Ok, I’ve just completed my beta version for a City Personality Fit Questionnaire. Basically, it’s a questionnaire designed to help church planters find a good “city fit” for where they’re going to start a new church. This is something that has been bubbling in my thinking for a while now. How much thought goes into not only the city but the type of city we’re going to plant in? Assuming cities each have distinct personalities is there a way to match them with our own?
Have you ever moved to a place where everything about the city, the people, the lifestyle, and worldview just didn’t fit? You feel really out of your element and everything takes so much energy just to function there. On the other hand, have you ever moved to a city where everything about it … the lifestyle, the people, the worldview, and culture was such a good fit that it gave you energy and passion? Think about in terms of church planting and coupling that energy and passion with the process of church planting. Woah, dude … potent.
Think about it. The 3 biggest decisions / questions in your life are (1) what you going to do? (job, career), (2) with who? (your marriage partner), and then (3) where? We put sooooo much effort and emphasis in the first two right? We pray about it endlessly, we scrutinize, seek counsel, weigh the pros and cons, talk about it with friends, post about it on Twitter, work really hard, and in the end we hope and pray we’ve made the right decisions. If we do that for the first two then why not the third? Are we any less spiritual that we go through all of this effort for the first two? Why or how would it be unspiritual to go through this same tedious process with the last?
That’s why I’ve created this City Personality Fit Questionnaire to help you take this third choice seriously especially when it comes to church planting. So go ahead, give it a try. Click on city-personality-fit1 to download it, then fill it out, and email it back to me. Any takers?
