Episode 629: What two things can we do to encourage more bivo/covo church planting – and what are the relational, financial and missiological benefits? Host Ed Stetzer and Brad Brisco, NAMB’s director of bivocational church planting, discuss "bivo/covo" church planting and how, d...
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We are excited to continue our episodes of the New Churches podcast, and we're going to talk about why is church planting so difficult? Why is this a challenge? Church planting is a challenging endeavor, and that's what we're going to talk about. One of the questions that we're addressing here at the New Churches podcast is why is church planting so hard?
I'm Ed Stetzer at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, executive director of the SEND Institute, working in a think tank for church planting. finding my guest today is none other than brad briscoe we had a few episodes back he's the director of vocational church planning for the sin network uh holds a doctorate he wrote on missional ecclesiology uh he serves as the on the national leadership team for forge america mission training network which in case you didn't know is where all the cool church planners are at the current time and um i i think i did a thing with them once and i was just struck by how how uncool I was. But Brad is co-author, author of Missional Essentials, which is a small group guide, The Missional Quest, and Co-Vocational Church Planting. So I want to start there. I want to actually ask you to tell me a little bit about the language.
This is not going to be our focus today, but I want to just tell us quickly about the language. You wrote a book called Co-Vocational Church Planting. We mentioned it last time. People might be wondering, okay, how's co-vocational different than bi-vocational?
What's the... The emphasis, what do you do in there? Tell us.
Well, I just think sometimes bivocational, that language of bivocational church planning gets in the way of what we actually want to see accomplished and sometimes the way I'll describe that is I'll and use this word on another podcast I think you use the word bifurcate and I think that's what we do sometimes we bifurcate and simply to bifurcate just means to take one thing and divide it into two parts and I think unfortunately we have too many bivocational planters or bivocational pastors that they separate or compartmentalize their work in the marketplace and mission or ministry. And I don't think that's helpful. So we just started kind of toying around a couple of years ago with this word co-vocational. And the way I like to describe it is think of that word co-vocational, co, C-O is the prefix from the Latin com, C-O-M, which simply means to have in common.
So think of words like co-pilot or co-author or co-panion. It's about bringing and or lining two things together. So I still use the language of both Bivo and Covo, but here's my little nuance for it. A bivocational church planter in my mind is someone that has a part-time job in the marketplace that they see as temporary.
So their goal or their dream or aspiration is that that church plant grows large enough that they could leave their part-time job and focus full time on it. on the church plant. And I would say two thumbs up, right? That's the Apostle Paul, tent maker, Acts 18. But a co-vocational church planter would be someone that has a primary calling in the marketplace that they never intend to leave.
In other words, they know God's called and wired them to be a school teacher or an architect or a web designer, but they also feel like the Lord's calling them to start something. So I want to help them see how can you Do what God's called and wired you to do for the glory of God, but at the same time, how can we give you a different imagination for church planting where you can start something while you're in the marketplace?
Yes, so good and so helpful. And again, it does relate to our question, why is church planning so hard? Just a little biographical for those who don't necessarily know you or me. I started, Donna and I went to the inner city of Buffalo, New York.
I got a job as a contractor, which I still remind her to this day that I can build things. So she does point out that I haven't done that in a very long time. But I got a contractor, I was a contractor, planted a church. church and did so what we would have said that time bi-vocationally i was 21 years of age had no seminary uh just the call of god i know that the presbyterians listening are horrified that anyone would let a 21 year old with an undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry go plant a church in the inner city of buffalo new york but bi-vocational church planning was some of the hardest things that we'd ever done later you know when i planted churches i was working at either mission agencies or lifeway Um, and I didn't want to use the term bivocational or co-vocational cause I was full-time in a type of ministry and then planted as a volunteer last church planted where I was a unpaid volunteer. Um, but I was, you know, co-pastor.
