PlantR: Reorganizing a Network for Movement

Posted on December 14, 2011

I’m incredibly excited about what’s happening through church planting in our city. There is a remarkable level of partnership and kingdom-mindedness among church planters in Austin, attributable only to the the Spirit of God. PlantR, our church planting city network, recently underwent a significant reorganization.

Struggle to Execute on a City Vision

The vision of PlantR is to catalyze a Christ-centered, context-sensitive church planting movement for the social and spiritual renewal of Austin and beyond. Since the beginning, we have struggled to understand how to best facilitate this vision with such a diverse group of church planting methods, ecclesiologies, and theologies. Should we carve the city up into districts to prioritize city renewal through church planting? That sounds awfully parochial. Prioritize planting areas? By what standards? Ethnicity, income, poverty, least reached? The PlantR board has debated this for several years.

In the meantime, we continually pressed ahead with our vision by our three-fold purpose of Networking, Resourcing, & Encouraging church planters for city renewal. Many church planters need:

  • Encouragement from someone with whom they can pray, bear burdens, and lick wounds. If the planter doesn’t make it, the church does make it. Churches have to make it to make movement.
  • Networking to increase social interaction, create space for swapping best practices, establish coaching relationships, and increase kingdom partnership for Christ’s mission. Movements are typically comprised of networks of networks.
  • Resourcing to equip the planter with local knowledge, missional ecclesiology, and church planting training. Some of the best resourcing can happen on-the-fly, when the leader acutely feels the need for it.
To varying degrees of success, PlantR has delivered on these three purposes through a Monthly Meeting. However, the strategic element for city renewal and movement continued to elude us. Then, we had a break-through idea. What if we took strategy out of our hands and placed it in the hands of the planters? This sparked an entire reorg of our structure.
Missional Hubs & MicroConferences
We decided to do away with the centralized Monthly Meeting and reorganize the network around smaller gatherings of church planters called Missional Hubs.
  • Missional Hubs are regional gatherings of church leaders that meet regularly to network and encourage one another for the renewal of a specific region of the city.
Our hope and prayer is that missional partnerships and strategy will bubble up from these smaller groups of planters as they labor alongside one another in a shared space in the city. Now that they are interacting with planters “in their backyard”, our hope is that they will work together on initiatives and strategies to renew, for instance, South Austin. Groups of planters working for Christ-centered renewal in smaller parts of the city suddenly makes the vision a bit more manageable. However, we didn’t want to leave planters un-resourced, so we also developed MicroConferences.
  • MicroConferences are uniquely focused conferences that occur quarterly to resource a Christ-centered church planting movement.
These MicroConferences allow us to handpick leaders to speak into the movement in the various areas of theology, methodology, strategic planning, and pastoral care. In addition, the regional breakouts allow us to customize content and work for real, local challenges on mission in the greater Austin area. For instance, Hispanic church planting on the Eastside. Where can you find a breakout on that at a national conference? The Microconference connects top-level missional thinking to street-level missional practice in our city. On that note, Im thrilled to announce that Jeff Vanderstelt will be speaking into our movement on the topic of Missional Community on January 10!