welcome to session 8 better together today's lesson is about building a called and balanced team that will help your church plant to thrive as a family this session's focus is about getting the right kind of people in the right positions to start a new church so why is having a team important when starting a church in business as in a partnership of a church plant it's important to have people with you so you have a greater opportunity for success in a business setting a partnership is four times more likely to be successful than a sole proprietorship going out on your own the same thing can be seen in a church plant setting some of the concepts you're going to hear about today come from a book by Bob Logan called The Church Planning Journey you'll hear from other sources as well and here's some things that Bob has to say about a church planting team number one it provides support and encouragement it keeps you from quitting one day longer it's important that you have somebody with you on the team because some days they'll want to quit and you can encourage them and some days you want to quit and they'll encourage you and then other times you will just have great joy together it utilizes your complimentary gifts when you're on a team different people have different gifts they have different skills personalities things that they're passionate about things that help them to be more effective in what they do and let you be more effective in what you do having a team also helps you gain wisdom uh it it's better if we have many of us looking at something together instead of just one man's perspective or one man's wisdom and it's important kind of going back to the idea of sticking with it longer by having people as partners on your team it allows you to share the burdens and the joys of ministries having somebody to share a church plant with will double the joy when you have somebody to celebrate a victory with and it will help cut the pain or failure when you're going through a struggle somebody that can help you to ease the pain and comfort you and encourage you that things are going to be okay also being on a team helps you focus on the truly important things it's very easy when you're working on your own to procrastinate you can get distracted distracted by wanting to do social media or oh I got to do the dishes or oh I got to go do whatever thing in the yard or fix something on the house those may be important things but when it's time to work on the church plant you need to work on the church plant and when you're in a team you encourage one another to do the things that you say you're going to do and when you're working with somebody else sitting next to you you're less likely to be distracted with distracted with those other things now in a church plant setting there are multiple kinds of teams involved we're going to talk about a few of those and then focus on our main one for today uh one of the teams you need to have is a prayer team uh a prayer team we've talked about this a lot before it's important to have people that get the importance of prayer they're willing to commit to work with you in prayer uh they are willing to pray for the things that you ask them to pray for as you share the gospel as you try to serve a community ideally again you need to have at least 50 people on your prayer team who are committed to pray for you and your church plant regularly you also want to have that more uh confidential inner squad that you can share the most confidential things with on your prayer team the second thing you want to have is an advisory board an advisory board is usually a small group of people such as pastors and other church planning leaders like me or other guys on my team who act as a group of outside elders for your church plant until your church plant is old enough and experienced enough to identify vet train and give experience to uh elders that can be commissioned or other leaders within the church body that can step into a leadership type role you want these outside elders or sometimes we call them cyber elders or virtual elders because they aren't necessarily with you dayto-day to give you wise counsel as a church planner to help make decisions for you uh when it before you have leaders within the church can do it and the other thing that it does is it helps protect you from outside influences uh new church plants will often draw people that have been removed is the nice way to pay say it from other circumstances because they've caused troubles because they want to do things their way instead of the vision that you have and when that happens having a group of outside elders that you can go to and say "Hey is this something we want to do?" And when you're asking them you can say "Is this something we want to do?" and they can give you counsel and encouragement and they can take a vote which is legally binding for the church plant to protect you from what that person is wanting to do that may have nothing to do with reaching the community or the vision that God has given to you another group that you can have in your church plant is your partners we want you to have a partnership coalition as we call it and uh we're going to get into this in much greater detail in sessions 10 and 11 but partners are individuals churches businesses uh associations conventions other entities that are out there that provide prayer support they have mission involvement they give financially and they advocate for you we call that pray play pay and parlay and we'll talk about that more later but they do all that for your church plant it's important to have that team in your corner but the team that we're going to focus on the most today is one that we're going to call the core group the core group the core being the center the middle