It can be awkward, but only sometimes. It happens in certain conversations with other church-planting guys whenever the topic turns to vision for the future. Usually it goes something like this.

Church-planting guy (not me): So how many churches would you Sovereign Grace guys like to plant over the next ten years?

Me: Mumble, mumble, mumble… (sounds of me stuffing chips in my mouth to avoid answering)

Church-planting guy: We’re believing God for thousands of churches planted over the next few months. We’re calling it maniacal multiplication. So how many churches do you guys have right now?

Me (having no more chips to protect me): About 80, or maybe it’s 90—I forget exactly.

CPG: Wow, that’s great. How long have you guys been planting?

Me: Since “We Are the World” came out.

CPG: Wow, that’s incredible.

Me: The first one.

CPG (doing math in his head): Oh…I’ll pray for you dude.

End of conversation. Awkward.

Let me say something at the outset here. First of all, I am so grateful that there are church-planting groups who love the Savior and love the lost so much that they are willing to take the risks and send men so that many gospel-preaching churches can be planted quickly. That’s bigtime faith! And make no mistake, it’s being hurled at a bigtime need. I have no doubt God will bless those efforts. But as much as I’d like to see Sovereign Grace churches so widely and thickly planted that you couldn’t spit from a freeway without hitting one, that isn’t what God is calling us to. At least for now.

Since our inception, we’ve had a clear sense from the Holy Spirit that we were called to be slow and patient builders. That was crucial because we were trying to sort out who we were, and therefore what we were trying to build. Had we exported quickly, we could’ve really wreaked havoc. And back in the day, church planting was kind of an odd thing anyway—old as the New Testament, but not really something people talked a lot about. You didn’t have churches and denominations dedicated to it—and no websites helping you learn how it’s done.

When it came to church planting, what mattered to us was that real, solid, gospel-loving, local churches would bloom. Churches that had shared values, relational connection with each other, and common purpose. We didn’t want to plant churches and walk away from them, or have them walk away from us. We call ourselves a family of churches because that’s what we’ve been. We wanted to build slow and plant slow because we wanted every church to apply the gospel and be a healthy contributor to the mission of church planting for years to come. We’ve made tons of mistakes along the way, but that’s what we’ve tried to do.

Slow and patient doesn’t come easy to us. In fact a little over a year ago, the Sovereign Grace leadership team went on a retreat to revisit a familiar question: How aggressive should we be in planting churches? We talked about ways we could expand more rapidly without diluting what makes us distinct. We asked, “How do we take advantage of the growing number of opportunities that are coming our way from both inside and outside of Sovereign Grace Ministries (and increasingly this includes genuine possibilities beyond the U.S.), without compromising the quality of care for leaders and churches in Sovereign Grace?”

As a result of this retreat, we came back more firmly committed than ever to being as aggressive and creative as we can to plant churches—we want to plant tons of churches! But we also realized that the Lord had deeply ingrained in us some clear values that would act as governors to control the rate of our growth.

What do I mean by a governor? Growing up, our family vacations always took us to the Jersey shore. It was a kind of religious pilgrimage; my family held a deep-seated belief that the ocean summoned us. The beach town where we stayed had go-karts, which loops us back to governors. A governor is a device that regulates the speed of the go-kart engine. It caps acceleration, controlling how fast the go-karts fly around the track. To a ten-year-old, governors stink. To the parent who pays for health care, they rock.

What’s interesting is that the purpose of the governor was to go slower than what the engine might ultimately allow. To go-kart track owners, other values like safety, passenger protection, and bloodless family times were important. Speed was sacrificed so other values could be promoted.

We didn’t consult a go-kart mechanic on this one, but as a movement we at Sovereign Grace Ministries saw that to remain healthy and to endure, we needed governors of our own. Don’t get me wrong; we love growth. But rapid growth could not come at the sacrifice of other values we hold dear—values that make us who we are.

So here’s where I’m driving this. In a couple of upcoming blogs, I want to pop the hood on Sovereign Grace church planting and check out the governors. I think it might be great to understand some things that help us grow at the pace that God would have us grow…and still remain Sovereign Grace Ministries.

----------------------

Dave Harvey leads international expansion and church planting for Sovereign Grace Ministries and is based in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. For more information about the Sovereign Grace church-planting process, click here.

• Permalink
• Email this
• Share