Introduction

You may be reading this Handbook as someone who has an interest in church planting, but no team. In that case, you might be wondering how do I pull a team together? This chapter will relate our experience and give suggestions based on teams we have worked with. The reader should note that the goal of forming a team is not to get an administrative structure, but rather to build relationships and ministry skills which will lead to effective church planting.

In this chapter we will relate our experience in establishing the Fellowship of Church Planters (FCP) believing that the practical case history will be more helpful than theory. The events cover 15 years, although the actual forming of the first team took a little over a year. I give a lot of personal detail to show the factors in the evolution of my thinking because some of you might be as skeptical as I was about church planting teams. Also it will help the reader get an understanding what was formative in my thinking regarding churches, teams and reproduction.

Some practical appendices are given at the end of this handbook which we have used helping others to forming effective teams. These helps were developed with the first team and the ensuing teams. The hope is that they will help you take less time to start a team. You may find as you read through our journey that you have come a good distance already. If you absorb the principles in the previous three chapters, you may become frustrated at how difficult it is to get an effective team functioning. But beware of taking short cuts, as they may prevent the kind of team from forming which will be effective and starting reproducing churches. "A student when he is fully trained will be like his teacher." Luke 6:40. You can only produce what you are!

When the FCP began in 1985, it consisted of only Jim Frost and myself. We were both married for over 10 years and each had two children. I had come to faith 11 years earlier and Jim 6 years before. Our wives, though supportive of our call to church planting, did not sense such a call for themselves. They felt their main ministry was to us as husbands and to their children. Each of them, some years later, received a call from the Lord to be actively engaged in the ministry of church planting and were commissioned to the team from our sending churches.

By detailing how the Lord led us together to be a team might be helpful for you to sense how God may have already prepared you for this task of forming a team.

I had been involved in the planting of two churches from 1975-81, but the idea of a church planting team had not even entered my mind! The first church, Cranston Christian Fellowship (CCF), was started shortly after I came to Christ, so I was involved from its inception. CCF was started by 65 people sent off from Quidnessett Baptist Church. Harold Burchette, the pastor of QBC had a vision for churches planting churches and set up a training institute at QBC to train the future leaders of these new churches. Dave Gadoury, the founding pastor of CCF, had been trained by Harold and headed up the new work. Dave trained several men for eldership at CCF.

I had only been saved for about a year through the witness of one of the members of QBC when CCF started. I had been personally discipled by one of the CCF deacons (Russ) who was in turn being trained by Dave as a future elder. Russ focused heavily on the transformational issues I mentioned in the last chapter. This was necessary since I was quite a bitter person and a hermit.

Russ asked me to help lead an evangelistic Bible study with him in one of the neighborhoods. I did studies with the young people in the gospels while Russ worked with the adults. We simply studied a few verses, asked questions about what it said about Jesus and what that had to do with us. Over 50 people came to Christ through that study that lasted about 2 years.

That was the beginning of my "on the job" training. I watched Russ as he worked with people and learned how to present the gospel in a variety of situations. I also watched him deal with questions people had about church, baptism, etc. all which he answered from the word. I became effective at this and began new studies as part of a visitation team that went out one night a week to follow up possible contacts. The goal of the visits was to start new evangelistic studies, the fruit of which would ultimately be added to CCF. The church grew from about 60 in 1975 to over 300 in 1981. Almost all this growth was from people coming to Christ through these studies.

In late 1975 I was asked by a student at Brown University where I had been a football coach to lead a study in his dorm room. We used the same simple Bible study approach I was using in the neighborhoods. Dozens of students came to Christ over the next 5 years. Just as Russ worked with me, I would work with them one on one, dealing with questions about the Lord, the church, etc. I learned to use the Word to deal with these fundamental questions. Also many of the students had deeper problems and I helped them using the Word even as Russ had helped me. Often I went to Dave Gadoury who had much more experience than either Russ or I. Cathy, my wife, got involved discipling troubled women students. As Russ did with me once these new believers began to learn how to overcome the effects of sin in their life, I would thrust them into responsibility. They could evangelize, shepherd new believer, answer questions regarding baptism and church membership, lead Bible studies, etc. I would coach them as they needed help. Ultimately I trained others to take over the entire campus work.

In 1978 I became a deacon and later (1980) and elder in the church. In 1979 Jim Frost came to Christ and I was involved in grounding him in the faith and encouraging him to start evangelistic Bible studies in his home.

