This is gonna be a short one. And many of my fellow church-planting colleagues may not like it.
But if a young clergyperson with aspirations of becoming a church planter came to me today and asked my advice about how to go about it, this would be my advice:
DON’T
Why? Because the picture they have in their head about what a church looks like is some variation of the typical church model that Christian clergy and their congregants have been carrying around in our collective consciousness for more than hundreds, if not thousands of years.
It probably looks something like this…
A dedicated church building. On a dedicated church lot. With a dedicated clergyperson. And dedicated members.
Somebody recently asked me if we would still see churches like this in the future. My response was, “Only if it were stuffed and mounted and displayed in a museum of church archeology.”
Because this model of church is dead. Walking dead. But still dead. It is unsustainable. Because the way the trends are heading, there will simply not be sufficient numbers of Christians per worship center to keep it afloat, either financially or communally.