Church planters are entrepreneurs and love to hit the ground running.  My experience in working with planters is that they are incredible visionaries and are motivated by seeing results.  Combine this with a driven personality and I frequently see planters starting the process of planting with a model already in place and plans to rapidly reach a community for Jesus.  This visionary entrepreneurship is exciting and easy to follow, but can also cause church planters to get ahead of themselves and more importantly God.

My assumption in this post is that God is already active in the world and has been long working in the communities we plant to bring about the salvation of many and the redemption of His creation.  So as not to take this for granted here are some Scriptures to support that.  Feel free to comment as I’m still learning through this and would appreciate your push back and further examples.

1. God loves the world. As John 3:16, the most quoted text points out God demonstrates that love by sending his Son, Jesus.  But God’s love is not limited to just the saving work of Jesus.  Matthew 5:45 points out that we are to follow Jesus’ example in loving our enemies.  The text points out that, God “gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.”  While this can frustrate us about God, it reveals his nature to love.
2. God Prepares the way for our ministry. God was working in Ninevah to prepare the way for Jonah’s ministry.  In essence, God was already active in Ninevah before Jonah arrived to do his mission work.  The principle here is that God prepares people to receive God’s grace.  Acts 17 is another example of God preparing the way.  Paul’s powerful preaching in Athens was based on the unknown God.  The people of Athens were spiritual and religious.  God used that spirituality to set the stage for Paul’s ministry.
3. God uses the ungodly to accomplish His will. The story of the exile is tragic, but it reminds us that God was at work among pagans to accomplish His will.  God was strategically subversive using the evil powers of the day to accomplish His will.  While the Jews at the time probably felt no comfort in that, hindsight shows us that God was in control during one of the darkest times in the history of His followers.  He worked outside the community of believers to accomplish His will and expand His kingdom.
4. God directs the actions of the church. There are also many evidences in Scripture of God directing the ministry of His people.  The whole book of Acts reads like a play where the Holy Spirit is the director.  One such example is the Macedonian call.  The Holy Spirit literally prevents Paul and Silas from preaching in certain areas and speaks to Paul in a dream to direct him to Macedonia.  The result was a church in Philippi.  Acts 10:22 tells a similar story of God working in the family of Cornelius a Gentile.  The Spirit directs Peter and through this experience the gospel is unleashed on the Gentiles.  One could argue pretty easily though that this is God working inside the Church.
5. God’s work is more than just individual salvation. Western evangelicals tend to look at salvation from a narrow point of view.  When we think of salvation, we think of it in terms of personal salvation.  God’s work is much bigger than that.  The Old Testament law makes provision for the widows, orphans and foreigners.   This gets back to the first point that God loves the world.  Environmentalism, the good kind not the wacky nut job kind , social justice, feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, providing medicine to the sick, all of these are God’s work.  Part of the subversiveness of God is that just as He used pagans to accomplish his will in the exile, we see today that He is using pagans to accomplish much good in the world today.  I think we need to recapture the Jewish sense of shema and understand that God’s work is bigger than just personal salvation but inclusive of creation.  It’s the restoration of creation, the fullness of God’s kingdom. God’s work is not just salvific in nature, but also restorative.  God can use these things to lay the groundwork for the church and for missional leaders who can proclaim the good news and the fullness of truth bringing true meaning to the good they do.  The healings of Jesus are another example.  They were God’s work but not necessarily salvific.

As church planters, I think the first priority is to discover what God is already doing in the community.  Rather than starting with a Sunday service in mind, we should begin to determine what questions the community is asking and what God’s answer to those questions are.  We begin to answer the question what is good news for this community?  And where we see God at work, we join in and begin the work of proclaiming good news and making disciples.  God is already tugging at the hearts of many and is busy bringing about the transformation of the communities we are planting churches in.  It’s time we get on board with God’s plan and stop asking him to bless and provide for ours.  In the next couple of posts I’ll focus on some ideas for learning more about the community and discovering God’s work outside the church.