By Brad Swope

About six months ago, I led a church planting team to Sacramento to plant a new church. I felt as equipped as any one could be. I had been in ministry for 10 years. I had my Master’s from a respected seminary. I had read all the important books and been to all the necessary conferences. I came armed with a great team, a well thought out philosophy of ministry and a solid two-year plan. So when we arrived we got right to work and after only three months we launched our first Sunday evening service. The response was good, as close to 60 people joined us that evening. I left subconsciously convinced that we were God’s answer to society’s ills and that from this moment on, we would enjoy growth as a never-ending spiral upward.

Then, God used several successive events to pull our well planned, well organized "rug" right out from under us. Looking back three months later, I realize how very little I understood about church planting in specific and ministry in general. First, attendance began to dwindle. Then our worship leader and his wife left the church for personal reasons. The team quickly grew tired and discouraged after seeing all the intense effort we had given over the summer come to naught. And so, I did the only thing I knew to do; I fell on my face and cried out to God for help. After seeking God for an entire week, here are the three things we felt God wanted to teach us.

A different kind of success

First, we felt him tell us, "I will give you more when you care for the ones you have." God showed us that we were more disappointed with the seats that were empty, than we were excited about the seats that were filled. In church each week sat 6-8 seekers or brand new Christians, a great harvest, which we couldn’t appreciate because we were caught up in thinking that success was found only in large numbers. God showed us that he wanted us to build the kind of church that appreciated and cared for each and every person; a church that was not content in allowing even one new Christian to fall through the cracks. The parable of the shepherd that left the 99 sheep to find the 1 took on new meaning for us. We quickly laid down much of what we were doing and pulled all of our seekers and new Christians into a midweek group and began investing relationally in each one of them. And we have seen God move in power in each of these relationships.

Since that time we have begun to question the "grow at all costs" type of thinking that seems to dominate the church in America today. We have also begun to question a system of that sees church health connected solely to church attendance, the number of cars in the parking lot, church giving, and small group participation? Instead we ask ourselves, "Are we knowing and caring for people? Are we drawing them into relationship and into community?" In our thinking, we’ve inverted the triangle so that instead of starting with the crowd and working toward community, we are building community and working toward a crowd.

A different kind of Strategy

The second thing we felt God tell us was, "Everything you’ve done up to this point has been in your own strength." We realized that up to that point, we had worked our fingers to the bone and if we had time left over, we’d pray to tell God what we wanted him to do. Instead, God was asking us to begin with prayer, ascertain what he was doing, and then to work hard in doing it. We learned that assumption is not the same as faith. Since that time, we have restructured our team meetings and our core meetings to build a foundation in prayer before moving on to the "business" of the church plant.

Redirecting our faith

The last thing the Lord showed us was that our faith had primarily been in our philosophy, our skills, our experience, and our people and not in Him. God was calling us to depend on Him in everything and for everything. Though this sounds clique, in our hearts we knew that we had to place this church plant back into his hands and actually allow him to lead us and provide for us as a church.