I am starting a new series on the Temptations Planters Face.  As I am in the middle of a planting mission myself, I find certain temptations coming my way that cause me to get frustrated, anxious, distracted, and unsure. Obviously planting, and for that matter any ministry, can cause the above mentioned things to happen. But what I have noticed is that there are certain temptations planters face uniquely that, if not dealt with properly, can totally derail them.

The first one I will bring to us today is wrong expectations. 

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[This post is part of the “4 Hour Campus Plant” series.]

Can you plant a church giving just 4 hours/week of time?

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By Jon Hietbrink

In a previous post, I suggested five indicators that a Movement is becoming a Monument, but identifying the problem is only a first step. Much more challenging than merely seeing a problem is doing something about it and effectively catalyzing organizational renewal.

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I have just started a book called To Spread the Power: Church Growth in the Wesleyan Spirit and I’m the section on apostolic confidence.

Reverend McCabe was sent by the Methodists in 1881 to plant churches all over the Northwest and they came to a point where they were starting a CHURCH A DAY and in some months two a day! He wrote about his mission in a paper and this is one great story:

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By Jon Hietbrink

As A.P.E. leaders our concern isn’t merely with the motivating the activity of A.P.E. ministry, but cultivating an environment where apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic leaders can emerge and thrive—we are both builders and architects.

In his work, Where Good Ideas Come From, author Stephen Johnson does a masterful job of capturing the qualities of environments that produce the kind of innovation we desire in ministry, and I found his thoughts both quite helpful and provocative for us as A.P.E. leaders. Though there’s of course more that could be said, here are a few of my favorite takeaways in understanding the “architecture of innovation” and how we can capture it for the sake of the Kingdom.

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This is a guest post by Brian Sanders. He leads an incredible church network in Tampa Bay called Underground. He is one of the most inspiring leaders I know. I love listening to him teach and I love the way he thinks about leadership, church planting, and missional communities. He is an apostolic leader through and through and you see this no better than in the way he is the chief architect for his network of churches. But he also comes hard with timely prophetic words. One of which was his last post you can find here.

Sometimes, what appeals to us in the word and world of the apostle is the sense of grandeur and even importance it conjures. I think this is a deep misunderstanding of the calling of an apostle. We should not aspire to engage in apostolic ministry or apostolic calling because it somehow seems BIGGER than merely being a pastor. We do not rail against the shepherd-teacher model of church because it is too small. Its smallness is probably one of the things that is most noble about that kind of church and ministry. We challenge it because it is out of balance, not because it is small. I keep meeting people who are nominally claiming an apostolic rubric for their ambition, simply to mask their delusions of grandeur. No one wants to plant a church anymore, they want to plant a movement. In one sense this is the epitome of the apostolic urge, and it can be very holy – but only if it is accompanied with an equally profound personal humility. The role of apostle should actually be the most modest of all the roles because nothing that we do or dream is FOR us or ABOUT us.

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