Yesterday we talked a little bit about why we need to plant churches. Today we will continue that conversation – only this time focusing on the concept of letting everyone "play".

"Everyone Gets to Play"

One of the beautiful things about true Christianity is that everyone – young, old, in-between – gets to join with the Lord in His work. There is no hierarchy of "spiritual" jobs or things that one person can do but another can't.

If you have bowed your knee to Christ Jesus and given Him your life, then you can "play". That's it.

Unfortunately in our crazy, screwed up world, the church (lower case) has told people the opposite. They have placed certain individuals or actions on pedestals and told everyone else to sit back and watch the "experts" do their thing.

This is where church planting comes in.

In a church plant, everyone has to do their parts. No longer can you get away with sitting on a pew – you have to step up and play the game.[@more@]

Individual Growth

One of my VLI teachers once said that if you don't send out leaders, you will have all kinds of power struggles.

The more I look at church politics – like it or not, where there is more then one person there are politics – the more I see the wisdom in those words.

God is in the business of growing and stretching people – which is a GOOD thing. As church leaders we need to be in the business of mentoring and training folks under us to take over our jobs.

Which is church planting comes into play – once we have trained up leaders, we need to a) send them out to plant a church, or b) hand over our ministry and go plant a church.

This does two things:

1. It opens up opportunities within the existing church for new people to step into and try out their leadership/ministry skills.
2. It forces the "trained" leaders to rely on God as they step out of their comfort zone.

What happens if leaders are not sent out?

If a church decides not to send out church planting teams, I believe there are three main consequences:

1. Up-and-coming leaders are shut down and either leave the church or resign themselves to not living up to their full potential.
2. The church could end up splitting as up-and-coming leaders engage in a power struggle with existing leaders.
3. If the church is large enough, the up-and-coming leaders may end up starting new ministries within the church. This works great as long as the numerically attendance is growing. However, there will come a time when the church can no longer support multiple ministries, which will lead to either #1 or #2.

The Goal

Personally, I don't like any of the above three choices. As such, I believe a health church is one what is dedicated to growing spiritually, numerically AND to planting churches.

Is it scary as a leader to send out your best people? Yeah. But isn't that very selfish? Instead of focusing inward, we need to be encouraging the growth that God is doing in those under us.

If we really cared about them, we would be giving them every opportunity to grow – even if it means sending them out to plant a church. Yeah – they may fail. But growth comes by trying and not by staying within our comfort zone.

Speaking of church planting "issues"…hmm…how about we tackle that tomorrow.