In 1981 I was sent out from CCF along with 50 other members to start the Warwick Christian Fellowship (WCF). At that time I became supported financially for the first time, a step I did not take with much enthusiasm. Jim remained an active member of CCF. Our families continued to meet fairly often even though we were involved in different churches. As the pastor of the new church I was involved in every aspect of church life, but especially recognizing and training leadership which would eventually be responsible for the church. I was deeply involved in the lives of these future leaders, their marriages and their families. It was in this context I learned much about transformational ministry.

However, I became persuaded that a plural leadership model was was crucial to the ongoing welfare of leaders and the church. I had started WCF as the pastor, following the model of Dave at CCF and, although I was persuaded about plural eldership, I had not modeled it. I came to see that to plant plural leadership churches, one needed to model plural leadership from the beginning of the church planting process. In studying the scripture, and consulting with older leaders from our network of churches, I became persuaded that a church planting team was the appropriate vehicle to plant church which would be led by teams of elders. WCF commissioned me to start a church planting team in 1985. I turned over responsibility to the elders I had trained.

I had been talking with Jim Frost over the years about planting a church together. He was burdened to plant a church in his home town of Cumberland, Rhode Island, where he had been running evangelistic Bible studies for some years, mostly from the contacts he had made as a school teacher. Jim approached the eldership of CCF requesting that he be sent with me to a church planting effort in his own town. The church commissioned him and we became a team of two church planters. We wrote up a covenant that would regulate our relationship with one another and lay out expectations to our sending churches and set off to plant churches. (See Appendix 3: Guidelines for developing a Covenant of Team Understandings.)

The Fellowship of Church Planters' (FCP) first effort at church planting started in Jim's home. We determined that Jim should head up the work since those involved had been gathered by him. My task was to train Jim from behind the scenes in everything I knew. Jim was faithful in requesting me to write position papers on various things I had learned as well as putting on paper Bible studies which I had used over the years for discipleship and leadership training. The result of this was the manual for House Church Planting in Networks, as well as the Leadership Training Guide which consists of the different Bible studies developed over the years to answer the questions new believers had as well as train older believers in things like transformational ministry.

Over the ensuing years, new church planters were added to the FCP team. We began to experiment with house churches which we felt would reproduce far more easily than the large churches we had planted. As team leader, I was responsible for training each of the new church planters. Jim's requirement of me to write out the training materials paid great dividends, this book being one of them! I was able to keep my hands in the day to day responsibility of church planting, but usually from a position behind the scenes much as Russ had trained me. The materials I had developed and used to train Jim enabled me to "coach" new church planters more effectively. This intentional coaching enabled the new church planters to learn by experience much more quickly than Jim had. I had trained Jim mostly from trial and error, but we constantly evaluated our work and tried to improve upon the training with every new member.

Developing methods for training of church planters has led to the teams reproducing and interns coming from other parts of the U.S.A. and the world for periods of intense training.

1. Our experience is that church planters normally emerge from strong reproducing churches. They receive an internal subjective call (See chapter 5) to church planting which is confirmed externally by objective means, normally the leaders and congregations of the church in which they serve. This seems to be the norm in scripture as well (Cf. Paul, Barnabus, Timothy, Silas, etc.)

2. Often one man will be the visionary recruiter whom others join in forming a team as I did with Jim (Barnabus did the same with Paul in Acts 11). He will often function as the initial team leader although this may change over time (as it seemed to with Paul and Barnabus in Acts 14). Jim eventually became the team leader and I became a member of his team. Jim was ready for that and with my traveling and coaching other teams it was apparent I could no longer give the necessary continuity to the work.

3. The visionary leader may draw up a team covenant and understandings as to how the team will function as well as a brief strategy. I had outlined this in preparation for being sent off to start FCP. I did talk to Jim often about this as I had already been recruiting him. It is helpful to set some expectation for what a team is and what it will do when recruiting a team since it gives a vision which team members often need. In Jim's and my case we became the team first and then fleshed out a covenant. The strategy came later through trial and error.(See Appendix 3 and 4 for helpful guidelines for writing covenants and strategy papers).

4. New team leaders will often arise from the original team as new sub teams are formed (see the previous chapter) and will recruit new members either from the original churches or from newly forming churches.

The above represent the normal ways we have formed teams, however we have observed team members recruited and teams form in other ways as well. Below recounts some of these.

