Church Planting

welcome, thank you for coming. First Sunday School of the Year, excited to dive in. So we are actually, Dan and I are going to be kind of reprising our presentations that we gave yesterday at the men's retreat. So for those of you who weren't there, men especially.

Soak in what you missed out come next year so you can get the the live version i was kind of joking that last yesterday they all got the passion of me doing this the first time but you guys get the polish of me having gone through this before so but before we get started let me just pray for us now heavenly father we thank you again that we are awake we are alive we have drawn breath again this morning we do not deserve that yet you are gracious to us through christ Christ, help us now as we turn to learn from you both here in Sunday school and as we worship together in the Sunday service. Father, be with us, soften our hearts to hear what you have for us, convict us of sin, and help us to be in awe of you. So may you be glorified in this time, this morning. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Aaron Tetzloff with my wife, Roxy, and I. We've been here almost two years, maybe just over two years at the landing, and we are so grateful to be here.

I've been asked to talk to you all about church planting, not because I'm an expert by any means. I haven't read all the books and all that kind of stuff, but I do have a unique experience of witnessing it up close. First, Roxy and I, right after we got married, actually right before we got married, we were part of a church plant in Fargo, North Dakota, where we left, planted a church. And then after five, six years or so, we were able to, I was an elder that planted from that church plant. So I've been able to see it in multiple different iterations, and so was asked to come in and just talk about that. So what I'm going to share this morning, hopefully you can see just as a kind of a primer for what church planting is, what it could look like here at the landing. Just as official, get this out of the way, I'm not an elder. I'm not announcing a plan of here's how we're going to church plant. Just wanting to kind of start the conversation so that we can get more familiar with what it might look like, what it might take for us to plant a church from the landing here, hopefully, Lord willing, very soon. I came to faith in college through Campus Crusade for Christ, now crew.

But it didn't take long for me to realize that I was a churchman. Para-church ministries are great and they certainly serve a purpose, but my heart was really in the church because the church is the bride of Christ. It's where gospel-centered preaching, discipleship, worship, and life together over long periods of time help form a faith that endures all seasons of life, not just the current life stage that you're in. And in college, I discovered three great loves, the one and only triune God, my lovely wife, Roxy, and the Lord of the Rings. in that order, I will say. And for me, after watching the extended, I was really hoping Ron would be here. He would have given me an amen for that. After watching the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, I just was like, wow, this is an amazing story. And so I watched all the appendices and all the makings of, and I'm like, wow. Thank you, Dick. I appreciate it. I love it. I just wanted to learn more. And so after I was like, okay, they made all this effort to make these great movies. I got to read the book. So I'm going to read the book. Loved the book, fell in love with it. There's so much more in the books. And then I started reading The Silmarillion. I attempted The Unfinished Tales. I'm not smart enough to fully read all of those, but I just wanted more. I wanted to know more of the story, what was happening. I wanted to be a part of this unfurling eucatastrophe where all the things that were marred by evil and marred by Sauron were being restored to what they should have been and what they were meant to be.

And then it dawned on me that I was in a story, a far greater story. You see, I'm not a hobbit. I'm not an elf or a secret descendant of the King of Gondor, but by grace through faith in Jesus, I've been made a member of a royal priesthood, son of the Most High God, prince of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, summoned to serve Christ, to live for his glory in a world at war against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, I was called to God's church. And the church did not begin as a human idea dreamed up in a fairy story. It was planted by the risen Christ after his death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus stood before his disciples and declared, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. And then before ascending to the Father, Jesus promised the Holy Spirit's power and sent his disciples as witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth. And from that moment on, God began carrying the gospel outward through the apostles to Antioch, Armenia, Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Egypt, Ephesus, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia.

