Coaching for church pioneers
John Keskeys of Stewardship writes about the Governance help they offer through their Church planting pathway.
I’ve never planted a mustard seed and I really have no idea how big a mustard seed can get. When we at Stewardship decided to focus on how we could help church planters, something sprang to life which is still growing a whole lot bigger than expected. What started as a list of the standard services and training we provide that church planters may need, has now developed into our new Church Planting Pathway.
We guide each church leader through the Pathway, understanding that every new church has unique difficulties and needs. So we provide complimentary, personal, one-to-one coaching sessions, that some church leaders have called a ‘game changer’. We want to help someone starting a new church to understand what it will take so they can be prepared, gather the right resources, understand the right timing and ultimately avoid the pitfalls that ignorance and naivety has cost many planters before them.
We have stood with many new church leaders in prayer as they tussle with significant issues that arise. It could range from moving house, the need for new schools for kids, a spouse’s job that has fallen through or the complications of transitioning from previous employment. Then there are often new challenges when it comes to balancing time, family, ministry, raising supporters, choosing elders, selecting trustees and setting up bank accounts and financial models. It’s all part of the church planter’s journey and our hope is that we can partner with churches to encourage and advise them, act as a sounding board as well as a friend. We want to use our expertise to help them and their teams to become confident in crucial things like finance, governance and compliance.
Talking about money is never easy, especially in the current UK church culture. It really does need battering down with Kingdom values like generosity. It’s our aim to provide resources that firstly help church leaders shape their own thinking about generosity, which then gives them the confidence to tackle topics like money and giving as discipleship issues, establishing a new culture of generosity in these new churches for the next generation.
The Church Planting Pathway is about establishing healthy and sustainable local expressions of church that flourish and relate to their community as Christ wants to reach everyone. We try to make the process a little easier, provide markers along the journey and help leaders and trustees to sleep a little better at night. We hope to inspire a revival in Christian generosity that not only provides the finances to see the gospel of the Kingdom shared with everyone everywhere, but also builds churches who handle the money in a healthy way, demonstrating excellent stewardship.
Revival...? We continue to hope, pray and labour for it together.
For more information on Stewardship click here www.stewardship.org.uk
