The Church Planting Team in the ‘Multiplying Teams’ Phase

Once you have launched on Sundays and you hit the season of the church’s life, the question that you will hear from many people, in one form or another, is ‘where do I fit?’. What they are really asking is whether or not you are going to allow space for them to lead and serve in accordance with their calling. It may seem natural to double-down on those who were the key members of your planting team at this stage, but doing so could create a bottleneck for others to come through and deny the space and opportunity for more leaders to emerge.

Now is the time to multiply your ministry.

Following your Sunday launch is an ideal time to think about where you want to plant next (if you haven’t been thinking about it already). When you have a vision to seed a whole region with new churches, then you need to be constantly revisiting the ‘twinkle in the eye’ phase and letting God inspire you with new dreams and ideas of the next thing.

It is important not to weaken your fledgling church too much, but empowering a couple of people to start the whole process again in the ‘get a meeting going phase’ and seeing what happens can keep the planting momentum strong, ensure that fresh leadership opportunities are constantly on offer, and most importantly begin to plant the good news of Jesus into another new community.

At the same time, bringing others through into leadership within your church, or allowing them to take the lead in work of service to the local community means that there is also space within your plant for others to use their gifts, and you can find that the diversity of passions and abilities in those that make up your team makes it possible to multiply your impact in ways that wouldn’t be possible if everything revolved around the main leader. Empowerment is they key, and the more trusted and skilled leaders you can raise up, who can then lead teams of their own, the more effective you (and they) will be.