The Professionalization of Church Planting

Church planting has already become an industry: just Google "church planting" (897,000 hits appear). A multitude of conferences and businesses have sprung up around church planting. Best practices and venues dominate planting conversations. Church planters borrow business language and practice in order to plant churches. Consider this string of questions:

• What are you running? What are your numbers like?
• Are your groups multiplying?
• When are you going to plant next?
• How are you reproducing leaders?
• How's your giving? What does your budget look like?

We're quick to talk numbers and slow to talk transformation. If we're not careful, church planters will become another profession in an increasingly professionalized church. Planters will share more in common with entrepreneurs than they do with apostles, elders, and pastors. Church planters will become disobedient to God and irrelevant to his church. They will build buildings and launch services, not pastor people and cultivate community. To be continued.