Top ten things your church can do to prepare to for a daughter church or partner to start a new church:
10. Encourage your intercessors to form a prayer team focused on praying for new church plants.
9. Invite an outside consultant to help you ascertain the organizational health of your church.
Any healthy church can parent a new church. Size is not the issue. It’s about health and desire.
8. Connect with other pastors who have led their churches through the parenting process.
Ask them to share with you what they learned through the process.
7. Approach parenting like you would a building program.
Develop architectural plans (have planning meetings with your church leadership team to cultivate agenda harmony and envision together what kind of church you will plant). Gather people and financial resources. Set realistic long and short term goals. Work your plan. Deciding you will build someday does not get the job done. Neither does deciding to plant. You’ve got to get started. What can you do today that will prepare you to parent or partner?
6. Sponsor a Partnering Party
Sponsor a Partnering Party by inviting neighboring pastors to meet together and discuss how partnering would work for the churches in your area. Usually, one church will need to accept the responsibility of the lead role for partnering to be successful. Is yours the lead church?
5. Identify potential church planters or site pastors in your church.
Consider your best staff as potential candidates (remember the Biblical principle – give and it shall be given to you!). Have potential planting candidates assessed to confirm their readiness to plant or to discover where they need to develop so they can be sent out later.
4. Attend a church planting training event.
A common misconception is that experience with leading an existing church adequately prepares a person to lead the starting of new work. Usually, that is not the case. Participating in a proven church planting training process will broaden your horizon and help further develop your understanding of how church planting works.
3. Read Viral Church by Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird.
This book is a comprehensive look at everything you need to know for your church to be fruitful and multiply.
2. Write your parenting strategy into your annual budget.
Parenting a church is a lot like parenting a child- you are never ready for it. You’ll never have enough money when you begin the process of parenting or partnering. Just as parents restructure their lives to provide for their children, you will need to restructure your church budget to enable you to parent or partner.
1. Trust God and go for it!
There are literally millions of people in the United States who, due to a variety of factors, will never be touched by existing churches. New churches are the best form of evangelism. Let’s choose to parent or partner and change our world forever!
