The Most Important Part of Church Planting

When we came to the Las Vegas valley in the summer of 2000 to start South Hills Church Community we had some strong advantages:  we didn’t know where our church would meet, we didn’t know when our church would start and we didn’t know who would be there (besides our small group of launchers).  “Wait a minute!” you say.  “That doesn’t sound like ADVANTAGES, all those things you just mentioned sound like DISADVANTAGES.”  No, here’s why:  we had enough funding and enough time on our side to do the most important part of church planting:  meeting, hanging out with, encouraging and sharing our faith with hundreds of people without putting pressure on them to attend our church.  But we did meet literally hundreds of people.  One of our more outgoing team members got a job as a barista at Starbucks and met dozens of new people every day.  Our family joined the Boy Scouts with our sons and met people.  We went door-to-door and just simply met others.  We passed out Cokes in front of high schools, served people in as many ways as we could think and made ourselves available.  God used our small team of launchers.  

The most important part of planting a church is NOT finding a PLACE for the church to meet.  There are thousands of new church plants that have “set up shop” only to find nobody showing up. The most important part of planting a new church is strategically, carefully, wonderfully finding ways to meet people and genuinely befriend them and ultimately share your faith with them without the pressure to get them into a church service.   

Having been a Youth Pastor for many years before planting a church, I instinctively knew of how powerful a good ministry to students can be.  So we started a high school ministry before our church went public.  We had 30-50 high school students (and some middle school kids who snuck in) attending a group called Explode before South Hills Church Community had its first public service.  

I also knew somewhat instinctively (although I am pretty sure I heard this from someone) that you should not launch a new church without 100 people committed to it.  It took us six months to get those first 100 people.  We still had not gone public.  But when we did go public we had 192 people at our first service on the first Sunday of January of 2001 (maybe the first third millennium church!).  Because of that good foundation, South Hills Church grew by 150 people every year for eight years straight.

        C. Peter Wagner, a church genius of the twentieth century has famously said that “Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven.” I believe him. We saw incredible fruit from taking advantage of the opportunity to simply meet people, love them, encourage them, answer questions, share our vision and then (usually much later) invite them to attend our church.