of what you're doing these are people who will work with you dayto day to get the new church started now there are variations of core groups uh we're going to talk about these and then walk through the process of building these teams but there's a variety of ways that you can do your core groups but there's some core principles that core groups need to have we want to not only get the right people but we want to work to build them into a cohesive and effective team or family as usual Jesus is our model when it comes to doing something and it's no exception when it comes to building a team so Jesus what he did was he would preach the gospel he would talk about the kingdom of heaven he would talk about the father he would paint a picture of this preferred future or vision and then he would invite people to follow him it tells us in Matthew 4 beginning in verse 17 "From that time Jesus began to proclaim,"Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near as he walked by the Sea of Galilee he saw two brothers Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen and he said to them "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him some versions of the scriptures were familiar with this passage say "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men." Jesus cast the vision he talked about the kingdom as he went as he walked places as he sat with people as he told stories he kept talking about the kingdom talking about the kingdom talking about the kingdom and then he said to some of them "Come do this with me." And he must have been good at it because not only did Jesus cast vision through preaching but he looked for his followers in a variety of places uh think about this many of them as in this story were fishermen some of them prepared nets for fishermen we know that Matthew who is also known as Levi was a tax collector he worked for uh Jesus version of the IRS back in Jesus' day and he was not really popular because tax collectors back then weren't known to be uh very scrupulous they would they would kind of pocket some extra was often the way it was seen to be uh there was Simon he was a zealot well what is a zealot um we use that as a description of people today today he's got zeal he's zealous about something uh that's not really a job it kind of could be a job but a zealot is kind of a political anarchist he was against the establishment of the day that's what he was known for uh then there was Judas who we don't know what Judas did before he followed Jesus but when he followed Jesus we know he was the treasurer and we know he was a thief uh so that's a little bit different of a background and some of the other disciples we honestly we don't know what their jobs were but we know again there was diversity in what was going on in that time uh amongst the people that Jesus had follow him and uh then there's the apostle Paul uh he came later but he was also apostle meaning one who was with Jesus he was a Pharisee which is kind of a religious leader and political leader he also supported himself while doing his ministry by working as a tent maker So my point here is your team could be from very diverse walks of life which is actually very helpful if they are if it's just a bunch of preachers or ministers uh we might not have access to many segments of the society that we could if we were businessmen or teachers or doctors or baristas uh to be out in the community earning an income gives you access to people that need to hear the gospel it also provides a way for you to support yourself and your family taking some of the financial pressure off the church another thing that Jesus gave an example for is he gave a clear opportunity to respond he didn't just say "Hey I'm going to I got some good stuff going on here okay thanks see you later." He said "The kingdom of heaven is at NAM at hand and I will make you fishers of men i will let you be a part of it come follow me and he obviously was very persuasive at what he did because they many of them just immediately quit what they were doing and followed him so your core group that you're putting together is like this it's comprised of individuals who are committed to Jesus and his new church plant and even though they're not the lead planter the ideal core group member is strong in in his or her own calling they're strong in character and they're strong in competency they're good at what they do it's the same kind of things that we saw in the last session when we were talking about the lead planter it is best when a core group member has a strong sense of calling to the mission of the new church and is willing to make this new church plant a priority and this includes a willingness not only to serve but to give generously of one's finances times and talent they want to be generous in what they're doing because they're passionate about it they care about it they believe that God has called them to do this just like he's called the lead planter because of that these people are committed to the mission and vision of the church and they're actively involved in the day-to-day operations they play crucial roles in various aspects of the church such as outreach worship disciplem community building administration children's ministry logistics and much much more it could be like they're helping even they take charge of setting up and taking down a portable church they're doing all these things in such a way that they're including others and they're building community with their core group and with the larger church and with the community together they bring diverse skills and passions forming a cohesive unit that drives the church's growth and development now sometimes some of the core group members are on loan and now here's what I mean by this this is one of those variations