Tag: Gary Rohrmayer

Churchplanting Landmines

Posted on October 21, 2008

In his book Church Planting Landmines, Gary Rohrmayer and Tom Nebel warn planters of ten landmines to avoid, especially post-launch. In the Foreward, Ed Stetzer writes:

Most of us don’t listen well. I usually don’t. Most of us have to learn by painful mistakes. Yet, those who God blesses most are those who listen best. This book could save your church plant. More importantly, it could save your marriage, your health, your ministry, and so on…if you listen.

In summary, here are the 10 Church Planting Landmines:

  1. Ignoring personal health and growth
  2. Lack of leadership development
  3. Leadership backlash
  4. Personal Evangelism Entropy
  5. Corporate Evangelism Entropy
  6. Inadequate Enfolding Strategy
  7. Fear of Money
  8. Underestimating Spiritual Warfare
  9. Misfiring on Hiring
  10. Delaying Missions Engagement

Converge

Posted on October 10, 2008

You’ll definitely want to check out the new Converge website for church planting resources. Converge is the new iteration of Teamerica, a Church Planting Assessment organization that is group-based as opposed to behavior-based. With Gary Rohrmayer at the wheel of this new organization, you’ll get a lot of very practical help in planting, nuts and bolts. Gary is the author of First Steps, which I reviewed along with a few other CP manuals a while back.

Very helpful article on the Unsustainable Pace of many church planters.

Church Planting Manuals Reviewed

Posted on October 1, 2008

Here are some recommended CP manuals on the nuts and bolts of planting.

First Steps

Gary Rohrmayer has planted tons of churches and wrote a helpful course called First Steps: Missional Church Planting. First Steps is strong on the nuts and bolts and guides the planter through six stages of the first year of missional church planting. These stages include:

  • Relating to God and Others
  • Networking and Gathering
  • Building a Launch Team
  • Designing Worship Services and Ministry Strategies
  • Launching Public Services
  • Establishing the New Community and its Ministries

Another one of its strengths is that it is principle, not model driven. So, it accommodates a variety of models and encourages contextualization. Though the course is launch driven, some of the templates for budgets, position descriptions, financial accountability, etc are helpful jumping off points. You can also purchase a membership at CoachNet that allows electronic access to the entire workbook and PDFs and take the course.

Redeemer Planting Manual

Tim Keller’s Redeemer Church Planting Manual is incredibly strong on missiology and philosophy of ministry. If you really want to know how to become lead missionary that cultivates a church of missionaries, follow Tim’s approach. At times, it is overwhelming (and I have background in Anthropology!), but there are a lot of riches to be found in this manual.

Exploring the Land

Exploring the Land focuses on understanding your target people and culture(s). This book was written for reaching unreached peoples, which is why it is so helpful for domestic church planting. It forces to ask questions that we think we already have answers for, forcing you to do the hard, loving work of contextualization.

Church Planters Toolkit

Bob Logan’s Church Planters Toolkit is a standby that offers a lot of pracitcal helps and is used by the Evangelica Free Church. Logan has actually transformed some of his personal convictions about methodology and is now planting more organically. He co-wrote an expensive book on this with Neil Cole called Beyond Church Planting.

Dynamic Church Planting Handbook

Dynamic Church Planting Handbook is built around strong theological and pastoral foundations, but with modern methods. I found myself continually challenged to rely on the Holy Spirit, plant in spirtual health, and plant for the Glory of God when reading this manual. Some of the nuts and bolts were disappointing, however.

American Church Stats

Posted on July 17, 2008

1) Less than 20% of Americans regularly attend church – half of what the pollsters report. There are approximately 330,000 churches in America; out of those churches approximately 17.7% (52 million) of Americans attend church on an average Sunday.

2) American church attendance is steadily declining.

  • Evangelical 9.2%
  • Catholic 5.5%
  • Mainline 3.1%

3) Only one state is outpacing its population growth. Hawaii. 4) Mid-sized churches are shrinking; the smallest and largest churches are growing.

  • Churches under 50 and over 2,000 are growing
  • Average attendance of Protestant church: 124
  • 1,250 mega-churches in America/one emerges every three days

5) Established churches, 40-190 years old – are, on average, declining. New church starts reach more people better, faster, cheaper than existing churches. 6) The increase in churches is only ¼ of what’s needed to keep up with population growth.

  • 3,000 churches close every year
  • 3,800 new church starts survived
  • Net annual gain: 800 new churches
  • Net annual gain needed to keep up with population growth:10,000 new churches

7) In 2050, the percentage of the U.S. population attending church will be almost half of what it was in 1990.

  • US Population in 1990: 248 million/20.4% church attendance
  • US Population in 2050: 520 million/11.7% church attendance

HT: Gary Rohrmayer