Exponential NEXT Podcast Episode 129

Series: Church on the Frontier

Description:

What if new expressions of church could make room for people and communities traditional models have struggled to reach? Rick Bolle of Front Porch Church and Rodrigo Cano of MicroChurch Residency discuss church communities shaped around belonging, participation, accessibility, and decentralized mission. Their work challenges familiar assumptions about where church happens, who gets to contribute, and what qualifies as an expression of church. This conversation explores how leaders can develop new forms without sacrificing theological depth, pastoral care, or relational integrity – and how the Church can become more accessible and reproducible without becoming less faithful.

Host:

Tom Planck, Innovation NEXT, Director

Guests:

Rick Bolle – Front Porch Church, Founding Pastor

Rodrigo Cano – MicroChurch Residency, Director

Category: Innovation NEXT

Links shared in episode:

Front Porch Church

MicroChurch Residency

The response was consistent. Leaders followed me through levels one, two, and three, then heard levels five and six as something reserved for churches with a technology budget and a full-time systems person.

I want to close that misconception gap. The distance between where most churches today are and where agents become useful is shorter than it looks.

Ok, so what’s an AI agent? An agent is a piece of AI that does a job on its own schedule without you starting it. You define what it watches, what it does, and when it checks in with a human.

Today, let’s talk about six types of AI agents that fit a mid-size church right now, most can be built without a developer, and all of them are things your staff does by hand on Monday morning, badly, because it is Monday.

AI agents church staff can set up without a developer

Agent #1. The first-time guest follow-up agent.

Someone fills out a connection card. Within two hours, a personalized draft note is waiting in your guest services director’s inbox referencing what the guest was looking for. A human reads the draft, rewrites it in their own voice, and adds what only they would know from meeting that guest on Sunday. The guest hears from a real person the same day, closing a follow-up window that usually runs 11 days.

Time you could recover: two to three hours. More importantly, your follow-up window shrinks from a week and a half to an afternoon.

Agent #2. The sermon-to-content agent.

Your message gets recorded Sunday. By Monday at 9 a.m., your communications person has a transcript, a blog post shaped around a searchable question, five social captions, three clip timestamps, and a devotional for the midweek email waiting for review.

Time you could recover: three to four hours, and this is the one that usually changes how a communications role feels.

Agent #3. The attendance and care flag agent.

The agent watches your church management system and tells your care team who to call: the regular attender who missed three weeks, the new family that came twice and stopped, the volunteer who dropped off the rotation. Your staff gets a short list every Tuesday morning with names and context.

Time you could recover: one to two hours of report-pulling. The real gain is the calls that now happen at all.

Agent #4. The inbox triage agent.

Your church’s general inbox gets facility requests, benevolence questions, wedding inquiries, prayer requests, and vendor spam in one stream. An agent sorts them, routes each to the right person, and drafts replies for the routine ones.

Time you could recover: two hours for whoever currently owns that inbox.

Agent #5. The meeting and decision memory agent.

Staff meeting, elder meeting, ministry team meeting. The agent captures notes, pulls out decisions and owners, and sends action items to the right people that afternoon. Six months later you can ask what you decided about the parking lot and get an actual answer.

Time you could recover: one to two hours, plus the meetings you stop repeating.

Agent #6. The weekly service prep agent.

Song list, Scripture, sermon title, and volunteer roster get pulled into slides, a run sheet, a lyrics deck, and a pre-service email to everyone serving. It assembles Thursday. A human checks it Friday.

Time you could recover: two hours, mostly from your worship or production leader.

Add it up conservatively and the total could clear 10 hours a week across your team.

Build your first agent and stop there

Pick the agent that removes the task your staff complains about most. Run it for 30 days with a human reviewing every output before it goes anywhere.

