church planting

Book Review: Saturate by Jeff Vanderstelt

June 17, 2015 By Daniel Im

*My post here was originally published on June 15, 2015 in Christianity Today.

When I first stepped into my role as a small-group pastor, I was at a loss as to how to help my church get on mission. I knew what it meant to be missional and intentional with my relationships. I knew how to share my faith. I even knew how to motivate my leaders to get on mission with God. However, the one thing that I didn’t know was how to make mission normal in our church—I didn’t know how to help the congregation get on mission with God in everyday life.

As a result, much like Jeff Vanderstelt explains in Saturate: Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life, I loaded my leaders and groups with a task list of missional activities. There was only one problem: I was teaching and expecting my congregation to be Jesus—when only Jesus can truly be Jesus. As a result, I was expecting my group leaders to do more than Jesus every asked of them. In reality, as Vanderstelt puts it, “we are not meant to carry the weight of the world or the mission of Jesus on our shoulders. Jesus came to seek and save. He doesn’t expect us to become the saviors.”

So when I first encountered Vanderstelt’s ministry, Soma, I was impressed with the way they were able to normalize mission and make it easy for their church members to get on mission with God in everyday life. That’s what led me on my journey to digest everything I could get my hands on from Vanderstelt and Soma—articles, seminars, audio files, and the like. But now you can simply read Saturate, a book with all of their wisdom in one place.

As I was preparing to develop a discipleship pathway for my multi-site church, I was inspired by the ministry philosophy, identities, and rhythms of Soma because they have the clearest missional paradigm of discipleship. Soma’s focus, and subsequently, the focus of Saturate, is to provide a vision for complete and utter Jesus saturation rooted in who you are in Christ, rather than in what you do.

Church Planting, Thermometers, and Thermostats

May 26, 2015 By Daniel Im

*My post here was originally published on May 7, 2015 in Christianity Today.

Isn’t it easier to point out the wrongdoings of others and tell people what to do, rather than be a part of the solution?

My wife and I have noticed this in our children—they love playing the victim. So whenever there’s conflict, instead of figuring it out themselves, they come to us crying out “injustice!”

I wonder where they learned that from? I knew I never should’ve let them watch Sesame Street…

In order to fix this attitude, a few days ago, my wife began teaching them the difference between being bossy and being a leader. Here’s the difference:

Bossy people point out the wrongdoings of others, expect others to fix their issues, and are never wrong.
Leaders take responsibility for situations, don’t dwell on problems, focus on solutions, and make change happen.

As I was reflecting on this new paradigm of parenting (my wife is amazing by the way), I couldn’t help but notice the similarities that it had with thermometers and thermostats. Let me explain:

Thermometers point out what currently is, expect others to do something with that information, and they provide us with the standard—they are never wrong. Thermometers are indicators.
Thermostats, on the other hand, take the information from the thermometer and do something about it. Thermometers take responsibility for the environment and focus on solutions. Thermostats are change agents.

Can you see the similarities that bossy people have with thermometers and leaders have with thermostats?

God is already at work in your community, so get better at asking questions.

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So what are you? Are you more of a thermometer or a thermostat? This is an important question as it affects the posture that you will subconsciously take in planting and leading a church.

Crowdfunding, Kickstarter, and The Future of Training Church Planters

April 27, 2015 By Daniel Im

*My post here was originally published on April 9, 2015 in Christianity Today.

What if there was a more effective way to train church planters? A way that focused on developing competencies and skills rather than the memorization of steps?

Every church planting program falls somewhere along this spectrum between a heavy emphasis on the classroom or field experience. Both are necessary, but there are weaknesses with an either/or approach. On the one hand, an over-emphasis on the classroom assesses one on their knowledge, rather than their ability to actually put their knowledge to action. On the other hand, an over-emphasis on field experience tends to be isolated to one particular method of doing ministry in a contextualized context, which may or may not guarantee success when the context of ministry changes.

As much as most church planting programs recognize the necessity for a both/and approach, most are just simply requiring both classroom and field experience time, rather than discovering a way to integrate them together.

Enter: Crowdfunding.

By now, crowdfunding, Kickstarter and Indiegogo are household names. Since 2009, over 8.3 million people have pledged $1.6 billion to 82,000 projects on Kickstarter. Also, over 15 million people from 224 countries visit Indiegogo a month. The most well known crowdfunded initiatives are arguably the Pebble smart watch, Oculus Rift and Hoverboards (yes, I did say hoverboards). Each of these initiatives started as an idea, and as a result of crowdfunding, they turned into reality. Crowdfunding touched a soft spot in my heart when LeVar Burton brought Reading Rainbow back to the world when over 100,000 people pledged $5+ million to it.

