A few other thoughts about my last couple of posts:

• Happy Tax Day...Did you remember? Not really related to my previous posts, but did want to throw that in there.
• Immaturity breeds vitality. Our home is not full of life because Nichole and I are getting more mature and "deep." It is full of life because it is immature. The churches most full of life are the churches that are full of appropriately immature Christians. What are "appropriately immature Christians?" Those who are new to the faith and still have the rough edges. Compare this to "inappropriately immature Christians" who have been Christians a long time, but refuse to grow up.
• We must equate leadership and discipleship. Jamey said in the Round Table that if we have a leadership problem, we actually have a discipleship problem. He's right. If there is a leadership problem in your church (I'm not talking about one rogue leader, but an epidemic), then how good are you at making disciples? 
• Church planting comes out of having an abundance of growing Christians (read: disciples or leaders). Something Vince Antonucci said has stuck with me, "A lot of people say you shouldn't start a second campus unless your original campus is bursting with people. (And so basically you're starting the second campus to open up more seats for more people.) I disagree. I say you shouldn't start a second campus unless your original campus is bursting with volunteers. If you have too many volunteers, and layers of leadership, and multiplying teams, then you're the kind of church that can pull off another campus. Just my 2 Cents, but then again, I'm always right..." (By the way, for those of you who don't follow Vince, he has the gift of sarcasm...but he is right).
• There was a lot of immaturity in Acts, but that was showing that they were growing and lively.
• The church at Antioch sent people out of the abundance of growing Christians in that church.
• The early church saw leadership issues as a discipleship issue. When they faced the issue of circumcision in Acts 15, they made tweeks to the discipleship process.

MPAA WARNING: This blog is PG-13 for Suggestive Themes.

I'm sharing a couple of thoughts from a Vision 360 Church Planter's Lunch I went to a couple of days ago. Jamey Miller of Christ Fellowship in Fort Worth was the speaker. 

The first was...

Church planting is revitalizing to the church. 

The second is...

Church planting can't be forced, it must come from pregnant churches.

The point of Jamey's statement is that church planting must come from churches who are ready to send people out into a specific area of the world. It must really by "bursting at the seams" ready to send people.

Here is what I would add...

Pregnant churches come from intentional fertilization.

Preganancy is very organic. Myself nor Nichole did anything to make growth happen for any of our three boys. Each baby went from stage to stage to stage on its own. No special buttons to push to cause a leg to grow. We didn't have to worry about doing any certain thing to make sure the heart forms. It just happened.

BUT, there are very intentional things you can do to start a pregnancy and nurture the baby during pregnancy.

Okay, back to the birds and bees of church planting.

A church being pregnant and birthing a new church is very organic. Churches that use this process talk about it "just happening." That they really couldn't stop it.

BUT, if you went back to the churches, they did intentional things that would cause pregnancy to happen and nurture the pregnancy to full term. By no means these are official, but here are some thoughts on the intential things churches sould do...

1. Inception. I'm actually talking about the movie :). You have to plant the idea in people's minds...you've got to talk about it.
2. Leadership development (really this is disciple development). This ties with the last post. We must make disciple making simple and reproducable and intentional and something people want to do.  
3. Warmth. This isn't kicking the baby eagle out of the nest to see if they can fly. This is incubating the baby in love until the baby just has to leave. I'm convinced that a baby cries upon entering the world because it is so dad-gum cold in the new world. BUT it couldn't stay in the wamth of the belly any longer either. Church planting should be the same. The new church "cries" becuase they come out of the "warm" parent church, but they know they couldn't have stayed in the warmth one moment longer.

Okay, I've probably said too much, but hopefully all of us think more about what it takes to make a church pregnant. Because we really need more pregnant churches.

Yesterday I enjoyed attending a local meeting of Vision 360, a church planting network/organization. No, this doesn't mean I'm planting a church. Yes, this does mean that I want to be involved in church planting. That passion/desire has not changed (actually grown).

Jamey Miller, Pastor of Christ Fellowship in Fort Worth, shared with the group. As I went over my notes and through through some of the things he said, a couple stood out. One was this...(the other will come later)

Church planting is revitalizing to the church.

He said this in the context of Christ Fellowship sending out people in the past to plant a church and the people who plant are the leadership people of the "parent" church, thus leaving those inclined to "pew setting" behind. His point to the quote above is that once the church plant group leaves, it is a requirement that more people step up, thus revitalizing the "parent" church. 

That lead me to think this morning that there probably is two basic ways you can handle growing and non-growing Christians...

1. Keep the growing Christians and cut-off the non-growing Christians.
2. Send out the growing Christians and raise up the non-growing Christians into growing Christians (to then send them out...and on and on).

Over simplification? Quite possibly. But think about this...The traditional M.O. of churches is to keep the growing Christians. We think that if we keep growing the growing Christians we will have a lively church. Really what happens is this creates the stagnation. We get to a point that all we want to do is "go deeper." The church might be mature, but it isn't lively.

OR we can send out the growing Christians because they are prepared to reach people and develop those they reach into growing Christians. THEN, back home at the ranch, we develop those who wanted to grow, but didn't know how (most likely because they didn't want to butt-in on the growing Christians growth). This produces TWO CHURCHES of growing Christians ready to send them out to do it all over again!

Any plant sheds off previous growth in order to grow some more. Unlike plants (or snakes) where the growth that is shed just dies, churches shed off the growth, then the growth grows more AND the first plant grows again! This is multiplication.

So, consider this...would you rather have a church reaches 1,000 people because they are growing Christians that continue to grow more and more and more together OR a church that is 250 (or 100 or 50 or 1,000) that is never very mature because once they acheive maturation, they send those who are mature out?