A little over a year ago I wrote a fairly extensive blog series on church planting in the future. You can read those posts here. I mentioned in the closing post that a group of us would be wrestling through some of the implications of what I was writing and something might come out of it.

Much to my joy…something came out of it! In my last post, I announced the start of The TOM Project, which is, at least in part, a church planting movement specifically for college campuses. (The other big part of The TOM Project is starting Learning Communities that are tailored for people who are already on college campuses doing excellent work).

But I think that much of The TOM Project will be seeking to wrestle to the ground a lot of the issues that confront church planters today. Or at the very least, meet them head on and learn from our mistakes.

Here are a few distinctives in how we are going to be training and planting:

• We’re only planting 100 churches. We aren’t trying to plant as many churches as possible. We are looking at planting on the 100 most influential colleges in the United States, with each one becoming a training and sending center in their own right. We want multiplication and we believe we get that by focusing on only planting a few and doing them incredibly well.
• Immersion training for two years. Before going to plant a church, we want to train church planters to do everything they are going to be doing…before they do it. Training will require planters to move and participate in two years of immersive training in all of the tools, vehicles and practices they will launch in the future. In many ways, we are taking a page from the Missional Schools that missionaries participate in before going overseas. Too often church planters feel like they are flying the plane, while building the plane, while getting their pilots license. It doesn’t have to be that way.
• Training for Couples. If you’re married, we don’t just train you, we train your spouse. With the Biblical understanding of covenant, that the two have become one, we don’t know any other way of doing it.
• More than Information. Sociologists will say that there are three ways that humans learn to do something, and our training will do all three:
  • Through receiving pure information (lecture style, reading, etc)
  • Apprenticeship to a specific skill set
  • Immersion in a particular kind of culture
• Economic Engines. By the time one of our church planters heads for the field, they will have an economic engine to take with them. We believe the future of the church is in Give (tithes/offerings), Share (amongst family when there is need) and Make (each church has economic engines). This is certainly a model we see at work in the New Testament. A substantial portion of their two year training will revolve around learning this economic engine.
• Plant an oikos. Rather than parachuting a lone church planter or a couple, they will plant with a fully functioning spiritual extended family from the beginning. Each church starts with at least 15 adults who are already missional ninjas (ha), ready to lead.
• Train leaders in how to use proven vehicles. Huddles and Missional Communities are vehicles of discipleship and mission made in the crucible of post-Christian Europe. In addition, we will teach leaders how the weekly worship service (which should still be highly valued) can be used when you are a scattered and gathered reality.
• We buy a house. It’s not just about having a functioning extended family, but having a place where that central leadership family can orbit in and out of. In other words, Greek Row got it right. Rather than giving large amounts of seed funding, we will rent/buy a houses on or close to campus for that family to live in.
• Health insurance. We will be doing our best to provide a group plan for church planters to buy into that is both affordable and with quality care.

As you’re probably gathering, if you choose to go for only 100 churches planted in the next 10-15 years, it requires an assessment process that really works.

Can you help us out with that?

• Does something like this interest you? We’d love to talk with you. You can get in contact with me here.
• When you read this, does you think to yourself, “Wow, my friend _________ really needs to hear about this.” Could you forward this post to them? We’d love to talk with them!

You can probably tell this is going to be a good deal of work. Furthermore, it’s not as if this whole thing is locked and loaded and we have it all figured out. Rather, we have some good starting points and a commitment to persevering on these bullet points until we get the breakthrough on it. Some of it’s ready. Some of it needs a lot of work.

Needless to say…I’ll be keeping you updated on the progress through this blog.