Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Where to plant a new church?


Each United Methodist pastor works in the local church and almost always functions at a denominational level as well. My denominational role is to chair the Board of Congregational Development of our Pacific Northwest Annual Conference. We have several million dollars earmarked for the purpose of starting new churches, but we've had serious obstacles over the last many years. In fact, our last several church starts have ended in failure, costing thousands of dollars, but not leading to new congregations.

So over the last few years I've led the board in a reassessment of our strategies and in hiring new staff to do the groundwork. These last few days our board met, and sad to say, we spent an entire day talking about new locations, but without coming up with a firm commitment on any of them. Vancouver? Lake Tapps? Post Falls? Staff is heading back now to continue the research and make a new proposal, but what a difficult exercise we found ourselves in.

Anyway, please pray for us that we'll get the research right and plant our next churches where they need to be.

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