One of the questions I’m asked a fair amount by people who read this blog or email or call with questions is how to go about starting a church. When I think about this question, here is how I frame it:

Knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time, how would I start our church?

I’d start by thinking about everything with this in mind: If you make disciples, you always get the church. If you make a church, you rarely get disciples.

If I were you, this is what I’d do.

1_Start a Huddle. You and 8 people. If you’re married, have your spouse Huddle another 8 for a total of 16 people. The inclination and current way of church planting is to get as many people as you can in your Core Team. In fact, in the current attractional mode of church planting, there are three magic numbers:

• 45—If you have 45 people in your Core Team to start the church, you have 5-6 times the likelihood of succeeding.
• 2—If you have two pastors on staff from the get-go, your chances go way up.
• 70—If you have 70 people in your Core Team your failure right drops way, way way down.

So church planting research (see Ed Stetzer) and just plain common sense says to keep those numbers in mind.

Without getting into the number of reasons why I think you shouldn’t go that route, I’ll simply say the right marketing schemes, teaching and music are only occasionally getting churches off the ground now (see more than 80% failure rate and climbing). The landscape has shifted dramatically. But discipling people well so they are missional disciples works almost every time. If you are going to play the odds, if you are going to play the numbers, play the ones with the highest rate of success: Huddle=success. If you can disciple people who know how to disciple people who know how to disciple people…well…that’s a church growth plan the way Jesus did it. (The problem, as I’ve covered extensively on this blog, is that most people don’t know how to make missional disciples. Programs don’t really do it, but it’s all most of us have ever known. For me, before being in a Huddle, I know I certainly didn’t know how to make disciples. This is why Huddle has been so pivotal for us)

Does this route take more time than the “gather a Core Team and throw up a weekly worship service as quickly as possible” route?

Definitely.

The numbers aren’t going to be that impressive after one year.

But I’d say almost every time we overestimate what we can accomplish in our strength in one year and vastly underestimate what God can do in his strength in 5 years.

Grab 8 people you feel God is calling you to invest in/disciple and start a Huddle. Make sure they know this is HIGH commitment and this won’t be sexy church. But this will unlock the life they’ve only dreamed of. Personally, I’d start with 8 men, not because there can’t be mixed gender Huddles, but because I think it’s easier to learn how to lead Huddle with the same sex. There are nuances you need to learn in Huddle when you have both. I’m not saying it’s a no-go, I’m just saying it’s what I would do. Seems a little easier when you’re first starting out.

If you’re married and your spouse feels good about starting a Huddle of their own right away…GREAT. If not, once you’ve worked with them some, in a few months, your spouse can start a Huddle with the spouses that are in your Huddle and any Persons of Peace they feel God is calling them to invest in.

2_Do life with this Huddle: Create the mid-sized, extended family experience.

While you have a “formalized” Huddle every-other-week, this group will, over time, become like extended family. So you should hang out a lot. What you will quickly notice is that the language of discipleship you learn in Huddle makes its’ way very naturally into other conversations. So while Huddle is formalized “discipleship” time, every time you hang out with people there is an ever-growing spiritual depth to the conversations.

My wife and I open up our house every-other-Friday-night to the people in our Huddles. We provide drinks and snacks, they bring their own meat for the grill.

We do dinner, breakfast, coffee with these people all of the time…because they are people we are investing in. We pray for them together every morning.

Eventually, the other people in the Huddle learn to do this with each other outside of just you, and slowly you start to see a spiderweb network of relationships developing. People are starting to act like extended family.

They go to plays of children that aren’t their own.
Birthday parties.
Moving days when people move.
Dinners for people with new babies.
Spur-of-the-moment coffee.
Lots of parties.

Everything you’d do with close friends begins to happen.

What you see is community and intimacy develop, but it is the bi-product of the discipling, not the aim. One of my favorite Ronald Rolheiser quotes: People who love community always end up destroying community. People who love relationships always build community. The goal isn’t intimacy, but often it does develop.

3_Develop balanced rhythms for community and mission early.

We pattern everything we do around UP/IN/OUT. All of our lives and communities revolve around the UPward dimension (God), the INward dimension (relationship with the body of Jesus…community), and OUTward dimension (people who don’t know Jesus yet).

