Starting with whats there

Let’s Have a Rauschenberg: Planting with Persons of Peace

“We’ve begun by finding Christians. But if you want a really powerful church start, find people of peace. Bar the Christians; don’t let them in. They mess things up in the early stages.”

Carol Davis, church planter

Growth culture	Reproductive model
Focus on individual conversions	Focus on group conversions
Start on believer’s turf	Start on unbeliever’s turf
Teach Scripture for information	Teach Scripture for application
Begin by finding Christians	Begin by finding “people of peace”
Begin in facilities	Begin in homes, front porches, yards, parks
Start with celebration in a large group	Start with a small group
Build programs and buildings	Build leaders
Import professional clergy	Have indigenous and convert-emerging clergy
Leader leads all the participants	Leader equips the emerging leaders
Fund the church starter	Start churches with bi-vocational people

The Fall semester rolls around and the machine keeps pumping. Two days into planning, staff member’s calendars begin to fill. Fall Retreat in October, staff conference in November, winter conference, trips to campuses around the state to give lift to ministries, staff meetings, phone calls and discipleship appointments…the list goes on. Where is the time to reach out to those who don’t know or have not experienced Christ? It is hard to find unless you call it a survey.

Under our current model of planting movements, it is my understanding that our primary method is to surface strong believing students and to coach them to lead a movement on their campus. What usually results is a glorified Bible Study with few reports of totally transformed lives from darkness to light.

At a Catalytic Training school, I head a speaker who said that Dr. Bright used to say WINBUILDSEND almost as if it was one word or one thing. Often, enhanced by our structures (randoms, Bible studies, retreats, conferences), we tend to divide the process into three separate compartments and few within our ministries experience the full transformational process.