I believe that shifting our language and expectations from launching to loving could revolutionize the way we approach church planting, which is actually the point of this blog.
Let’s start talking more about loving the people God has placed around us, and less about launch dates and critical mass. Launching implies violence, linear movement, predictability, self-promotion and frenetic activity. Loving, on the other hand, requires gentleness, messiness, patience, learning and self-sacrifice.
So how does this language pivot transform church planting? In one sense, it changes everything. The good news of the gospel is that we are free to be loved by God and love other people without an alternative agenda (even a good one like church planting!).
In another sense, it changes nothing, because there is no disruption in who you are and what you do 30 days before you “go public” with a gathering or 30 days after. My identity isn’t tied to how many fickle people responded to a marketing ploy on Sunday morning at 10 a.m., and my mission is the same on Monday as it was on Saturday: to love people.
Hopefully, changing the language of church planting will lead us to change our metrics and reshape our expectations. Rather than being driven by an obsession with ratios, data points, benchmarking and hype, we can simply ask ourselves the question: “What does it look like for me, in this time and place with the resources I’ve been given, to love God and love my neighbor well?” I think I’ve read that somewhere before.
