3 Essentials of church planting

for those people who are thinking about planting those people who are thinking about multiplying what are the things that they need to do in order to get ready to do that and we're going to boil it down today to three p's the prayer the preparation and the planning of church planting family multiplication restoration i'm dahaty lewis join me noah odom and haydn radner as we come to you from atlanta st louis and las vegas as we seek to add value to your church planning journey we'll have real-time authentic conversations that are relevant to the life of the church planner and pastors join us as we hear from leaders of this movement from across north america and discover what it really takes to plant churches everywhere for everyone welcome to the we are send network podcast my name is noah oldham lead pastor of august gate church in st louis joined as always by dahaty lewis lead pastor of blueprint church in atlanta georgia and haydn ratner senior pastor of walk church in las vegas nevada tahati how you doing today sir i am doing well sir how are you i'm well well hayden welcome brother how are you yeah i'm doing good it's november it's las vegas the sun is not quite as beaming out here it's a good day man that's fantastic and we have that we have the the nba season is going to be starting officially december 22nd let's go we got to go ahead and redeem this ring back man that season was already so long it's almost like hockey season it's already starting again because of covid man you guys are living it up yes i'm excited hey guys we have the awesome opportunity to really help our listeners people all over the send network people that are checking out the send network people that are thinking about planting and multiplying with the opera the opportunity to help them level up if as one way to say it and we want to do that today by going all the way back to before we planted for those people who are thinking about planting those people who are thinking about multiplying what are the things that they need to do in order to get ready to do that and we're going to boil it down today to three p's the prayer the preparation and the planning of church planting the prayer the preparation and planning of church planting i believe that we have a breadth of different experiences in this group among us and then all across send network we can pull from so i'd love for us to offer some tangible advice to those who are in this preparation season so let's begin here as we believe according to scripture the harvest is plentiful the laborers are few therefore pray let's begin talking about prayer what have been those prayer strategies that you used in the early days and maybe you continue to use as you think about and you plan to multiply what have been those prayer strategies let's start with you man how have you led your church your family yourself to prayer prior to planting well i mean i think that's a great question and for me the strategy would be exactly what you said i would just finish that verse off you know when we talk about our prayer strategy for us it's always we it wasn't about praying for a building or praying for something like we wanted to be an answer to the prayer of the luke 10 2 or the matthew 9 37 where jesus says the harvest is plentiful the laborers are for you pray to the lord of the harvest that he would send more laborers and so we have we have developed a prayer strategy and continue then and even continue to our day to having a prayer strategy that's around raising up more laborers that is the reason why we exist that's the reason why we desire to do that and so from like we have a strategy for that we pray for every covenant member every single week we pray for every leader like that is our strategy is the praying for the people in which that god is raising up to co-laborer for us specifically um here in atlanta georgia and so like our prayer is primarily around the people that's awesome yeah so praying for the people praying for the harvest and leaders to come out of that harvest what about you hayden we spent some time together and you talked to me about some of your tangible strategies that you have used and you continue to use what would you offer as advice to those who are putting together a prayer strategy yeah i mean the simple advice is to do it i think sometimes we have this tendency to talk more about prayer than actually pray and i i know when we were getting ready to plant walk church and we were in our kind of a ramp up phase developing a core team i had this choice where it was going to be hey either i hope we're going to be a praying church or i'm going to be intentional about us raising up a culture of prayer in our church i loved this quote from spurgeon early on it's simply this it's if god be near a church it must pray and so we wanted god to be near our church we still want god to be near our church and so in order for that to happen we knew that we needed to be a praying house in fact right that's the lord's word himself my house will be a house of prayer i can remember our church walking through i mean our launch team our core team walking through jim symbala of the brooklyn tabernacle his book fresh wind fresh fire and i love how he just represents this this season in his life where he was so desperate on the verge of quitting until he started a prayer meeting and that really birthed the the movement that the brooklyn tab saw and so we wanted to model some of that early on and so i think my advice would be start a prayer meeting don't cancel it for anything and continue to build upon that and as you grow and so that was one thing that we did was we started a first wednesday prayer meeting every first wednesday of the month and um we've kept it until this day in fact in 2021 we're starting to go to every wednesday prayer and it's part of our culture now it's not just something we do as a one-off it's who we are wow and that's fantastic i love that height and that commitment to prayer it exudes out of you and i can see it i can see it in your life in your industry dude early on in our in our process we didn't know where god was sending us we knew god was calling us to plant it was more to a demographic a kind of person a generation of people and so we got these big maps out of different cities across the midwest we put up the maps i'm in our guest bedroom at our house we had a two-bedroom house heather and i were first married we began to pray god what city is it is it chicago is it paducah kentucky is it evansville indiana and god brought us to st louis uh through prayer and then when we