Daniel Im's Blog, page 24

Top Quotes and Images for Planting Missional Churches

Here are my 11 Favorite Quotes for Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply:

Missional means being a missionary without ever leaving your city.
Church planters should be known first and foremost as people of integrity.
Success is measured in multiplication of churches and quality of disciples.
If your church is empty in a single location, it will still be empty with two locations.
Multisite is not a substitute for church planting; it’s a substitute for a large auditorium.
You cannot lead people to godliness when you are not regularly encountering God.
You cannot love a city if you do not know a city.
Without an intentional developmental approach, the church is likely to become a mile wide and an inch deep.
Everywhere Christians have gone to share the gospel churches were formed.
Churches
 of all sizes and ages can take part
 in church planting.
Your ultimate calling is not to plant a church; it’s a calling to come to Jesus himself.

I’d be honored if you shared these images with your friends and followers on your favorite social media platforms!

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[GIVEAWAY] A Companion Course for Planting Missional Churches

A Companion Course for Planting Missional Churches!

When Ed Stetzer and I wrote Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches That Multiply (click here to see what’s new with the second edition), we designed a companion course that went along with it, Essential Church Planting. This course digs into the essential knowledge and advice every church planter and multiplier needs to know. Think “Church Planting and Multiplying 101,” in an 18 module, 7 hours of HD video online course format. Click here to learn more.

Well, if you purchase Planting Missional Churches, review the book, and share about it on social media before May 8, you’ll be entered into a draw to win one of three free copies of this $397 course.

Buy, Review, and Share before May 8 for Additional Entries!

Purchase  the book (Every purchase counts as an entry for this giveaway. So buy a copy for your friends and staff members!)
Write a short Review on Amazon, Goodreads, and/or your blog (Each review counts as an entry for this giveaway. So copy and paste your review onto several sites.)
Share the book on social media using the hashtag #PMCBook for one additional entry.
Once you’re done, fill out the form below.

 

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Join Me at Exponential East 2016

Here are a few ways that you can grow during one of the largest church planting conferences of the year, Exponential East 2016.

If You’re Not in Orlando…

Tune into the Exponential live stream here for all the main sessions.
Download my new eBook, Multiplication Today, Movements Tomorrow: Practices, Barriers, and an Ecosystem here

If you’re not registered as a Free or Plus member at NewChurches.com, then you can go here to register for free and get the eBook



If You’re in Orlando,

Say Hello to me by visiting one of my workshops listed below
Purchase my new book with Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply for 40% off

My Workshops:

Workshop Session 1: New Trends in Church Multiplication

The Gospel remains the same, but the methods that we use are ever changing. Join us to hear about the newest trends in church multiplication. Where is church planting and multiplication heading in the future? In this session, we’ll talk about different residency models, the future of theological education, trends in bivocational ministry, and the future of collaboration.
Time: Tuesday, 2:30-3:30pm
Location: AP Buildings – AP 8

Workshop Session 2: Using Technology to Unleash a Culture of Multiplication

This isn’t about Twitter, Facebook or Google Analytics. Nor is this a session for geeks or techies either. In this session, we will discuss how you can easily use technology to support a leadership reformation in your church. After all, gone are the days where you would expect 100% of your leaders to show up on a Saturday morning training seminar. How can you train, support, empower and coach your leaders using technology? Come and find out. There’ll be freebies galore, including free access to the latest and greatest conference videos.
Time: Wednesday, 8:45-9:45am
Location: AP Buildings – AP 8

Workshop Session 3: Creating Systems that Fuel a Leadership Movement

Your church will never grow beyond your leadership lid. That is, unless you have the right people on the bus in the right seats, as well as the appropriate systems to support your leadership. In this session, discover how you can develop your volunteers into your future ministry directors, campus pastors or future church planters. You won’t just hear a philosophy, you’ll receive tools and resources to help you do it.
Time: Wednesday, 1:00-2:00pm
Location: AP Buildings – AP 8

Workshop Session 4: How Your Church Can Create a Multiplication Movement

Learn how to create a church multiplication movement in your city. Whether you’re a church planter, a staff member, a campus pastor, a lead pastor, or a denominational leader, you will glean insights to help you cultivate a multiplication movement in your city. When this session is done, you’ll leave with a strategy to employ in your city to see multiplication happen.
Time: Wednesday, 2:30-3:30pm
Location: AP Buildings – AP 8

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Book Review and Best Quotes: Habits for Our Holiness by Philip Nation

“The spiritual disciplines can help you, but they cannot save you.”