Parthenia, Phrygia, Rome, Scythia, Spain, and Syria. And that was just the apostles. But he didn't just use the apostles. God moved the gospel through ordinary believers, using trade routes, using persecution and migration to propagate the planting of churches. By 177 AD, the gospel made it to Gaul, or modern-day France, where a church had taken root in Lyon under the leadership of Irenaeus. That church endured, it grew, and it bore witness among pagans and Aryans, calling them all to Christ. Generations later, God used the faith of a woman, Clotilda, to influence and lead her husband, King Clovis, King Clovis of the Franks, to Christ, which sparked the Christianization of the Frankish people, and thousands publicly professed Christ. In the 820s, God gripped the heart of Ansgar, a Frankish nobleman who brought the gospel north to Hamburg, Germany, where he would actually go on to install what basically was a university that became a church planting and educating hub in Northern Germany. But he went to Germany, to Denmark, to Sweden, and in time.

Churches were planted all across Scandinavia. The work of making disciples was arduous and faced fierce and often bloody opposition in Sweden. And yet God kept planting churches and the churches kept growing. In 1008 AD, Sweden's King Olaf was baptized, and over the next 500 years, the church in Sweden continued to grow. During the Reformation in the 1500s, God raised up Olaas and Laurentiis Petri, sons of a Swedish blacksmith, to study under Martin Luther. They were the first to bring scripture and the gospel teaching back to their homeland, translating the New Testament into Swedish and helping lead the church towards renewed faithfulness and obedience to Christ as laid out in God's word. And the result was the planting of more and more reformed churches. In the 1800s, the Swedish Great Awakening arrived and God used preachers like Carl Rosinius and George Scott to call people beyond nominal Christianity, beyond Christendom of the time, and to joyfully obey God's word. One of Scott's disciples, Frederick Nilsson, planted the first Baptist congregation in Sweden in 1848, and for all of his troubles, he was exiled for it, exiled to America.

But exile did not stop the gospel. It can't. It never has. It never will. And through his influence, Gustav Palmquist became a Baptist and planted the first Swedish Baptist church on American soil in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1852. Six years later, a collective of early churches that were influenced by him started gathering in Scandia, Minnesota, of all places, eventually forming the Swedish Baptist General Conference of America. They would go on to drop the Swedish and become the Baptist General Conference of America, or today you might know that as Converge, our denomination. You see, by God's providence, a small part of the story that he is telling includes you and me here at the landing in Duluth, Minnesota, planted in 2017, where we exist to savor, strengthen, and spread our hope in Christ all to the glory of God.

You might be wondering, why are we starting church planting with a history lesson? But brothers and sisters, understand this history means that every single church that you and I have ever stepped foot in at one point did not exist. At one point, it was planted by faithful men and women that were strengthened by the Holy Spirit and boldened to take on the risk of planting churches. Some of them risked their lives. Some endured exile, doubts, loneliness, opposition, persecution. Some crossed national borders. Some learned new languages. But all of them left ease and comfort behind and stepped into dark places so that Christ may be proclaimed and glorified in a local church. But think with me for a second, what would cause people to do that? What would cause generations of saints to willingly give up their comfort, their ease, their careers, their livelihoods, and give everything so that Christ may be glorified through planting churches? What would sustain them in the face of heavy opposition, persecution, and even death.

To start to understand the answer to that question, we need to look at what the local church is and the essential role that God has given the church in redemption. So first, the local church is the context in which God designed the Christian faith to flourish for our maximal joy and His maximal glorification. You see, the Christian life cannot be lived alone. As our God is one being in three persons, He is eternally living in community. As God's image bearers, we too are to live our lives in community in the local church. You see, the church is the only institution which Jesus created and authorized to do his kingdom work. We see this in passages like Matthew 16, where upon hearing Peter's profession of faith, that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, Jesus says, And I tell you, you, Peter, and on this rock, the rock that is faith in Jesus, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Again, in Ephesians 2.20, we see Jesus' church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Holy Spirit. So Jesus establishes his church and is building the church, giving her the authority to spread the gospel.

