If you wanted to start a church …

I was recently asked in an email, ‘If you were parachuted into a city, an organisation were paying you and you wanted to start a church – what would you do?’ Hmm. Here’s what I replied …

1. Recruit a team
You can’t do it on your own! It doesn’t need to be a big team. Half a dozen people would be enough. What does matter is that you have people who are on board with your vision. We routinely ask people not to join us. (Our rule of thumb has been not to have Christians from other local churches join us just because they fancy a change of church.) We want people to feel a sense of coming to be part of missional team (even if they have a full-time secular job).
2. Develop a vision
Start to develop a sense of what kind of church you want to be. What principles or values will shape you? Try to express this is in a clear way so that everyone in the team can articulate it for themselves. We don’t have much in the way of programmes, plans, structures and buildings. But we do try to set a clear vision so everyone knows what they should be doing and has the freedom to innovate within the vision.

3. Hang out in your area
Walk the streets, prayer walk, spend time in local cafes (do your reading and prep there), join community groups, talk to people about your area. This serves a double purpose: (1) it will help you contextualise and (2) it will begin to build bridges with people in your neighbourhood.

You can do all these three things in an iterative way – they all feed into one another.

One other word of warning. Don’t rush to start do something called ‘church’ until you are confident your team has a radically different vision of church. The business of ‘doing church’ (services, children’s work, etc.) can be a distraction. You might want to call yourself a ‘missional team’ for a long time and then let slip that you have been church all this time and this is how you’re always going to do church. Or consider waiting to plant a church until you have the home of new convert in which to meet. This may help you get your contextualisation right. Let church be done on the hoof.