How times have changed.

When we came the city 14 years ago, church planting was often seen as a threat to existing churches… I must say with some justification, as it did tend to involve whole groups of people ‘moving in’ to an area from elsewhere. It was also seen as an activity exclusively for the ‘radical’ people.

A few years ago I (Colin Baron) wrote a manual outlining lessons we had learnt in our first phase of planting churches in Greater Manchester. I now want to bring it

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Cheer up and enjoy yourself! When you look back in 20 years from now you may miss the days when your church was small and fast moving. Not that church won’t be fun in 20 years, it is just that it won’t be like it was. Too many church planters get bogged down in how hard things are and all the trials they are going through. It is all part of the package and it is the same for everyone, so enjoy it while it lasts. Have fun being creative and doing new and exciting things.

Another reason to

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When Jesus began His public ministry what was the first thing He chose to do? Gather a crew of course. He walked around and called people to His vision and asked them to walk with Him on His forthcoming mission. These men became His disciples and were largely responsible for the formation of the early church in the Middle East. For us church planters the same can be true and gathering a crew can be effective at increasing the capacity of your church to grow. Dave Stroud from Christ Church

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There is an element of church planting that is so vital that your effort is doomed to failure without it. I am of course talking about faith. Faith to see God move in your area and to see people saved, faith to grow your church and envision the future, and faith to take on activities and goals that are challenging and seemingly impossible without this belief in God’s power.

I would argue that every church starts with a small seed of faith and if you talk to any leader or founding member

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Every church plant is faced with the same problem: how are you going to reach your local community. With the passion and enthusiasm that permeates through a new church, leaders are often faced with trying to find a way to effectively utilise it. We want our church plants to grow and we need to let people know that we are there. There are many words for this I suppose but the clearest one is perhaps your ‘evangelism strategy’, quite simply, how you are going to reach people?

There are

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Inevitably, a church plant will spend a great deal of its early days, especially the beachhead and pioneering days, in someone’s living room or dining room. That living room will also inevitably belong to a hospitable person or family who loves to have people in their home. Every church has these people regardless of its size and they are worth their weight in gold. These people who love to cook a meal on a week night for 12 people or have all the ladies in the church round in the morning

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In the Second World War landings at Normandy in 1944, allied forces immediately faced the problem of navigating through the unfamiliar terrain and trying to secure the beachhead in order to properly resource an invasion of Europe. For the first few weeks after D-Day allied commanders were obsessed with trying to secure these beachheads and subsequent bridgeheads as well. The purpose of a beachhead was simple; to take and secure an area inside enemy lines from which further ground can be taken.

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In the early 1990’s a handful of people, based mainly in the Southeast corner of England, began dreaming and planning a major church planting initiative 250 miles away in Greater Manchester. What became obvious very quickly was if we wanted to make a substantial impact in a short space of time in this key city, we needed a large resource. We subsequently hit the ground with, believe it or not, five full-time members of staff (two paid senior leaders and three interns). We had been given

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