Church Plant Boot Camp Pt. 2

What is the purpose of planting churches?

Generally speaking, churches are to make disciples.  Churches are to be the Body of Christ in the world.  Churches are to reflect God's love.

Curiously, in the curriculum for the Boot Camp was this statement,

"Church planting is about one thing- Putting People in Seats."

I posted this on my twitter feed and some comments came in regarding the above statement.  I wanted to spend a little time talking about this.

• I don't feel like the presenters have made the case that we plant churches to get people in seats.
• In fact, one of the presenters Top Ten Mistakes New Church Pastors Make states, "Pursuing the Great Commission to the Peril of Ignoring the Great Commandment."  We were told to be a lover of God trying to plant a church rather than a church planter trying to love God. 
• In a sense, it is more difficult to make disciples or share the Gospel if we do not get people in the seats.  Our worship services are not to be Holy Huddles, but we are to reach out and invite others in.  However- weekly worship services are not the only place where disciples can be made.  We must be willing to go outside the church walls and build relationship with those who do not know Christ.

While I don't think the presenters really mean putting butts in seats is the most important task of church planting, I wish the above statement did not appear in the material.  Much of what is wrong in the church growth movement is the importance that is placed on getting butts in the seats (and dollars in the offering plate).  The emphasis for the church planter is to develop and missionary heart and love for the lost and to live incarnationally among them- inviting them to encounter the transformational love and grace of Jesus Christ.

Church Plant Boot Camp Pt. 1

I drove into Richmond, Virginia on Monday night to attend the Virginia Conference Church Plant Boot Camp with Jim Griffith of Griffithcoaching.com.  There are people here from all over Virginia, Eastern Pa, Wisconsin, New England, Ohio, North Carolina, and Minnesota. While I came by myself (short notice), there are many teams here from church plants in the UMC.

The first day of workshops consisted of The 10 Most Common Mistakes a New Start Makes, Self-Care, Creating Mission Alignment, and some nuts and bolts stuff about creating a good first impression.  The first few session were pretty good-- with some good thoughts on them.  The 1st impressions sessions was decent, nothing groundbreaking, but it came out of order.  The coaches have talk repreatedly that a major reason a new start fails is because of a premature launch...which made it intersting when we discussed the nuts and bolts of how to do a full fledge worship gathering before discussion the when and how of developing a launch team and plan.

The second day focused a lot of how to determine your public launch timeline.  There were a couple of bombs today.  First, the presenters said that critical mass to reach before a public launch is 149.  They believed that this was an important number because it is big enough where the pastor will need other leaders to hand off responsibility to....and that it creates more momentum.  My guess for "critical mass" was 75-100.  When we began the H2O Gathering at Avenue UMC, our first Sunday was 91 and we rarely dipped below that in the first few weeks. 

I have one more day left of the boot camp and I will post some more thoughts in the following days.