And in spreading the gospel, we then create a gospel outpost where saints receive care, discipleship, and safe refuge. So let's take those in order, starting with sharing the gospel. Remember, the word gospel is the Greek word euangelion, which literally means good news. It's the good news. Much like a herald in ancient times was employed by a king to deliver their message with the equal authority and weight of the king himself, you and I have that same authority and are charged with delivering the gospel message to a sin-sick world. We see this in passages like 2 Corinthians 5, 17-20, which says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away and behold, the new is come. And that's a fact. That's true. Whether you feel like a new creation or whether you are struggling, whether you're downhearted, it's true. You are a new creation. New has come. All of this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us, the church, the ministry of reconciliation. You might be wondering, what does that mean? the ministry of reconciliation? I'm glad you asked. Paul anticipated that question. He says, that is.

In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. Notice that God gave us as the church a purpose and a message. So in saving us, God is at the same time entrusting all of us with the very message that saved us so that we may take it to the world and all of the nations might be saved. You know, in the Great Commission, we say all nations, right? The Greek word there is Pantata ethne of all the people groups. Everyone, every ethnicity, every language, everywhere. Not just the nations recognized by the UN, every people group.

And that is our task. Regardless of our ability or our gifting, all of us have the message of reconciliation who claim the name of Christ. So if you feel you're not equipped for church planting or for service or evangelism, if you believe the gospel, you have the message that everyone needs. And God uses us as his ambassadors to appeal to the hearts of lost men and women that he puts into our lives. So not only is the church a gospel outpost that evangelizes to the lost and to the nations, but it's also a place where saints receive care discipleship and refuge and the church cares for its members by walking with each other over long periods of time and through the participation in ordinances, i'm getting to the point old enough now where i've lived more outside of my childhood home than i have inside and have come to understand how important the church is many church brothers and sisters have walked with us through things that our families never have.

I'm not saying that that's the ideal, but that's the beauty of the church. We walk with each other through the ups and the downs, through the good times and the bad, encouraging each other and being there to care for each other. One of the things I must confess I didn't love about the landing when we first joined was all the emails that we get of all the needs of the church. But I love seeing that because that's real life. And we meet all of those needs because God is moving in us to care for those that call the landing home. And I'm grateful for that.

But we also do it through baptism and the Lord's Supper. Baptism is our first initial public declaration of faith where we announce to the seen and unseen worlds that we belong to Jesus. That's one of the first steps of faith. And then the Lord's Supper, we do regularly to remind ourselves and we own up. We say, I need him. I need him. I am a sinner and I need the reminder that only the blood of the lamb washes away my sins. And then engage church membership where we actively participate in formal fellowship and covenant care under the oversight of the church's biblically qualified elders. All of these ordinances were given exclusively to the church for the building up of the body and to encourage, care for, and equip our brothers and sisters in Christ. So as such, the church is a place where we learn for learning and discipleship. The church is the means of teaching each Christian individually to obey the commands of Scripture with joy and to use their natural and spiritual gifts for God's kingdom work. Ephesians 4, 11 through 14 says this, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to do all the work of the church.

No, that's not what it says. It says, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. That's our standard. We can be done with discipleship when we are all to the fullness of the nature of Christ, which means we can never be done with discipleship. We must always be learning and encouraging and sharpening one another. But why? Just so that we can have a bunch of knowledge and pass Bible trivia, or are you smarter than a fifth grade Sunday school teacher? I don't know, whatever game you wanna play. It's not for that. It's so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and disqueatful seams. We live in a crafty world. We live in a wicked world and we need to be in that world with eyes open, knowing the truth and clinging to the truth. Our gifts build up the body so we can ensure our churches remain a safe refuge from false teaching, false teachers, and the influence of our culture. And by false teaching and false teachers, I don't mean people who make mistakes, right? That's part of, as we wrestle through what the Bible calls us to, what the Bible is saying, we all make mistakes. All of us here have imperfect theology.

We just don't know what's wrong. And so that's part of the wrestle as we learn, as we do things like this, as we listen on a Sunday morning, is we try to conform our beliefs to what the Bible says.

But getting rid of false teachers and protecting the saints from false teaching is really talking about those who seek to lead people astray, to cause controversy, to cause division in God's family. Paul warned against this in Romans 16. He says, I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught. Avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. And by smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive. This is why the qualification for elders is not just that they teach. It says in Titus 2 that they must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that they may be able to give instruction. Yes, and amen. But just as importantly, especially when we get the church planting. I don't know what it is about church planting, but it brings all sorts of crazy theology to the surface. Lots of it.