The tooling question comes second. A custom GPT built for your church handles the drafting work inside agents two and six. Anything that fires on a trigger or a schedule needs an automation platform like Zapier, Make, or n8n, all of which added agent features you configure in plain English. For something that remembers across sessions, a tool like Hermes, an AI agent with real memory, gets you there without writing code.

Two rules before you build anything. No personal data goes into a tool your church does not control. A human reviews every output that reaches a congregant.

What you do with the hours is the actual question

10 hours back does not automatically improve your ministry.

Leaders recover real time and then fill it with the same administrative work at higher volume with a nicer interface. The calendar stays full, the pace stays frantic, and the only thing that changed was the tooling.

So decide in advance what the hours are for. Write it down before you build a single agent.

Maybe it is four hospital visits a month that were not happening. Maybe it is your youth director getting lunch with students back on the calendar.

The agents take the work that never required your presence. When a machine can produce the bulletin, the caption, and the schedule, what remains is being with people, which was the center of the calling all along.

Your congregation will remember who showed up in the hospital room. The run sheet never makes that list.

If you want to build these alongside other leaders running the same experiments, finding a group of peers shortens the learning curve considerably.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an AI agent for a church?

An AI agent is a system that performs a defined job on its own schedule without a person starting it each time. It watches for a trigger, does the work, and hands results to a human for review.

Do I need a developer to set up AI agents at my church?

For most of them, no. Agents two, four, and five run on tools built for non-technical users, including meeting note takers and the agent features now inside Zapier, Make, and Lindy, where you describe the job in plain English and connect apps visually.

The three that touch your church management system take longer. Guest follow-up, care flags, and service prep each need a working connection to Planning Center or whatever you run, and that is where most churches stall.

How much time can AI agents save a church staff?

A mid-size church running all six agents could free up 10 or more staff hours per week across the team, concentrated in communications, guest follow-up, and service preparation. Treat that as the potential, and measure your own numbers as you go.

Are AI agents safe to use with congregation data?

Only with clear boundaries. Keep personal information, giving records, and pastoral conversations out of any tool your church does not control, and require human review before anything reaches a congregant.

Before you build

Ask your team one question this week. Which recurring task eats the most time and requires the least judgment?

That is your first agent. What did they say?

We were young, optimistic, and probably enthusiastic enough to believe we could change the world. We had a simple dream: Help people find their way back to God. We started with one church, which became multiple services, then multiple locations, then new churches, networks, and eventually a movement that has taken us places I never could have imagined.

I am incredibly grateful for the journey. But after more than three decades of church planting and multiplication, I know something today that I didn’t know at 25. If I were starting over, I would not simply plant a church. From day one, I would plant a church designed to become a church of churches. I would start what I’m calling a Network Church.

In many ways, that is what COMMUNITY is evolving toward today. But if I had to do it again, multiplication wouldn’t be something we discovered along the way. I would put it into the original design. I would begin with the expectation that the church would eventually take many forms – large gatherings, small communities, house churches, microchurches, campuses, digital expressions, and autonomous church plants – all connected by a common mission and multiplying DNA.

That is why, if you are planting a church – or leading an organization that plants churches – I would strongly encourage you to consider the Network Church model. I think it offers one of the most hopeful possibilities for the future of church planting.

The Atlas, recently published by Exponential gives definition to seven different church archetypes. It defines a Network Church as a decentralized expression that combines “the relational depth of house churches with the collective strength of a unified church body.” Smaller expressions provide environments for relationships, discipleship, prayer, care, and mission, while the larger body provides shared identity, leadership, doctrine, accountability, resources, and celebration. I like to make it even simpler: A Network Church is a church of churches.

Here are five reasons I would build one from day one.

1. Don’t Just Plant a Church – Plant the Seeds of a Movement

Most church planters begin by asking, “How do we start a great church?” I would encourage us to ask a bigger question: How do we start something that can reproduce?

That question changes your decisions from day one. Instead of asking only how many people you can gather, you begin asking how many people you can send. Instead of building everything around one gifted leader, you build a culture that continually discovers and develops new leaders. Instead of seeing your first location as the destination, you see it as the first expression of something that could eventually take many forms.

