From Tim Keller: All in all, church planting helps an existing church the best when the new congregation is voluntarily 'birthed' by an older 'mother' congregation. Often the excitement and new leaders and new ministries and additional members and income 'washes back' into the mother church in various ways and strengthens and renews it. Though there is some pain in seeing good friends and some leaders go away to form a new church, the mother church usually experiences a surge of high self-esteem and an influx of new enthusiastic leaders and members. However, a new church in the community usually confronts churches with a major issue--the issue of 'kingdom-mindedness'. New churches, as we have seen, draw most of their new members (up to 80%) from the ranks of the unchurched, but they will always attract some people out of existing churches. That is inevitable. At this point, the existing churches,…
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In some churches, breaking into leadership requires the blessing of Moses or an act of God -- or both. Older churches may be unknowingly restricting their leadership pipeline. If you require new leaders to work within existing confines, you are restricting the type of leader who will step forward to lead. Existing churches often need to create new outlets in order to develop new leaders. However, the cost and challenge of doing so may prove to be too difficult. New churches, however, need new leaders. These potential leaders are often drawn to the risk involved. One reason why new churches create new ideas and new methods is that they attract entrepreneurial people. If we want to increase the number of kingdom leaders, we need to increase the number of kingdom opportunities.
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One of the best ways to learn is to alternate between lecture and lab. Unfortunately, when it comes to reaching people for Jesus, many churches are too heavy on lecture and light on lab. Older, existing churches are tempted to create committees to study the subject of evangelism. New churches must evangelize or starve. Enduring companies understand the importance of research and development. R&D is what brings new products to market and serves as the catalyst for technological breakthroughs. Often R&D efforts will result in companies finding outliers -- products they weren't looking for but that surfaced as the result of experimentation. New churches serves as the research and development arm of the larger church community. New churches are young, flexible, and able to change (and change again) quickly. Since they deal primarily with unchurched people, they have a good sense of what questions they are asking. Here's how existing…
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Tim Keller, senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City, states that we need new churches to reach: new generations new residents new people groups From own experience planting a new church in San Diego (shout out to LifePoint!), I've found that new churches are extremely effective at doing just what Keller describes. As a church grows older, it needs to be planting new churches to reach new people. This keeps the existing church feeling younger while recognizing that new churches are better equipped to reach new people.
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Harvard professor Dr Ben-Shahar created the MPS Process as a way for people to better assess what type of work they should be involved in. With the MPS Process, you ask yourself three crucial questions: What gives me meaning? What gives me pleasure? What are my strengths?
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