Monday, March 7, 2011

One of My Biggest Mistakes as a Church Planter

Well, before I start, the only people that may relate to me on this post could be church planters. Not sure if your experience is like mine, but if it is, then you feel like you are always failing.
This is such a hard job and I now see why that when I started many people said if you can do anything else in your life but plant a church, then do it! You have to be called to this stuff. This is tuff.

Well, the bottom line is that I messed up the vision. Yeah, the vision. Yeah, the number one thing that everyone in the church planting world tells you to keep at the front of all things and do not let go of. Some even saying, "Be mean about the vision". Well, let me tell you how I messed up and maybe it will give you a wake up call, or maybe not. Maybe you will fail too and it will take you failing for God to bring you where He wants to bring you.

I had the vision. I spoke the vision. Over and over again. My people knew it. Great!, Right? No.... People started to get tired of the vision and some even left. Disheartening, but God is in control when we are weak and even foolish. So, what was my problem? For the last serveral years, with my core group and even after we launched the church, I was preaching the vision and kept pointing our people toward the vision. It looked like this: our people ----> VISION. Right? That is what I learned. But the problem was that I was pointing people to a mirage that did not exist. I was pointing people to great words of unfulfillment. Tragedy. God has taught me that the vision is not: our people ---> VISION, but OUR PEOPLE <----- vision. The vision of Jesus Christ was to come and save a depraved, broken, helpless world. To give us hope and life. Paul says in Ephesians that we are to equip the Saints for good works, not point the saints to a non reality.

You see, I was saying "Hey guys, lets do this and this". "Hey guys, what if God did that?" But none of this and that ever happened. The saints were not equipped.

Now, once the Saints are equipped, then you can point them to what God has called your church to do. Also, make sure the visionary has people around him to help organize and layout the vision in a calendar where you can see the vision in ink and what it looks like detailed out through a year. That has been another problem in our church. I preached the vision, but people did not see it played out. The vision was words, no one experienced it in reality. Now we are heading into a season where we have the vision, the Saints are equipped and they can see the vision. God is in the organization and clarity.

For some reason, although I have failed badly, God has kept people in our faith family and they have come around me to support me. I have a renewed passion. Now the goal is preaching the vision to our people and having them catch it and role with it this time around. This is tuff, but worth it. This is still my calling and I pray that God would use my weakness to make His name great. The challenges of church planting! Wow, what a ride of faith and failure.