some core group members who are very skilled and called to see this new church plant happen may be a part of another church but they're on loan from that partner church to come help this church get started the amount of time this is for can vary greatly it's quite often maybe 6 months or two years somewhere in that range and it's more important to me and to others that we do this in such a way that it's milepost driven not timeline driven so it's better to say we're going to get to this certain point and then we will go back to our partner church we're not just going to say you get 6 months no matter what and we're out of here and we leave you right in the middle of doing things instead we say we're going to help you make disciples we're going to help you start small groups we're going to build up until we have a worship service together i'm going to train my replacement and I'm going to overlap with them for a few months and then I'm going to go home so that may mean something like 6 months after the new church has launched worship services now they go home and go back to their partner church sometimes they may feel called in this process to stay where they are and they become part of the ongoing core team of this new church another variation of a core team is actually to have what we know as a launch team now a launch team is a bit different it's a temporary group that focuses on getting the new church through the launch of its worship time together and getting new people incorporated into this new church plant um you need to have a core group within that launch team that are still the spiritually mature people that will lead the ministries and lead others to get involved with them but a launch team could be a group of people that are just focused on the different tasks that get the church up and going they're the worker bees if you will and uh a launch team may not even all be Christians now it's important some of them are because anybody in a spiritual leadership role needs to be a mature Christ follower so if they're a worship leader or the small group leader a children's teacher they should be Christians but people that are going to open doors and host people in the parking lot and clean up and set up and take down and they're going to bake cookies those kinds of things it's okay to have others who don't even know Jesus be a part of this and you may say why do they want to believe it or not many of them are excited about this new group in their community and they just love the people and they want to be a part even though they're still on their faith journey they haven't they haven't crossed from death to life yet they haven't become followers of Jesus yet but they still want to be a part and we want to include them where appropriate the other thing to keep in mind is that for everybody that does that the amount of people who will actually participate increases so if you have 50 people serving on your launch team uh you could have 200 people show up when you start your first service now there can be variations of that but some of that goes back to the old uh Sunday school training by a man named his last name was Flake and they had what they called Flakes's formula and one of the principles of Flakes formula was for everybody involved you will have four people that will show up when you start something new and so the more people you can add to your launch team giving them a role that helps them find purpose and meaning the more that they want to invite people to come and sometimes what we find is those people in the launch team who aren't believers they're the gatekeepers to the community they're the ones that have the relationships like we saw about Lydia who who brought people from her study group if you will into what we believe is what happened in the early church and it grew she was that gatekeeper in that community you have those people in your community as well now within the larger core group there's usually a leadership team so we talk about the core group being those that are committed that are going to make it happen but sometimes with that there's even a smaller team which are the key leaders uh of the church they head up the different ministries and here's a couple of things that are important when we look at these leaders these leaders should be just as committed to the church plant as the church planter is what I mean by that is if something happened to the church planner by health or family or whatever happens and the church planner is no longer there they're still committed to seeing this happen and they will work and pray and and God hopefully provides a new church planter a new pastor for them but these people are like "We're going to see this through we're not just called to follow Gary or somebody like me we're called to what God is doing here which means we're going to keep doing it even if circumstances change." The other thing about them is that they're multipliers multipliers these aren't people that just do a ministry well but they mobilize others to do it they recruit others to be in it they train others to do it they deploy them empower them give them opportunities to serve and multiplication happens so these people could be worship leaders children's ministry leaders youth outreach disciplem counseling and so on and so on and so on but they not only need to be good at what they're doing they need to be multiplying others so let's look at this first of all we want to know that they're committed second of all we want to know that they're they're multipliers and the third thing we want to know is we want to know that they do it with a servant heart they are servant leaders and uh meaning that they're not in this role because they want the accolades they want everybody to tell them how great