So, but I tell you, it's hard. I mean, this is a hard thing to do bivocationally, but it's a hard thing to do, period. I mean, church planting is a difficult reality. Now, I want you to know we actually have at newchurches.com a course, a core team course, and it's free.
Everything at newchurches.com is free now, which I hope you picked up on is a blessing. So developing a core team is applicable whether you're launching a new church or starting a campus off an existing church. It's free, available now at newchurches.com because I think the most difficult time of church planning is when you've got nobody and you're trying to start off from there. But let's talk some about it.
When you see church planting, there are some factors that say this is a difficult endeavor. What are some things that you think make it difficult or maybe are we making it too difficult? What do you think?
Well, no doubt. I mean, I don't want to minimize the difficulty of it. Any ministry or mission is hard because we're working with people and people in relationships we all know can be complicated. They can be messy, both church people and certainly lost people.
But I do wonder sometimes if we if we might make it harder than it has to be. I think. Sometimes I wonder if there's some foundational assumptions that we have about church and mission and even leadership that we actually make it more difficult. So the one that I probably talk about more often than any is just the way we understand the nature or essence of the church.
And I'd love to get your take on this, Ed, but I wonder sometimes over the past several decades if we've kind of created an understanding of the church as a vendor of religious goods and services. and services where we've kind of created this consumeristic monster I'll call it sometimes this attractional approach to the Sunday morning worship service where church people often are just never satisfied so I just wonder sometimes rather than seeing the church as a more simple or more nimble more missionary entity which doesn't make it easy by any means but I just wonder if the way we think of church as this Sunday centric kind of a launch much large attractional approach if we if we make church planting more difficult than it has to be at least in that realm
Hmm. I think so. I mean, I think yes and no. So this is where, you know, you and I have known each other for a while.
So people just listen in like, are they about to disagree? Yes. So I actually think that some of the ideas that we've talked about, if people could listen to episode 625, where we talk about some of this. Some of the ideas that you and I both affirm, you know, the idea of more simple communities, more organic church planting, I think may actually be harder. then some of the ways that you're saying make it harder in other words um i think it's easier for me to say the majority of people in our culture hey listen we're going to start in this high school and it's going to be sunday morning at 10 a.m and you can come in and there'll be seats and there'll be music and i'll do a talk and people like okay i kind of get the general gist of what that is rather than let's say we went down the full approach of simple church or simply church using we mentioned Felicity Dale Tony and Felicity Dale are well-known leaders in the movement I think it's harder to say listen we've got a church there's no pastor in the sense that you understand a pastor and we meet in a home and it's not a cult so I mean it seems to me that it's almost harder keeping in mind that I've written for these people some people were listening in and yelling at their their podcast device right now, which hopefully is your phone.
And I want to say to you, I'm an advocate for, we've actually planted out of our church, house churches. So we're for that. But so if we simplify, as you're maybe calling to, how does that make it easier when that's stranger to most people in culture?
Well, again, I think it depends on where we are contextually,
Sure, sure.
but I think in places where we're really reaching into lostness, I mean, I just think we have to have a much longer runway perspective and we have to measure and count different things. I mean, so I just think the idea of it being any once again, it's a both and it's not an either or, but I think the idea of a
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Okay, no, I'm buying what you're selling on that. I mean, you're communicating, I think something that's real important is that co-vocational church planning, by the way, I also say that I've bought into the language. So I don't always use it because I'm just used to saying bi-vocational. So I'm actually with you on the language as well.
