Launching with the right focus is essential if your plant is going to avoid defaulting just another big church after you’ve grown. If you’re using the New Testament apostolic model, then the solution is hard-wired into your church already. You’re not wired to grow big, but to reproduce. As soon as the tender shoots begin to grow, you’ll be splicing them to ready them for transplants. Outgrowing your building means that you’ve got to start assembling some new teams for planting outwards. Multiple services, outlying campuses, and other forms of ecclesiastical greed will make you want to vomit instead of causing you to salivate as you indulge your insatiable appetite for more. Getting your priorities right from the start involves setting a missional agenda that seeks to grow the church outward, rather than just upwards. It also details how to ensure that you’re starting by reaching the lost, rather than just attracting disillusioned Christians from other churches.

But starting out well isn’t a guarantee that all will end well. It is possible to start out a champion like Gideon earning the moniker of “Baal-slayer”, only to end up establishing your own form of idolatry in its place as people bow down to your sacred ephod. If people worshipped Gideon’s armor, rest assured that they will find ways to worship your success too… If you let them. The masses will flock to you and burst the fire capacity of your four walls, but at that juncture, you have a choice. If I had my way, most of you reading this would constantly be shedding the ephod like David, finding Saul’s megachurch armor too big and cumbersome. Instead, you’d be opting for a sling-shot, the Spirit’s power, and enough confidence in the Almighty to keep running at giants.

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: SABOTAGE

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WHY THE WORLD NEEDS YOU TO HAVE A MISSION STATEMENT

Sean Cronin — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 09:00:48 +0000

by Peyton Jones: Launching with the right focus is essential if your plant is going to avoid defaulting into just another big church after you’ve grown. If you’re using the New Testament apostolic model, then the solution is hard-wired into your church already. You’re not wired to grow big, but to reproduce. As soon as the tender shoots begin to grow, you’ll be splicing them to ready them for transplants. Outgrowing your building means that you’ve got to start assembling some new teams for planting outwards.

Multiple services, outlying campuses, and other forms of ecclesiastical greed will make you want to vomit instead of causing you to salivate as you indulge your insatiable appetite for more. Getting your priorities right from the start involves setting a missional agenda that seeks to grow the church outward, rather than just upwards. It also details how to ensure that you’re starting by reaching the lost, rather than just attracting disillusioned Christians from other churches.

But starting out well isn’t a guarantee that all will end well. It is possible to start out a champion like Gideon earning the moniker of “Baal-slayer”, only to end up establishing your own form of idolatry in its place as people bow down to your sacred ephod. If people worshipped Gideon’s armor, rest assured that they will find ways to worship your success too… If you let them. The masses will flock to you and burst the fire capacity of your four walls, but at that juncture, you have a choice. If I had my way, most of you reading this would constantly be shedding the ephod like David, finding Saul’s megachurch armor too big and cumbersome. Instead, you’d be opting for a sling-shot, greater mobility, guerilla tactics, the Spirit’s power, and enough confidence in the Almighty to keep running at giants.

The world has had enough of churches that are out for themselves. Young people have already made up their minds that churches are no longer about people, but about the institution. They cynically analyze the million dollar money making machine from a distance and conclude that the church is out for itself. Their number one question is “Are you for me, against me, or for yourself?” In the end, a mission statement will help you safeguard that the church doesn’t become about “itself” as an institution, merely adding more programs to keep the machine running and the people happy. After all, if you don’t keep the people happy they’ll leave, right? Any church planter worth his salt always wants people to leave his church; either to plant more churches, or to stop distracting the rest of them from the mission. You know what the difference between a church plant of 50 people and an established church of 1000 people? The answer is 950 people. It’s up to you to make sure that your church has more to say when it gives that answer. There should be more difference between a church plant and an established church than numbers. It’s an issue of DNA, not size.

Source: WHY THE WORLD NEEDS YOU TO HAVE A MISSION STATEMENT

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AIMING FOR NOTHING

Sean Cronin — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 09:00:06 +0000

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.

Source: AIMING FOR NOTHING

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OUTREACH SHOULD BE GIFT-DRIVEN

Sean Cronin — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 10:00:27 +0000

by Peyton Jones: I don’t believe in sitting down and strategizing…the world’s needs are greater than my resources.

I can’t do everything, but I can do something, and I will not let the everything I cannot do, keep me from doing the something that I’m called to do.

Business models operate with the idea that you can draw lines across a whiteboard, predicting what you’re going to be doing, and how you’re going to branch out in the next couple of years. Great when you’re flipping widgets, but not so good when you’re dealing in Holy Spirit filled believers. I’ve talked about the gift driven model in Church Zero, but we don’t use lines. We use concentric rings. Inside the ring is our team symbolized by a bunch of dots. Outside the ring are the lost dots. We draw arrows from our dots to them. Those arrows represent our spiritual gifts. Once they are reached, we draw an arrow around the dots outside of the original circle. Now we have more dots.

More dots = more gifts.

But which ones? If we’ve just reached 3 creatives and want to reach the lost, then we figure that’s where the Holy Spirit wants us to go next. If he brings us 3 bikers, then we do stuff bikers like. If he brings us 3 single mothers then we start a mother’s support group. All of these are relational and involve these people getting involved in their own communities with things they are already familiar with. Paul became all things to all men, and therefore, we allow these people to stay themselves. They follow us into battle, but in reality, you might say we’re actually accompanying them. They perceive us to be in charge, but our plan from day one is to release them to do things through the power of the Holy spirit that they never dreamed possible.

Therefore, the question that anyone who wants to be effective in outreach has to ask is “How has the Holy Spirit equipped the people in front of me to reach this town?

When I started my first church plant, I’d been in ministry for 14 years, and a missionary for 5. I was burnt out. I told the team that I had a broad canvas, and a few brush strokes, but they needed to fill in the details. They didn’t know what I meant. I told them that I didn’t want to be in ministry anymore…just a normal guy. I told them that I didn’t have a red bat phone to heaven that was ringing off the hook with calls from the commissioner. Plus, I didn’t want to be Batman. (Did I just say that?) We looked around the group and asked, “What gifts do we have here?” We couldn’t use a business model or five year plan, but decided to use an organic model with no clue what we were doing. All we knew was that if the Holy Spirit was real, he’d lead us, move us, and reach the people through us that he was gunning for.

We had people who liked cooking, so they started a group that taught young single mothers how to cook healthy foods. We had college students who were addicted to Halo. We started tournaments. People got saved, and discipled in that group. They also got their butts kicked at Halo. Our guys were good.

So how do I find my gifts?

Source: OUTREACH SHOULD BE GIFT-DRIVEN

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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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