I love books written on the spiritual disciplines because I understand that my relationship with God is the plumb line to everything in my life. If I’m not regularly spending time with God in prayer, reading Scripture, and engaging in the other disciplines, my compass gets skewed and there’s fall out everywhere else.

Here’s the problem though: most books on spiritual disciplines lack one thing.

That one thing isn’t great stories, solid theology, innovative ways to practice the disciplines, or motivation. That one thing is how the disciplines connect to mission.

In Habits for Our Holiness, my friend and co-teaching pastor, Philip Nation, addresses what’s been lacking in most books on spiritual disciplines in a readable, yet comprehensive way. It’s precisely this,

Discipline leads to mission.

He believes that the central discipline of the Christian life is love, and that “love is what propels habitual holiness and the desire to follow God into the world for His redeeming mission” (25). If you practice the disciplines, while disregarding others and the mission of God, you miss the entire point. The fact is, discipline leads to mission.

While most books on spiritual disciplines relegate mission to just one of the spiritual disciplines–namely, evangelism–Philip finds a way to masterfully weave mission throughout each and every one of the disciplines, as outlined in the table that I created below. You can download the pdf here.

This is how Philip categorizes the disciplines:

Worship, Bible study, and prayer: These three disciplines form the foundation for our habits for holiness.
Fasting, fellowship, rest, simplicity, and servanthood: These disciplines cause us to love God more thoroughly and cause him to shape our hearts more missionally.
Submission, leadership, and disciple-making: These disciplines help us understand where our loyalties lie in relation to God’s sovereignty.

All in all, this is a much needed book and one that I advise all churches to adopt and use as a part of their discipleship process. I give it a 5/5. You can pick up a copy here.

Here is a list of my favorite quotes from this book:

Love is the central discipline of the Christian life.
The world should benefit from our spiritual growth.
The more often we hold up love, the more habitual our holiness will become.
At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves who we want to become.
When we worship God, we say to everything else, “You are not God.”
Our prayers take on different forms at times than my prayers.
Applying the Bible in community will also help with your spiritual blind spots.
When we learn together, we grow together, and then we can better serve the world together.
Grow up so I can reach out. Reach out so I can grow up.
Prayer, however, is much more than merely rattling off whatever is on the top of our minds or repeating phrases with great passion.
Prayer should drive us to a sense of God’s work in both us and the world around us.
Fasting is a beautiful test of what or Who rules our lives.
The call of God is not to separate from the world but to know how to live in it.
When you use what you own to bless the city where you live, your passions become tools rather than idols.
As you serve, you build up the body of Christ because you reflect the heart of Christ.
We submit because we love Him. He accepts our surrender because He loves us.
The deeper your love for God, the more effective your leadership for others.
Leadership without character is tyranny.
The spiritual disciplines can help you, but they cannot save you.
Spiritual disciplines are paths on which we walk, not treasures to which we cling.

By the way, here’s a picture of my copy of the book as I was designing the chart

The NEW Planting Missional Churches: Changes in the 2nd Edition

When I began working with Ed Stetzer, one of the first things that I did was approach him about revising Planting Missional Churches. It has been such a helpful book to tens of thousands of people around the world, but much of the stories and content needed to be refreshed. Furthermore, there were new questions and issues that planters and multipliers were facing, like multisite, residencies, multi-ethnic churches, theological education, and the difference between denominations and networks.