This is one of the convictions behind Multiplier: “You reproduce who you are and what you do.” If multiplication is something you hope to add later, there is a good chance you will reproduce a church that knows how to gather but not reproduce. But if multiplication is in your DNA from the beginning, every disciple, leader, group, and church expression carries the possibility of becoming a multiplying one.

That is what excites me about the Network Church. You aren’t merely planting one tree. You are planting an acorn with a forest inside it.

2. Stop Counting Only the Crowd – Start Counting Who Gets Activated

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that the size of your crowd and the size of your impact are not necessarily the same thing. A church can become very good at attracting people while unintentionally teaching them that ministry is something professionals do for them.

A Network Church pushes against that instinct because it requires distributed leadership. The Atlas identifies this as one of its primary opportunities: People who might simply become “attenders” in another model are given meaningful opportunities to lead.

Church Project in The Woodlands is a great example. Its house churches are led by identified, trained, and empowered lay pastors who shepherd people, oversee discipleship, meet needs, and carry out many functions we normally reserve for paid clergy. Their large Sunday gathering supports the house churches by providing teaching, doctrinal consistency, leadership care, and common identity.

This is pure Hero Maker. One of the fundamental shifts we describe there is moving from “I can do it” to “You can do it.” Great leaders don’t simply use their gifts to gather more followers; they use their gifts to call out the gifts in others.

So I would change the scoreboard. Of course, I would still celebrate attendance and baptisms. But I would also ask: How many people are discipling someone? How many apprentices are being developed? How many people are leading? How many new communities have been started? How many leaders have we sent? The question isn’t just, “How many came?” It is, “How many were activated?”

3. Make Church Small Enough to Be Personal and Big Enough to Be Powerful

There are things a crowd can do that a small group cannot. There are also things a small community can do that a crowd never will. We need both.

South City in Little Rock has intentionally designed its rhythm around that conviction. On the first and third Sundays, people gather in homes. On the second and fourth, the whole church gathers for worship. Their CityGroups live on mission throughout the city, and leaders are developed with the expectation that groups will multiply.

What I love about this is that discipleship doesn’t become another program offered by the church. It gets embedded into the relationships of the church. South City uses Discovery Bible Study, one-on-one disciple-making, triads, missional training, and BLESS rhythms to equip ordinary people to live on mission where they already live.

Disciples are not mass-produced. Somebody needs to know my name, know my story, notice when I am missing, encourage me when I am struggling, challenge me when I am drifting, and eventually say, “Now I want you to do for someone else what I’ve been doing for you.”

At the same time, those smaller expressions don’t have to operate alone. They benefit from the teaching, resources, leadership, accountability, and momentum of the larger church. That may be the genius of the model: Small enough to know you, big enough to send you.

4. Reproduce the Mission – Not Just the Model

Church planters are entrepreneurs. We innovate. We contextualize. We figure out what works. The danger comes when something works so well that we start believing everybody needs to reproduce exactly what we created.

I don’t believe the goal is to reproduce our model. The goal is to reproduce the mission.

At COMMUNITY, that is becoming increasingly important. We have grown from one location into multiple physical campuses, online expressions, small groups, community ministries, church plants, and other expressions. We are increasingly asking how every person can become a spiritual leader wherever God has placed them – what we describe as “Every Person a Pastor.”

A Network Church gives you permission to ask a wonderfully disruptive question: What could church look like here? In one community, it may be hundreds of people gathering in an auditorium. Somewhere else, it might be 20 people around a dinner table. It could be a microchurch for people with disabilities, a spiritual community in a prison, an online community, a campus, or a new autonomous church.

The expressions don’t have to be identical because unity doesn’t require uniformity. What holds the network together is shared mission, doctrine, values, relationships, accountability, and a commitment to multiplication.