they are or because they like to boss people around we want people who are humble yet strong leaders but they do it out of a servant's heart and humility those are the people that we need to have on our team so if you get those right people uh things can thrive if you don't get the right people in those roles you can actually stop what's going on um it's important that you don't get the wrong person in a key role because they end up being the bottleneck the point of restriction that keeps a ministry from going growing if they're the small group leader and they're holding everybody back because they're not making new small groups and raising up new leaders uh the church won't have enough people for the other ministries it won't have enough places for the people you reach from the community to go it'll stop the growth of the church because this one ministry has the wrong leader in or in that that spot we need to have the right person in the wrong in the right spot and if we don't have that person we need to wait for the right person and we need to keep praying for that right person to come now again we don't need to say "Well we don't have a good children's leader so we're just going to let the kids run wild on the street." You still got to take care of the kids but you don't put somebody permanently in that role who's not really gifted to be a multiplier with children's leader you need to find somebody who will multiply other leaders and help things to move forward so uh this happened uh early on in one situation i had I was working with one of our church planners when I was first a church planting leader in the Seattle area this guy was great friend of mine still is uh I don't get to see him nearly as much as I did in the early days but when he came to the area to plant a church he had somebody join his church and the guy had had a goodsized family and all of a sudden the the church like tripled between the first family and the second family and this was a great godly man he was a good small group leader he he done a number of things well and so my friend the church planner put him in charge of small groups the problem was even though he was good at leading a small group he was not good at raising up other small group leaders and it's just like I said before that became the bottleneck and they tried it to do all these things to help him become better at multiplying and they tried training and coaching and and just anything they could do and he just really couldn't get it and it wasn't his fault it just wasn't the right fit so they tried moving him in other roles and that didn't work and they eventually said "Hey we need you to step aside from being on our staff so we can put somebody else here." And as you can imagine that was a very hard conversation to have with a guy who's one of your best friends that you're having to have him resign from a ministry role that he was in in your church and so that's a principle that the church planner said to me he had learned from one of his mentors in the ministry who often said to him "The right nobody is better than the wrong somebody." What that means is you're better off having no one in the role than having the wrong person in the role because when you do you keep the right person from doing what he's supposed to do now the other thing that I would say is important for you to have on your leadership team is you need people who are committed to making disciples what I mean by that is they lead people to Jesus and they see people get into opportunities to grow in their faith if you have people in key leadership roles and they think all I got to do are the tasks of the church and they don't try to share their faith they don't tell people about Jesus they don't invite people into the kingdom they don't ask people to come to church what ends up happening is you have leaders who aren't leading others to do what they need to do people aren't going to do more than you do as a leader so we need to make sure that we get the right people here so if we have people who are committed to the church plant they're multipliers uh they they're gifted at what they do um they are ones that will make disciples all these kinds of things we have a much healthier team if we don't have the right people it's like the analogy of the bus if you have a bus and you have an assigned seat on a bus or a train and some you you get on this bus and you go "Hey um I know this bus is going to Atlanta but I heard Southern California is pretty cool so can we go to Southern California can we go to Southern Cal?" And they just keep bugging the driver to go there southern Southern California well he can't go to Southern California his route says go to Atlanta he's got to keep on that route and so you keep going on that route but they really start to become an annoyance to you because first of all they're on the wrong bus and if they are on a bus maybe they're even on the right bus they could be in the wrong seat now usually on buses you don't have assigned seats but let's say that it's on a train they do quite often you've got a ticketed seat you're supposed to be in your seat and if you get in that seat and you refuse to get out the person that's supposed to be in that seat the one that's the right fit for that seat they can't get in that spot and go where they need to go so it's important that we are all going in the right direction now let's say that um you're all going to the same place uh and you're on the right bus you're you're heading in the right direction but sometimes uh you can end up guiding things in the wrong direction you can start wanting to go someplace different u by the way you see you want to do stuff and so here's the danger with that you can create stress for the church planner you can create uh a situation