If you’re planting a church, what’s your strategy? I’m not talking about your vision for a church that makes disciples or changes your city or plants other churches. I’m talking about do you know how you are going to live, act, work and organise so that as the best you can – you work towards that vision?

There are a lot of books about church planting, leadership and strategy none of which are much use in post-Christian, secular Europe. I find using those sorts of books akin to the man who tried to sail the Atlantic with a street map of Southampton as his navigational aid (true story).

I was recently talking with a fellow church planter who was sharing his frustration with the whole idea of a strategy that was divorced from biblical concepts. He would develop a strategy and when that wasn’t working he would go looking for a new and better strategy. One that this time would actually work. He kept doing this until he realised that this ‘strategy’ wasn’t working for him.

So he decided to return to simple obedience to love God and love people. The burden fell off him and you know what, things got better. Jesus was building his church.

As my friend said to me, “I’ll just do this and let the historians work out what our strategy was.”

Photo by National Library of Ireland on The Commons