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This is the best church plant ever!

January 6, 2011

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I’ve been reflecting on how we recruit and promote the latest church plant invariably to a city (especially as I’m going to do this myself over the next few years) and I’ve compiled a list of recent trends and strategies employed when planting a church in the 21st century. It’s about time I put my foot in my mouth again and this feels like a good opportunity. If you’re looking for caveats, get out of jail clauses and the like they’re all at the bottom of this post.

  1. Make a video. This video will have an exciting soundtrack but curiously dull images this is to make you think your church plant has lots going even when it doesn’t.
  2. Have ‘god of this city’ play in the background. There are after all greater things that must be done in this city, right and your church is one of them!
  3. Boast about your city. Every usable fact comes out – population, youthfulness, financial, cultural, social, political nay global influence. The world depends on this city – which you can legitimately say about half a dozen or so cities, but it feels a little stretched when used of a mid-sized town in the west country. I will be guilty of this myself shortly.
  4. Copy a cool website. Preferably a church called Mars Hill (take your pick which) but any cool hip city church will do.
  5. Tweet. Tweet a lot. Plenty of verses and cool Bible sounding sound-bites. St Paul would have tweeted right?
  6. Go to cool conferences. I don’t know why, but it seems like you should.

I’m sure there is more, what would you add?

*This post has its tongue in cheek, with a gentle dig in the ribs to anyone who thinks this is what matters – anyone taking this too seriously will be reminded to lighten up*

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  • http://www.wordandspirit.co.uk/blog Mark Heath

    don’t forget to create a facebook group entitled “love [city-name]“

    • http://thesimplepastor.wordpress.com/ Simplepastor

      Good one – I’ll be doing that myself very soon!

  • http://blog.spiderscripts.co.uk Peter

    Don’t forget the leaflets, there have to be leaflets!

    And you could always run a love [city-name] day conference where you gather the “core team” ™ and share your “vision for the city” ™ with anyone who is interested in joining you.

    • http://thesimplepastor.wordpress.com/ Simplepastor

      Yep I’m going to do a day conference too!!

  • http://timsimmonds.wordpress.com/ Tim Simmonds

    Don’t forget the need to sit in Cafes “learning the culture” whilst reading Driscoll.

  • http://matthewhosier.blogspot.com/ matthew hosier

    You also have to emphasize the fact that despite being an incredibly exciting and hip place to live, your city has “some of the most deprived areas in the country.”

    • http://thesimplepastor.wordpress.com/ Simplepastor

      Based on all the suggestions I think I’m going to have to update this post. There’s so much I’ve forgotten -all true, true, true

  • http://matthewhosier.blogspot.com/ matthew hosier

    On further reflection, I think you should just advertise your church plant as “The Swedish model” – that’s bound to attract a lot of attention…!

    • http://thesimplepastor.wordpress.com/ Simplepastor

      Think of the website traffic if we called it that! Maybe there’s something to it

  • http://freelancetheology.com Jon

    In all seriousness, don’t call it a church plant. That is utterly meaningless outside of churchianity.

    But of course it’s a very helpful term for attracting disaffected already-believers who have done the rounds of the churches in their city adn found that none of them come up to scratch*.

    (*Check the common denominator in those cases)

    • http://thesimplepastor.wordpress.com/ Simplepastor

      What term would you use instead? Would you simply say ‘starting a new church’? However if I was speaking to a Christian audience, ‘church plant’ communicates so it seems reasonable to use it, or would you not use it even there?

      Most ‘church starters’ I know wouldn’t use the word plant if all it did was attract the disaffected as frankly they can often be the biggest hindrance to a good start in a new church.

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  • http://diesisgain.blogspot.com/ Rob Mason

    ha, this is what I always think of when I see a sign ‘plant crossing’ but then I’ve been in churches for too long.. 

    http://duncs.info/plantcrossing.htm

  • http://diesisgain.blogspot.com/ Rob Mason

    but I do agree with Jon, it’s meaningless to anyone outside of church. Inside its fine, we all use shorthand terms (however incorrectly)

    Some terms I’ve swapped out for external audiences include:

     - (church plant) Starting a church or church startup [I avoid 'new' its too marketing and ambiguous in meaning] 
    - (church planters) Church founders  
    - (plant from… )  connected to…  
    - (life,cell, small group)  Anything other than such terms which sound plain weird to unchurched people… I tend to say ‘get-together with friends to worship, pray, learn about Jesus and support each other…’ – it’s a mouthful, but though I did for a while become comfortable with ‘connect’ as a catch all, since we connect with each other and with Jesus,  it still emphasizes relationships in ‘meetings’ and I just can’t abide that as a way to grow a friendly Godly community – so it had to go. :)

    Of course the bigger challenge is that many people simply don’t understand most of the words we just take for granted beyond prayer, singing (hymns) and services, so to some extent it really doesn’t matter what words we use, you’re gonna have to explain what you mean.

    • http://thesimplepastor.co.uk Phil Whittall

      Well I think your last paragraph says it really, that whatever we use most won’t make sense. I talk about starting a new church and that pretty much does the job. But for Christians plant works fine.