got here it was give us a map of the region of saint louis and we began to prayer walk different areas and as we prayer walk we would kind of mark off like did god say something did our something kind of in our hearts begin to burn like luke chapter 24 on the road to emmaus and then there was the one day we took a prayer walk with our core team down in the soulard neighborhood of downtown st louis and as we went in different directions all five of us we came back and we all had the same look on our face like this it's so good and it was all birthed out of prayer and so i tell people that to this day like you want to plant in our city buy a map of the city put it on the wall and begin to pray for that city pray for the people pray for the different areas that god would direct your steps um in that anything you guys would add any any rhythms that you had as a core team any i like the strategy you just said haydn did you have anything like that any rhythms you guys have still to this day i mean again like for our focus it's we're really kind of like how do we leverage prayer as a means for like discipleship and disciple making i mean as haydn just even talked about it and so like we just want all of our members to be praying right and so when you think individually and collectively and like so a lot of our strategy is really around like a family that prays together stays together right and if we could get one of us praying for one another then i think that that is is a way that we also built that culture a family you know and like and being able to just send out like the text hey like i'm praying for you like those are just like really things that we have been doing from the beginning we like we try to spend less time talking in our other elders meetings and more time just simply praying in our eldest meetings and that's really kind of the fight you know often times that we are that we are doing so even doing the work on the front end so that we're praying more in the back and having our city group leaders and and and i think the biggest thing is is like getting our members to pray for one another so it's not just leaders praying for our members but as our members praying for one another our city group leaves us praying for their members and so on and so forth and so if we i just really believe that if we get multiple people praying for one another then i think what we we don't give our people like specific things we put our people on mission together we put our people together and we try to build that kind of culture and importance of prayer and then and so we don't necessarily have a strategy outside of pray for one another than that that's all encompassing because god starts speaking uh through that and he calls them out and you can send them and i love that i love it and that's super convicting about uh making our elders meetings more about prayer than about planning super super convicting um you mentioned charles spurgeon haydn just he has so many quotes about prayer that's right someone told me once about they want to know what the powerhouse was like where did the power come from in this church because it's moving powerfully and he took him down below during the service and there were people that were praying um and wow there's room underneath the sanctuary the entire service and he said the powerhouse that's the powerhouse yeah you know and i was thinking just strategically one thing that we've done as a handlebar is we've kicked off the years with what we call 21 days of prayer and fasting and so in january of every year we're taking out a block of 21 days and we're just committing those days we're using our app we're using social media our website to push out a daily prayer point where our church is praying for 21 days and we're encouraging people to fast from something during those 21 days to really spark and start the year off with a mindset of prayer and then in august we do another 21 day of prayer set and we call this 21 days of prayer and feasting and so we say hey everybody's kind of coming back to school back in things like that and so we encourage people 21 days of prayer but this time instead of fasting we want you to fellowship we want you to get together with some new people and feast and so really those are just two rhythms throughout the year and i think one thing that's sparked with with what the hottie said is you know asking people how we can pray for them and really trying to model praying there on the spot i know oftentimes people say hey on sunday can you pray for my cousin i'll say yeah let's write let's do it right now sometimes i'll forget sometimes i i don't want to lie and say yes and so even even on text messages hey can you pray for i'm texting a prayer and so i think on on the spot praying helps us with our praying yeah and i think that's really important to this highlight like because you know as we talk about prayer we part of the reason why we have to put it in as a discipline is just simply that it is it's a discipline because i am like a go-getter like and i won't i'll find myself waking up did i pray today so unless i have those built-in disciplines i won't be a person of prayer you know and so like i have to remind me and there's something about like when i pray that i'm reminded of my my shame reminded of my humility reminded of my humanity right and it just kind of kicks me back in the line of my dependency of just in need of god so it's not i don't pray because i'm strong or to show my strength i really pray because i'm weak right and i'm and i'm prideful and i'm arrogant and i'm selfish and i'm you know and i think i can do things on my own you know and i and i can and i dream about things that i can do on morning or how i can create like i have the type of faith like jacob like i have this type of faith as long as i can manipulate the situation that like and that's and i think that is what drives me to my knees and driving me to prayer so i don't i just didn't want anyone to be like oh man he's a he's a prayer warrior like nah like i it's it's a discipline that i have to to have and i often find myself like man i'm not praying enough and i so i find myself more like that than i'm often like just saturating myself in prayer that's awesome so the foundation for all of this for planting or multiplying has got to be prayer it's not the the box that you check when you don't want to give or you don't want to go i'll pray like it is the the foundation it is the impetus it's the energy behind everything but but next that there's another aspect of getting ready to plant and that is personal preparation um so somebody's