But they must also rebuke those who contradict it. Sound doctrine. See, the church protects the saints so that they can live in joyful obedience to God's word and so that God may receive the full reward for which he died. So to our spiritual ancestors, the church was a fortress for their faith and utterly vital to their daily lives. There was no separation between Christ and his body. And that was the passion and what drove them to plant churches. Because if we're gonna fulfill the great commission, that can't be done from Jerusalem. The great commission assumes that we're gonna plant churches. Because we need gospel outposts everywhere.

So a question for you this morning, do you view the church that way? Is it vital to your daily life? And I'm not talking about this building. I'm talking about the brothers and sisters who call the landing their faith family. Do you come to receive care, discipleship, and protection? Are you looking to get those things here? And just as importantly, are you looking to care for others, to disciple them, and to help protect them from false doctrine? I encourage you to think about that because as a church to be healthy, we need all of us to be doing that. That is not just the work of the pastors or the elders or the deacons or even the ministry leaders, everyone.

But not only were they motivated because the church was vital to them, but they were motivated because it's the natural fruit of a faithful Christian life. Think about this for a second. Healthy things grow and growing things multiply. Healthy things grow and growing things multiply.

I don't know if you have gardens at your house. You probably have at least grass or weeds, like my house. This year, we tried to start a garden. It did not go well. don't come to us for free veggies. We might take some of yours actually. But there was like one or two cucumber plants that somehow managed to grow in spite of our inability to nurture those plants. And it was healthy. And as a display of its health, it sprawled out its vines, leaves, and it kept going inch and inch by day by day. But if that's all that it did, it grew out vines and leaves, would it be healthy? Question for you, would it be healthy? No, why not? There's no fruit, right? So it is with us as a Christian, right? We can grow, we can learn, we can get closer with God, but if we ultimately don't bear fruit, we're not living in the fullness of our faith that God has called us to. See, just by sprouting flowers and then cucumbers, the plant fulfilled its purpose, so we must multiply our faith through evangelism, through discipleship. A church filled with growing Christians will also grow in faithfulness, which will eventually lead to growth numerically.

This is the only pyramid scheme that's not a scam. Think about it. If I win three people to Christ and we all grow in our faith and then all three of them win three people to Christ and we grow in our faith and then they all win three people to Christ, what's the result? What's the fruit of that? God gets the glory, and we get to see brothers and sisters come from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. And we have brothers and sisters with whom we can lock arms.

And find refuge, all while we continue to learn and grow in Christ. If that is a pyramid scheme, please sign me up. Sign my kids up. Sign my family up. So what does church planting actually look like? We're going to switch now a little bit to practical. I do have some time here for questions, so as you come up with questions in your mind, write them down, and then we'll have some time at the end where we can do that. So one of the, like many things in the Christian walk, there's not a soul, here's the only way to plant churches. Planting churches requires much prayer, wisdom, and dedication to follow the Holy Spirit's leading as we do our best to faithfully live out the commands of Scripture and how we function as a church body. There's a few church models that I want to just kind of go over just as a way to give you some education, and then we're going to camp out in the one that, Lord willing, we will be seeking to use if the Lord allows us to plant a church here. So the first method is the parachute method. So this is often used where there's really no local connection. This you see a lot with like the old missionaries that were sent to people who don't even know English. They had to go figure out the language, all of that. So it's like a parachute. Think of like a military, someone with a parachute. They just land in. They're the only ones. And now they're going to start evangelizing. Lord willing that the evangelization will lead to conversions, which will lead to small group Bible studies, which will grow and leaders will become equipped and eventually we'll have a church.