where a church planner has to fire you and and these are friends you don't want to be firing them and like I say you keep people from being a part of what they're supposed to do and um it's important that we get the right people to begin with so we don't mess things up how do we how do we do that how do we avoid that mistake i would say the first thing is ask God for discernment ask him to guide you because this is a spiritual enterprise be asking him to guide you in the right direction uh for who is supposed to be on the team i've had church planters tell me that there is nothing in the early days of planning for their church plant and starting their church plant there is nothing that makes them pray more than praying for the right leaders uh they know that they need the right people and they don't want to mess that up um Matthew 9:37 and 38 says we should pray for those leaders jesus said to his disciples "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few ask the Lord of the harvest therefore to send out workers into his harvest field that last part ask the Lord of the harvest therefore to send out workers into his harvest field matthew uh in 9:38 is actually where we get a passage that we emphasize regularly in church planning at 9:38 a.m monday through Friday we send out a text to our prayer partners and we ask them to pray for different church planters and church planting leaders and partners that we have in church planting or or other ministry leaders that somehow support what we're doing in church planting but one of the prayers that we quite often pray is Lord send us more workers into the harvest i encourage you you could do that from Matthew 9:38 or from Luke 10:2 both of those passages say the same thing set an alarm for one of those times 9:38 a.m or 10:02 a.m and when that alarm goes off on your watch or your phone every day stop and pray for God to provide more workers for the harvest so there's many things that a church planner will pray for he'll pray for God's provision we need the finances Lord we need the place to meet we need we need you to provide the things that we need for the church plant uh a church plant appropriately pray for his family and for himself lord help us to grow in you help us not to to fall in temptation or help help us not to go the wrong way or to get angry or to do something that will harm our witness in the community or our leadership in the church a church planner will pray for partners to come come along and help but two of the most important things that a church planner will pray for is that the Holy Spirit will come and work in the community amongst the people where they are going to share the gospel and that the Holy Spirit will guide you to the right people to be on your team so we need to pray and pray and pray for the Holy Spirit's leadership the next thing we need is we need to consider who we might need there's a variety of factors to consider when putting your team together uh what are the spiritual leadership roles that a church should have ephesians 4 gives us um description of some spiritual leaders that the church needs and it says in Ephesians 4:11 "So Christ himself gave the apostles the prophets the evangelists the pastors or shepherds and teachers." Now these gifts are most commonly identified by using the acrostic apes which stands for apostle prophet evangelist shepherd and teacher and there are many tests out there and quizzes if you will that help leaders figure out what their giftings are are they more apostolic and by apostolic we mean people that create things that are new uh apostolic or an apostle in the New Testament was a capital A apostle meaning the first apostles those that were special and will never be repeated the ones that walked with Jesus here on earth plus the apostle Paul who saw him face to face on the road to Damascus who saw Jesus uh speaking to him from heaven those those are big A apostles but a small A apostle is somebody who is catalytic somebody who starts new things somebody who over and over maybe starts new churches so the role like I do and others on my team do and many of our church planners do is an apostolic role we are used by God to start things that are new um a prophet is someone who hears from God and speaks a specific word from God to a distinct person or persons so this this does not always mean telling somebody the future when we think prophet oh he's a prophet he can tell about the future that actually was a very small percentage of what happened in scripture uh the majority of what prophets did in scripture was telling people about what had already happened what it meant and what was going on now what God was saying to them right now not necessarily something about the future the next role that we have is an evangelist now we all are called to share our faith don't say "I'm not an evangelist so I don't have to tell people about Jesus." That is not what scripture says but scripture does say there are some people who have a special calling and passion and gifting to lead people to Jesus Christ they are ones that are out there either individually or in corporate settings whatever it may be telling people about Jesus and for whatever reason the Holy Spirit uses them in miraculous ways that many people come to faith in him uh the next one shepherd or pastor this is one who has an overwhelming concern for the continuing care of a specific faith community so a pastor of a church this is somebody who shepherds them encourages them is there for them when they're hurting challenges them uh to walk like Christ as they move forward this is somebody who has some special gifting to love people a group of people for a period of time sometimes a very long time and then we have a teacher a teacher is one that's responsible for