listening to this podcast and saying i feel like god's calling me to plant i want them to know all the different avenues that they may need to consider when it comes to personal preparation so i'd love to hear from each of you guys beginning with you haydn what were the different avenues of personal preparation that god took you through in order to plant your church yeah that's great great question i'm a huge advocate for wise counsel and i part of that is because one of my daily rhythms is starting every day reading the proverb and you can't go far in the proverbs of the day without learning that you need wisdom your input is never enough and so uh when nina and i felt led to plant walk church here in las vegas we wanted to get counsel in the counsel that we got from our ascending church hope church was be assessed and so our our next step of preparation was to do a send network assessment from there we got our next step from there which was do a residency and we were able to do an apprenticeship residency at hope church and that was huge for for our preparation i was able to see a local church modeled from a lead pastor standpoint pastor vance and the team there as well as just other people with on the on this i never served on a church staff like that so i needed a lot of preparing and that created a space where i could still focus energy on our church plant walk church while at the same time not having to be on every weekend and preach every weekend and so i'm in the background i'm asking questions i'm leaning in i'm taking notes on my phone or my pad and i'm just i'm just in the background getting ready i'm building i'm preparing it's almost like when you see these big hotels in las vegas you just see the uh the beautiful hotel but the reality is they had to dig so deep of a foundation before they could even start the building that that's what felt like that the preparing season was for nina and i and uh yeah it was it was a game changer for us it still is for this day i still i still modeled that in our leadership that's good honey what about you man what did what did you do to personally prepare before you planted well i mean let me just kind of start off with just saying you know the old statement now the old adage is true is that you cannot give what you do not have and so like what i talk to our leaders all the time is that is that i believe that authenticity is the apologetic of our day and the reality is is that often time people want to know is it real and people don't want to see if you're perfect people want to know whether or not you're able to struggle well in this life you know and are you willing to struggle with with it and so i constantly i'm asking the question you know ask myself two questions you know on multiple different levels i says am i the type of person that i would want to see reproduced in my church and what disciplines am i putting in my life to help me get there and then i ask myself the second question do i have the type of marriage that i would want to see in my church and what disciplines do i have and then i kind of create these rungs to my nuclear family to my um you know my citigroup family to my church family and i think that that leads to even the church planning so i say all i have to say is that it is important for these times of preparation i had the privilege of going to fellowship associates in little rock you know and spending a year there just to simply put in to do a residency there and just to kind of walk through and just like what does it look like for us to be prepared what does it look like for us to be doing the real thing because one of the things that i'm just a firm believer of is that man you teach what you are but you reproduce who you really are you teach what you know but you reproduce who you really are and and so like a big part of it is like as we are doing that like constantly doing these diagnostics and putting myself in that and so most of what we do at blueprint church has been things that i've been through personally like i've been through residencies i've been through training i've been through times when i've said you know sit in under the bible like i've been through these things and a lot of the stuff now i have to obviously in a lot of ways contextualize them to my own context but these are things that i've been through and i'm and i'm living and i'm working through so i just think that the importance of personal preparation is a critical piece because the problem is is that i see so many pastors so many planters so many people allow their gifts and their talents to take them to a place where their character is not keeping them you know and i think a lot of it is that they're not creating those that that discipline of being the real thing and they're just kind of they're teaching stuff and they're good communicators and expositors but they're not really living this stuff out man that's challenging that's challenging okay the final peep we have prayer we got personal preparation and then it's planning it gets down to it uh for us to plant a church and we are starting an organization where we are leading people towards a common goal a common end and so there's different elements i'd love to hear from each of you uh what were the most important elements that you focused on planting your church you know some people are going to think about the gathering community engagement groups a lot of that comes out of methodology let's begin with you what were the most important elements you wanted to make sure that you had planned for that you could execute when this church was launching i mean for us as easy as gospel family mission um that we wanted the people to be understanding both their identity as gospel-centered believers right we want them to understand their identity as responsible siblings we talk about the churches not like family it is family and we wanted um our people to be indigenous disciple makers and so i know that like a lot of times people get frustrated when i answer things like that because it's like all right but what practically no that is like we those are the aims in which everything that we do is about reinforcing the identity of those things and so when we when at our church like we believe that our identity drives our activity and our focus and our target is always trying to get our people to understand who they are and then we basically trust in the holy spirit to allow him to lead them to what they have so we feel like we got to put the tools in the tool belt and so again it goes back to this idea of discipleship disciple-making you know and so when we say