I have received quite a few books about church planting over the past few months. Among the more than interesting have been Church building Planting Is for Wimps by Mike McKinley and Discovering Church building Planting past J.D. Payne. Fresh off the press is Darrin Patrick'southward Church Planter: The Homo, The Message, The Mission. Patrick is vice president of the Acts29 Church Planting Network and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis. From those vantage points he has seen church building planting upward-shut and personal while likewise assisting and guiding many other pastors as they have sought to plant churches. He is well-qualified to write about this discipline. His volume comes highly recommended and is endorsed past a long list of notables.

The book's contents are divided into three sections: The Man, The Message and The Mission (as y'all may accept guessed). In the start part Patrick describes the kind of man God is looking for, maxim that he is to be rescued, chosen, qualified, dependent, skilled, shepherding and determined. This gives a well-rounded agreement of the kind of character that should mark a homo who seeks to step out and plant a church. He covers the biblical qualifications every bit laid out particularly in the pastoral epistles, but he goes further as well, looking to practical considerations along with other spiritual qualifications.

In the second function he looks to the bulletin this man is to dedicate himself to. Hither he shows that it is historical, salvation-accomplishing, Christ-centered, sin-exposing and idol-shattering. He largely focuses on the celebrated Christian truths that the church building must affirm and proclaim if it is to exist a faithful church. This is a very compressed overview of sound Christian theology.

In the concluding part he turns to the mission of the church planter. He says that the eye of mission is compassion, that the house of mission is the church, that the how of mission is contextualization, that the hands of mission is care and that the hope of mission is urban center transformation. I establish that this section offered some especially useful questions and rebukes. For example, Patrick shows how busyness and hurriedness can often be the enemies of compassion; in both cases pastors may inadvertently miss the people amidst all they effort to accomplish; they may become very productive even while they lose sight of the importance of shepherding the flock. Near the terminate of this section he drifts from teaching to narrative, spending a couple of chapters discussing churches within his network more than than actually teaching what the Bible says near planting churches.

At that place are a few things I disagree with along the way. Patrick is one of those self-described Acts29 "Charismatics with a seatbelt" and that measured-just-yet-obvious Charismatic bent is visible quite oftentimes throughout the book. More notably, the volume concludes with a couple of capacity which focus on cities and how the hope of church planting is city transformation. He seems to go and so far equally to depict a correlation betwixt the resurrection of Jesus and the transformation of cities. Equally he drifted from educational activity to narrative, the book became weaker rather than stronger. Unfortunately this caused the book to cease with a fizzle rather than a bang; the all-time of the book came simply a picayune fleck earlier.

Church Planter serves as a church planting boot camp, an introduction to the kind of person God is calling to plant churches, the message this man must preach and the ways in which he must do so. It focuses less on methodology than on calling and qualifications. Patrick's many years of difficult feel both as a planter and equally a mentor to pastors give him a valuable perspective–a gritty and battle-scarred perspective. This is non a book full of abstractions and generalizations, but one that is written from the trenches to other men within the trenches. I know it volition exist a valuable resource to church planters and pastors alike. For those who are seeking to go church planters, it volition tell them of the gravity and necessity of what they are doing and help them catch God's desire for his church building; for those who have already planted or who are already pastoring churches, it volition renew, refresh, reset and re-challenge.

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