NOTES FROM A WEEK INTERVIEWING PROSPECTIVE CHURCH PLANTERS

In both the Pittsburgh area and nearer to Baltimore, I interviewed a dozen prospective church planters last week, nominated for consideration and conversation by their overseers. It was really a delightful week meeting some talented people.

The folks that were chosen for this exploration largely belonged to a group I call the "I doubled my church club." That is to say, that most of them have taken tired and declining congregations and led a revolution of new energy and positive momentum, along with ministry innovation.   Replicate these people and the future of American Christianity would shift.

  

Are any of them church planters? Time will tell. I suspect most are not. They are, however, high capacity church leaders. Their experiences parallel one another, almost regardless of how sickly the church in which they are placed. They double that church. Or triple it, and in relatively short time. They overcome the people hogging the power and protecting the status quo.

 

In many cases, to pull them out of the work they are engaged in (prematurely) would cause the momentum to stop and for their churches to slowly fall back to what they were five years ago. In almost every case, these leaders have the capacity to multiply what they are doing, by adding new sites and new people groups or taking over management of failing congregations in their vicinity. In this age where parachute drop church planting has grown so very difficult - it would be highly risky for all but one or two of the persons I interviewed - and even with those two (who could do it), I ask why would we want to deploy their gifts in that way, when they could make more kingdom impact more quickly just developing a network rooted in the amazing work they have done where they are currently serving - or the impact that they can make leading another ministry turnaround in a larger system.

  

We should pull together the pastors who double and triple the sizes of their churches and create support fellowships for mentoring and idea-sharing - these characters are not the norm and sometimes we view them in suspicious ways:  as not denominational enough or as "too maverick" in their style. They stretch our sleepy, maintenance church culture with fire and passion that make the majority of Protestant pastors uncomfortable.

  

Our sister company, Readiness 360 is going to start a new Facebook page for church leaders who have led ministry expansion that at least doubles the number of folks present when they arrived onsite. We will call it the Ministry Multipliers group.  We hope to encourage the few apostles in our midst by networking them with other people who are wired as they are wired.

  

Part time, full time, big ministries or small - the similarities within this pool of leaders really jumped out there for me last week.