Certainly a model, certainly God has used it and certainly can use that. However, it is tough. That's a lot to put on one person. If you want proof of that, I would encourage you to read a book called To the Golden Shore. It's a book, I can't remember the author's name. It's Courtney something. It's the only one, To the Golden Shore. It's a unique title. But it tells the life of Adoniram Judson, who went, he was the first Baptist missionary sent from the United States overseas. And he actually went to, which is now Now, Myanmar, I'm blank Burma. He went to Burma and boy, the hardships he faced, that is a lot to try to tackle alone. But God's grace, he did. But that is not what we are going to pursue here unless the Lord raises up someone.

To do that. Next is the multi-site or franchise model. This has really only been popular in the last 40 years because technology has only allowed this to happen. So this is kind of where you've got the main church here. And then instead of focusing on campuses or on planning churches, it starts by doing campuses, which are kind of like mini clones of the main campus. Oftentimes, not always, there's like a satellite feed. So the preaching is not live. And a lot of it's run almost like a business where the headquarters is the main campus and any campuses act more like a subsidiary. That's out there. That's not how we will be going. I would argue that that's historically not how churches have been planted historically. But if you have any questions about that, I'd be happy to talk to you after that. But the one that we are going to, Lord willing, like I said, pursue, and I think the one that has the most biblical and historical support is the mother-daughter or sponsored plant model. So the mother-daughter approach is when the sending or the mother church identifies a strategic nearby area or people group to reach and then commissions a core group of people to send as a church plant, as an independent church plant. The mother church provides often people, funding, and short-term leadership oversight to launch the new church, but the goal is always to get them on their way. I think of this if you've ever taught a kid to ride a bike without training wheels.

The image that comes to my mind is this model is we've got our hand on the seat, there's no training wheels, and we're just running along until we can let go, right? We're maybe in their ear giving them some advice, encouragement, but the goal is always to let go. We're not going to run six miles holding onto a toddler's bike, right? That's just not how it's going to work. We want them to be independent. When I was an elder of the church plant in Fargo, this was the approach that we took. The initial church plant was growing. Our primary ministry was through small groups. So we would have kind of like life groups that we're hoping to launch here at some point.

And in South Fargo, we started with one, and then Roxy and I multiplied off of that one. Now there was two, and then there was three, and then five, and then nine. And we were like, huh, the Lord is doing something in Southwest Fargo. Let's pray about that. This is also, in terms of strategy, this part was the fastest growing part of town. Most of the people who lived there were young families, young professionals who were increasingly becoming less and less churched, oftentimes enticed by the suburban lifestyle where the 11th commandment is thou shall be convenient, right? That's a joke. I was just kidding. But it's true. So we formed a core group.

The initial group of us, we started talking and praying about what this might look like. And then we formed a core group, which consisted of a lead pastor, three supporting elders, a handful of small groups, and about 60 people. And we set out to plant in Southwest Fargo. At first, we shared a budget. We always joked that we were just a line item in their budget now that we had become a plant. We had joint elder meetings, but we did our own preaching. We developed our own small group leaders, and we were working to build up the infrastructure and the giftings necessary to become an independent church.

And as I mentioned, by God's grace, this is the model that we're praying the Lord will use if we are so privileged to launch a church plant here from the landing. But I wanna close our time with looking at what does that actually look like now in practicality? And this is where things can get really crazy because again, there's no one way to do it. We have to take into, there's a lot of things to take into consideration, but in general, there's four phases of planning a church and then we can have time for some questions. So phase one is vision and planning. The mother church needs to have a vision for church planting. But more than a vision for church planting, we need to have a vision and commitment to multiplication. To plant a church, we need to be able to multiply at every level. We need elders. We need worship leaders. We need deacons. We need kids club teachers. We need people who can coordinate lunch at the landing. We need people who can run the soundboards. We need security to make sure that we're safe. All of these things, we need people who are gifted in these areas. In my first job in ministry, the pastor told me that in ministry, We must always be working ourselves out of a job, not in the sense that we will ever complete the work of ministry, but we want to be raising up people so that if we left, the church would continue to carry on because the church isn't about any one person other than the God man, Jesus Christ.

