Church Multiplication

New Churches: Multiply the Mission

June 23, 2015 By Daniel Im

Currently, a significant trend in the U.S., Canada, and around the world is a renewed emphasis on starting new churches. More than 4,000 new churches are launched in the U.S. each year alone, each one representing the potential to reach new people with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

However, new churches commonly struggle with limited resources, a lack of trained volunteers and few tools to support their work. Even more, these limitations can often be the most detrimental to churches in their very first years.

But LifeWay and the initiative that I’m leading through New Churches is committed to help.

For churches in their first two years of operation, LifeWay has a variety of free offerings to help get a few of the foundational aspects of ministry in place. This includes helps for:

Bible Study Groups (6 months of digital curriculum for all age groups)
Church Website: twenty:28 (Free website design and 1 year of hosting)
Leadership Development (1 year access to Ministry Grid, LifeWay’s new web-based training platform)
LifeWay eGiving $0 month + 2.75% + .30 per transaction. Plus, no set-up fee for text giving
LifeWay Envelope Service– 600 free offering envelopes
Plus, $500 in free printed LifeWay resources of the church’s choosing

To qualify to receive the free offers above, simply complete the form here at New Churches.

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

Developing a System for Leadership Development – MSC Leadership Training

March 31, 2015 By Daniel Im

Is your leadership development haphazard?

Do you have a system for developing leaders or do you just pick the low hanging fruit? Are you being intentional in your church’s leadership development process? In other words, do you have a leadership pipeline to move someone from the pew into a high level leadership position?

When talking about leadership development within the church, we need to have the big vision in mind. We cannot just narrowly focus on developing leaders for our own ministry areas, Our goal and vision needs to be bigger than that – it needs to be about creating kingdom workers for the harvest.

When I developed this Mid-Size Community (MSC) leadership training program (which became a farm system to develop future church planters), I was not going off of nouveau leadership sayings and tacky workshop techniques. Rather, I created this system intentionally around a multi-dimensional adult-education oriented model for leadership development.

As a result, this program takes into account a variety of learning methods, such as, personal growth, conceptual understanding, feedback, and skill building. This program is also focused on developing leadership competencies, in addition to role based skills.

It is important to note that this program is merely the primary/initial training for MSC leaders and leadership team members. Successful ongoing leadership requires secondary/subsequent training, which will be the topic for another post/workbook.

The diagram here outlines how the leadership training is laid out. Each session can be accomplished in a two-hour time frame. Furthermore, the all-day retreat setting gives you the opportunity to observe the personality of these future leaders in a relaxed environment.

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