What if every church planter was required to crowdfund an idea?

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What if this was a part of their core curriculum? After all, where else would a potential planter have the real life opportunity to innovate, collaborate, cast vision, create momentum, and raise funds before they planted a church and had to actually innovate, collaborate, cast vision, create momentum, and raise funds for their church? Crowdfunding would be the perfect way to mix classroom and field experience time for a church planter. Essentially, by requiring the church planter to crowdfund an idea, you would be cross-training them in many of the same areas required to plant and lead a church. (Obviously there’s more to planting and leading a church than the skills required in crowdfunding, but there are many overlapping areas.)

Imagine if crowdfunding was part of the training ground and litmus test to see if an individual had the core competencies to plant and lead a church?

Not only would you be able to identify actual strength and growth areas in the planter, by which you could create a plan of development around, but with successful crowdfunded initiatives, you would also be creating an additional revenue stream that could be used to further fuel and fund church planting efforts.

When researching successful crowdfunded initiatives, I discovered five common traits: [Read more…] about Crowdfunding, Kickstarter, and The Future of Training Church Planters

How to Develop a Church Planting Farm System

March 10, 2015 By Daniel Im

spruce grove community garden — My kids and an MSC harvesting their community garden

How do you feel about these statements?

Being excited about becoming a church that plants churches is not the same thing as doing it.
Picking the low hanging fruit (the already developed seminary student) and sending them out to plant is not the same thing as having a process to develop a new believer into a church planter.
Setting aside a percentage of your budget for church planting is not the same thing as developing future planters.

What would it look like if God answered Matthew 9:37-38 through your church? How would you feel if God raised up harvest workers and church planters through your church?

Now I know many of you might be thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I need to start a residency program or an internship program.” But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

This post is about developing a church planting farm system that starts before any type of internship or residency program. This is ultimately about developing the type of leader that you would want to accept into an internship or residency program.

Every church planting farm system requires three things.

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–> Enter: Mid-Size Communities (MSC)

When I started the mid-size community movement at my previous church (you can watch the MSC intro movie here), I said that it was going to be a way to get more people connected into community (which it totally did – 700 more people into community in three years at three campuses). However, the underlying reason I was so passionate about MSCs was because I saw them as a farm system to raise up future church planters. This pervaded the way that I developed the MSC leadership development curriculum, training strategy, roll-out plan, and everything else that accompanied it.

In fact, when you consider what makes up a healthy farm system, there seems to be three common factors:

Four Church Planting Tips with Lesslie Newbigin

March 3, 2015 By Daniel Im

Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), while being best known for his work in missiology and ecclesiology, actually has a lot of advice for church planters. In fact, each of them is an extension of his quote in the picture above, or of my paraphrase below:

The church – a healthy church – is the hermeneutic of the gospel. It’s the way that the gospel comes to life. It’s the way that people can taste and smell the gospel.

When planting a church, it’s easy to go the way of the herd and get so caught up with the details, that you forget the values or the underlying ecclesiology that you’re trying to develop in the life of your church. After all, without those details getting done, you wouldn’t be able to plant a church. But what if, for a moment, you put those details aside and re-examined the type of ecclesiology that you’re developing in light of these four church planting tips that were inspired by Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society?

After all, Jesus did not write a book, but formed a community – Lesslie Newbigin

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1. Cultivate gratitude, not entitlement.

Newbigin suggests that churches need to be communities of praise and thanksgiving and that this, perhaps, is the church’s most distinctive character. So how are you cultivating a culture of praise and thanksgiving in your church? Are you being intentional with your preaching/teaching and the rest of your ministries? If you cultivate that culture of praise and thanksgiving in your church, you’ll actually see that translate into a heart of gratitude – and with gratitude, you’ll be slaying the idol of entitlement. If that happens, you’ll see your church’s “me” culture translate into a “we” culture, where the focus will be less on personal comfort and wellbeing, and more towards the wellbeing of your city and the salvation of those who are far from God.

2. Share truth, not gossip.

The fuel that drives pop culture seems to be gossip and scandals. This isn’t just true for entertainment shows, late night shows and sitcoms, but this pervades the news as well. If this is the MO (mode of operation) of our culture, this will naturally seep into the life of your church. So instead of calling your church to reject pop culture outrightly and burn all their “secular” CDs and DVDs, what if you cultivated a sense of skepticism towards it? After all, this skepticism would enable your congregation to, in the words of Newbigin, “take part in the life of society without being bemused and deluded by its own beliefs about itself.” This sense of skepticism would allow your church to be aware of pop culture, so that they could speak truth into it by being an alternate community of truth apart from it.

3. Be for your community, not just in your community.

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