You know you are a church planter/ Apostle when…
- You look around at your church of five people and get excited.
- When new people come to your church, you get unsettled when they tell you they are already Christians.
- The back of your car is filled with coffee pots, sound equipment, random items left behind by strangers, flyers, six versions of the bible, a throw rug, building blocks, and tape.
- You wonder where church will meet next week.
- You get unsettled when your church reaches the 75 person mark and can pay you/ your husband a full wage.
- When asked for income references, you list two or more sources.
- When picking a home, you view its “home-study room”…. Rather than “living room”.
These are just a few observations the first half of this year of Church planting. No doubt it’s not a life for the faint of heart….or boring. While church planting may have its challenges, it is utterly satisfying when the adventurer in you is feeling a bit smothered by the boring routine of life’s normal laundry days.
My husband recently took me away for my birthday to Sequoia national forest. When I arrived at our lodgings and found my stock pile of travel soap had diminished to nothing, I really got upset. Not because I was going to have dirty hair for my hot, 39th birthday bash, but because, as I sat down defeatedly on a very comfy couch, enjoying a fabulous view of the sequoias, I worried that I’d lost my adventurer’s edge…and I hadn’t even hit menopause! This odd phenomena of the missing free toiletries, acquired on long hours of incessant traveling, believe it or not, really tuned me in to the fact that I was, for all my stressing, a church planter to the core.
Why? Because you see, one of the things I should have listed above was “You know your a church planter when you have an unlimited stock pile of hotel soap and shampoo!” Traveling is almost a compulsion for the church planter. Packing is as natural as cleaning your ear wax. A necessary and satisfying evil.
A Church planter is unaccustomed to such words as twiddle, coast, relax and settle…unless that silly church planter is momentarily envying the “normal” people of this world. The dichotomy of need to press on toward ministry mission, often rubs against the occasional weary legged church planters-feet. But be encouraged, it has been only a month since my birthday and I’m due to be collecting travel soaps in a few weeks again. The adventurer may pause, dear church planter…but only to shift gears.
Hear the call, then call those to hear.
“Do not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”