leadership

David Isn’t a Role Model

August 9, 2016 By Daniel Im

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Not everyone in the Bible is a role model. For example, who looks at Goliath and says, “I sure want to be like him when I grow up!”

However, how many times do we look up to David and try to emulate our lives after his? After all, he was the King of Israel, the greatest poet of all time, and the author of the psalms–including the famous Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

Now there are many honorable things in David’s life that we can learn from, but unfortunately, he doesn’t teach us morality. He’s the one who committed adultery, killed a man to cover up his tracks, and lied to get his way.

The fact is, David doesn’t teach us morality, he teaches us how to be human.

He teaches us how to be real and he teaches us how to have a close, intimate, and living relationship with our Lord God.

Pastor, What Makes Your City Unique?

July 26, 2016 By Daniel Im

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The type of leader who plants an urban church looks different than the one who plants a rural one.

This is a relatively unimpressive statement for obvious reasons. After all, those who would want to live on a 20 acre piece of land and raise chickens are typically not the same type of people who would want to live in an 800 square foot high rise and prune a banzai tree or a Chia pet. (Remember when that was a thing?)

This is kind of like someone who asks you if they can ask you a question, when by virtue of asking you that question, they’ve already asked you a question. Or, as the great philosopher and comedian Steve Martin said, “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”

What makes something obvious anyway? And who determines what constitutes as common knowledge?

Okay, before I cause you to have an existential breakdown, let me get to the point of this nonsense.

The Point

In the past few months, I’ve been traveling quite a bit talking about church planting, leadership, and discipleship. I’ve been sharing from my latest book that I co-authored with Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches, as well as from the latest research we conducted on church planting and multiplication. You can download that research for free here.

As a result, I’ve had the privilege and blessing to meet with church planters and pastors in major metropolitan cities like New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. And I’ve noticed something.

The type of leader who plants a church in New York is different than the type of leader who plants in Houston or Los Angeles.

It’s not that they necessarily look different, or require distinctive theological education, but there’s definitely a difference. It’s almost…intangible.

It’s kind of like when someone asks a happily married couple how to tell if someone is the one. The answer is often, “You just know when you know.”

Cultivating Missional Community in the Summer

June 7, 2016 By Daniel Im

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Back when I lived in Edmonton, Canada, it was literally winter six months out of the year. We used to say that there were only two seasons in Edmonton: winter and construction. So you could guess my excitement for those blissful summer months where it didn’t take a century to get in and out of the house with all of our winter gear, and I could just walk out with flip-flops! For some, summer is about jumping into a pool, with no worries, timelines, or meetings. For others, summer is about hiking, biking, being outside, and enjoying God’s creation. And still for others, summer is about getting those honey-do lists done. In any case, as adults, summer vacation is usually a couple weeks long, and then we have to get back at it and put our noses to the grindstone.

Although we all love taking a break in the summer, and the natural rhythms of life dictate our need for one, the one thing that doesn’t stop over the summer is our need for community.

So here is that infamous question that every small group or missional community needs to ask over the summer, “To continue, or not?”

Here are a few of my suggestions:

Why We Need to Be Mean About The Vision

May 24, 2016 By Daniel Im

A Personal Conversation with Shawn

I remember having a conversation with Shawn Lovejoy a year after starting my new position with LifeWay Christian Resources. I had moved my family down to Nashville, TN to figure out how LifeWay was going to resource church planters, multisite churches, and multiplying churches (we started NewChurches.com as a result).

So we were together at the Exponential conference, and Shawn asked me, “How’s everything going?”

I just responded the way I normally do with a big grin, “It’s going great!”

But then, he stopped, looked at me straight in the eyes and asked me one more time, “How’s everything going?”

I remember thinking to myself, Shawn’s a really nice guy, and I enjoy working with him, but why is he asking me this question again?? We’re in a public place at a conference…does he expect to “counsel” me here?

Sure, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed, but who wasn’t anyway? After all, in the previous months, I was rewriting Planting Missional Churches with Ed Stetzer, developing and launching the strategy for NewChurches.com, leading a major software redevelopment initiative with the North American Mission Board to better assess, train, and coach their church planters, launching The State of Church Planting research project, and now speaking four times at the Exponential conference, but this season was eventually going to pass, right?

I was at a conference and had to put my “game face” on, so who was Shawn to be confronting me like this? Well, the reality was, Shawn was just being himself. He was acting as a wise mentor who had travelled this path many times, and was seeing someone else who was heading down the same path.

So he looked at me and said, “I’ve been where you are bro, I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and it just wasn’t worth it.”

At that, I decided it was time to sit down and have a real conversation with him.

Tomorrow’s Church Planting

April 15, 2016 By Daniel Im

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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.