Seven Strategies

If you have ever attended a Prepare to Plant training (formerly Church Planting Bootcamp), you’ve heard about creating strategies. God has given us a mission – to make disciples, and to live out that mission requires intentionality and planning. Or, to put it another way, our mission requires a strategy. Actually, it requires several strategies. Building off suggestions from the Prepare to Plant training, I want to suggest that there are seven key strategies that every church must develop if they are going to best position themselves to be used by God. These don’t have to be complex; in fact, they shouldn’t be, but they do have to be present in some form. They can be grouped into three orientations: upward, outward, inward.

Upward

• Gathering for Adoration. One of the prime purposes of the church is simply to worship Jesus, and we do that most powerfully together. While our minds may quickly jump to Sunday morning (and indeed this is a component of gathering for adoration), take a minute to think through the question: how are we going to gather as a church to worship and pray? Pay special attention to prayer. It is easier to rally people toward singing, and thus intentional, collective prayer is more prone to neglect.

Outward

• Evangelism. So often this is assumed; assumed by the people and assumed by the pastor. The pastor assumes that people are having spiritual conversations and inviting others to experience the life of the church. Meanwhile the people assume that the pastor is doing all the soul winning. As the old adage goes, when there is no vision, people create one. What is your church doing to intentionally and regularly engage unsaved people and offer them the opportunity to surrender to Jesus?

• Church Planting. In the Prepare to Plant training these three outward strategies are lumped into one (Reaching the Lost), but I have found that when we do so, invariably one of the three gets forgotten. A church planting strategy can be as simple as prayerfully and financially supporting a church plant in your area, or as robust as developing a Greenhouse Environment, but if you don’t keep this out front as a stated goal, it’s unlikely that your church will ever be part of planting a church.

• Missions. It’s probable that this is present in some form in your church, so let me simply offer this question as a check-up: how many people under the age of 30 are actively involved in whatever it is that you’re doing to engage in global missions? If you’re not engaging this demographic, you need to tweak your missions strategy.

Inward

• Discipleship. While all seven of these contribute to the making of disciples, here I mean the intentional working with the Holy Spirit to form Christ in people. While preaching is certainly part of this, preaching alone cannot suffice to “[teach] them to obey everything” as Jesus commanded. In fact, Jesus Himself did more than just preach. What is the intentional strategy your church employs to come alongside the work of the Holy Spirit to form Christ in His followers?

• Leadership Development. Everyone is called and to be a disciple, but not everyone is called to be a leader. How do you identify those God is calling into leadership? How do you determine what kind of leader God is making them (elder, ministry director, missionary, etc.)? Finally, what is your plan to train them for leadership? Remember, this is not discipleship. This assumes discipleship and instead hones the skills needed to lead others.

• Community. The longer name for this strategy might be “care for the Body”. Simply put, how do you weep with one another, rejoice with one another, or indeed carry out any of the “One Anothers”? The way that we love one another may be the greatest apologetic to Christ and His deity (Jn 17:23). Of course, this doesn’t mean that we plan each “one another”, but it is worth asking: what kinds of environments do we create and curate so that people can love and be loved by one another?

There are times when these seven strategies feel quite daunting. I know because I’ve worked through them and thought through them several times myself in various ministry settings. Even so, I think it’s good to keep them front and center to remind ourselves of them often. And while it’s impractical to attempt to create or improve all seven at the same time, I wonder which one of the seven the Lord may be leading you and your team to give special attention to in 2025. If, over the next few weeks God begins to stir a desire to deepen your church’s ministry in one of these areas, please reach out and let me know. I’d love to be praying for you this year as you embark on this journey, and to be able to share any of the tools and resources at my disposal that may be helpful.

Together with you,

Chris
ctweedy@rmdcma.com or (406) 647-2764