“Church planters often don’t know what went wrong. Figuring out what it takes to plant a successful church is a mystery that still eludes the experts.” (page 2)
“God has a plan for multiplying churches that is evident in the corners of Scripture and lived out in the stories of church plants everywhere. But the insights are found in places where no one has thought to look. We’ve shrouded them with spiritual answers and mythologized faith stories.” (page 3)
“Every community has an established degree of spiritual receptivity. When you plant a church on fertile soil, it springs to life out of the community’s readiness. When you plant a church on infertile soil, it chokes and gasps to survive. In this case, you have to stop planting and start cultivating.” (page 3)
“The church is a social entity as much as it is a spiritual one. People don’t care about your new church unless social momentum is on your side.” (page 3)
“The vision for a new church can never be imported but is birthed out of the community. The most effective church planters have a strong connection to their mission fields and a deep loyalty among their team.” (page 3)
“You can always tell a new, inexperienced church planter because he’s the only one who thinks he knows what he’s doing. The veterans show a humility that can only come from experience. It takes a year or two to knock the self-reliance out of the new guys.” (page 10)
“Not only is your ability to share the gospel dependent upon a person’s heart condition, but your ability to plant a church successfully is dependent upon your community’s spiritual fertility as well.” (page 21)
“Many unnecessary offenses have been attached to the gospel that must be removed. These include the patronizing tone in which some people explain their beliefs, the condemnation we emphasize over God’s grace, and the religious activity we substitute for faith.” (page 31)
“When we cultivate people’s hearts, we are not trying to sell people on following Christ. We are simply removing the man-made thorns that keep them from trusting him.” (page 32)
“When people’s hearts are hardened, our job is not over. We don’t have to walk away in resignation. We can help nurture their hearts until there’s a soft, receptive place for the gospel seed to plant deep roots.” (page 33)
“Church planters are notorious for thinking that a great dream plus hard work equals a thriving church. But church planters fail all the time with this formula and have not idea why.” (page 46)
“I’m righteously indignant about the thousands of defeated church planters who have no idea what hit them. I’m sick of the mortality rate. I want to keep planters from thinking that will they need is a great vision and a fast-growing community to be successful.” (page 47)
“We have placed a dangerous label on church planting that puts tremendous pressure on planters to persevere through any and all difficulties. We call it faithfulness. But in many cases it should really be called stupidity.” (page 50)
“When idealism becomes the voice of reason for the planter, it can create a ton of problems. It leads to a church without momentum.” (page 67)
“A church that’s not birthed out of an indigenous movement will always be perceived as an outsider to the local population.” (page 67)
“Churches without momentum become a charity in and of themselves. The planter spends most of his time begging people to help improve the church.” (page 68)
“Here’s the honest truth: when you’re starting out, people don’t care about your church. If they care about anything, they care about you, and, more specifically, whether you care about them. This becomes the foundation for your church plant and for the gospel to have impact.” (page 76)
“I’m convinced that when God calls a planter to start a church, he calls him either to start a social network first (which can take years) or simply to leverage the one he’s been building around him.” (page 81)
“A crowd doesn’t come together unless there are enough people who share the same preferences. And there must be a way for them to communicate with one another for the idea to spread.” (page 87)
“To gather a crowd requires a great tolerance for wrongly motivated people.” (page 89)
“We must be true to the gospel, and there is clearly a biblical definition of church. We should not compromise either one. But by their very makeup, different people groups require different forms of church.” (page 101)
“We are to meet people where they are, not present the gospel or plant churches in a way that requires them to meet us. Repentance is hard enough without having to jump through hoops we create.” (page 106)
“No matter what you think of other churches and how they worship, you can’t deny that God uses them too. And no matter how integrated we’d like churches to be, they will always be made up of clusters of like-minded people.” (page 108)
“The gospel is a movement. Your church plant is a movement. And once it starts rolling, your job is to not screw it up.” (page 112)
“The gospel movement is not just theological or spiritual. It’s also sociological.” (page 120)
“If we want to remove barriers to the gospel, we have to immerse ourselves in the local culture and learn
to speak its language. We have to build bridges to our community so that people can easily cross.” (page 122)
“Fueling a movement is about identifying your connectors and enabling them to reach even more people.” (page 124)
“In a church plant, your most committed people will be those whose lives have been impacted by the ministry of your church. No one else will believe as strongly in your vision as someone who owes her life to it.” (page 135)
“When God creates a church in the making, he doesn’t just call one person to start it. He calls a whole network of people who have been growing pregnant with vision.” (page 137)
“To have the most success as a church plant, look for what is not represented in a community and do that! Your gifts and your passions have to line up with what the community needs.” (page 149)
“God uses frustration to shape a vision. This is what he did to Nehemiah. And this is what he did to me. If God doesn’t build up a tremendous amount of frustration within us, we’ll never have the passion to pursue his calling.” (page 158)
“If people are leaving [our churches] because they don’t like our vision, we should celebrate. Their exodus verifies that our purpose is being lived out. Vision is affirmed not only by the kind of people we attract but also by the kind of people who leave.” (page 161)
“Can you withstand the pressure to become something other than your vision? At times the pressure will grow intense, almost too strong for you to bear. But never forget that once you surrender the original picture for your church, it is nearly impossible to go back.” (page 161)
“The only thing worse than not pursuing your God-given vision is compromising your God-given vision for the sake of cash flow. Don’t let money do this to you.” (page 162)
“Now that you’ve created a system [for achieving your vision], do nothing else in your church but that. Your system is the straightest path to achieving your vision so any unrelated activity puts a drag on your effectiveness.” (page 172)
“Senior pastors are notorious for under-estimating the potential of their staff, mostly because they overestimate their own potential. Creating systems in your church is a far better way to leave a legacy than building up yourself.” (page 191)
“The fruit of the gospel comes from building a church that can exist without you and beyond you. Jesus spent three intense years with his disciples giving them a system. The reason he did this was because the gospel depended on a system to reach the next generation.” (page 193)
Premiere Video of Church in the Making