progressive go growth and understanding and the application of truth within people uh a teacher is somebody that helps somebody go from point A to point B and so on in their faith and knowledge of Jesus they help them to walk across that load that road excuse me so each leader has one or more of these kind of gifts if they're in some kind of of ordained or or called out role within the church uh what is it that God has called them to be and that's some of what we want to figure out because we want to have some balance that balance of that on our team jesus was the only one who showed all of these in perfect balance he was the only one who totally fulfilled all these spiritual roles the rest of us we may be gifted in one or two of these areas um and we need to find others who are different from us to serve alongside us for example if we have a church full of leaders who are all apostles and prophets these are people that challenge people and charge forward and tell the truth and just keep going and going and going and if we have people that are only apostles and prophets but we don't have any shepherds or pastors in the group we're probably going to wear the people out we're going to burn them out they're just going to get exhausted and uh they're not going to be able to keep functioning fully and there will be no joy in the journey for them um a church with uh someone without anyone leading as an evangelist uh we can share our faith and yes some come to faith in Christ but the danger is there if we don't we don't have somebody who's really leading that charge and gifted in that seeing a lot of people come to Christ it's quite possible that our church will just get to a certain size and plateau it'll just stay there and if we just stay there eventually because of attrition through people moving or deaths or whatever the reason our church will dwindle and eventually it'll grow sick and eventually the church won't be there anymore because we don't have that fire for sharing the gospel and a church where the leaders are all shepherds you know we're going to feel very loved we may enjoy that we just love the sweet fellowship of our flock if you will but we're not going to move forward in any measurable way another way that we can look at what kinds of leaders that we have in the church or need in the church is based on what kind of ministries there are you've heard me mention some of these a couple of times already in this session uh we have worship leaders and disciplemaking leaders people that do evangelism uh people that lead our kids kids ministry our ministry to students our ministry to college students women's leaders senior adult leaders people that are good at administration or finance people that are really good in helping us get out and engage the community and serve the community we need people that are going to be in these different roles so we need to look at those who have not only the spiritual giftings but they can fulfill these special needs that we have within the church and the community another way we can look at we need on our team is by looking at your strengths and weaknesses so as a lead church planner I'll have some things I'm strong at really good at and that's where I should put my energy that's where I should spend my time there's going to be some other things that I'm not so good at and yeah maybe I need to get better in some of these but I also need to build a team around things that I'm not good at or maybe even something that I'm good at but because I'm good at these other things as a church planner I really shouldn't be spending my time on this other stuff like for example in my situation um I may be better at speaking or singing or sharing the gospel or leading the church now I can do bookkeeping i can do administration i have some skills in those areas things like that i love working with kids but even if those are things that maybe I'm good at it's not good if that's where I spend all my time when I have these responsibilities that only the planter should be leading in uh and there's some areas I should be sharing with others but I still should be spending a lot of my time in so I need to build a team that will help make sure we take care of my strengths my weaknesses my growth areas we often talk about play to your strengths do what you're good at shore up your weaknesses meaning get better at some things you're weak at but build your team around your growth areas or your needs we want to find some balance in those things so that we can be most effective in moving forward uh we also through this whole process need to make sure that we're not just recruiting people to be in certain roles or giftings but we need to also make sure they're on the same page with us we want to use our vision our mission our values and even our doctrine or theology to recruit people and to unrecruit so here's what I mean by that to recruit we want to encourage the right people to join us by unrecruit there's sometimes there's people that just don't match what we're doing and you may think "Boy we want everybody to come." But if you have somebody who's going to fight you on every step you take you probably don't need that person to be part of your core team or your leadership uh because they're they're just going to take away the energy you could put into moving forward with the church and sharing the gospel with the lost so one of the things a a church planner needs to do first of all with vision he needs to be are able to articulate a compelling vision for the church that God has called him to plant remember our vision is our preferred future we're painting a picture of what the church will become what the church will be in the future he needs to be able to do this in a one minute sharing time and three minutes if maybe