Ok, a title should never be the length of a short post, but there it is. Since you made it past that, admit it, It’s a pretty good question, isn’t it? Today, most church plants in America are DOA unless they have at least half of the DNA listed in the title above.
Or so we think.
And many have been taught.
But nearly everyone I’ve ever met who has started a church in the past 10 years has included a philosophy built on all or most of those modern church buzz words contained in the world’s longest post title. If you suggest a few others such as, Bible based, outreach oriented, or mission minded, some will quickly nod and add a Homer Simpson, “D’oh! Well of course we’ll be all of that, but that’s not what grows a church nowadays! You need to have an angle—a catch, an attraction, a nitch…blah, blah, blah”
Really?
Suppose you are a junior officer in the military and one day a five star general comes to your entire unit and taps just a handful of you for a very important mission—I’m talking, “take out Osama bin Ladin” important. Next, he hands you your marching orders—a very careful and strategically laid out plan the success of which depends on every member adhering to their role precisely—and charges you to stick with the plan. You glance over your orders and the first thing that strikes you is that there’s a lot of details. The next thing that annoys strikes you is that it’s not really the way ‘you would do things.’ And finally, you have a fleeting urge to crumple up the paper, throw it in the general’s face and tell him he’s nothing more than a relic from the past and that you will handle it your own way. Fortunately, you suppress this urge…for now.
Three weeks later however, you’re rushing out of the helicopter in the dead of night with a dozen other highly trained soldiers on your way to the compound of the slippery terrorist. It is now that you decide to go with your own plan rather than the one handed down by your superiors.
Your plan?
You have decided to use your powerful debate skills—finely tuned in your sophomore year of high school—to convince Osama bin Ladin to give up his evil ways and join the good guys. You’ll do this—you reason—by appealing to the things he loves, sharing your treasure trove of knowledge about the Muslim religion, the Arab plight, and especially your guaranteed solution to the 3,000 year old struggle between the Israelis and their Arab cousins. Your superiors may cringe at first when they hear of the rogue plan but once they see the results they’re sure to elevate you to a brand new military position made especially for you—six star general.
Ridiculous? Sure, but church leaders today do this all the time with the marching orders they receive from God.
In part two I’ll show you how.