Lessons Learned

Got to spend some time with other church planters today from the metro area. I always love to get together with these guys. It always encourages and challenges me. We typically talk about what everyone is doing and the lessons they have learned over the last season of life. As the facilitator of our meeting asked "what are you learning these days" my mind was immediately filled with lessons that I have learned over the couple of years. I thought I would share a few here.

1) Expect the Unexpected-- God will always do things in your church that you never dreamed that you would be apart of. When you go into the journey of planting a church you will always have in your mind what it is going to "look like." The reality is, you never know what it is going to look like. For instance here in NYC God has really opened doors for us to to do ministry with those living with HIV/ AIDS. We never had this ministry in any of our "vision" documents, but it is the ministry that God has given us and quite frankly it is the ministry that we are seeing the most open doors in. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of other ministries we are involved in and they are doing great things, it is just that this one area came out of no where and God really seems to be using it.

2) Invest in Leadership-- Your ability to grow a healthy church will rest solely on your ability to raise up healthy leaders. We are entering a season at The Gallery Church were we are refocusing our efforts on connecting with and investing in our leaders. A couple of the things we are doing to invest is: 1) Send resources that will be valuable to our leaders. Things that will feed into their lives. 2) Take them away on retreats. We feel like we can accomplish more in a 48 hour retreat than a years worth of training. All in all, we are trying to create a culture that values leadership.

3) Embrace Your Gifts-- As pastors, each of us are gifted in different ways. The problem is that as pastors we have to wear so many different hats that we will inevitably have to operate outside of our gifting. If we end up operating out of our gifting to much and for too long we will be out of balance in our personal lives and we will create a strain on our staff teams. If the main leader is out of alignment then chances are the whole organization will be out of alignment. The remedy for this is for us to embrace what we are gifted to do and then empower others to do what we are not gifted to do. We need to steer clear of the tendency that says a pastor has to be a jack of all trades. "He gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastor/teachers."


My list of lessons is up to 15, so I will continue to blog more of them. I would love to hear your thoughts as to the lessons you are learning.