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Are you not a good church planter match?
If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you’ve probably picked up that church planting is a regular fixture on my mind. As someone who planted a church, coaches church planters and whose hobby is researching ideas of re-imagining church planter training, planting and funding…you could say I’m a bit of a church planter geek.
We all geek out to something, right? The more secure of us just let our freak flag fly. 
So I wanted to throw out a thought that’s been rolling around in my head for about 6 months that I’ve discussed with a few people who seem to think there might be some validity to it.
You’ll remember in Exodus that Moses is getting absolutely hammered in taking care of all the Israelite problems. Finally, his father-in-law Jethro pulls him aside and has the “come to Jesus” meeting with him that probably started like this: “Honestly man, if you don’t change something or slow down, you’re just going to keel over and die.”
He then gave some very shrewd advice in Exodus 18: But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain —and appoint them as officialsover thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.
What Jethro seems to be suggesting is this (and Paul perhaps alludes to as well): There is a grace that sits on people up to a certain threshold. Some people have a leadership threshold of 10. Some 50. Some 100. Some 1000. (and so on).
But because we’ve bought into the Western myth that bigger always = better, many assume that our grace is bigger than it actually is (or hope that it is). Here’s another way of putting it: It’s pretty important that, for the most part in your time of leadership, that you operate in your grace sweet spot.
Some people operate best while leading only 10 people. That’s where they truly shine and feel most alive. For others, it’s 100. That’s where it all clicks for them: their grace, personality, gifts, experiences, skill-set, etc all come together.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about as this relates to church planting: For people who have a grace that might exceed that of 100, church planting will probably be really hard. I mean epically hard.
And that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it if they are called to it, but it means they may need to understand going in that the skill set they have isn’t necessarily the greatest match for the skill set needed for starting a church out of nothing. There are people who are simply going to blossom and shine when they are leading larger groups of people…not because bigger is better but because they just flourish there. That isn’t a value statement. But those same people can quickly look completely helpless and incompetent when trying to start a church plant with 10 or 50 people. QUICKLY.
And this isn’t to give them an excuse or to allow them to shrug off what is difficult.
I also don’t say all of this to discourage certain people from church planting. I think you can actually learn skill sets that don’t come naturally to you, and in many ways, God uses those times of weakness to train us, refine our character and draw us closer to him. But you should probably expect it to be much slower process than for others.
But I’m big on people understanding things as they are experiencing them or making sense of what they have already experienced. That’s how we learn.
So what say you? Does this make sense? Have I completely jumped the shark on this one?
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6 Responses to Are you not a good church planter match?
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Hey Doug,
Very interesting post. I always appreciate your deeply thought provoking analysis on leadership, ministry, and church planting. You put words to some things I’ve really been wrestling with internally. Thanks for that. Makes me feel a little less crazy.
Aaron
Totally resonate with this.
Good thoughts Doug - I think I am wrestling through many of these issues as well. Thanks for bringing clarity to some things I have been thinking through!
“God uses those times of weakness to train us, refine our character and draw us closer to him.”
Sometimes I think this was the only reason I was called to church planting!
How one defines and views “leading” is the key. In some contexts, leading is advancing a bloody revolution with lives on the line, while in other contexts, leading is just holding a fully funded stable institution in a successful holding pattern. Any given leader might have the grace to “lead” 100 in one context, but not in the other.
The language of “Early Joiners” vs. “Developers” might be another important aspect of the discussion. In some language systems, Early Joiners are called “barbarians” for good reason. They tend to rebel against routine, quickly embrace challenge and change, thrive on high-stakes risk and adventure, etc. Developers are in many ways the opposite of Early Joiners; they can also be thought of as the settlers who come in behind the barbarians to occupy the newly claimed territory … even as the barbarians move on to the next frontier.
The kind of leader who is gifted in leading barbarians or Early Joiners is probably quite different from the leader who specializes in leading Developers and settlers.
A church planter who is gifted to lead 50 Early Joiners may do better the first two years than the planter who is gifted to lead 100 settlers… but a planter who is graced to lead 75 Early Joiners will probably have more front-end success than either of the first two.
So it might be less about the grace given to lead any specific number of people than it is about the grace given to lead certain kinds of people. Which again suggests the huge advantage to planting with teams that can balance the tension between taking new territory and then holding the territory that has just been won.
Your original point about how frustrating it can be for a high-capacity leader to struggle along in the early stages of a launch with only a handful of followers (many of whom are probably unruly “barbarians” that are not always good about building sustainable systems) strikes me as very helpful. Thanks for sharing.
Some great thoughts here Dave! Thanks for putting them up for all of us.
Great thought and very well said…”written.”
As a church planter I would agree and I do understand. This is a topic thats as wide as it is deep. But to just put a piece of it out there I believe that is why we need real transitional leadership.
In other words, the ability for the senior leader to release other leaders and give them responsibility within the church. That enables the leader to move from up from where their “sweet spot” was to a newer one. It also allows others to operate at there “sweet spot” all while the church grows and keeps things working/functioning with excellence.