it's a call to membership is a call to discipleship and it goes back to the very thing that we said at the beginning praying for more laborers praying for more disciple makers and so you know and so that's really the core of everything that we do you know when we talk about our our planning and we bring it up every single time we do a new series every single time we're we're leading out it's like here's our aims and so let's let's let's be let's plan around them it shapes everything that's right and that vision those aims it shapes everything haydn what about you what were those those main focuses that you had in planning as you prepared to plant yeah well we wanted to start off with planning around city engagement we wanted to we wanted to not just start with a service but we wanted some of our service to lead to our worship service that makes sense and so we started out with city engagement and trying to reach people and trying to uh just be in in spaces i love how dahati says it where life exists and say okay hey there's 90 of our city is is lost and so let's plan stuff around reaching lost people and let's build from there and so yeah we we had a season that was very intentional before we launched our church with that and then we identified a location it happened to be the middle school that i went to growing up as a space for us to have public worship services and then we started to plan around having a life-giving attractional yet very gospel-centered worship service on sundays and i love john wooden's quote the legend the winningest coach of all time from ucla he said failing to plan is planning to fail and so we had to realize okay hey if if we really want to have a successful season of ministry in our church to experience growth we got to plan better um and i once heard i mean just to circle it back i once heard a friend of mine say hey if you don't pray together you can't plan together and so i think we're seeing all of this work together planning preparing praying and so yeah we started just i i think that i would just say too just being in the moment of of whatever season of life your church is in so if you're in like a pre-launch stage you know start planning around what's most effective in that season if you're trying to level up your sunday gathering because you're not experiencing the growth on sundays that you feel like you'd like to see well then start planning on how to have a better sunday service recently we had to take a look at our groups just to kind of our group's pipeline and our group's pathway and realize hey we haven't been planning for groups we've just kind of assumed they're just going to keep getting better we took our eye off groups for a minute and we realized man we got to plan for our next group season better and so yeah i think there's so much value in that's good and planning we see that biblically as well hey the only thing i'd add to both you guys said i think it's amazing the vision the aims and the those basics you talked about i would say make sure you exegete your community as you're doing all of that planning i've seen too many planters come from another context parachute in and try to accomplish a gathering or groups or even missional engagement community engagement based on what they experienced in another context and for me i grew up in a in an area that wasn't highly catholic moved to a catholic city and when we started planning our gatherings you realize if we're going to be down here in the middle of the city like there's more liturgical elements that are going to connect people don't want to come to my house for a small group first as the front door they want to come through the front doors of a building that looks like a church because they grew up in a catholic or a lutheran background and so we had to do that not just the church i want to plant in my heart the church that god wants to plant to reach this community was super important so um hey all of this is wrapped up like you said bringing it back around it's praying it's preparation it's planning i'd like before we close height and if you would just lead us in praying for the listeners for both their personal preparation and their planning to plant these churches wow i'll be honored too father we come before you in jesus christ's name the only name that is above every other name and god i just want to breathe a word of prayer over each individual listening regardless of gender ethnicity planting season or stage here's what we know god you are there you're with them and you're for them and so god i do pray that you would give us wisdom and insight in each season uh on how to plan better and god what we need to do when it comes to preparing and god give us a white hot flame a a passion a very tangible expression of prayer in our context in our church god give us not just churches that pray but god give us praying churches i love how dahadi said it lord that each individual member would be praying not just pastors and leaders but there's prayer taking place throughout the city prayer in groups prayer in homes prayer and families prayer with couples god prayer with kids prayer on the way to school prayer at the gym god i do pray that we would have this culture of prayer within the sin network within church plants all around north america i do want to close this prayer lord with just saying lord keep us from evil protect us from temptation lead us not into temptation deliver us from evil god we are in difficult challenging days we pray for those who are in authority we pray for different leaders and those who are ruling in different places god and we pray that they would be praying men and praying women holy spirit help our churches to be influencers of this day and disciple makers all throughout this nation and we do it all for your glory and our joy thank you for this podcast lord in jesus name amen amen hey thank you all for joining us for another episode of the we are send network podcast we hope this has been helpful as you pray prepare and plan to plant as always if you are interested in finding out more about church planting with the send network just text send network to 888-123 send a network to 888 123. and until next time we are send network you have been listening to we are send network a resource of the north american mission board for more information about today's podcast and other relevant resources visit [Music] sendnetwork.com you

Channel: North American Mission Board

Views: 1,163

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Id: vEC491YmPv0

Length: 25min 46sec (1546 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020