LESSONS LEARNED IN CHURCH PLANTING
Our Beginnings as Church Planters
Denise and I planted our first church in January 1980 in the Queensland city of Ipswich. We were sent there by our senior pastor, Trevor Chandler, in our first year of marriage, with no real experience of preaching or leading a church, let alone starting one. Awaiting our arrival was a small group of people from different backgrounds.
Several problems immediately confronted me:
- my own inexperience;
- tensions within the group;
- some found it difficult to accept a young 25-year-old pastor;
- two men who had considerable experience in ministry but didn’t want to take the responsibility of the role of pastor;
- what I thought was my poor preaching.
My First Lesson: You need God to turn up!
Faced with all those challenges, I learned one of the great lessons which has served me all of my life: in church planting, you need God to turn up! In fact, I was once asked what my church-planting strategy was. I replied, “It’s very simple; I get alone in my room and cry out, ‘God, help me!’” That’s about it.
For 8 long months, we had small (sometimes very small) meetings, especially during the holiday season. We saw no salvations, but God was moving in deliverance and, having been raised in ministry alongside Graham Powell, a renowned authority in deliverance, I understood how to move with what God was doing. Finally, one man was saved in our Sunday night meeting, and I was greatly relieved.
An Important Lesson: Learn to be Patient!
This is where I learned another vital lesson in church planting: patience! I like saying that I belong to the “Glenn McGrath School of Ministry”. For those who might not know much about cricket, Glenn McGrath was one of Australia’s greatest fast bowlers. The secret of his considerable success was to put the ball in the right spot each time and let the conditions do the rest. This became my approach in church planting: do the essential things well and for long enough, and God will do the rest.
Four Essentials in Planting a New Church
The four essentials, in my experience, are the following:
Intimate, anointed worship
Inspiring revelatory preaching from God’s Word
Authentic fellowship around a meal
Effective outreach to the wider community
Off and Running!
Once we had our first salvation, it wasn’t long before the second came along, then the third… and we were off and running! The Sunday evening service became an exciting place to be in and launched what remains, in my mind, the first of our golden eras in ministry.
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The Glen McGrath analogy is true – at a time when not much seemed to be happening at Catalyst and I lamented the situation a great pastoral friend of mine gave me the best advice possible in that season. He said, “hold your nerve – God will do the rest”, and he did. Patience is part of the fruit of the Spirit and without it no-one will be greatly successful in ministry.