Wise church planting: is the problem you?

In this series of articles on church planting, the plan is to learn the lessons from church planters who have struggled. Not the usual suspects. Not the successful all-singing all-dancing ‘super-heroes’ with book deals and big budgets but the (often) unknown heroes who have planted around the world and it didn’t go as planned.

How quick will we be to listen to them? In each article we’ll consider one strand of why they struggled, and - what we’ll find, is it’s not really so much about church planting, more just the complexity of living ‘under the sun’.

Prioritising character over competence

Not far off half of the strugglers admitted that a large part of their planting struggles grew out from their own character issues. It’s easy to point the finger in all kinds of places when things go wrong, but nearly half of these planters - in part at least - honestly pointed at themselves. Perhaps the stress, pain and intensity of the planting process revealed what was going on under the surface? We are easily prone - in all sorts of contexts in the Christian life - to prioritise competence over character. We can tend to care more about what a person does as opposed to what they are (really) like. This should not be.

You might know this is dangerous from your own experience of working in contexts, or even being in churches, where tasks are completed well, deadlines are met, things seem to be successful - but this success has come at the expense of people. Often in the planting world, driven and visionary leaders have a track record of getting the job done, but with casualties along the way. This should not be.

And so, in all areas of the Christian life but especially when considering leadership, can I urge us to consider the Christlike-character of an individual? That might mean in kindness and love, slowing the process down and asking some hard questions; taking references seriously, speaking to the people that really know them. That might mean being patient and not rushing as we can be so easily prone.

Why? Because who we are matters. Listen to puritan John Owen on this:

'If a man teach uprightly and walk crookedly, more will fall down in the night of his life, than he built in the day of his doctrine.'

How we live - what we are like - can end up undoing what we say or whats been built.