Now, in a church context, raising up so you can take a break, so we can share the duties is great. But you also build up people so that one day we could send them out and both of the churches will thrive. Both of the churches have the giftings and the skills and the people that they need to serve well. The leadership in this phase, the leadership of the mother church must define the vision of the plant, identify what we are calling people to. Because we wanna commission a church plant with people whose hearts are burning for God's glory and for the people to whom they are sent. Church planting is not, hey, who wants to meet at a different location next week? That's not what this is. This isn't a logistics problem that we're solving, but we wanna send people out who are aligned and united in the mission of reaching the people that we are going to plant amongst. Once a vision is set, a provisional leadership is needed. This includes the planter, who is often the pastor or elder who will be doing the bulk of the preaching, but not always.

As well as elder qualified men to provide initial leadership to the young church plant. And this might be a minor point, but one of the things that is important is that it is a provisional leadership team. You know, as Paul warned, shoot, either Timothy or Titus, be slow to appoint elders, right? Removing someone from a provisional leadership team is a lot easier. Than an elder who's been affirmed by the congregation and all of that. We experienced that not in the second church plan, but in the first church plan. There was a member of that initial provisional leadership team who ended up just running headlong into apostasy, and had to be removed. And so we were thankful he was not an elder. He was just a provisional leadership team member. But that provisional leadership group will start meeting, praying, and planning early. Planning in this early phase includes assessing the target area, local demographics, and the spiritual climate of the destination so we can understand the needs of that community and how we can be most effective. And this isn't a, we go around and survey, like kind of the saddleback idea of like, well, what do you want to see in a church? And let's just target our consumers. That's not what it means. Okay. Learning what are the people struggling with? What are the lies that they're believing? How can we shine the gospel directly like a laser beam on their idols? In a loving way, in a merciful way, in a compassionate way.

But that'll help us to be more effective as a church plan. The Mother Church will also work with the provisional leadership team to agree on a support plan for the church to ensure funding, equipment, and other resources they are willing to commit to the church plan. And this isn't always set in stone, always, in terms of, you know, all the details ironed out. But we want to agree. We want the mother church and the sending church to be in agreement so that the expectations are aligned. Because one of the biggest causes of frustration is unmet expectations, right? And so if we can go into this knowing, okay, we're going to get this much support for this amount of time, it helps to focus where we're going to be and prevent conflict. And it also helps the provisional leadership team call people in. Because if we know we need these certain skills, we can be praying for that. That we can be talking to those people who we think might have those skills.

All right, so that's the vision and planning stage. The next phase is preparation and team building. Once the initial planning has been completed, the provisional leadership team starts to build a core team. A core team is a group of people from the existing congregation who are committed to serve in a meaningful way to get the church plant off the ground. So the core group isn't everyone who will eventually go to be a part of that church plant. It's the people who are gonna help lead the ministries and make sure they're committed to giving their all to see this church plant succeed. So that's often elders, deacons, you know, ministry leaders, those types of people. There's no perfect size, but you'd certainly, the more the merrier to a certain extent. And that core team must be equipped through training or residency programs. Hopefully a lot of that's already been taking place.

If the mother church is all about multiplication, we can see that happening. But sometimes planting churches calls people who are, you would have never thought.

They were even awake on a Sunday morning. And yet they want to come and be a part of God moving in the city. So we got to be able to equip them. Next, we have to establish a local presence in the targeted area. We begin holding small gatherings, prayer meetings, prayer walks, or Bible studies in the target area before the public launch of the church. We want to become regulars in the area that we're planting. And I know this kind of gets tricky because, I mean, how many of you actually live within like five miles of the church? Probably not a lot. Some of us do, right? But we're ever willing to do this. But still, we want to be able to figure out how can we identify and get to know, the people that we're trying to reach with the gospel. This helps us to embed ourselves in the community and builds inroads for the gospel to take root, as well as stir the core team's heart for the community so that they want to see everyone come to know Christ. At the message sheet last night, I asked, how many of you heard Tom Florestano talk about Egypt two years ago? Probably not a whole lot. How many of you hear him talk about Egypt now? Everybody, right? Why? Because he went there. He got to meet the people. He got to see the needs. And so did the other teams. Man, and I forget who all was there, but you all, all of them came back different.