he's getting to share a few minutes in a big church or maybe he's got a 30 minute time where somebody wants to sit down and have a long conversation or maybe he gets to go share in a partner church on a Sunday night and they give them basically the whole sermon time to talk about what God's doing in this new church plant he needs to be very able to be clear in this vision and make sure that people understand what he's saying so they can decide if they want to be a part of it or not now we're going to share with you here i got a I got a video a diagram that's hopefully going to show up to my side here in in the video and I want I want you to check this out now this is an illustration for the vision for a new church plant on this chart there's you there's the vision that you have your church plant vision uh the direction you're supposed to go that you believe God has told you this church is to go and then on this we also have options A B and C now I want you to look at these drawings here and think for a minute which of these three A B or C is the most dangerous to the new church plant and its direction now some of you may say "A well because in you know here's the church miner going this way and and this vision A is going man it's going like 80° or whatever off in the other direction so that's got to be dangerous you're going to have people trying to pull them in the wrong direction." Well the reality is if somebody's got that vision when you're going this way uh hopefully they won't try to join you in the first place they'll recognize boy we're going in two different directions and if they try to join you would see that and hopefully invite him to go somewhere else okay um and so uh that one's clear that's not a problem that's not that's not a huge danger now C you can see it goes over here it goes over there it just kind of goes everywhere and uh this one you look at C and you go man that guy's just plain crazy he can't figure out where he wants to go he's scattered he's going in a different direction every day he's up he's down he's right he's left he's all over well this isn't somebody that people will follow for very long he may be passionate and energetic about what he's doing now but then all of a sudden he's over here and it won't take very long till people will get tired of that and they'll see it for what it is that this just doesn't make sense and so they won't follow that so that's C the dangerous one believe it or not is B because when you look at this at the beginning your vision and be are almost identical you're like right on top of each other you're going but as you keep going out there it's like in mathematics when you have a ray array being a dot at one end and going off into infinity in that other direction if you start at the same point but you're not on the same line the farther and farther you get out there eventually you're infinity apart you're not going the same place at all but the problem is because these two visions are so close you thought you were in alignment you thought you were saying the same thing and I don't know if it's because maybe in some situations you were saying something and they were hearing something else that sometimes happened i've I've seen that happen in my own ministry and sometimes you were going the same way but something drew them in another direction maybe it's the pressures of this world or social agenda or maybe they got upset with you and all of a sudden they're off a little bit and the farther and farther you go they're way off from you well why is that dangerous because in the beginning you were so much together that you put a lot of trust in this person you gave them a lot of responsibility you encouraged others man he gets it stick with him or stick with her and you're you're telling people this is a great person to follow and now they're going off in a total another direction and you're left with the situation of saying yeah don't follow that person and what they will hear is that you change because you used to say follow them now you say don't follow them they won't see that this person's necessarily gone off in a different direction they'll think you have and so it's really important before you put a lot of trust and a lot of faith and a lot of leadership in somebody you really make sure that you're going in the same direction i had this happen in a church plant I was in with a guy who was my best friend in that situation we did everything together but then he started listening to some others that were kind of going another direction and he got drawn in that direction and then one day came to me and said "I'm out because you're not doing what we want." And I'm like "I've never changed i've always been going in this direction it hasn't changed." He's like "Yeah but that's not for me." And it was very hurtful and it was damaging to the church we had to work to recover from that so it's important to get going in the right direction at the same time so the other thing a part of that like I say gave an example where he could be going off a little bit direct different direction that's something we refer to as mission drift and mission drift can happen sometimes just because you have not communicated the vision clearly enough or often enough you have to tell people the vision over and over and over again you can't be like the guy who married somebody and on his wedding day said "I love you." to his new bride and then you know 30 years later she's like why don't you tell me you love me he's like well I told you I love you i haven't changed my mind well after 30 years she might be beginning to wonder about it because she hasn't heard about it and so what happens in mission drift is we're not keeping it in front of them uh you need to be telling people the vision of your tree