This connects to something we wrote about years ago in On the Verge: Movements require a shift from “the centralized and controlled to the decentralized and empowered.” The Network Church makes that shift practical. You don’t have to control every expression. You have to reproduce the DNA that allows each expression to carry the mission faithfully.

5. Don’t Build One Church-Planting Church – Build a Church-Planting Engine

This is the reason I am most excited about the Network Church. I love church planting. But I have become even more passionate about reproducing churches, because reproduction is how we scale church planting.

Here is how I would explain it: A church plant gives us another church. A reproducing church gives us another church-planting organization. A multiplying church gives us generations of church-planting organizations.

That is a completely different kind of return.

Imagine beginning a church with the expectation that every leader will apprentice another leader, every disciple will learn to make disciples, every group will have multiplication in its future, and every new church expression will eventually reproduce another expression. Suddenly multiplication is no longer a department of the church. Multiplication is how the church works.

We see glimpses of this in the Atlas case studies. South City develops leaders through home groups and helps those groups multiply, with enough groups in an area potentially leading to a new church. Church Project combines decentralized house churches with common leadership and shared resources, giving individual house churches the strength of a much larger body.

This is multiplication with infrastructure. You get the entrepreneurial energy of something small and the resources of something larger. You get contextualization without isolation, distributed leadership without disconnection, and multiplication with accountability.

If I Were 25 Again…

So let me go back to that 25-year-old church planter. If I could sit down with him today, I wouldn’t tell him to abandon the dream. I would tell him to make the dream bigger.

I would say: “Dave, don’t just ask God to give you a church filled with people. Ask Him to give you people who can become the church in thousands of places. Don’t just build a great gathering. Build a leadership pipeline. Don’t just start groups. Start communities that can reproduce. Don’t just plant a church. Plant a church of churches.”

Would it be messier? Absolutely. This model introduces real challenges around leadership, theological consistency, accountability, and maintaining common DNA. The Atlas acknowledges all of those challenges. But I would rather deal with the challenges of releasing people than settle for the limitations of controlling everything.

So, if you are preparing to plant a church, I want to put one practical challenge in front of you: Design for the fourth generation before you launch the first. Ask what would have to be true for a disciple to make a disciple who makes a disciple. Ask what would have to be true for a leader to apprentice a leader who apprentices another leader. And ask what would have to be true for your first church to eventually become a network of reproducing churches.

That is the shift from planting a church to catalyzing a movement.

At 25, I wanted to plant a church that could reach a lot of people. Today, I would start with an even bigger dream. I would plant a church designed to plant churches, develop leaders who develop leaders, and make disciples who make disciples. I would plant a Network Church – a church with a movement already inside it.

Exponential NEXT Podcast Episode 128

Series: Church on the Frontier

Description:

Discipleship was never meant to remain a class, curriculum, or concept. Peyton Jones of Discipology and Patrick Linnell of Grace Bomb are helping ordinary followers of Jesus turn Scripture, kindness, and faithful intention into everyday action. Their work shows what becomes possible when people realize that participating in God’s mission does not require a platform, professional title, or complicated program. This conversation explores simplicity, obedience, relational mission, and the challenge of building a church culture in which discipleship extends far beyond Sunday. The future of disciple-making may depend on ordinary people believing, “I can actually do this.”

Host:

Tom Planck, Innovation NEXT, Director

Guests:

Peyton Jones – Discipology, Founder

Pat Linnell – Grace Bomb, Founder

Category: Innovation NEXT

Links shared in episode:

Discipology

Grace Bomb

October marks the anniversary of pastor Eugene Peterson’s death. 

Eugene Peterson was a giant in the faith and led with quiet humility, devotion to Jesus, and a heart for the people of God. When leaders think of Peterson, they may recall the more than 30 books he wrote, his paraphrase of the Bible in The Message, or his decades of pastoral ministry. But perhaps most of all, they remember a man who poured out his life for others, loved his family deeply, and finished both his ministry and his life well. 

