Should Pre-Christians Be Included in the Launch Team Covenant?
Posted by Doug Foltz on May 4, 2011 in Launch Team | 2 comments
In case you’ve missed them, here are the first three parts of this series on launch team covenants.
Why Should I Have a Launch Team Covenant?
What Should I Include in a Launch Team Covenant?
Today’s question is perhaps the easiest for me to answer. You should absolutely include pre-Christians in the launch team covenant. The church is the only organization that doesn’t exist for its own members. Our mission is to make disciples of Jesus. It’s critical to build this DNA into the early life of the church. Having pre-Christians around keeps us focused.
The bigger question is how do you include them? This depends greatly on two factors.
1. How is your launch team covenant worded. As I mentioned previously, I would word the covenant in such a way that it revolved around Christian rhythms of life. Then regardless where you are in your journey of faith there is a next step you can take. I believe the discipleship process begins long before baptism and such a practice can help pre-Christians experience living like a Christian before they commit their lives to Christ. Others will word their covenants with a focus on the job at hand, starting the church. In this case, the covenant is typically worded toward the job at hand. It is important for Christians and pre-Christians alike to know what is expected of them.
2. Where is the pre-Christian at in their walk with God? When we started LifePointe in Charlotte, we had pre-Christians on the launch team who were far from God. In fact, some of them were pretty anti-church and religion in general. They were on the team because of my relationship to them. I never said to them, “Hey would you be a part of our launch team.” Instead, I asked them as a friend to help me out with something that was important to me. Throwing a launch team covenant at them would have been counterproductive to the friendship and they would have felt manipulated. But asking them to serve in a role for three months to help me out was appropriate. Bottom line: use some common sense. Don’t be rigid. The launch team covenant is a great tool, but with some people it won’t make any sense. You need to discern who to use it with and when its appropriate. Just don’t shy away from it because you are afraid to call people to commit.
I realize there are lots of opinions on including pre-Christians on the launch team. What are your thoughts? Am I off my rocker here? How are you planning to include pre-Christians? Does the word launch make you want to puke? It sort of does for me. Any better language?
I agree that pre-Christians/non-Christians should be part of launch. It can help develop them into a relationship with other team members as well as with Christ. It also, like you said, keeps us in check and reminds us we’re being ‘watched’ as the example.
My other thought is, if you parachute in, who else is going to be on your launch team? You don’t have a lot of options. You must recruit whomever has hands and feet at that point, and is willing to do work.
Then we get busy discipling, discipling. discipling!
Great post. I have taken a different approach. Started with Christians and called them to missional leadership and the covenant was extremely helpful.
Now that they are developed as leaders and vision/mission ownership we are multiplying into missional city groups that will have their own covenant. These groups purpose is to be in community and on mission to love non-Christians so of course we will word the covenant to reflect that as we have done with our mission statement…. CityEdge lives to love beyond reason, journey with God, and serve the city. No matter if you are close to God or far from him you can begin to do all three.