your church maybe it's weekly but at least every month uh guy we referred to earlier in this series is Dr jeff and I remember when he was a church planner uh I I remember him coming to the Northwest and speaking to a group of pastors and leaders and somebody asked him "How do you spend your time?" Now they were actually kind of doing like some people did to Jesus where they tried to ask a question and trip him up and so like well what does a church planter do anyway you don't really have people yet so how do you spend your time and Jeff's answer is something that burned in my brain to this day he said "I spend at least a third of my time casting vision." And all of a sudden this room that was cynical is like "Wait a minute what are you talking about first of all how can you even do that and second of all why?" And he said "Well how I do that is when I go to lunch with somebody when I share in a small group when I'm preaching when I'm when I'm talking to a group whatever it is I'm talking about the vision of the new church and where we're going." And uh he said why I do that is because if I don't do that they'll have mission drift it'll go away they won't remember what we're doing and he says and if they lose the vision I'm going to end up doing all the work and I don't want to work that hard i want them to do the work with me so I keep the vision in front of them so that they're passionate about it and they're committed to do what we need to do so don't let the mission drift happen don't let social issues happen uh even today when I was doing this I had a a lunch with somebody and he was talking about there were some people that was upset about something that I had said in a message and I'm not going to take the time to go into the message i'm not going to preach it to you here but the thing they were upset with me about was something that Jesus said it was just me telling them what Jesus said and they were upset by that uh that's okay i'm not offended by that i'm not hurt by that i'm not going to go home and cry about it uh if I'm somebody doesn't like what I said because I quoted Jesus I'm sticking with Jesus we need to stay to what he's called us we need to stay to scripture but we also need to stay to the vision to be kind to speak the truth in love but we still need to speak the truth and um otherwise we will let what's popular today what's the social agenda of today take over the teachings of Jesus and the teaching of the apostle Paul and others that have written in scripture we can't let that happen we need to be proactive and we need to be definitive we need to define what we're saying to make sure that we're on the same page and we're following the same vision and part of how you know this happens is when it goes from being your vision as the church planner to people talking about our vision for the new church so we need to talk about those things we need to talk about the vision of the church we need to talk about the mission we need to talk about core values which means how we're going to do things how are we how are we going to show love to one another how we're going to work diligently how we're going to risk things even if it means they don't always work we need to share those core values and we also need to go beyond that to doctrine we need to make sure that people understand that these are our core beliefs and we're not going to move and I won't take time to go bullet by bullet but there have been times I've done this long enough where I've sat down with somebody who says "Hey our group wants to come join what you're doing." And I'll say "Okay let's make sure we believe the same things." And I will go point by point by point on what we believe scripture says and uh sometimes there's major issues most of the time there we're talking about major issues and we're not going to change our minds on that and we're not going to go somewhere else so meaning if if somebody says "Well I think Jesus is one way to God." Well Jesus was very clear he says "I am the way and the truth and the life and no man comes to the father but by me i am the only way." If they're not going to agree with that we're not going to work together but they might have differing opinions about things in theology and how what certain interpretations mean and you know what some of those are they're secondary issues we're not going to let those hold us up we talk about uh close-handed issues meaning these are ones we're we're going to so to speak go to the cross for we're not willing to give those up but there's open-handed issues where maybe we don't agree but but we can still work together and it's important that we understand those and then that even goes beyond theology and how we're going to do things we need to talk about expectations for how we're going to do worship and what our styles are going to be how we're going to handle finances how we're going to hire people and who's going to get hired first if we hire somebody what kind of ministries are we going to have what kind of ministries we're not going to have and why where we're going to focus on planning a church how are we going to make decisions what's going to be our disciplehip proc uh priority and how are we going to have access to the pastor because it's going to change in the early times leaders are going to have a lot more time with the pastor and that's important to the to many of them but over time as the church grows that access and availability is going to lessen we need to talk through those things so people are not surprised by it when they come or that they come with us and they keep trying to push for their preferences instead of the things we've clearly articulated as to where we're going this will help us to not only build unity but also to avoid a painful breakup later on