1. New team members may join the team although they have not been a part of a church (Cf. Luke, Pricilla and Aquilla, etc.). In this case their calling is confirmed by an already exiting team. For instance Paul likely picked up Luke in Troas and, recognizing his value, he joined the team. The team did not wait for a church to commission him. This also seems to be what happened with Priscilla and Aquilla who were picked up in Corinth before there was any church there. They functioned with the team before they functioned with the church.

2. Or Teams may emerge more or less spontaneously by a couple of committed believers receiving a call directly from the Lord to form a team even though they have no church planting experience. In this case they should be quite mature men and humble themselves by getting all the help they can find (including a church planting mentor if possible). This is most likely to happen on a college campus, or in cases where a person has moved to a new area and finds no suitable church . In any case team members should make every effort to have the calling confirmed by others, either another church planting team, a mentor, or a church. Otherwise they might fall into the trap of commending themselves (II Corinthians 13:12ff). We encourage members of such "spontaneous teams" to start the first church and then ask that church to send them off a team. This avoids the problem of "commending themselves".

3. Team members of an existing team may get a call to go to a different city or country and recruit members from their own team or other teams with whom they have a relationship (with the confirmation and encouragement of the teams leaders of course, who should always looking to foster reproduction). Sometimes the new team leader may go early to the new area to make preparation for the rest of the team with other members following usually within a year. Future members would remain part of existing teams until they leave for the new team. This is often the preferred way when teams are going to another culture and where a different language is spoken. This will enable to team leader to serve the rest of the team by enabling him (and his wife) to make the cultural adjustment first so that they can help the new team members through the transitions.

You may have noticed that we have not addressed the issue of finances. We believe that a calling to plant churches has little to do with how God chooses to put food on your table. Almost all of our church planters hold regular jobs which fully meet their needs. Often these jobs carry them to new places where new teams will form and thus new churches get planted. We encourage teams to look to the Lord to determine if any on the team needs to be financially underwritten, but the biblical norm is that most church planters should be tentmakers (Cf. Acts 20:34).

Part the reason for this conviction is that we plant house churches which normally do not have supported pastors or church staff. The leaders must balance the responsibility of job, family and ministry. A self-supporting church planter is a far better example. The principle of unpaid shepherds (pastors) leads more rapidly to reproducing churches and teams because finances are one of the more severe bottlenecks to reproduction. By keeping supported church planters and elders to a bare minimum, a key obstacle to reproduction can be eliminated. I am fully supported although as I mentioned earlier I was not happy in doing so realizing how fruitful I had been as a school teacher and the example I had been to those who were not "full time Christian workers." My travel does not allow me to engage in gainful employment presently.

A word about "full time ministry". We do not believe that the Bible teaches what is sometimes referred to as a call to "full time ministry". Certainly there is no evidence that the New Testament viewed supported people as having a superior call over those who labored with their hands. There were times when Paul and his team were supported by the offerings of the saints and there were times when they worked with their hands. "The laborer is worthy of his hire" and believers may often share financially with those who teach and have labored among them. But the idea of a professionally trained and fully supported clergy is far from scripture. Often church planters will derive some or all the their finances through "working with their own hands". For more on this issue of finances see Appendices 1 and 5.

Some church planters may not be able to hold a job because their itineration will keep them moving and unable to remain in one place long enough to hold a job (as has been my case for the last 13 years). This will likely be true of a mentor of several church planting teams and even some team leaders. But in this case they need to look to the Lord for their provision and should always consider that one of the ways He would supply is by engaging in gainful employment. Paul made tents when the Lord did not supply by the free will offerings of the saints. All our church planters are expected to have skills which will enable them to get a job if the need arises.

1. If you are part of a church planting team, how was it formed?

2. If you desire to start a church planting team but do not have one yet, who has God placed in your life who might have a similar burden?

3. Who has God placed in your church or brought to your attention who might have gifts which could be used in church planting?

4. How could you begin to test whether the Lord might call you together to form a team? (Be certain that you seek confirmation of those the Lord has placed as leaders in their church!)

5. Have you witnessed the establishment of other teams? If so, then describe them. What are the key steps which enabled this to happen? Outline steps you need to take? How might you need help? Who could help you with this?

6. If your church has not reproduced itself why not? What ministries may be lacking? How could a team help your church fulfill its responsibility for the great commission? What are your leaders doing about these things? What responsibility do you have to help? How do you see what God is putting on your heart fitting in with your church's vision?

7. Form a triad with two church leaders to discuss and pray about forming a new team and what the next steps should be.