Wise church planting: is the problem you?

In this series of articles on church planting, the plan is to learn the lessons from church planters who have struggled. Not the usual suspects. Not the successful all-singing all-dancing ‘super-heroes’ with book deals and big budgets but the (often) unknown heroes who have planted around the world and it didn’t go as planned.

How quick will we be to listen to them? In each article we’ll consider one strand of why they struggled, and - what we’ll find, is it’s not really so much about church planting, more just the complexity of living ‘under the sun’.

Prioritising character over competence

Not far off half of the strugglers admitted that a large part of their planting struggles grew out from their own character issues. It’s easy to point the finger in all kinds of places when things go wrong, but nearly half of these planters - in part at least - honestly pointed at themselves. Perhaps the stress, pain and intensity of the planting process revealed what was going on under the surface? We are easily prone - in all sorts of contexts in the Christian life - to prioritise competence over character. We can tend to care more about what a person does as opposed to what they are (really) like. This should not be.