5. There’s a huge difference between knowing your demographics and your geography. Demographics tend to tell you who lives in your city, but it doesn’t tell you how the city works and what is unique about it. By geography, I mean that you draw a circle around your church area where you’re planting and ask, “What’s in this circle?” Are there schools, a jail or prison, police station, schools, businesses? How do we develop relationships and serve them? Or is there a place in that circle that’s just hard spiritually? How do we make an initial impact? Is our church even ready missionally to make an impact?
Sometimes we get so fixed on the numbers and percentages that we actually miss the whole geography surrounding us. Our focus becomes more about how many kids live in the community as opposed to how we can impact the schools they go to. Or how many college students instead of what are we doing on the college campus to be present and incarnational.
So I think knowing your geography is more important than knowing your demographics. And it requires talking to people in your city. You’ve got to go talk to city leaders and get an understanding of how they see the city. They see it differently than pastors do, and they have a different opinion of how you can impact it.
6. If your primary focus is the church, your impact will be limited. This is probably the most important one for me. What I mean by this is that there’s a huge difference between how you see your community and city and the Gospel being planted when you look through a Kingdom lens as opposed to the lens of a church. Church lens is small thinking and tends to be focused just on the gospel of salvation as opposed to the gospel of the kingdom, which is way bigger. A church lens focuses on producing people who attend church, but not necessarily disciples.
When you look at anything through a kingdom lens, it’s going to look differently. To church planters, I think that’s huge. Otherwise, the church is the only thing they know, and the church is the only way they think they can get anything accomplished. When the church is about four walls and a meeting place, we make disciples for the church instead of making disciples for the world. Disciples for the church tend to show up for church. Disciples for the city tend to be focused on transforming the city and the world.