They loved the people of Egypt far more than when they came back than when they left. That's the hope of this phase. We start to build that fire for others in this phase. We also need to make sure all the legalities are taken care of. Hopefully the mother church will do that, but things like governance, documents, incorporations, all of the fun stuff. Hopefully you have a lawyer or somebody on your court team that can help with that. Phase three is the fun part, launch and stabilization. So this is when regular public services begin. Venue doesn't have to matter. as long as it's big enough to fit everybody. It shouldn't be so small that there's like no open seats, but it also shouldn't be huge that it makes the gathering feel tiny. You know, like when we were at Proctor, that was one of the biggest downsides of Proctor is it made it feel like the church was so small because that place was just huge.

So, and these can be in kind of non-conventional ways. The initial church plan we were a part of, we met in a jazz club, which was less than ideal. They had a pinup girl painted on the wall. She was modest for a pinup girl, But we just covered her up, which was great, until the one time the banner fell and we had people stand for the rest of service. And not moved by the Spirit, moved by necessity. But that's church planting. You kind of got to do what you got to do, and the Lord will provide. But you have to find a space there. And then you also start engaging the community as a church. Now we have a congregation to call them to so we can use the local presence that we've established already. And now we can start evangelizing even more, bringing them to Sunday services, bring them to our other gatherings. We must also set up consistent rhythms of church life, such as children's ministries, Sunday schools, whatever that church is gonna look like. There's really, again, no right or wrong answer. The only thing I would say is that we need to have some sort of gathering service, whether it's Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday night, something like that. And then at least one thing that people can come and connect to during the week. Could be a small group, could be a Bible study, Something else that they can dive deeper than on just a sunday morning.

And then phase four is release and autonomy. So as the church becomes self-sustaining, they need to transition from a provisional leadership team to an established local elder team. The church plant must identify and train local elders, deacons, and ministry heads from within the new congregation. Most likely, like I said, the elders will come from the provisional leadership team, but not always. The mother church then at that point transfers all authority over to the local church plant. Hopefully it would have been kind of, their support would be tapering at this point, but this is where you kind of cut the cord, so to speak. And we really let them become their own entity without any ties. While not required, the final step of this phase is the official commissioning, some sort of declaration where both churches formally celebrate the autonomy of the new church, shifting the relationship from a parent-child dynamic to a peer partnership. Now we are churches linking arms in mission together. We can still function together. Sometimes, you know, might have a joint Christmas Eve service or something like that, or partnering in different ways. And then there is actually a bonus phase, phase five, where both churches do it all over again. And we plant more churches, Lord willing. yeah that's a great question yeah so the question was are the people who go out volunteer or, paid or a mix it's usually a mix you know what we did in fargo is we had one paid staff two of us were paid like a small stipend because we kind of helped, lead some of the ministries but the rest were all volunteers yeah so we had one officially full-time staff two of us that were kind of part-time and then the rest were all volunteers

I want to make sure I promised Kevin that I would end on time. So I'm going to end with this.

So I started this by talking about how I love the church because we're part of a much better and bigger story than Lord of the Rings. So I thought it would be best to end this way. This is the, excuse me, this is in the two towers, Frodo or Sam talking to Frodo. He says, it's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clear. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something. There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for. Brothers and sisters, we live in a culture that is mired in the hopelessness and futility of a world marred by sin, where the killing of innocent lives is not only allowed, it's applauded, where humans have become commodities to be used and abused, and where we think that this is all that there ever is, so we might as well do what we feel is right in our own eyes.

People in our city and in our lives have no hope of redemption, have no hope of a happy ending, have no hope unless someone tells them the good news, that there is some good in this world and his name is Jesus Christ. And by faith in him, we will see all of the evil of this world be undone. Justice will be served and everlasting joy is waiting for us. But remember, we are in the only story that actually matters. God's story of reconciling a sinful and rebellious people made in His image to Himself. And we have been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation and, Lord willing, the ministry of planting churches. Let me pray.