Wow, my boys are freaked out about tornados. Having grown up out West in California and Arizona they grew up with threat of natural disasters … earthquakes (yawn), tsunamis (sigh), venomous snakes and insects, heat, and so on but tornadoes? You’d think Armageddon is coming. They’re terrified so when it rains and is windy they’re thinking we’re going to get sucked up. So last night we watched Kung Fu Panda to take their mind off things.
As I watched the movie in light of the book Deliberate Simplicity I’ve been reading it got me thinking. Right now, I’m entrenched in figuring out an assessment process to determine what church planters are going to get funding from us. Like we’ve talked before, assessments seems only really applicable when there’s money involved. If you’re not getting money who then cares what others say or think about you? So I go back and forth mentally knowing that our assessment process bogs down the very movement we long for but since there’s money involved it snags it up.
It seems in most current church planting systems everything is so front-loaded. We Discover, Design, Develop, and then Deploy. In the book I’m reading their model for rapid church planting is … Identify, Deploy, Train, Support. Basically, they find the right leader and turn him loose. That’s it. “We find that deploying leaders first allows us to put leaders into the game more rapidly and creates motivated learners (at least they now have informed questions to ask).”
It’s akin to learning Kung Fu. How do you learn unless you immediately start doing it? It’s hands-on. Isn’t church plantin that way? Isn’t it learned best but just doing it? I think here’s our overarching problem. We’re not risk takers. Most church planting organizations are high on control thus on over emphasis in formal assessments and goal-setting and our funding is based upon whether someone “hits their marks.” We’re a culture of control. The longer an organization has been around the tighter the controls. On the other hand, movements are fluid, organic, and need laxed controls to breathe and move. This is a culture of taking risks. The reality is that there are failures in both camps it’s just that one side doesn’t allow for it while the other knows it’ part of the game.
If we ever want to move church planting away from only the elite and talented doing it then we need to rethink how we get people involved. Like learning Kung Fu, we just need to get people going and help them on the fly.
