I would find my own story. I have a huge concern that many planters see some leader they admire and they want to duplicate that admired leaders story, You can’t…So don’t try. You can read, listen and learn from them. But you must find your voice.
God uses different scenarios to work in different ways. In the Evangelical West, we tend to get way to much credit to those in leadership and not enough credit to the work of the Holy Spirit.
Jeff and I have a passion to help the average church planter. Most churches are not going to “blow-up” quickly and that is usually a huge discouragement to the majority of planters. Why…We want to be like Rob Bell or Mark Driscoll or maybe RIck Warren or Perry Noble…Do yourself a favor and be comfortable with who you are and what God’s called you to do.
I recently spoke to a church planter who was having a hard time getting started. He actually planted and then stopped so he could re-plant. In our discussion he kept telling me he wanted to only focus on vision and leadership development. Grandiose thought for sure. Before you can have that kind of focus..You must have a people to lead and a staff (paid or unpaid) to manage. Until then the church planter does everything that needs to be done to *gasp* pioneer the movement. Just because some famous pastor gets to focus on vision and leadership development does not mean the average church planter can.
So please church planter/leader. Find you’re own story. Most likely you won’t pastor a mega-church, write a best-selling book or speak at some major conference. There is a good chance you won’t have thousands of of blog reader or Facebook friends and you may have more “spamers” follow your Twitter then real people. Don’t worry about, God is using you. You’re not a failure, just be faithful. (and don’t try to sell ad’s on your blog)
So be at peace with who you are and what God has called you to do and I bet you will find your story in that process and that will fill you with peace that is beyond understanding.
This is great stuff! We are starting in September and it was amazing how quickly we fell into the trap of modeling all our plans around what big churches were doing. About three months ago we pulled back and restructured our thinking based off realistic expectations. It was humbling, but necessary. Only time and experience will fully expose the story God is writing for our church. All I know is that we are doing what God has laid in front of us and it will not look like what everyone else is doing. We are ok with that. Thanks for the encouragement in this post.