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MISTAKE – I will take anyone because I want more people rather that just taking people who align with our vision and values.

• A first question for lots of church planters is where their team will come from.
• If your gifting is an evangelist you may be able to recruit your team from the harvest.
• Particular moving cross-culturally the pool of people who might come with you is not large.
• Sometimes you might get people wanting to come with you who have some very different ideas about key things in Christianity.
• When you are more established you have a set culture so can integrate people with different ideas more easily.
• In a very small church plant everybody’s voice and influence goes further.
• Often the issue isn’t that people disagree with your core values but would add others on a similar weighting – they want to define things more narrowly where for you it is a broad conviction issue.
• You spend a lot of time asking people ‘what do you mean by that?’
• It is unhelpful to accommodate to a pressure to be something you are not.
• It can often be the case that people have been with you for a while before these issues come to the surface.
• These conversations are good for people coming in too – when you are small and people come in there is an expectation that there is more chance to shape what it will be.
• You need to know what is open for you to work out together as a team and what are your non-negotiable convictions and ways of doing things together.
• Even when it is not spelled out, you can usually tell when somebody comes at things a bit differently from you – this gives you a choice whether you want to open that issue up or not.
• One question is when you start writing things down – when you develop your website may be the moment to do this.
• A lot of what gets written on the website can be practice as much as it is theology.
• When you start with more people from the same church it gives you a head start in establishing culture.
• In our hearts we need to ready for things to take a bit longer.
• Fairly early on have something of your vision and values stated as a launchpad for conversation.
• Planting for the second time helps you understand how things will go.