Church Planting Opinion — There is no certainty
If you plant the kind of church where you move to a new town, one of the hardest parts is not knowing if the church will last.
The statistics on church plants seem to be mostly made up to raise money, so I have no idea what the failure/success rate of church plants actually is. But let’s say it is a 50–50 endeavour. You raise a bunch of money, uproot your family from its current church context, maybe sell your house, maybe buy a new house, make new friends, put your heart and soul into building a brand new thing. Of all of those things, I think the lack of certainty is one of the hardest parts.
You simply can’t know in advance if the church will grow enough to support you and your family. The thought in the back of your mind is that you might have to quit and move again if the church didn’t work.
As a person who likes success too much, the thought of failure was pretty intimidating. There is no question that a fear of failure drove some of my church planting efforts. God, in his grace, can still use that kind of broken effort, but it wasn’t healthy.
If you are heading into a church plant, if you are in the middle of a church plant, you should know that this is one of the angles that God is often working on in our hearts. Part of the reason God has you in church planting is because it is the ideal place for him to work on you. In church planting, we are forced to commit the unknown future to a known God.
Recently, my wife and daughter wrote out some verses and drew pictures to go along with them and then taped those verses up around our house. Right now, over our kitchen sink, so that I stare at it when I do dishes, is this verse from Matthew 6: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
Seems to describe church planting.
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