Steve Nicholson is the Senior Pastor of Vineyard Christian Church of Evanston, a Board Member of the Vineyard USA, and its National Church Planting Coordinator. He gave an interview with Cutting Edge (the Church Planting Newsletter of the Vineyard) several years ago on the Challenges of Church Planting. We quote below (from the Cutting Edge article) the counsel that Steve gave on a number of key challenges. We are now paying very close attention to them as they are likely to be relevant for us at this stage of our journey:

1. Have realistic expectations. Out of fear you sometimes have an overly fast timetable. If your expectations are too high, you become your own worst enemy. You start criticizing yourself, feeling like a failure, like it’s not working when actually it may be doing just fine. It may be right on track for the way a church plant should go. But it doesn’t look anything like what you came from.

People aren’t going to have the same degree of maturity or unity about vision. Every church develops a culture, but in the beginning you don’t have one at all. We tend to look at the two or three widely known people who grew gigantic churches in a short period of time, and measure ourselves by that—which ultimately become very self-defeating.

You have to know enough about your vision in the beginning to be able to tell people about it and give them some handles.

2. Being bivocational: The tendency with church planters who aren’t bivocational is to set up an office and wait for people to come. But that doesn’t work. You have to get out there and connect with people, and being bivocational helps you do that.

Also, these days, one of the first things people ask you is what you do for work. If you tell them that your full-time job is to “start this church” and that’s the only thing you are doing, that can often raise suspicions and barriers. They don’t trust that. Of course, it’s OK to be full-time if you have a church of 100 or more; that seems legitimate to people. But less than that and it doesn’t seems justified; it sounds like a scam or a cult. So having another vocation can be an advantage.

On the other hand, there are situations where being bivocational can be a problem. Perhaps you’re older or have a well-established family. But then your whole strategy changes; you do a really fast start-up, aiming to get a couple hundred people quite quickly. But usually if you are in that setting, you are older, more established, and possess the experience and the means to do those things. I can think of several examples of older people who have planted before, had experience in churches, knew how to pastor, but needed to do a faster start-up. It wouldn’t have made sense for them to be bivocational.

3. The biggest challenge is the tendency to want every warm body to go with you to make you feel better. Then when you get there, you may well find out that some of those people aren’t very helpful, and in fact may be distracting or draining to the ultimate process that you have before you. So I always tell planters, “Don’t start by thinking of people, think of functions. Then fill the functions in your team.”

Resist the impulse to just bring your friends, or to bring as many people as you can. Because if they are not functionally helpful, very likely they are going to be a drain. In the very early stages of church planting, if you’re not helping, you’re probably hurting. If you are not pulling the wagon, you are probably dragging your feet off the back end. So the church planter wants to be a little more ruthless about who he brings with him. Of course, it’s not just function; you do need to like them; they need to be people you enjoy spending time with. But they may or may not be close friends. You become friends along the way. I tell people, “If you have a friend but they don’t have a good track record of functioning in the ways you need, leave them at home. That way they will still be your friends. Otherwise, if you take them with you, you are all going to be frustrated and probably not friends anymore, either.”

Thinking in terms of functions: You are looking for worship leaders, evangelist / gatherers, administrators, small group leaders. And the best predictor of what they can be is past behavior. What have they done in the recent past? That’s probably what they are going to do in the near future. Changing locations isn’t going to make that much difference. If they haven’t gathered people or pastored people in the mother church, they probably won’t do it in the plant either. That’s what you want to look at carefully.

The must have: Worship leaders and evangelist/gatherers.

4. Developing culture: Whatever you do in the very beginning is foundational and will affect everything thereafter. Your most key values need to be not only talked about but practiced as much as possible, even if they’re only in embryonic form. Certain things will have to be delayed until later because you just can’t do everything all at once. But there are key values—a short list of four or five things—that you need to be putting on the table early if you want them to be a strong part of your church. And it’s not what you say so much as what you do. Those things need to be thought about and planned very deliberately.

Take evangelism. It doesn’t have to be full-orbed, but I would be doing as many things as I could to encourage people to build relationships with non-Christians, first of all by doing it yourself and secondly by having lots of social events people can invite friends to.

Or take worship. You’ll have to demonstrate and talk about an approach to worship centered on an expectation of meeting with God. For most people—even folks who’ve been in church their whole life—this is an alien concept.

Most people misunderstand Vineyard worship. They’ll come to us and say, “Give us all your music.” They’ll get a guitar and a drum set and play the same songs. Then they come back to us and say, “How come it doesn’t work for us the same way it works for you?”

When they’re with us, they will sense that people are connecting with God. Then they play the songs at their own place and when that doesn’t happen, they don’t understand why. I tell them it’s not the style of music—it’s not the notes or the instruments or the words. It’s the expectation in people’s heads of what they are doing when they come together. You have to teach people what biblical worship is, what it means to be the people of God coming into the presence of God. I wonder how many people in the church have ever heard a sermon on the church being God’s temple, the place where God dwells, and the connection that might have with worship. I’ve been in situations where people have been struggling with their worship and they can’t get people to respond, and think the problem is the wrong songs or the wrong worship sets. Then I ask if they’ve ever taught people how to respond. They look stunned. But how can we expect people to respond if we’ve never taught them how?

Sometimes you have to be very nitty-gritty. You talk about worshiping with your whole person—worshipping with your intellect, your emotions, and your body. You talk about putting aside distractions or disappointments of the week and coming into God’s presence. You teach people to be looking for that interaction, that connection with God in worship. And of course folks have to see it. Once it’s happening in a church people start catching on as they observe worship. They sense it before you teach it. But in the beginning, before you have that critical mass of people already worshiping, it’s a hump to get over.

