Celebrating 25 Years: A Vision for Church Planting

"And so it gave us a chance to kind of stop, pause, look back, and celebrate all that God has done over the last 25 years. And by God's grace, man, God has done some really amazing things over the last 25 years that are worth celebrating. And to look back and say, okay, just because God has done something really remarkable among us over the last 25 years, where are we going for the next 25 years?" [00:00:37]

"That we have always been theologically aligned as a network. And that's really important that we are orthodox in our faith, evangelical, reformed. That's the way we've always been. That's the way we are. We're not departing from that. And so we're theologically aligned. We relationally collaborate. That we got into this not to go and plant churches as lone rangers." [00:01:51]

"We got in this because we knew we needed some people to come alongside of us. And you'll often hear church planters say that church planning can be some of the loneliest times in their lives, or it can be some of the hardest times to be doing something and pioneering something and feeling something. And feel like it's alone, but we felt like it didn't have to be that way." [00:02:18]

"And you're seeing it all over the place. Some of the things that we could have assumed in years in the past, you know, people being raised up, where they're coming from, how churches are planting, the economics, all of those sorts of things, all that ground seems to have shifted over the last handful of years. And because of that, we said, here's what we need as a network." [00:05:13]

"We need a clear, intentional, proactive, consistent strategy and direction for church planting. That we need something that's clear, meaning that's something that's, understandable, right? That we can all kind of wrap our head around. We don't need an overly complicated, overly engineered direction and system and strategy for church planting, but we need something to be clear so that we all can understand where we're going in this thing." [00:05:39]

"And then the last thing is we want it to be able to be contextualizable if that's even a word I don't even know if that's a word but we'll run with it that that we wanted it to be uniquely Acts 29 and we wanted it that wherever you went in the world it would feel like Acts 29 but we also wanted something that had some flexibility to say hey if you're in East Africa if you're in Indonesia if you're in North America the the strategy is basically the same but you can tweak it and turn it so that it fits the context that you're in." [00:08:08]

"And so what we wanted to do is to say, hey, we're not saying this is the perfect strategy or the perfect plan. But here is a plan that we are going to run on that we've thought through and where we can give guidance to that hopefully our churches in the network and church planters can thrive on, that it's trellis on which the vine can grow." [00:10:17]

"And so we kind of said, hey, there's about a six year window where we wanna, how do you take somebody who raises their hand and says, hey, I think I'm interested in church planting. Or if you identify somebody and maybe they don't even raise your hand, but you go, I see it in them. How do you take that person and then fast forward about six years later and a church has been planted and that church is self-funded, self-governed, and has the ability to be self-replicating, meaning they have the ability to get into the church planting game." [00:11:28]

"And so I think we are heading in the same direction where we need to. back our training up. And we're going to train in two ways. We're going to train people so that when they go to assessment, they're ready to go to assessment. So, you know, teach to the test. We're going to unapologetically teach to the test. We're going to train people so that when they show up to assessment, they're prepared to be there." [00:14:31]

"And a lot of the pieces that are in the residency will, if you kind of think of it, like the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, like a year zero, it will help church planners be set up in order to then go and start to form their core groups and their launch team and do the work on the ground. So we'll help, help them form their, you know, church incorporation and get bank accounts and set up websites and do mission, vision, values, bylaws, all those sorts of things, all the kind of behind the scenes groundwork, along with all of the training." [00:18:39]

"And so those two things are predominantly what that first cohort is, and it lasts about two years. The next cohort you'll see at the very end in the light blue, that cohort, we don't really have a good name for it. Finishing cohort kind of sounds like finishing school and manners. I don't think it's really a good name, but you know what I'm talking about here. Right. The goal of that cohort is to help you become self-funded, self-governed, and the ability to be self-replicating." [00:23:08]

"And so at that point, our hope and our goal is that they would kind of graduate out of church planting. And they would just be a really, healthy, young church. And so Acts 29, there's the church planting division, and then there's the churches division. Justin Anderson is leading that area. And so my goal and our commitment together is that we would raise up these church planters and then graduate them kind of into the churches division. And then they would start it all over with people that they identify." [00:26:33]