So we decided to revisit the book, and in doing so, we ended up changing over 50% of the content. The stories, content, and models are different in each chapter. We also wrote five new chapters, completely reorganized the book, and integrated the research we conducted in the new State of Church Planting study, a research partnership of over a dozen denominations on church planting in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

In addition to rewriting the content in the existing chapters, we wrote five new ones from scratch:

Chapter 8: Multiethnic or Monoethnic Churches
Chapter 9: Multisite Planting
Chapter 27: Residencies and the Future of Theological Education
Chapter 28: Denominations and Networks
Chapter 30: Spiritual Leadership

Who Should Read This Book?

If you’re considering church planting, the first section in this book will give you a good sense as to what it takes and who is qualified
If you are already planting, this book will provide you and your team with different leadership and church models for your plant, as well as a plethora of systems to implement in your church so that you can move towards multiplication
If you are pastoring and considering multiplying, this book will be a tool for you to use to help raise up future church planters
If you teach and train others how to plant, this book can function as a guide for your curriculum

Our hope is that this would be a beneficial and helpful book in your ministry, as you consider planting, are in the journey of planting, or are training others to plant churches that plant churches that plant churches.

Next Steps:

Download the first three chapters by entering your name and email here
Learn more about this book’s companion church planting course,  Essential Church Planting
Purchase the book
Review the book
Get the 30+ additional resources that go along with this book
Share the book on social media, #PMCBook

We would be honored if you could partner with us in any one of these ways!

Thank you!

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If your church accomplishes its vision…

Every decision influences the vision whether to enhance or destabilize it.

Episode 57: The Issue with Conflict

What happens when you don’t deal with conflict head on? What if you let it fester on your team?

In Episode 57 of the New Churches Q&A Podcast, we talk about dealing with conflict in your church. Here is Robb Robins’ question:

What happens if I have pastoral or personal concerns with someone who is on my team?

In this episode, you’ll discover:

How to deal with conflict
Different active listening skills
What happens if you don’t deal with conflict head on

Shareable Quotes (#NewChurches):

“Are you a leader?”
“The ownership is on you to ask probing questions.”
“Pride, power, sex, and money tend to be the killers in ministry.”
“Bring the person aside, and have a personal conversation with them.”
“Don’t talk to someone else who knows them closely, and ask them probing questions…because that’s gossip.”
“If there’s one thing that you’ll keep on encountering in leadership, it’s conflict.”
“We’re not trying to digitize development or discipleship.”

Additional Resources:

The Leadership Pipeline Conference
Developing Your Leadership Pipeline eBook
5 Leadership Questions Podcast

Help us Multiply the Mission:

Please subscribe
Leave a rating and review on iTunes
Ask a question by clicking Send Voicemail on the right hand side of NewChurches.com
If you’re on a phone or a tablet, then go to www.speakpipe.com/newchurches to download the app and record your message
When you’re recording, introduce yourself and your context in about 15 seconds and then record your question for 30 seconds

Trend #3 for the Future of Church Planting: Residencies and Theological Education

Seminaries are realizing that ministerial training happens best in the context of a local church.

Tomorrow’s Church Planting

Church planting today is not what it used to be.

Before, church planters were the ones who couldn’t get a “real ministry position” at a church, so they started their own. Albeit, there were those entrepreneurial few who defied all odds and started churches on their own, by and large, being a church planter wasn’t what it was today.

Now, being a church planter is the thing to do.

Church planting is getting the attention of the masses. In fact, many church planting conferences are now larger than typical pastoral conferences. This is surprising when, decades ago, there was no such thing as a church planting conference. For example, the recent SEND North America church planting conference in 2015, hosted by the North American Mission Board (an SBC entity), had two to three times the attendance than the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in 2015. That would not have happened 15 years ago. In addition, most seminaries now have certificates, tracks, and/or entire degree programs focusing on church planting. This too would not have been the case in yesteryear.

The evidence is clear. Church planting is exciting, it has momentum, and it is here to stay. But this article is not on today’s church planting, it’s on tomorrow’s church planting.

