A Week of Church Planting

Last week I was in Deerfield, IL, at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) located on the Trinity International University campus. I was part of a teaching team for the EFCA's Church Planting Boot Camp. There were about 45 students in the class, some who were taking it for course credit, others who were there becuase they are ready to launch a new church .

The Evangelical Free Church of America has a great new website called efcastartchurches.org that has a ton of resources for church planters and much of what we taught is available online for free.

Teaching along with me was George Klippenes, the Director of Church Planting for the EFCA National Ministries, along with Ray Chang, Founding Pastor of Ambassador Church in Anaheim, CA. There were a few other guys who stepped in as well, but Ray, George, and myself did the majority of the teaching.

There are some fantastic guys out there doing great things. I met Tony Balsamo, Founding Pastor of Integrity Fellowship in Long Island, NY. He's got a church of 300 in what is known as one of the toughest areas to do ministry in the country. He was there to learn how the Boot Camp works so he can take it out east and begin to teach it there.

It was awesome to be able to reconnect with Dave Miller, the former Senior Pastor of my home church, The Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth, CA. Dave is now living in Exeter, a small town not too far from Visalia, CA, and will be launching a new church next year.

Even though I didn't plant the church I'm currently at, I do have a love and passion for church planting. The church I planted back in 2002 is still doing well, and my plan is to start a church planting residency at Compass Church within the next year.

Even in the midst of hard economic times, we've got to be sending out leaders and launching new congregations. I believe that a major reason churches split is because they never had a vision for multiplication - so God allows it to happen in the form of a split, which is obviously a much more painful way to go.

But churches that are intentional about planting realize that they're going to lose people anyway, so they might as well send them off with a positive purpose.

More on this later...