Church Planting Quotes

“The IMPOSSIBLE is ONLY relevant to those who NEVER attempt it…otherwise it is ABSTACT and MEANINGLESS”
― John Paul Warren

“Missional leaders understand the power of connecting relationally in their community through personal networking.”
― Gary Rohrmayer

“The world and it's people are my church".

~R. Alan Woods [1996]”
― R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal

“I thought this director gig was just one of those side roads we take at times on the journey to our true purpose. Now I see that in God's economy, nothing is wasted”
― Gay Idle, Bloom Where You're Planted

“The mission that God has given us is a highly relational mission. Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you" John 20:21. Jesus came into this world, lived in obscurity for 30 years and then spent three years relationally investing in twelve men, whose charge was to do the same thing by relationally investing in others. This strategy has worked for 2000 years each of us has been touched by someone reaching out to and investing in us relationally, thus advancing the gospel and the mission of God.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, First Steps for Planting a Missional Church

“Missional leaders not only feel the burden of God's mission but they also act on the burden and act upon it sacrificially. Leading a missional church is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage to push yourself beyond your comfort zone and to lead the church beyond it personal limits. Brokenness, inner turmoil and sacrifice will always be part of the missional leader's life.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Next Steps For Leading a Missional Church

“Effective leaders are good spotters. They are on the lookout for
potential leaders. They have the ability to look beyond other’s deficiencies to
see their possibilities.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“Great leaders are teachable leaders.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“When you start pursuing your vision, some people will try to discourage you. When they can't discourage you, they'll try to discredit you. When they can't discredit you, they'll start saying they were there from the start.”
― Andrena Sawyer

“Every church has a marketing plan! The only difference is that some are better than others! When I think of marketing I think of building a relationship with those within reach of your ministry who know nothing about your church or are disconnected from your people.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, First Steps for Planting a Missional Church

“Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the relationship all over again. The old adage “it takes six to stick” is proven true over and over again. I realized this in year three of our church plant. I think of the hundreds of people that came to our services that had no connection with me or our people because we were willing to build a sustained relationship with them through marketing.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, First Steps for Planting a Missional Church

“One of the landmines that church planters never dodge is the landmine
of leadership development. I will never forget the day when I realized
that there are no such things as 'ready-made leaders'.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“Having a good definition of spiritual leadership is critical to development
of leadership cultural throughout your church. You need to know what you are
shooting for if you are going to hit the target.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“As the church get older and older it becomes harder to keep evangelism on the front burner because of all the competing issues that keeps pushing it back.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“Effective networkers know how to make a positive first impression. They understand their environment and know want is acceptable and unacceptable conversation and attire. They know how to get people to talk about themselves, their business, their desires and dreams. They know how to tell who they are and what they do in twenty-five words or less, in a way that draws questions out of others. There is nothing more annoying than someone who just talks about themselves and shows little interest in others. Networkers are effective listeners and continually learning about the nuances of their communities and the leaders who serve them.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“Missional leaders know that their church will only grow as large as its capacity to provide ongoing care through a network of small groups and ministry teams.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Next Steps For Leading a Missional Church

“There is nothing better than to have a highly motivated team of leaders focused on than reaching those far from Christ. And yet statistics and our experience reveal that evangelism entropy can creep deep inside a new church within months of its first public service. The longer we are around new churches the more amazed we are at how quickly these mission-focused, vibrant new churches become old.”
― Gary Rohrmayer, Church Planting Landmines

“Entrepreneurs are favored in neoliberal contexts because they prize ingenuity, self-invention, adaptation, dispensing with establishment hierarchies, and self-mastery. Church planting can be read as a religious incarnation of late modernity's entrepreneurial disposition.”
― James S. Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity

“I believe, the future church will be high-touch, experience focused, and Spirit-evident small congregations that grow from conversions, not church transfers. Its clergy will be co-vocational and willing to equip believers for their lives on Monday. It will be embedded in the marketplace, dual-using their facilities for their own sustainability and the flourishing of the local economy.”
― Svetlana Papazov, Church For Monday: Equipping Believers for Mission at Work

“Church planting is still the most effective means for advancing the gospel locally, regionally and globally.”
― Gary Rohrmayer

“Etymologically, paroikia (a compound word from para and oikos) literally means “next to” or “alongside of the house” and, in a technical sense, meant a group of resident aliens. This sense of “parish” carried a theological context into the life of the Early Church and meant a “Christian society of strangers or aliens whose true state or citizenship is in heaven.” So whether one’s flock consists of fifty people in a church which can financially sustain a priest or if it is merely a few people in a living room whose priest must find secular employment, it is a parish.

