Leadership

Top Quotes and Images for Planting Missional Churches

May 3, 2016 By Daniel Im

Here are my 11 Favorite Quotes for Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply:

Missional means being a missionary without ever leaving your city.
Church planters should be known first and foremost as people of integrity.
Success is measured in multiplication of churches and quality of disciples.
If your church is empty in a single location, it will still be empty with two locations.
Multisite is not a substitute for church planting; it’s a substitute for a large auditorium.
You cannot lead people to godliness when you are not regularly encountering God.
You cannot love a city if you do not know a city.
Without an intentional developmental approach, the church is likely to become a mile wide and an inch deep.
Everywhere Christians have gone to share the gospel churches were formed.
Churches  of all sizes and ages can take part  in church planting.
Your ultimate calling is not to plant a church; it’s a calling to come to Jesus himself.

I’d be honored if you shared these images with your friends and followers on your favorite social media platforms!

Join Me at Exponential East 2016

April 26, 2016 By Daniel Im

Here are a few ways that you can grow during one of the largest church planting conferences of the year, Exponential East 2016.

If You’re Not in Orlando…

Tune into the Exponential live stream here for all the main sessions.
Download my new eBook, Multiplication Today, Movements Tomorrow: Practices, Barriers, and an Ecosystem here
- If you’re not registered as a Free or Plus member at NewChurches.com, then you can go here to register for free and get the eBook

If You’re in Orlando,

Say Hello to me by visiting one of my workshops listed below
Purchase my new book with Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply for 40% off

Book Review and Best Quotes: Habits for Our Holiness by Philip Nation

April 21, 2016 By Daniel Im

“The spiritual disciplines can help you, but they cannot save you.”

I love books written on the spiritual disciplines because I understand that my relationship with God is the plumb line to everything in my life. If I’m not regularly spending time with God in prayer, reading Scripture, and engaging in the other disciplines, my compass gets skewed and there’s fall out everywhere else.

Here’s the problem though: most books on spiritual disciplines lack one thing.

That one thing isn’t great stories, solid theology, innovative ways to practice the disciplines, or motivation. That one thing is how the disciplines connect to mission.

In Habits for Our Holiness, my friend and co-teaching pastor, Philip Nation, addresses what’s been lacking in most books on spiritual disciplines in a readable, yet comprehensive way. It’s precisely this,

Discipline leads to mission.

The NEW Planting Missional Churches: Changes in the 2nd Edition

April 19, 2016 By Daniel Im

When I began working with Ed Stetzer, one of the first things that I did was approach him about revising Planting Missional Churches. It has been such a helpful book to tens of thousands of people around the world, but much of the stories and content needed to be refreshed. Furthermore, there were new questions and issues that planters and multipliers were facing, like multisite, residencies, multi-ethnic churches, theological education, and the difference between denominations and networks.

So we decided to revisit the book, and in doing so, we ended up changing over 50% of the content. The stories, content, and models are different in each chapter. We also wrote five new chapters, completely reorganized the book, and integrated the research we conducted in the new State of Church Planting study, a research partnership of over a dozen denominations on church planting in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

In addition to rewriting the content in the existing chapters, we wrote five new ones from scratch:

Chapter 8: Multiethnic or Monoethnic Churches
Chapter 9: Multisite Planting
Chapter 27: Residencies and the Future of Theological Education
Chapter 28: Denominations and Networks
Chapter 30: Spiritual Leadership

Tomorrow’s Church Planting

April 15, 2016 By Daniel Im

tomorrow

Church planting today is not what it used to be.

Before, church planters were the ones who couldn’t get a “real ministry position” at a church, so they started their own. Albeit, there were those entrepreneurial few who defied all odds and started churches on their own, by and large, being a church planter wasn’t what it was today.

Now, being a church planter is the thing to do.

Church planting is getting the attention of the masses. In fact, many church planting conferences are now larger than typical pastoral conferences. This is surprising when, decades ago, there was no such thing as a church planting conference. For example, the recent SEND North America church planting conference in 2015, hosted by the North American Mission Board (an SBC entity), had two to three times the attendance than the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in 2015. That would not have happened 15 years ago. In addition, most seminaries now have certificates, tracks, and/or entire degree programs focusing on church planting. This too would not have been the case in yesteryear.

The evidence is clear. Church planting is exciting, it has momentum, and it is here to stay. But this article is not on today’s church planting, it’s on tomorrow’s church planting.

As I’ve been consulting with denominations, networks, and churches regarding their strategy to assess, train, coach, and fund church planters, there are a few trends that I’m beginning to notice. In fact, a few of these trends were the focus of Ed Stetzer’s and my writing in the newly updated edition of Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply. Not only did we overhaul every single chapter, but we also wrote several new ones. If you read the previous edition, it would be worth your time to take a look, since it’s practically a new book (over 50% new content). For this article though, I want to focus on three of the major trends that I’m beginning to notice for tomorrow’s church planting: Kingdom collaboration, bivocational ministry, and residencies and theological education.