What its Like to Plant a Church (The Wonder Years)

About 40 people started a church on the south side of Des Moines this year and its....been awesome.

I was a Nervous Nelly going into this church plant. Last summer we were gearing up to go door to door and listen to our pastor talk about what it takes to start a church (we were planted from a congregation downtown), and there didn't seem to be a crazy amount of enthusiasm, myself included.

Granted, we were going DOOR TO DOOR once a week. Sharing the gospel with people cold turkey in the Iowa summer's balmy upper 80's at minimum. It felt like you were covered in warm cottage cheese as soon as you stepped outside. And I don't know if its anyone's favorite activity to go door to door sharing - heck, maybe you are way more spiritual than I - but it sure isn't my favorite.

Every week I wanted to make an excuse not to go, and I mean every. But I didn't want to be a bad example to others and the Spirit of God inside of me was basically saying, "Its good, just go." So go I did.

Since then we have gone through a myriad of troubles securing a building, getting said building up to city liking (took 6 months longer than we thought is all) and wondering if people were discouraged or just kinda rolling with things.

Another struggle came with planning. There are pastors in our church, naturally...being that its a church. But no specific pastors were coming along with this church plant so basically it was up to a monthly meeting with the pastors to really nail stuff down and plan. Which, when it comes to the nitty gritty, once a month doesn't really cut it. I felt disconnected from other community group leaders that were semi-in-charge like myself, and didn't really know what my role was.

One of the guys asked me to get together so we could do a little planning together, and the next week he invited another guy. That second guy, we'll call him Mike, cause that's his name, he voiced frustrations with basically all of the stuff I was thinking about: lack of clarity, people in the church may be getting frustrated, a lot of people feeling like they don't know what is going on.

So we talked to the pastors and got their permission to do some planning of our own. We've been getting together weekly ever since and discussing and planning, sharing our thoughts with the pastors and other leaders, and its been so much better.

"Get counsel or fail miserably" - Every proverb ever