It’s easy to jump into church planting with presuppositions about what we need and how things will turn out if we have the right resources.
But it doesn’t take long for reality to set in, and we realize our grand plans seem to be lacking. We may be tempted to assume that with the right resources we would be further along in our church planting efforts.
Rather than recognizing what we have, we can become wrongly fixated on what we lack.
Some of God’s greatest miracles happened in seemingly simple moments, with seemingly limited resources.
When Jesus healed the blind man in the Gospel of John, what did He have? He had the dirt in front of Him and spit; yet the miracle still happened in spite of what He seemingly lacked. In other words, it was His power that healed the blind man— not the mud, of course.
Here are two things to remember when you feel like all you have is a little bit of mud to work with:
We need less than we think and have more than we realize.
Church planters are usually starting with the bare minimum. We may lack a church building, offices or full-time paid staff. All of these are helpful resources, but none are essential to advancing the gospel.
The gospel did not spread throughout the world in the early church through carefully crafted programing and astronomical funding. It spread, and the church grew, through the witness of faithful men and women
We often need less resources than we think, and we usually have more than we realize. Church planting requires leaders to be resourceful and to use what is right in front of them to fulfill God’s mission. While you may not have much, you have something.
When resources are lacking, this is an opportunity to see God at work. After all, He did a lot with five loaves of bread and two fish (Matthew 14:13-21), and His spit and mud (John 9).
People are your greatest resource.
It’s easy to think of resources solely as the stuff we need to have a successful church—a building, sound systems or more money. But perhaps the greatest earthly resource God gives us is His people. No planter—no Christian—is meant to advance God’s kingdom alone.
At Send Network, we believe in the power of brotherhood, multiplication and holistic restoration. We also believe God has a plan to use ordinary but faithful people to live out these values in His name. Although we are tremendously lacking on our own, we believe we are never lacking when we draw from the abundant power Christ has given us as believers living on mission together.
Published December 5, 2019
