There are lots of exciting things going on this week. Here is the roundup:

Greensboro

It’s not too late to get in on the Mercy Hill church plant. In May/June, those that aren’t in Greensboro will begin moving out there. They’re looking for people who will go, plant their lives and get jobs  in order to live as missionaries to the city. For more details or to get connected, go to www.mercyhillgso.com.

Indianapolis

A couple of weeks ago we announced that our next church plant will be in the great city of Indianapolis. Indianapolis is the 12th largest city in the U.S. and is desperately in need of more Gospel-centered churches. Stay tuned later this week for more details on this plant, in the meantime, you can get connected HERE.

We are looking for additional church planting residents for this years. HERE is some information on what a residency is all about.

Advance Regional

Join us this Friday for Marks of a Gospel Movement at Vintage21 Church in Raleigh. J.D. Greear, Tyler Jones & Elliot Grudem will be teaching on what Gospel movement looks like in the life of a church, as well as the potential dangers of Gospel-centrality. For a preview, check out this post from J.D..

You can register for this FREE event HERE.

We launched our church planting residency 2.5 years ago. This year, we plan to have 4 residents. We’ve already identified 3, and we’re in the process of looking for a 4^th (see below for more details).

We invest a lot of time, energy, and resources into our residents. Why? Because we believe a church planting residency is one of the most effective ways to prepare planters. Here are 6 reasons I think anyone who feels called to plant should consider a church planting residency:

1. ASSESSMENT. Church planting is hard. In the last 5 years, there has been an explosion in the training and resources available to planters. Despite that, 1 out of 3 church plants still fail. The main reason? The lead planter – lack of spiritual preparation, inadequate training, and unrealistic expectations. As the maxim goes, “everything rises and falls on leadership.” Healthy plants require healthy leaders.
    
   A good church planting assessment is a must for planters, but a residency is even better. Why? A residency combines the benefits of a formal church planting assessment with the informal, ongoing assessment of a local church. We take all of our residents through a rigorous assessment process, but no matter how good a formal assessment is, it doesn’t compare to walking alongside a guy for 9 months of a residency and speaking into his life, his marriage, and his ministry. The best assessment tool we have for church planting is the local church. A residency leverages that resource for the health of the planter.
    
   
2. TRAINING. This one builds off the last. Growth and development happen best in community. Too many planters approach their training in isolation. The best place to learn how to plant healthy churches is in a healthy church. Many planters are coming out of unhealthy church contexts – it’s often one of the reasons they are driven to plant. Often they know what they don’t want, but they don’t know what they do – or they’ve never seen it. A residency offers planters the chance to be trained in the context of a healthy church that has planted churches. I’ve heard (and I believe it) that 9 mo in a residency puts a planter 3 years ahead in his thinking about planting.
    
   
3. COACHING. Residents don’t just benefit from the experience of a church planting church – they benefit from the experience of residents who have gone before them. Our planters love to pour into the guys coming behind them. They’ve been there; they’ve seen it; and they want others to learn from their successes and their failures.
    
   
4. RESOURCING. Church planting is expensive. Fundraising takes a lot of time and energy, even for those who have experience raising money. Our residents come out well-resourced. In fact, they aren’t sent out until they have their funding in place. We invest significantly in our planters, but they still have to raise a good amount of money. We teach our planters how to fundraise, we set them up with opportunities, and we give them time to travel to raise the resources they need.
    
   
5. TEAM-BUILDING. Money isn’t the only resource a planter needs. He also needs a healthy team. We help our residents discover the key people they need on their team, and we give them a hunting license on the church to recruit whoever they can get to go. Last year, we sent out over 80 people as part of one of our church plants.
    
   
6. RELATIONSHIP. Church planting is lonely. Many planters feel isolated. Churches assume what church plants most need is money, but most planters are looking for more (thought they still need the money). They’re looking for connection to a like-minded network of churches – camaraderie, brotherhood with a group of churches that share their DNA. Through the course of a residency we establish a deep relationship with our planters – when they suffer we suffer, and when they rejoice we rejoice. We pray for them, and we leverage our resources to serve them.

We’re looking for more residents for this year, for strategic cities all over the U.S.Interested in applying? You can get more info HERE. Contact us directly HERE.

This comes from John Piper’s book A Hunger for God. All of us have people we admire in ministry, and all of us will experience success at some point in our ministry. This is a great warning for either:

It is dangerous to hold up a person or ministry or church as a model…As soon as we do, the clay feet will become plain. Disillusionment often follow naive admiration. There is none without sin, and all our triumphs are mixed with imperfections. We do well to temper our esteem with the acknowledgement that there are hidden faults in any saint, and today’s victory is no assurance of tomorrow’s holiness. Nor can we even read the heart of today’s triumph. Neither the heart of others nor our own (1 Cor 4:4)…

God alone never changes, but the outpourings of his blessings ebb and flow in some ways far too mysterious for our minds to judge. The moment we think righteousness holds sway, some sinful plague is spreading in the midst. And just when we think the darkness is so thick that all is lost, someone grabs a rope that rings a bell and brings an army with torches. We will only maintain our stability and unshakeable confidence if we keep our focus on the unchanging God and take every rising and receding tide as a work of infinite wisdom for the accomplishment of His holy purposes.

Church planters tend to be lone rangers. In some respects, they have to be. There is a sense of isolation and responsibility that comes with church planting that is unavoidable. Being (1) rooted in the gospel, believing in it’s power to save (Rom 1:16), and God’s responsibility for saving people, not yours; and (2) having a strong team including future elders that can share the responsibility and hold you accountable are vital. But at the end of the day you will still feel like the buck stops with you, and to some degree that’s true.

That weight and responsibility tends to draw guys that are comfortable operating with a degree of isolation. Sometimes this is the sign of an experienced leader who is comfortable in his own skin and has enough wisdom to know when he is hearing from God and when he just ate bad pizza the night before. Other times it is foolishness ambition that is more rooted in proving one’s own worthiness than a genuine calling. Often it’s a mix of the two.

Proverbs 18:1 offers some great advice for those exploring a call to plant, and really for any leader:

“Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.”

That’s not just a verse about isolating yourself so you can pursue BAD things without others knowing about it. It’s also about isolating yourself to pursue GOOD things without godly input. Don’t pursue your calling outside of community. Make sure you have people in your life that have access to your deepest desires. And give them permission to speak into those desires, even if it’s not what you want to hear. If you find yourself making major decisions in isolation, that should serve as an indicator that things are out of balance. Remember, the greatest assessment tool we have for church planting is the local church.

One of the best books out there on community is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. It often gets looked over for more recent books, but Bonnhoefer’s work is rich with insight on the implications of the gospel for Christian community.

I thought this sections was particularly insightful for church planters:

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is like to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life should be and try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams…Every human wish dream that is injected into Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself…

God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered common life with them…[So] we thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather than God for what He does give us daily…

When the morning mist of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.

Planters are visionaries. They have to be. Planters have to look at a lost community and envision a church that could reach them. The problem is when your vision for your community trumps the community that the Gospel actually creates.

Don’t let your dreams ruin your community. Don’t let the church you’ve planted in your head spoil what God actually gives you.

Thanks to @spenceshelton for turning me on to this book.