Church Planting Wisdom - From Drew Goodmanson

Drew Goodmanson is a pastor-elder at Kaleo Church in San Diego. He came from Mars Hill Church in Seattle, and has been involved with 4 church plants, including Mars Hill. His experience has taught him some invaluable lessons, namely:

• Don’t plant a church as a reaction. Often, church planters decide to start a church in reaction to the churches they previously attended. I trust these church planters feel called to start a church but still the ‘planting as a reaction’ motive can influence them greatly in the beginning and shape their philosophy of ministry. If you are a new church, what is your identity? As I attend many church plants they usually can tell me what they are not. We don’t have a CEO leadership mentality, we don’t sing old-school hymns, we don’t have traditional services, we don’t…[fill in the blank]. In the long run, you can’t rally people to this anti-identity. If you do, you will only gather a group around cynicism and will never move forward in a positive direction. In order to ever build a church, planters need to exercise this demon of planting as a reaction. This is a transition that our church has gone through, and I have seen several other local church plants go through the same process. Know your positive vision for your church and the world around you. This is something that I see as a common denominator for churches that are making a large impact on their community. Some of those who are extremely gifted in this area are Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill and Rick McKinley at Imago Dei Community . I pray that Kaleo would learn from these but also forge our identity as we consider the following: To make a Kingdom-impact on your local community and the world-at-large, you must move from Deconstruction to Kingdom Building.Driscoll and McKinely are just two of the pastors I know that do an amazing job at casting a vision and gathering people to join that vision. While I attended Mars Hill for about 5 years and I was always impressed by Driscoll’s vision-casting often at the beginning of the service. It was a ‘here is where we are going as a church’ that got people passionate about what Mars Hill was doing. When I think of Driscoll, it is the counter-culture message he preaches that contradicts a city that is one of the least church cities in the country. Driscoll has rallied a group around this great cause he champions. Where Driscoll spear-heads this vision at Mars Hill, McKinley does this through servant-leaders. There is a platform for the ministry leaders, other pastors, even author Donald Miller and others to cast the vision and gather groups around ministry, cultural ideas and kingdom-mindness. Both have different methods but both work. The common denominator is that instead of reacting against, they are building towards something.

• Don’t plant a church by yourself. We are strong believers in planting with more than one pastor/elder. For almost two years I wrote, Sheep & Goats, a weekly column on spirituality for the San Diego Reader. In this column, I visited many churches and interviewed pastors (of all faiths but Protestant churches were the most common). In this time, as well as our own observations, churches who have one ’senior pastor’ tend to reflect this pastor’s strengths and weaknesses. If the pastor is a strong teacher, the sermon may be very insightful, but the community could lack the caring hospitality they should exhibit as believers. We all have strengths and weaknesses and so I strongly encourage at least two people plant a church together with the goal of a plurality of elders to govern the church. This church government structure will solve a lot of problems a church planter will go through.

Wow. Great stuff from Drew. You can check out his blog at Goodmanson.Com. Tomorrow? We’ll hear from Matt Payne, who, in addition to church planting wisdom, has a great story, and he’s just getting started!