The Most Difficult Things to Count Starting from the small church of my youth, winding through my last 20 years of vocational pastoring, I have had a decent vantage point on the church growth narrative. When I was in a booming attractional church, we took pride in our voluminous of felt-needs programs. When I was in a liturgical church, there was …
One of the defining characteristics of missional communities is how they organize their rhythm of life around being on mission to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships. A missional community is, after all, a community with a mission. That particular mission, however, can (and should) look different for every missional community. In time, disciples, leaders and missional communities multiply. …
In my first 10 years as a pastor I became accustomed to resources. I worshiped and served with a charitable portion of resources as unidentified supports around me. I had great worship facilities, great budgets and decently funded programs to suit any need or stage of life. I had on-hand artists to paint canvases for my sermons and quality writers …
In my most recent book, I ask, “What would the church look like if everyone in the church used their God-given gifts and talents to equip the rest of the church in such a way that the entire church became more like Jesus?” For if the whole church looked and lived more like Jesus, how much more would our neighborhoods …
Founding a new community will lead you to encounter unusual levels of chaos. New people, new places, new plans, and new priorities are just a few of the dynamics at work behind the chaotic experience of a planter. Although typically avoided, chaos is not always a bad thing. Under the right conditions, it can actually facilitate growth and innovation. This …
After taking some time to use the cultural web to exegete the neighborhood within the city, the same cultural web can be helpful to discern how to be the church in your context. In Creating a Missional Culture, I mention that if we are going to have churches where the community more fully reflects the character and ministry of Christ, …
If we want to meaningfully connect with our neighborhood, we need to be able to read the city and neighborhood well. Exegeting a city or neighborhood is a basic task of a missionary, where you seek to “draw out” the meaning of a people and place in order to see the power of the gospel more fully transform the neighborhoods …
Welcome to our new V3 Church Planting Movement website. Please take a moment to look around at the site, check out our about us section, our services, our homepage and of course this blog. In the about us section, you can learn more about the vision of V3, our values, what the three V’s mean as well as meet our …
This coming week we are starting our G8 Church Planters Learning Cohorts. We are beta testing this year and are excited about this approach to training. We have 15 churches participating in our training from Miami, to Hononlulu, from Syracuse, NY to Richmond, CA, from Washington DC to many parts of Virginia. The V3 Learning Cohort (LC) is a two-year …