By nearly any measure – spiritual or personal – Peterson’s life stands as a pastoral success story and faithful follower of Jesus.

Peterson is not alone. Countless women and men, before and after him, have also finished the race well. We would be remiss not to study the lives of those who pursued the call of God and met Jesus with love in their eyes and tenderness in their hearts toward the people they served. Corrie ten Boom, Fred Rodgers, and Dallas Willard just to name a few. 

Several years ago, I set out in search of an answer to a question that kept nagging me: “How can we help people who serve in ministry finish well, loving Jesus and loving others?” This question inspired my doctoral research and led me to interview nearly one hundred pastors, church leaders, and church attenders to see if I could discover a through line.

When we discuss these Kingdom success stories, we often focus on accomplishments and personal practices: What did their Sabbath look like? How often did they vacation, pray, read Scripture, retreat into solitude, or spend time in nature?

These are valuable questions for anyone hoping to establish healthier rhythms of life and ministry. Yet in my research on pastoral leadership, one overlooked question emerged again and again: Who surrounded them?

That question changes what we notice. We tend to focus on leaders’ private practices and assume their formation occurred primarily between them and the Lord. This does not discount relationship with Jesus or the Spirit’s transforming work, but it does not fully account for how faithful leaders lived. We make the same mistake with heroes of Scripture, especially Moses, whom leadership models often present as a lone figure leading a people into freedom.

We have polished Moses’s story into a sacred legend: the baby drawn from the Nile, refined alone in the wilderness, and called from the flames to lead God’s people. Moses parts the waters, confronts Pharaoh, and stands on the mountain wrapped in glory. Even Aaron often appears nearby but at a distance while Moses carries the calling alone.

While Moses offers a compelling example of faithful leadership, reading his story through the lens of individual greatness leaves us vulnerable to misreading the text and disillusionment when we try to carry a calling Scripture never asked us to bear alone.

READING THE RIGHT STORY

To read Moses rightly, we must locate him within the larger biblical story. He is not simply an effective leader whose methods pastors should reproduce. As prophet, deliverer, and covenant mediator, Moses awakens expectation for the greater Prophet and Mediator to come (Acts 3:22; Hebrews 8:6). Reducing him to a solitary leadership model obscures both his role as a foreshadowing of Christ and the people who surrounded him.

The same could be true when we speak of King David. Many books have been written about pastoral ministry comparing the leadership ideals from David’s courage, restraint, anointing, and authority. Yet David, too, occupies a Christological promise in the story of the redemption of God’s people. God’s covenant with David created an expectation that there would come a greater King whose throne would endure forever. David’s life does not set the pathway for pastors to become kings over God’s people any more than Moses’ life authorizes them to become sole mediators between God and the church. Both men point beyond themselves to what Jesus would ultimately fulfill. 

When the church turns Christological archetypes into pastoral job descriptions, we ask leaders to occupy a place only Christ can fill. Churches that are shaped around one charismatic, exceptional leader invite abuse, isolation, and insecurity, leaving fewer pastors able to finish ministry with their love for Jesus and his people intact. The mantle is too heavy because it belongs to Christ alone. Concentrating authority in one person also diminishes the anointing poured out upon God’s sons and daughters and silences gifts given to the whole church.

What makes this pattern even more troubling is that the biblical characters we invoke to justify our actions, did not lead that way when they were leading well. When we read Moses’s story carefully the image of a solitary figure begins to dissolve. Around him stood counselors, prophets, priests, elders, family members, and future leaders – each carrying gifts and responsibilities that shaped both Moses and the people he led.

A CALLING TOO GREAT TO CARRY ALONE

Few people can think of the story of Moses without thinking of Jethro. The wisdom of this Midianite priest enters Moses’s story long before the exodus begins. After fleeing into the wilderness, Moses carried with him an orphaned sense of belonging, suspended between the family that raised him and the people whose suffering had become his own. Jethro stepped into that fractured story as a father figure, offering Moses not only a home but a different way of understanding the God who would soon call him by name.

