Church Planting Mistakes – The Effect of Gathering New People

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MISTAKE – Expecting that when somebody visits they will come back the following week.

  • When Pete first planted he had a first time visitor almost every week.
  • This is very positive as it makes you outward looking.
  • The downside is having an expectation that they will come back and becoming discouraged when they don’t.
  • This can play into our sense of being a people pleaser.
  • We can also let it effect our marriages.
  • It can be easy to be constantly chasing the visitor.
  • In the early days of his first plant, Pete did his follow up by hand-written letters and invitations to dinner.
  • Often we don’t look at church over a season, we look at it in a single week snapshot and respond too much to a down-week.
  • The key is a genuine belief that God is sovereign and builds his church.
  • Pragmatically, build with people not on people.
  • Recognise that people will come and go.
  • Get people involved early.
  • For marriage, the mistake is spending too much time chasing people and not investing enough time into your wife and kids.
  • Doing it this way might slow things down slightly but is way more sustainable.
  • The competition is not other churches – it is sport, drinking, shopping etc.
  • Doing tea and coffee both before and after the meetings gives time for people to connect.
  • Stories help people connect.
  • Termly small groups can be very good.
  • Values tend to be much more important to leaders than they are to the people in the church.
  • Every place is so different that you need to study a place to find the shape of a church for that place – we are not about mimicking or franchising someone else’s church.
  • Releasing people into their workplaces is really important.