The Church Planting Team In the ‘Get a Meeting Going’ Phase
Once you have had the idea of the church plant and started to make a bit of noise about it, the next thing that you should be looking to do is to get a meeting going in the place you want to plant. This isn’t a public Sunday service (that will come later) but just a small scale gathering in a home or coffee bar. A good place to start might be getting together once a month to pray, and as things develop you may then move to a weekly Bible study.
In order to make this happen, all you need is somebody who can get a meeting off the ground. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the person who will lead the plant, though make sure you are clear to communicate what you are and aren’t asking them to do; you don’t want to create false expectations that will cause issues further down the road. If this is somebody who is already living in the area where you intend to plant then so much the better.
There is no harm if the meeting is just two or three people praying into the plant to start with, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to force things at this stage, but as you continue to share about what you are trying to do and meeting up, you hope that a few more will join you and a vibrant group will start to form. Don’t worry about asking people to ‘commit’ at this point. You just want people who show some kind of interest, and then allow them space to come along, have a good time, form some good friendships in the group and figure out for themselves whether they want to be in the mix for the long term.
The exact shape of this group depends on whether or not the person/people leading it are the ones who had the initial vision for the plant, and also whether they are the ones who will lead it in the long term. It is entirely possible that this will all be the same person, and when this is the case there will certainly be a lot of drive and purpose behind the group, but the danger is that the whole project will rest on the shoulders of just one individual, and this could be a hindrance to forming an effective team in the church plant (this was one of the challenges that I faced the first time I tried to plant a church).
On the other hand, this meeting could be run by somebody other than the eventual leader. When Paul was going to Cenchrae, and then back to Antioch and Galatia, he passed through Ephesus on the way, and he left Priscilla and Aquila there before going on with his travels. Later we see that Paul returned to Ephesus and a church got planted there, but in the first instance he had set up a couple of people in that area who could just get something established there until he returned and could take it forward (at Broadcast, we call this a Bridgehead). Often doing it this way can help a group form with less pressure, and a high quality of community can develop, but it needs careful strategic input from a senior leader to ensure the group doesn’t lose focus on the intention to plant!
