Tam & I were encouraged the other night when we sat down with her Mum & Dad. Tam's parents are doing a new cafe-style house church in Ormeau, which they started about 2 years ago.
We wanted to talk about how they've gone about planting their church, what strategies they've used, how they've connected with the community, and so on. We were struggling to know where to start! We've had lots of ideas, but we were finding it hard to turn it into a real plan.
One thing I wasn't sure about was the time involved - how long you'd spend on each stage of the journey. We've started getting people in our community together for social gatherings - to make connections and start building relationships - but there've been no "official" spiritual input times. We know it needs a fair bit of time to build friendships, but I still felt that maybe we weren't doing enough.
So it was encouraging to hear the story of their church so far. They were doing free BBQs in the park, without any spiritual input, for five or six months, before starting a more "spiritual" gathering (with a 5-10 minute talk). And they told us the church has only really started to take off this year, and it's been two years since they started it.
We could do that. That's how we'd expected it would happen for us, but it was good to hear that six months of purely social interaction is a valid plan!
It's bizarre how quickly you can feel insecure as a pastor - our decision to plant a church was only really a few weeks back!
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