As I’ve been consulting with denominations, networks, and churches regarding their strategy to assess, train, coach, and fund church planters, there are a few trends that I’m beginning to notice. In fact, a few of these trends were the focus of Ed Stetzer’s and my writing in the newly updated edition of Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply. Not only did we overhaul every single chapter, but we also wrote several new ones. If you read the previous edition, it would be worth your time to take a look, since it’s practically a new book (over 50% new content). For this article though, I want to focus on three of the major trends that I’m beginning to notice for tomorrow’s church planting: Kingdom collaboration, bivocational ministry, and residencies and theological education.

Trend #1: Kingdom Collaboration

Together we can accomplish more than we can ever do alone.

This is the buzz phrase of the new generation of church planters. Tomorrow’s church planter will be less focused on building their kingdom and more focused on seeing Jesus build God’s kingdom. They will be less focused on denominational lines and rules, and more focused on reaching their city. They will be less focused on the superman model of leadership, and more focused on team leadership.

A Focus on God’s Kingdom.

Tomorrow’s church planter will have a strong foundation in missiology. They will understand that their mission in life is not to plant a church and grow it by sheep stealing, but rather, their mission is to join God on his mission, and do whatever God wants them to do to reach and disciple the nations. As a result, instead of turning to church growth books, they will read missiological books like, The Mission of God by Christopher Wright, Transforming Mission by David Bosch, and The New Global Mission by Samuel Escobar. For tomorrow’s church planter, when someone mentions the name Ralph Winter, they will think of the missiologist, rather than the X-Men movie producer. In other words, tomorrow’s church planter will approach church planting as a missionary, with Romans 15:20 as their theme verse, “My aim is to evangelize where Christ has not been named, so that I will not build on someone else’s foundation, but, as it is written: Those who were not told about Him will see, and those who have not heard will understand.” (HCSB).

A Focus on Reaching Their City .

Tomorrow’s church planter will be so focused on reaching their city, that they will not allow denominational lines to keep them from discerningly working together. In other words, instead of partnering together solely with sister churches in their denomination or network, they will collaborate with likeminded churches in their city. I’ve seen this happen where I used to pastor, where Anglicans, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance came together in an evangelistic campaign with Alpha to reach Edmonton, Alberta, with the gospel. Tomorrow’s church planter will approach ministry the way Meldenius did, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

A Focus on Team Leadership .

Tomorrow’s church planter will understand that their greatest contribution to the kingdom will be when they focus on their strengths, and manage their weaknesses. As a result, they will lead with their strengths, and staff to their weaknesses. They will build a team around them, and treat them as co-equals, rather than as hirelings. They will serve them, rather than command them. They will seek to develop them for God’s mission, rather than use them for their mission. By doing this, they will see a higher level of engagement and ownership amongst their leadership team, while also moving their church towards a culture of multiplication. Tomorrow’s church planter will lay down their cape, and take up the cross.

Trend #2: Bivocational Ministry

In the past, if a church planter was bivocational, oftentimes that secretly meant that they they lacked financial support. A standard section in any church planting proposal would include the church’s plan to financial self-sustainability, which included paying the church planter and maybe another staff member a salary with benefits. Many denominations would even support the church planter’s salary for at least three years, while also providing seed money for their ministry. As a result, in the past, bivocational ministry was more of a last resort, than a first resort. Interestingly though, we are seeing this change for tomorrow’s church planter.

A Missiological Strategy.

Tomorrow’s church planter sees bivocational ministry more as a missiological strategy, rather than as an alternative way to fund themselves. When John Nevius (1829-1893) arrived in China as a missionary, he observed the impact that paying pastors and evangelists had on the growth of the Chinese church. Not only did it lead to Chinese dependency on Western money, but it also slowed the expansion of the church, since it created a two class system of believers. The holier and the less-holy. The paid and the non-paid. The pastor/evangelist and the regular lay person. As a result, Nevius developed a dramatically different method for missions that he implemented when moving to Korea. A few of his principles were related around the importance of bivocational ministry, where unpaid believers would be able to pastor and lead their own church. Many scholars believe that the Nevius method was one of the critical factors to Christianity exploding in Korea. In addition, we don’t see any outbreaks around the world of church planting movements that are led by full-time paid vocational clergy. Is this merely a coincidence or something that the church needs to take note of? For tomorrow’s church planter, bivocationalism isn’t a penalty, it’s an opportunity. Bivocationalism is a missiological strategy.

