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How Do You Create a Culture of Sending

By New Churches Team

Every church starts as a church plant. And often they start with a lot of missional energy that gets lost over time. Sometimes many years go by and the church has never planted. In that case, a culture must be created.

Take Some Time

It takes time to catch the vision. Try to get things to multiply in general in your church – multiply disciples, multiply groups, multiply ministries. Then begin to talk about the value of partnering with church planting. Celebrate that. What you celebrate you will become. As you begin to see multiplication, talk about how you can be involved at a greater level. Is it time to be the primary sponsor church? Can you send out 5 to 10 families? It might take a couple of years to build up to this point, but it is doable.

Create systems that will help create this culture. If you want to change the culture of your church to sending when previously it has been largely self-interested, consider the conviction of your church. Is there a conviction for sending? Is it believed by the leaders of your church that sending is important and it is the church’s responsibility to multiply? If that is the conviction, what can you do to celebrate when multiplication happens at any level? What are the constructs you have in place throughout the organization?

Church planting is not unusual. Churches everywhere are doing this. Find ways to get involved as your first step to making a difference. Reach out to other churches in your area that are planting and see how you and your people can get involved with what they are doing.

Adapted from the New Churches Q&A Podcast Episode 449: Create a Culture of Sending. Click here to listen to more to church planting, multisite, and multiplication tips.

By Ed Stetzer: People in your church are going to be nervous. They’re going to say, “Now, wait a second. If we send people out, won’t our church decline?” Statistically, the most likely scenario is that it won’t. Jeff Farmer (researcher and professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) did a comparison study of 75 churches and found that churches who planted, when controlling for other factors of similar size and passion, actually grew. When you send people out to plant, others will show up and step into leadership roles.

When I planted a church in Erie, Pennsylvania, we decided to start two daughter churches. We said we were going to have twins, so we planted two daughter churches on one day with residents. For six months, these residents were on staff where they walked with us and we trained them. We then gave them a three-month transition period where they had a fishing license to anybody in our church. We blessed and encouraged them to approach anyone in the church with a challenge to come and plant with them. At that point, we were running 350–400 in attendance, so when they got about 50–75 people to go with them, it hurt. It was a lot more than we expected.

One whole worship team and a drummer—we had two worship teams—got a vision for church planting and decided to leave. This meant we now had no drummers in our church when they would leave. We said to our church during one of the preview services, “Listen. We’re so excited about what’s happened and how you have rallied around these church plants we’re sending out. But did you notice there’s no drummer today? We had to use a track.”

After the service, one of the members came up to me and said, “You know, I could be the drummer.”

And I said, “That’s awesome, man. But have you ever been a drummer before?”

He said, “Yeah, yeah. I used to tour professionally as a drummer.”

“What?” I was shocked because our previous drummer struggled. I mean we had a drummer all these years and he was painfully bad, but at least we had a drummer. And now this guy, who was a professional drummer, who had played for a couple different famous bands, comes up to me and tells me this?

“Are you serious?” I asked him, “Why have you never said anything?”

“Well, you know, I just wanted the guy to have a shot who was up there.”

“Dude, you’re killing me.”

This is what happened throughout the church. After we sent out people, others began stepping up to the challenge and taking on leadership responsibilities. So, cast a vision for this and allow God to send people to fill the void!

This was an excerpt from the book that I wrote with Daniel Im, 1000 Churches: How Past Movements Did It—And How Your Church Can, Too. You can learn more and download it for free here.