Obviously Huddle has a very strong UPward dimension. There is teaching, discussion, scripture, prayer, accountability. It’s money for the UP.

So what about IN and OUT if we want a balanced community from the outset?

If I were doing it again, this is the monthly rhythm I would
use (and then obviously all of the organic stuff is happening in between):

• Week 1 | Huddle
• Week 2 | Worship Service. But not how you’re used to it. Still pretty informal. Do a meal. A time for people to share what they are thankful for, stories of how God is moving, maybe some musical worship, a teaching and time for communion. It’ll have similar elements to a “standard” worship service, but in a very informal setting.
• Week 3 | Huddle
• Week 4| Meal with Huddle, spouses, kids. Only set “spiritual” time is for people to share what they are thankful for and take time to pray. We use these questions to guide our times together:
  a. Is anyone sick?
  b. Is anyone worried/anxious?
  c. Pray for Persons of Peace.
  d. Pray for our community.
• Week 4 | Part 2 — Mission. This can be doing a BIG party with everyone and inviting Persons of Peace who don’t know Jesus, exposing them to the supernatural quality of the community that is almost tangible, it can be serving the homeless and inviting friends who don’t know Jesus, it can be very, very BOLD mission where you do something like Treasure Hunts…the possibilities are endless. Something in the week outside of the normal “slotted” time for “church.”

The point is that you are developing a community that is balanced, with an eye towards personal discipleship, family and growing the family. In fact, what you are doing is launching a PILOT Missional Community…a mid-sized community that is experiencing UP/IN/OUT together, but not looking to grow the group just yet. It’s just testing those waters out. Letting people see how good life can be with a group of 15-20 people (+ kids).

4_Teach your Huddle to sow seeds of mission into every day life.

This is relatively easy to do.

For a few Huddles, have people bring their calendars for the next week or two and then draw the Triangle on a whiteboard. UP. IN. OUT.

Then look at your schedule.
How is it weighted?

What you will quickly see is people are quite selfish with their time (I include myself in this). My schedule, left to my own devices, revolves around what I want, when I want it, almost exclusively to the people I want it with. But I should be able to look at my week and clearly be able to see:

a. When am I resting this week? When’s my day off? When, each day, am I pulling away and spending time with God? What about my family? Are they getting my best? (UP)
b. Am I spending time with people in the community outside of designated “church” time? Breakfast? Coffee? Lunch? Dinner? Movie? Gym? Basketball? Am I spending time with the people who I can encourage and be encouraged by? (IN)
c. Who am I spending time with this week who doesn’t know Jesus? What if I had dinner with that couple who are Persons of Peace along with the other couple who is in our Huddle, so that way we are doing OUT and IN together at one time?

What most people see is they are reasonable strong at IN, maybe OK at the UP, but are woeful at the OUT.

So…we simply use Huddle to teach people how to fold OUT into their natural, normal lives. So many Christians claim they don’t have non-Christian friends. OK. Well…change that! Huddle gives you the device to teach people how to do mission and hold them accountable to doing it.

By doing this for a few months together and talking about it regularly in Huddle, people start to see more and more Persons of Peace who are open to them. This is sowing the seed for a harvest in the future.

5_Spend 6-9 months in this rhythm. Don’t try to grow the group. Just sow seeds. Sow. Sow. Sow. Become healthy. Huddle will teach them how to do the basics of what Jesus said disciples should do.

Experience mid-sized, Missional Community life so you know what it feels like, what it’s like to live in a community that isn’t tied to the identity of worship service in a building. Yes, there are times that you intentionally meet, but the best stuff is usually coming out of the “organic” that has developed from the “organized.”

6_Start talking about creating Missional Communities, communities that grow to be 2o-50 people, who are targeted at a certain group of people or geographical place (network or neighborhood). This is probably 6-8 months into this. Ask people in the group to pray for vision, that God would put something specific on their heart. Say you are looking for 2 sets of leaders, each with a specific vision for a MC, who want to pioneer the missional frontier. In our experience, after months and months of discipling, of experiencing life, community and the vibrancy of knowing Jesus…you’ll have people that want to step up. You won’t have to beg. You’ve taught these people, via Huddle, to hear the voice of God and respond. You won’t have to beg. This will invigorate you.

