Oh The Things You'll Do

I've read a lot of blogs from church planters who are still in the pre-launch phase and it seems what most of them talk about most is raising money. I can understand this as money was a big worry for me when we first began, but if planting a church has taught me anything this far, it has taught me that it is possible to make it on very little start-up cash as long as you can manage three things:

1. Having a volunteer church staff in the beginning. This includes the lead pastor!
2. Having a small core group committed to tithing faithfully to the plant.
3. Having the above mentioned people be naturally resourceful and flexible.

In regards to being flexible, as far as my own life goes I've found myself doing a lot of things in the planting of this church that no one ever told me I'd be doing when I was in Bible College. I knew a lot of different jobs go into the title of Pastor, but these are somethings that I've had to do that isn't found in many church planting manuals:

Truck Driver - Somehow I've found myself driving a 14 foot truck loaded with sound gear once a week. This is especially disturbing when you think about all the things I've destroyed through the years with just a compact car. Thank God for good insurance.

Website Designer - We could either afford to to do advertising or to have a website built. Since website isn't much good unless people know about it. So, we paid for advertising and I taught myself HTML. Our site may not be the greatest out there and I'm sure there are mistakes in the coding in places, but it's doing it's job right now and it'll work until we get some more cash flow coming in.

Chair Tester - We wanted to test our church chairs to see how much weight they could handle the other night, so some how I found myself sitting in a chair with two men on my lap. It wasn't a pretty picture and unfortunately it is now a picture (I won't be posting it here though, so don't ask). It wasn't my proudest moment, but we proved that the chairs could take a lot of weight and it made Bekah happier than I've seen her in quite awhile so I guess it was worth it.

Set Designer - This is actually more Jason than me, but I've found myself helping him (and by helping I mean holding his tools) build things that I don't think most pastors have had to make. Partitions are a must have for a portable church when you find yourself in a bigger space than what you need, but they are incredibly expensive. We were donated partitions early on, but before we could pick them up the deal fell through. Jason decided to make his own and I personally like them better than the professional ones. Sometime in the near future I'll post pictures and talk about these a little more, but for the purpose of this posting let's just say that you can think your way out of a lot of problems if you have some time and a guy who is handy with a chop saw.