Or take openness, directness, and vulnerability in the way relationships are handled. You want to help people understand “how we are going to do relationships” in this place. That’s a definite culture. If you get a bad culture in how relationships are handled, it comes back to get you in a major way later.

If you want people to be vulnerable, you have to be vulnerable. If you want them to handle relationships straight—things like “Go to the person you have a conflict with instead of to everybody else”—you have to be doing that yourself. Get you core team to start doing that. Operating that way relationally is a new concept for most people—even those who have grown up in the church!—and has to be learned.

5. Developing leaders: You have to be creating commitment among the people you have, and moving the right people into leadership to help take care of people and help run the show. The interesting challenge is that you have to do that at the same time you are still gathering other people. It’s one of those “scratch your head and rub your stomach” things; you have to do it all, all the time.

If you are a charismatic individual or very evangelistic, you can hold up much bigger numbers without training leaders or developing infrastructure—but the problem is you will have a big crowd but not a church. You’ll have a lot of people who come around but they aren’t being discipled or taught to live as a Christian, and they will be in constant messes. Eventually it’s going to be like living in a house with 100 people but nobody ever cleans the toilet. Things are going to start to smell after awhile, and it’s going to become a more and more unpleasant place to live. Besides, there are still only 24 hours in a day, and even if you overwork yourself, there is a limit to how far you can go.

People are changed the most by significant, meaningful relationships with other people who have taken them under their wing, not so much from big mass services or one-shot events.

So you cultivate leadership in people just by living life with them, giving them things from your experience.

7. Sunday services: Let’s say a person is a good, general “all-rounder”—good one-on-one, good in small groups, decent in preaching. I would encourage him, probably, to take a slower road toward Sunday services. Build a good infrastructure of small groups and leadership, and have some other alternative setting for meetings. (Until you decide to launch weekly services, you’ll want to avoid meeting on Sunday mornings because of all the cultural expectations that brings. Once you get 70 or 80 adults, then you can start thinking about Sunday mornings.)

On the other hand, some guys are not that strong at the small group level—their main gift is being up front, running events, and preaching. They need to move more quickly to some kind of Sunday event on a regular basis so they can maximize their strong points. If your main gift is preaching, you have to have a way to use it; it’s not going to show up in small groups. So I work with those guys to develop a strategy where they gather a crowd more quickly and go to Sundays more quickly…but then they have to work really, really hard after the fact to build the infrastructure underneath it. They create a bubble and then work frantically to build a skeleton underneath it before the thing pops. That’s also hard work, but sometimes that’s appropriate for the particulars of the situation. They may have 100 people on Sunday, but they are going bonkers getting all the workers in place to pull this all off. It’s not a short-cut. It’s the same work, just with the order shuffled.

8. First year challengers: There are always people who come into church plants with agendas, because people with agendas want to go to a place that’s unformed, fluid, where they can have a hand in shaping the direction and culture of a place.

Generally they don’t go to big churches because there’s no opportunity to do that; the direction is already set. But a new church is always an opportunity for people. The question is, how are you going to handle it? You can mitigate it a bit by being very, very clear about your vision and direction, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to test you on how much you are going to stick to it.

On the positive side, you are going to gain some great people who are reasonably healthy, who may have leadership potential, who will find you and say, “This is what I’ve always been looking for,” and they will join up. They may have been unused in their former church, or they may just not have been comfortable there. And then you always hope there will be wonderful stories about people who get saved along the way and for whom this is what church is. Hopefully those two groups of people will be most of what you have.

You will also see two other groups: healthy people who have a different vision who want to see if your vision will match theirs. Some may just be trying to find the church with a matching vision and will eventually realize that you don’t and will go elsewhere. Others may have a subconscious desire to work out their vision someplace without doing the hard work of being the leader themselves, so they may try to push it onto you. You will have to resist it, and they may fight you and make a little trouble for you. You just have to hang on to “This is what we’re doing, this is where we are going, and we are not doing these other things, at least not right now.”

The other group you will get is the broken and needy people. A certain number of those people get shuffled from church to church. They have difficulty relating to people and settling in. They will come for their relational needs, maybe in hopes of getting a pastor who will pay more attention to them than what they can get in a bigger church. Your challenge will be how to be compassionate and merciful without letting them suck up so much of your time that it distracts you from your other main task of gathering people and raising up leaders, which will be necessary if you are ever going to develop a healing church that can actually have the capability of handling more broken people.

The other biggest challenge is your own spiritual life. It’s very typical to work, work, work, minister, minister, minister, without recharging or working on your own spiritual life. Slowly but surely the spiritual fire you started with begins to die out. I think that in the same way you carve out time to gather people, you have to carve out time simply to attend to your own spiritual life, to try to stay healthy. Otherwise you will go down the drain. It’s not just about getting through the first year or getting the first 100 people. It’s about still being a man or woman of God 20, 30 years down the road, and not having crashed and burned along the way. You need to keep in mind that the biggest reason church plants fail is not because the church fails, it’s because the pastor has crashed. Their spiritual life goes down the tubes, and then their moral life follows, or even if that doesn’t happen, they don’t have the internal resources and become totally demoralized. They get to where they can’t hear God anymore and can’t get any direction from God. They end up floundering. It’s so important to keep in mind that this is not a sprint to the two-year point. It’s a marathon, something you are going to do for the rest of your life. So take your time daily with God, and on a regular basis get out of town and spend an extended time with God. Make sure there’s time for fun with your family and friends. Otherwise you are going to lose it all just trying to get to some elusive goal.