Simon Cox Blog: Church-Planting Shifts, Part One: The Launch

Tuesday, 7 March 2017

Church-Planting Shifts, Part One: The Launch

Consider your people group and the time of year.

Church planting is somewhat of an entrepreneurial enterprise that tends to be on the front end of change, both catalyzing change and being catalyzed by change.

This is the crux of what I want to discuss in this four-part series. The series is intended to keep grounding us in the realities of church planting while helping us seek creative ways to engage with our specific contexts.

Let me be honest, church planters tend to think that their individual and local church-planting model is the norm globally. That’s not the case.

Furthermore, our tendency is to cling to whatever conference we attended and mold our plant around a personality, model, or successful movement. That also makes it hard to think about different methodologies being helpful and appropriate.

For example, let’s looks at the church planting launch service.

The methodology of starting a church with a publicly announced beginning has probably influenced all of us. Even if we are doing a missional incarnational approach to church planting, at some point we realize that there is value in inviting people to our community. This may not be at the scale of the traditional approach, but because people are intrigued to check something out the first time, most church planters have a grand opening of some type.

One of the lessons we have learned is that big beginnings are now becoming less common. Although many still have ‘grand openings,’ since the 1980s and the 1990s there has been a decline in the size and audaciousness of large launches when planting new churches.

But large launches are still out there.

Large launches tend to be successful when we consider a few factors. These factors are not things I’m saying are good, but things I am saying help ...