Half of my church plant is comprised of people who’ve never really grown up with a church community. We gather monthly, and at one service I had the audacity to experiment. I broke the room up into sections based on religious affiliation. (Admittedly, I probably won’t do this again.) Nonetheless, I had people move around to a space that fit …
What is a Mid-size Community? The Church is familiar with small groups but mid-size communities are another story. We need to explore an old but new vehicle for being present in the world, for the sake of God’s mission. Belonging is easier, missional engagement is higher, discipleship is laser focused, community is happening, and leaders are developed. This is the culture of …
[The following is a guest post from our friend Steve MacDouell. Steve teaches at Fanshawe College, is the co-founder of Good City Co., as well as a Senior Editor at The Localist. He is from Woodfield—a neighborhood in Central London, where he enjoys instigating place-based projects, hosting workshops, and inviting everyday citizens to leverage their time, their ideas, and their creativity for the sake of their …
Single church planters are like four-leaf clovers: we’re hard to come by. If you think about it, neither living the single life nor church planting is easy. It takes a certain special combination of maturity, character, grit, and giftedness to plant healthy churches, and it takes a particular blend of patience, faith, wisdom, and self-control to live the single life …
Here at V3 we get the joy of encountering stories from around the globe that inspire and encourage us and we hope to do the same for our readers by highlighting a few. We are honored to come alongside our church planters as they labor to ground their leadership and missiology in community. We are grateful to be part of …
As of Saturday morning, June 2, 2018, the population of India was 1,352,795,014, making up 17.74% of the world’s population. In other words, approximately one out of every six people in the world live in India. This is important to consider in this third post of our series exploring the best places to plant churches. (see our first post here …
God’s spirit is awakening us to the beautiful mess of being a diverse church together. Everybody seems to be talking about being a Multi-ethic church. But what does that mean? Are we using consumeristic tactics to build multi-ethnic churches? Is this leading to a new colonialism rather than shared-life in community? We need to move beyond cool church practices and dive deep into neighborhood-rooted …
A couple years ago I remember reading a job description for a new church planter. A mega church was embarking on their first planting foray. My eyes widened at the qualifications list. The only person who could meet the criteria was a man (had to be a man) more qualified than Jesus. I didn’t apply. It’s common in church culture for the best …
It’s been a few years for me since my first year of church planting. Back then, I was coming off 15 years of full-time paid pastoral ministry and was uncertain how to make the transition. To be honest, I was in some detox from swimming in a plethora of resources, programs, buildings, and titles. I had never learned what ministry …
An illusion is an error in perception. Over time we subtly rename perception, “reality.” And it is not uncommon to believe we are living in God’s reality when we are actually steeped in personal illusion. The tragedy is that church planters are equally as susceptible to living in illusion as anyone else. I know I am. The 20th century, Serbian …