ChurchPlanting.com

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in church planting recently. An increasing number of sending organizations are offering coaching as part of their planter support package.  I’m seeing this across a wide variety of denominations—from Anglican to Vineyard. And why not?  For significantly less than the cost of health insurance, you can see a 30% to [...]

I’ve coached people—including church planters—for pretty much forever now. When all is said and done, here’s what needs to happen in each coaching session: prepare, engage, and act.  This cycle is what makes coaching effective. It’s what gets things done:  preparing for the session in advance, interacting during the session, then determining next steps at [...]

Learning to not only delegate work but influence is one of the most inspiring tasks of a church planter and good leader. Far too many leaders limit themselves in keeping tasks and responsibilities to themselves. After having poured my life into two couples and a fairly young man who is the worship leader, I realized [...]

It was the best of decisions. It was the worst of decisions. In my last blog, I questioned whether John Mark should be considered a false positive or false negative. Paul and Barnabas disagreed sharply on his fitness to rejoin them in ministry, leading the companions to go their separate ways. Paul had a successful [...]

One of the big issues in most forms of church planting is money.  I truly believe in the final analysis all success at some point gets down to money.  It is difficult these days to raise the nearly $300,000 it will take to get a start going over three years.  One idea is to look [...]

Did you happen to see the video by Jefferson Behke entitled “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus” on YouTube? It depicts Behke rhyming about the purity of Jesus and the hypocrisy of the church. It argues that Jesus preached love, but religion is rigid, phony, and stale. He insists: “Religion puts you in bondage, [...]

My good friend Bob Bouwer was having lunch with the campus pastor of COMMUNITY a couple weeks ago when he said, “Everyday at the top of my journal I write these three letters:  E (emotional), P (physical) and S (spiritual) and then give myself a 1-10 rating.” He went on to explain how this daily routine of [...]