Advice for first year church planters

Jonathan Dodson over at Church Planting Novice did a good article for church planters and I wanted to share it. The stuff in ( ) is my thoughts on what he said.

Advice for First Year Planters
June 19, 2009 in Church Leadership, Church Planting, Giving, evangelism

Here are a few tips for early stage church planters on everything from fundraising to evangelism:

Don’t forget to ask the pagans! If you are fundraising, remember that God used the pagan king Cyrus to fund the rebuilding of an entire city. He can definitely handle your church planting needs. Most pagans know more about your city than you do, and some of them love it more than you. (This is very true. I had a guy who I never met, that doesn't even go to church that I know of, drop down thousands of dollars for our church. Twice.)

Spend more time with people and less time with books in the first year of church planting. Learn your city, know its lostness, love your city, re-learn how to share the gospel in your context. Fall in love with your target people. The more you know and love them, the better your witness to the gospel will be, including your preaching. (Some church planters advocate preaching stuff from other guys for the first year, rather than spending hours and hours preparing, so you can spend that time with people. Of course in my case, I have years of stuff from pastoring before hand, so the prep. time is cut in half.)

"Identify the top 10 Obstacles to the Gospel in your Context. Don’t do this from the armchair, do it from anecdotes (conversations) and cultural exegesis (spending time in pockets of resistance or indifference)." (Sometimes that can be other churches. Ouch!)

Identify the top 10 Obstacles to the Church in your Context. Anecdotes and exegesis. Learn the history of hypocrisy in your city or town so that you can apologize and distance yourself from mockeries of the Church. What do people think of when they think “church”? Have they ever gone to one? Why did they stop? (I have to deal with a lot of this since there are many churches that have gone under in the last 5 years. That is why we say and try to do church that makes sense. No perfect people allowed.)

Don’t spend ungodly amounts of money or time on developing your first website. It will all change anyway, several times. You should be with people, not websites and blogs (!). Here are two good, inexpensive web solutions for early stage church planting: Church Root & Clover Sites. (I just chose a site that I thought would work for us. It wasn't overly expensive and we will probably be changing it very soon.)

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