First Resort, Not Last Resort.

There will be both full-time paid vocational church planters, as well as fully bivocational planters in tomorrow’s church. However, the difference is that tomorrow’s bivocational church planters will have chosen that path as their first resort, rather than their last resort. We will see youth pastors, associate pastors, and lay leaders choose the path towards bivocational church planting as a missiological method to reach their neighborhood for Christ. For many of tomorrow’s church planters, choosing bivocational ministry will not be a matter of being out of money, but it will be a matter of being on a specific mission.

Reversed Tier Funding.

There will be church planters who will initially plant their church fully bivocationally, but then slowly transition to taking a salary as the church grows. I talk about this in Planting Missional Churches as an alternative way to approach church plant funding. The point of this model is to start the church as a missionary, with a regular job in the marketplace. As the church begins to gain momentum and grow, that is when the church planter will begin taking a salary, since more time is required to develop leaders. It’s a proof-of-concept way of approaching funding. Or, in start-up business speak, it’s a minimum-viable-product (MVP) way of approaching church planting.

Trend #3: Residencies and Theological Education

When it comes to theological education, the pendulum has swung back-and-forth a few times over the last couple of centuries. From theological education being birthed out of the church, to it then being handed over to educational institutions, then back to the church and so-forth, we are at a time in history where the two sides are beginning to move towards an equilibrium. Seminaries are realizing that ministerial training happens best in the context of a local church, while churches are discovering that training someone theologically is completely different than training someone for practical ministry. Both seminaries and churches are looking to one another for help and for partnerships because both sides realize they cannot take on the task of theologically educating and pastorally forming an individual by themselves. The bridge that is being formed between churches and seminaries is called, “residencies.” While there are many different ways that churches and seminaries are approaching residencies, they all seem to share a common goal – to do a better job at integrating theology with praxis. Where they all differ in their model is their starting point. Let me share three out of five of them. You can learn more in the new edition of Planting Missional Churches.

Starting Point: Multiplication

In this residency model, tomorrow’s church planter will develop the knowledge, skills, and ability to infuse multiplication at every level of their church. They will be developed with the gradual release of responsibility model, so that their development is personal and hands on. By the end of this residency program, they will have developed a plan, not just to multiply the leaders and groups within their church, but also their church as whole.

Starting Point: Sustainable Ministry

In this residency model, tomorrow’s church planter will develop the five characteristics of a healthy sustainable pastor, as was revealed in the resilient pastoral ministry study that Covenant Seminary conducted in partnership with Reformed Theological Seminary and Westminster Seminary. They will grow in spiritual formation, self-care, emotional and cultural intelligence, marriage and family, and leadership and management.

Starting Point: Leadership

In this residency model, tomorrow’s church planter will develop the leadership skills required to successfully plant and lead a church. These leadership skills include vision casting, hiring practices, team ministry, strategic development, and conflict management. In order to develop these skills, the church planter will first focus on growing in self-awareness, since this is where the heart of the leader is formed.

Conclusion

As churches continue to be planted and reach the lost in their neighborhoods, my prayer is that the next generation of church planters would be raised up, trained, and sent out from the harvest to the harvest. May our churches be the training grounds for the future army of church planters. May we stop penalizing pastors for being bivocational, but instead see the unique opportunities that are latent within that model. And lastly, may we stop seeing church plants as competition, but instead create opportunities for kingdom collaboration.

*This was originally published in March-April 2016 issue of The Net Results magazine

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Three Essential Questions to Developing Leaders

Learn how to use residencies and internships to develop leaders in your church.