This original meaning of parish also implies the kind of evangelism that accompanies the call of a true parish priest. A parish is a geographical distinction rather than a member-oriented distinction. A priest’s duties do not pertain only to the people who fill the pews of his church on a Sunday morning. He is a priest to everyone who fills the houses in the “cure” where God as placed him. This ministry might not look like choir rehearsals, rector’s meetings, midweek “extreme” youth nights, or Saturday weddings. Instead, it looks like helping a battered wife find shelter from her abusive husband, discretely paying a poor neighbor’s heating oil bill when their tank runs empty in the middle of a bitter snow storm, providing an extra set of hands to a farmer who needs to get all of his freshly-baled hay in the barn before it rains that night, taking food from his own pantry or freezer to help feed a neighbor’s family, or offering his home for emergency foster care. This kind of “parochial” ministry was best modeled by the old Russian staretzi (holy men) who found every opportunity to incarnate the hands and feet of Christ to the communities where they lived. Perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer caught a glimpse of the true nature of parish life through his introduction of the “Parson” in the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Note how the issues of sacrifice, humility, and community mentioned above characterize this Parson’s cure even when opportunities were available for “greater” things:

"There was a good man of religion, a poor Parson, but rich in holy thought and deed. He was also a learned man, a clerk, and would faithfully preach Christ’s gospel and devoutly instruct his parishioners. He was benign, wonderfully diligent, and patient in adversity, as he was often tested. He was loath to excommunicate for unpaid tithes, but rather would give to his poor parishioners out of the church alms and also of his own substance; in little he found sufficiency. His parish was wide and the houses far apart, but not even for thunder or rain did he neglect to visit the farthest, great or small, in sickness or misfortune, going on foot, a staff in his hand… He would not farm out his benefice, nor leave his sheep stuck fast in the mire, while he ran to London to St. Paul’s, to get an easy appointment as a chantry-priest, or to be retained by some guild, but dwelled at home and guarded his fold well, so that the wolf would not make it miscarry… There was nowhere a better priest than he. He looked for no pomp and reverence, nor yet was his conscience too particular; but the teaching of Christ and his apostles he taught, and first he followed it himself."

As we can see, the distinction between the work of worship and the work of ministry becomes clear. We worship God via the Eucharist. We serve God via our ministry to others. Large congregations make it possible for clergy and congregation to worship anonymously (even with strangers) while often omitting ministry altogether. No wonder Satan wants to discredit house churches and make them “odd things”! Thus, while the actual house church may only boast a membership in the single digits, the house church parish is much larger—perhaps into the hundreds as is the case with my own—and the overall ministry is more like that of Christ’s own—feeding, healing, forgiving, engaging in all the cycles of community life, whether the people attend”
― Alan L. Andraeas, Sacred House: What Do You Need for a Liturgical, Sacramental House Church?

“Both Jesus and Paul practiced form following function. The biblical function of the mission, multiplicative disciple-making, provided the direction and the form of the churches that followed.

The seemed to know that if you make disciple-making disciples, the result is always a biblically functioning community--Jesus' church.”
― Roy Moran, Spent Matches: Igniting the Signal Fire for the Spiritually Dissatisfied

“The first lesson of church plantology is that planting a church should never be our focus. Christ never commanded his disciples to plant churches, because it’s not what He wanted them to focus on. Focusing on the church to be planted leads to church starting, whereas focusing on the Great Commission itself leads to church planting.”
― Peyton Jones, Church Plantology: The Art and Science of Planting Churches

“If you plant churches, discipleship may or may not happen. Yet if you devote yourself to making disciples, churches will inevitably be planted.”
― Peyton Jones, Church Plantology: The Art and Science of Planting Churches

“Eckhart Schnabel quoted Ferdinand Hahn, saying, “The early church was a missionary church. The proclamation, the teaching, all activities of the early Christians had a missionary dimension.”
― Peyton Jones, Church Plantology: The Art and Science of Planting Churches

“Why does every young church planter these days feel compelled to articulate a "mission statement" and a "vision statement," which will then be regularly rehearsed on stage, in videos, and in all the church's literature? If you had asked pastors for the first two thousand years of church history what their mission statement was, they would have looked confused by the question and then probably opened their Bibles and pointed to the last verses of Matthew 28.”
― Jonathan Leeman, One Assembly: Rethinking the Multisite and Multiservice Church Models