So here's, I think, something we are 100% agreement on is that that by vocational church planting when you don't have this immediate need to get to you know let's say two to three years you got to be self-sufficient and self-sufficient means
Being able to pay for a full-time clergy, I think it is easier, maybe easier, there's less pressure. towards um towards that sunday morning gathering and you can disciple evangelize and disciple a church into existence um and you know this is this is a strange reality you know when i was leadership at work hired me to do a study of church planning a few years ago and we became warren bird then who's with leadership at work helped and we turned it into a book called viral churches but in the original the actual project it's i don't even know how many pages like 300 some pages it's never seen the light of day gave it to this donor who funded it and in there we because we looked at who was doing well in church planning who was doing badly and they didn't want to publish who was doing badly in church planning but this donor was trying to figure out who to fund And when we looked at that, we did see some of the best practices that were at work. And one of the things I did is me and my team, I think I actually read all the books in the English language on church planning at that time. There's a lot more now. So 1954 forward.
And there's a shift that Bob Logan and others helped facilitate. And it's interesting because Bob's now sort of come more to where the conversation you're having. having right where we're talking about what it looks like to plant organically and more but it was actually around the 80s where it shifted everything before the 80s was plant a church by reaching people i mean that shouldn't say everything that's too strong a lot of it was plant a church by reaching people get two people four people eight people 16 people 32 people and no one thought of and then go public with your big launch But Bob, who popularized that in the best-selling church planning resource of probably all time, the Church Planner's Toolkit, which cassette tapes, I'll have to explain that
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yes. Of course, I mean, that's somewhere in my office I could find it. I mean, I have a whole shelf of these archival resources. But all of a sudden church planning became in the 80s something it wasn't for 1,900 years in the history of the church, which was primarily a launched experience rather than a discipled experience.
Now, again, if I plan a church again, Mrs. Detzer says I can't do that right now. But if I plan a church again, I probably will launch that church. I'm not against that. But.
It does, and this is where I think a lot of the misfires come, right? If you want to continue the metaphor, launching a rocket is when it blows up, and we've seen some real blowups. It seems to me the most common time of failure is actually in that time before you go public, but what if your goal wasn't a public worship service but discipling people? There'd be a lot less failures because we had a different target, and it made a difference.
So why don't we do that, and what would you call it? Would you call us too?
Well, I think we first off, we have to champion all the benefits of being bivocational or co-vocational and it's still difficult, but there's lots of beautiful and wonderful benefits of being bivocational. And then I think we need to champion bivocational planters themselves. In other words, every single one of us that have the opportunity to tell the story of bivocational and co-vocational planters, we need to tell their story over and over and over again to I would say not only to be an encouragement to them because a lot of bivocational leaders. Leaders don't get a lot of encouragement.
But then also to crack open the imagination of other people. So when you tell the story about the high school science teacher that's also planting a church, there'll be people who'll say, oh, I didn't even know that was an option.
Right.
In other words, I thought I had to choose. I had to choose between my calling in the marketplace and mission and ministry. And I'm going to say, no, you don't have to choose. In fact, in a missionary context, I would prefer that you don't choose because you have access to a mission field you wouldn't have otherwise.
So I think those are the two big things. highlight the benefits but then also tell the stories of the people that are already out there doing this yeah
Yeah. So am I wrong that the hardest time of church planning is, and you might have a different view, is when you don't know a soul and you're just sort of starting? I think the hardest is the first 30, not the second 100. You know, I've done courses on breaking the 200 barrier, right?
But the hardest is that first 30 to me. Are there different places where you see this more difficult?
i think like what you just said there ed speaks into the other reason why sometimes we make this harder than it needs to be is we don't really do it with a team we
Yeah
just too often and especially if you're bivocovo there's just no other option I mean you have to do this with a team so I think we need to actually think differently about team church planting and I know this sounds a little idealistic but my like my perfect future kind of picture of this would be that if if there were two or three co-vocational couples and two or three co-vocational singles that would go somewhere together to plant a church. And what I mean by co-vocational is that think if every one of them had a calling in the marketplace, can you imagine the relational capital that those 10 or 12 or 15 people would have? And if every one of them could say, look, I have a primary calling in the marketplace, but we can give six hours a week or eight hours a week or 10 hours a week towards a church plant. Think about the financial capital, the sustainability of the finances of that church plant, the relational capital.
