Everything!
If I were to boil church planting down to a few base ingredients, they would be these: 1. Prayer, 2. Clarity of Vision, 3. Understanding the focus population, 4. Networking and 5. Team building. (And all these ingredients also go into revitalizing existing churches, as they get re-rooted in their communities.) The more interwoven a church planting team is with their community, the easier it is to plant a new church. In the old church planter boot camps they used to teach us that a planter should be making 25 fresh contacts a week. This little admonition often came on the third day, when we were running behind in the agenda - and after a few minutes of suggestions about places to make said contacts, the agenda moved on. I have personally trained almost 200 people in LaunchPad planter training in the last three years, and we seldom have time to really teach people how to make effective contacts and build a community of friends and allies within their neighborhood. We just tell them "You had better do this, or you will be sorry."
If I were to boil church planting down to a few base ingredients, they would be these: 1. Prayer, 2. Clarity of Vision, 3. Understanding the focus population, 4. Networking and 5. Team building. (And all these ingredients also go into revitalizing existing churches, as they get re-rooted in their communities.) The more interwoven a church planting team is with their community, the easier it is to plant a new church. In the old church planter boot camps they used to teach us that a planter should be making 25 fresh contacts a week. This little admonition often came on the third day, when we were running behind in the agenda - and after a few minutes of suggestions about places to make said contacts, the agenda moved on. I have personally trained almost 200 people in LaunchPad planter training in the last three years, and we seldom have time to really teach people how to make effective contacts and build a community of friends and allies within their neighborhood. We just tell them "You had better do this, or you will be sorry."
