Sean Benesh's Blog, page 11

What Church Planters Can Learn From the Specialty Coffee Industry

I admit that I have coffee on my mind most of the time. Last weekend I went on a road trip and beyond bringing coffee with me for the drive, my trip also centered around finding new coffee shops and coffee roasters. Here at home as I visit new coffee roaster after coffee roaster, as well as peruse their social media, I se...

Why the Future of Ministry is Part-Time

When I first ventured into church planting I only did it part-time. Whereas I once thought of it as a failure from my lack of smooth-talking ability to woo and raise funds, I now look back at it as one of the most pivotal moments of my life. That’s why I am convinced it is the future.*

Sure, in that first paragraph there’s...

How Much Time Should Bivocational Pastors Use to Prep Sermons?

A debate began to build up steam. How long should we pastors spend preparing our sermons? Some of the guys in my pastor’s group said twenty hours. A couple leaned toward thirty. One guy spoke up saying his school taught him to spend no less than forty. Another said that was “demonic.” Then a guy said … “Well, I probably s...

Church Planter, If You Really Want to Be Effective Then You Need to Scrub Your Social Media

Who are you? How do you self-identify? The answer to those questions are revealing. Why? Because it’s about our identity. However, we know that it’s not so cut and dry. There’s you … and then there’s the “social media you.” Which one is true?

This is especially relevant for church planters and others in “professional” mini...

Why Most Church Planters I Meet Are Blowing It

Too often the words we use can become so commonplace that they lose their potency. For years now we’ve talked so much about being missional or incarnational that those words have become simply a backdrop. Worse yet, they are niceties to put on websites or our church planting prospectus we cobbled together to raise funds. ...

Finding Success in a Results-Driven Ministry World

Every church planter wants one thing and one thing alone … success. Immediately we’re faced with the follow-up question … what is success? If every church planter is plagued by this word, is measured up against this word, and their entire funding and livelihood is tied to it then it would be prudent to find it and capital...

Why I Wrote Intro to the City

I was sitting in an urban planning class at Portland State University as I was preparing for a life and career that had nothing to do with church planting or even ministry. The plan was to finish my PhD, land a gig as a professor at some state university, and spend the rest of my days reading obscure academic journals. An...

There's One Thing That Will Keep You in Place Long Term and It's Not a Mystery

The only time I ever left a church planting venture was because of money … or the lack thereof. Therefore, whenever I write I don’t do so from the vantage point of being afar, aloof, or arrived. I failed. Miserably. I know that if finances or funding were not an issue I’d still be church planting in my previous stops.

Look...

Spoiler Alert: Most Church Planters Are Not Pioneers

I need a frontier.
My hunch is that you do as well.
That’s why you clicked this article. That’s why we read an article or pick up any book for that matter. The title and summary strike a chord. We resonate with them. We’re compelled to investigate more fully. There’s something about that term “pioneer” combined with “church...

Planting Churches in a Majority Culture System

It’s not debatable that church planting systems in the U.S. overwhelmingly favor white church planters who’re planting churches in white neighborhoods. I now have nearly two decades as a participant and observer to be able to confidently type that first sentence. Truth be told, this is one of the reasons why I started Int...