The first time I journeyed down the church planting road I
kept coming across something I found to be quite obnoxious. Everywhere I turned
– every organization, every denomination and every mentor that had been down
this road before kept asking me about my “call.”
“Are you called to
plant this church? When were you called? How were you called? Are you sure
you’re called?”
It was obnoxious. What was this “call” that everyone was
talking about and why were they making it into such a big deal? I mean, I thought
I was called. I had been journeying with Christ for some time, loved people and
ministry and felt like this was what I was supposed to do next.
But even so, just the idea that someone might count me as
disqualified because I couldn’t recall some supernatural moment in which God
said, “Therefore goeth Aaron to Toledo and planteth a church” really irked me.
Why couldn’t someone just choose to create something as beautiful and redemptive as a new
Christ-centered, missional community with their lives? Wouldn’t God honor that?
After all, isn’t this sort of thing precisely what he has called all of us to be a part of? Then why the
insistence on something that at best seems, well, optional?
Well, I didn’t really get it back then but I think I am
beginning to understand. You see, I continued down that road and low and behold
things got hard. Actually, that is an understatement. The experience included some of the darkest months of my life personally, emotionally and spiritually. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. And I'd
say it's just been in the past 18 months that I've finally got the
pieces of my soul all put back together. It was a tough road, one in which I regularly struggled with
feelings of deep anxiety, insecurity, loneliness and a powerful undercurrent of doubt.
That was a few years ago.
This time, however, the journey has been completely different. Unlike the
first time, my calling isn’t a fuzzy ambiguous sense but a clear and undeniable
call to Lincoln at this time. (I’d love to share more about this but that will
have wait until another day.) And can I tell you something? It really makes all
of the difference. Although the road will no doubt be difficult, this time around I journey it without any anxiety. No fear. No hesitations. Complete
security in Christ. And that undercurrent of doubt? It has been transformed
into a powerful movement of hope and promise.
So I think I am beginning to understand why a specific
calling is so very important to a work as trying and unpromising as church
planting. There’s just too much common sense that must be completely and regularly ignored.
If you do it without a clear call, then you are just crazy. If you do it with a
clear call, then you are obedient…and crazy.
Ok, so going back to our original question: do you need to be “called” in some extraordinary transcending
way to plant a church? Technically, although some would disagree with me, I
have to say “no.” We all make a number of choices each day to either honor
Christ or deny him, to serve our own purposes or to serve God's purposes in this world. Some of those choices are small and some of those big, but
more often than not it still comes down to our choosing whether we will honor or dishonor God with our actions.
But that being said, planting a church is not just one
choice, but tens of thousands of hard choices, often under hard conditions. It is
extraordinarily difficult. It involves lots of heartache, lots of trials, lots
of failure and it can be very lonely at times. Every church planter will tell
you he has days when he seriously doubts whether this thing is ever going to
work. I mean, statistics show that 85% of church plants fail in the first 5 years. There are
a lot of good and talented men and women represented in that 85%! But it takes
far more than talent and good intentions to plant a church.
And when the going gets tough (which is often),
when those you have loved and invested so many months and years in decide to up
and leave to go to the church on the other side of town with the new worship
center, when all funds are gone and you are trying to figure out how your
family is going to survive, when you feel like there is no possible way you can
succeed and that for all practical purposes you are alone most days in this
thing, you had better be either clearly called or be the most faithfully stubborn
S.O.B. to walk God’s green earth. (In concrete terms, this means you do not have a history of flakiness, half-hearted committment, bailing on projects/people or rarely finishing what you start, but rather, you have a history of seeing things through to completion, resiliency in face of adversity and steadfast commitment.)
If that's you and other seasoned leaders have affirmed your leadership and are encouraging you to plant, then I say go for it! But if not, wait for the calling.
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