You bring together a team where everybody is bivocational or co-vocational, it just creates missiological and financial benefits we don't have otherwise. So
but i
for me, that would be kind of a perfect case scenario.
yeah and it's not just biblical i think it's historic i mean we think of the we can look back to people like columba and columban who were would bring missionary teams we could look back for uh you know in the re-evangelization of europe after the fall of europe i mean this this makes sense um so i'm sometimes of the concern though that people in the world in which we're talking now sometimes devalue the i mean again i'm for and i want to get your response i'm for the parachute drop church planner i'm for i know you're gonna say both and so and you have you have to respond without using the term both and but let's just let's move through that how do you how do you have how do you celebrate the parachute drop church planter who comes in, plant a church, build a core group, launches it and goes from there. And if you're celebrating that, because what you celebrate, you become. And then you say, oh, there's these whole other people who don't look like that and they're awesome too. How do we celebrate both?
Well, we just tell their stories, I think. The people that are doing this, we need to, as I said earlier, encourage them and crack open the imagination of other people by telling their stories. And I just think typically in most denominations and church planting networks, we only tell the story of the launch large, the church that grew to 206 months or whatever the numbers are. And we don't very often tell the beautiful story of the bivocational or co-vocational planter that's driving the school bus or. or the school teacher or the mechanic that's planting a church.
So I just think we just have to do a better job of tapping into the power of the narrative of telling those stories.
Love it. And that's one of the reasons I want to have you on as well to tell the narrative of that story. So keeping in mind our audience is church planters, most of whom, though some of whom are co-vocational. So one of the things early on that we decided to do at two churches.
So we plan it a go is to send out some people who had different approaches to try to elevate the idea that kind of simple organic approach approaches could be both viable and enthusiastically embraced. So we sent out one wasn't like hundreds, but we sent out one and I was I was pretty much only there a short time. So so my question is, is. So how would you suggest if, I don't know our audience, 80% are doing more of the traditional approach to church planning, how should they and how could they without, because again, you can say, well, they should stop what they're doing to do something different.
I don't think that's what you're saying, but how do they support that? Because I think that's because most people are like, well, what's I'm not going to change what I'm doing right now because I believe God's called me, but I believe what we're hearing. So what would it look like to support that?
Well, I would identify the people in your church, and there's no doubt there are people in your church that want to engage outside the walls of the church more than they do now. Either they haven't been encouraged to do that, they haven't been equipped to do that, but they have a desire and a passion to do that. So I would identify those people, and then if it's very different than your kind of current model of church, I would create kind of a pilot project or sometimes I'll use the language of. with a parallel track and start something, experiment, don't be afraid of failure and encourage those people out. So it's, it's something, yeah, you're not trying, you're not blowing anything up, you're not starting over or trying to do everything different in the current context, but you're starting a pilot project over here to the side where you're encouraging them.
And when that goes well, capture those stories and tell them back to the rest of the congregation. Once again, it's going to. open up the eyes of other people to say, hey, I love what they're doing. I think I could do that in my neighborhood. I think I could do that in my workplace or social spaces that I inhabit during the week.
So I just think it's encouraging and empowering people already in your church that want to do this and then trying to use their stories to encourage others to do the same.
Love it. Brad Briscoe has been our guest. You're going to love his book if you like this conversation. It's called co-vocational church planning, aligning your marketplace calling and the mission of God.
And it's. It's The Price is Right. We're offering the book free using a link that you find at the show notes for today's episode. Let me encourage you, if you've been enjoying the New Church's podcast, make sure you go to wherever you download your podcast.
Maybe you're probably most likely at Apple Podcasts. So leave a review there. It helps other leaders find this. And now that all the resources at newchurches.com are free, you leaving a review ultimately leads people over there as well.
Free resources we believe in church planners. I want to help them. them as well. Thanks for listening. I'm Ed Stetzer and on behalf of Bread for School as well, God bless.
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