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 London puts recruitment down as a vital aspect of the early church plant.

It is important to note that this is very different to evangelism. Recruitment is not about just gaining members, but about gaining a crew that will be integrally part of the churches’ vision and development in its early days. These would be people with passion or experience, knowledge or maturity, leadership or skills, or maybe a combination of the above. It does not mean that these people are somewhat better that your other members but that they are recruited for a specific purpose in the early stages to make growth more achievable.

At Christ Church Manchester, and with a number of the other churches in Manchester we have seen how recruiting people can be very beneficial. At CCM we have around 20 people from all over the country who have lived all over the world and have developed our ministry to the community and have brought new skills and talent to our congregation. These people have no special status in the church nor are they viewed as better of different, just that their entry into the church came about in a different way.

So how do we recruit people? There is obviously no formal ‘technique’ to this as it is down to relationship and circumstance. However, ultimately it is about finding people you believe would be useful to your church planting effort and asking them to join you. It is hard to give advice on this sort of thing because more often than not it will be spontaneous, circumstantial and natural, not a scheme to steal someone from another church. I suppose this post is more about letting you know that it is OK to recruit people. It good and godly to do so and can help your church plant in massive ways from the beginning.