7_Work with those leaders to clarify and hone their plans, determine details, start dates for everyone, etc.

8_Work with the people who aren’t leading the MC who will serve as the Core Team and help them choose the Missional Community they want to be a part of. How do you know which you are called to?
a. You are called to the specific vision of the MC
b. You are called to serve a specific leader of an MC

9_Take the entire group on a retreat for 3-4 days before the MC’s launch. (We didn’t do this because this scenario is what I’d do if I could do it again). Lots of down time and fun on the retreat. Prayer. Worship. Teaching. Discussion about details and the future. Lots of celebration for what God has done. This is putting an Ebenezer up. This is a huge marker in the life of the community.

10_Each MC leader starts a Huddle of their own. Their Core Team is in the Huddle and additional Persons of Peace who are drawn to the vision of the MC. Grow the MC, balance doing UP/IN/OUT.

11_Decide the rhythm of the community now that you are a networked community. How many times a month will EVERYONE gather together? At this stage, you probably need to get everyone together twice a month. So for our community, we gather everyone together for a service with worship, prayer, teaching, stories, etc on the 2nd Sunday of the month, and another service that focuses on prayer and worship on the 4th Sunday. When people hit the missional frontier for the first time, when they are in a small Core Team, they need a lot more official gathering time. This eases the chaos in their minds and spirits. This will be hard for them, and it will be hard for you. But it’s a special time.

12_ Start a Leader Huddle where you are Huddling MC Leaders. (each MC should have 2, maybe 3 Leaders…these leaders then Huddle the rest of the community). We’ve continued doing these every-other-week.

13_Decide what your role in this multiplication is. Are you starting a MC of your own? Are you simply pouring tons of yourself into your MC leaders and jumping from MC to MC to MC each week? One thing you’ll want are times when your place is open and your leaders can just come and relax. We call this the Leader Oikos (the leader “household”)…a time when we can just be, enjoy each other, tell war stories, laugh, take care of each other…all without trying to grow the group. Your #1 job will be investing and equipping your leaders (but making sure you are doing all of the things you are asking them to do. If you want them to be bold in mission, you better be doing that and leading the way!).

14_Every 6 months, gather all of your MC leaders for a retreat for 2.5 days. This retreat is a combination of teaching, stories, discussion, worship, team exercises and planning. This is the track we’ve learned:
a. What is? (honest assessment of previous 6 months and where we are now)
b. What could be? (dreaming, inspiration)
c. What will be? (6 month detailed plan)

***At this point, groups grow and multiply, or stall and don’t make it (not every MC succeeds and that’s OK, that’s part of the nature of it). You continue to resource and equip and discern how to best guide your leaders and the rhythms of the greater community.

But I think this is the important part: For all of this, for steps 1-12 (which, by the way, is simply the beginning of the amazing growth you’ll hopefully see), you’re looking at probably a minimum of a 2.5 year process. Like I said at the beginning, this isn’t a quick thing. Investing and discipling never is. But you create something that’s worth imitating and worth multiplying. You create something that has the potential to see exponential growth, but something that remains incredibly substantive. Rather than saying “church growth” and “deep, substantive church” are mutually exclusive, it says they are integrally connected. After 4 years you could have 4-5 MC’s, after 6 years, 20′s MC’s, after 8 years, 60 MC’s. Each representing a bucket of about 20-50 people. Every person being discipled. Every person feeling like they have a family fighting for them, to whom they belong. You start doing it from the beginning, and it never really changes. It just contracts (multiplies) and expands (grows). Contract and expand. Contract and expand.

And you don’t need a ton of people to start it. In fact, like Jesus, you start with a handful.

This isn’t meant to be “formula” in the slightest bit, it’s just what I would do if I could do it all over again. I also think it’s a pattern you see Jesus use and Paul use over and over again. (Though often Paul had to do the majority of this process in 4-6 months before he was kicked out of the city!)

Hope you find that helpful. It’s actually been quite good for me to write it out. It’s a good way to process it for me personally.