Moses met Yahweh while tending Jethro’s flock. Jethro’s presence would have been deeply impactful in Moses’s formative years and thereafter. This is important to note because Jethro spoke to Moses’ heart long before he ever spoke to his organizational methods.

Later, when Jethro watched Moses settle disputes from morning until evening, he saw what Moses could not: one leader could not carry an entire people without harming himself and those he served. His counsel anticipated the shared responsibility later reflected in Acts 6.

Jethro was not alone. Aaron helped Moses find his voice, and Aaron and Hur held up his arms when his strength failed (Exodus 4:10-16; 17:8-13). Miriam, the first woman explicitly named a prophet, led the people in worship (Exodus 15:20-21). Zipporah intervened decisively when Moses faced covenantal danger (Exodus 4:24-26). Seventy elders received the Spirit and shared Israel’s burden, while Joshua prepared to carry the mission beyond Moses’s lifetime (Numbers 11:16-17, 24-25; 27:18-23).

When we rightly read the Moses the picture that emerges is not of one extraordinary man accomplishing God’s purposes alone but rather of a leader surrounded by people who brought wisdom, strength, correction, shared responsibility, and continuity. Moses needed more than people who believed in his calling. He needed people whose gifts could shape the way he carried it, people that could love him enough to say the hard things, and others who could hear from the Lord and take action.

That pattern continues in the early church. In Acts 6, the apostles respond to a growing need by sharing authority rather than consolidating it. It is most likely that the Apostles look back to Jethro’s wisdom of shared delegation and authority when thinking through the structure of this brand-new Second Testament church. 

In Acts 13 and 15, we see leaders discern the Spirit’s direction together. Priscilla and Aquila help Apollos understand the way of God more accurately, and Paul confronts Peter when his conduct contradicts the gospel (Acts 6:1–7; 13:1–3; 15:6–29; 18:24–26; Galatians 2:11–14). We can so easily romanticize the difficulties that came with the tensions of shared responsibility, mutuality, confrontation, and discernment. The Second Testament church was not without bumps and bruises, but the testimony of their faithfulness stands as a witness to a watching world and remains an example for us to follow.

THE ROLE OF MANY

The church does not belong to one exceptional leader surrounded by assistants. It belongs to Jesus, who gives his Spirit and gifts to the whole body. If we want thriving churches and thriving pastors, leaders need more than a team to advance God’s mission. Teams are wonderful. As a former church planter and pastor, I am grateful for teams and staffing, ministry doesn’t happen without them. But leaders are still susceptible to the enemy’s attack without a varied circle of relationships that shape them, challenge them, share the weight of leadership and discernment, and remind them who they apart from their role and title. A spouse or a close friend should not be expected to become an entire accountability and support system.

Healthy leaders need mentors who are willing to say the hard things. They need people like Jethro who can stand outside the immediate system, recognize both the heart of the pastor and the unhealthy patterns that must be confronted rather than normalized. The leaders we remember as models of faithfulness have their own “Jethro’s” woven into their stories. Fred Rogers was shaped by Dr. Margaret McFarland, his longtime mentor and adviser. Eugene Peterson received spiritual direction from Sister Constance and found an early model of pastoral vocation in George Buttrick. These relationships addressed more than their public work; each of these spoke to their heart not just their vocation. It would be difficult to study anyone who finished ministry well without discovering the voices of those who formed them woven through their lives and words.

Healthy leaders also need people who genuinely share authority. Healthy boards and leadership teams must be able to do more than advise the senior leader or implement an already established vision. Shared authority means their discernment can change a decision, redirect a plan, or place necessary limits around the person with the most organizational power. This may sit within an elder or board structure, but it may not. Who genuinely carries discernment, authority, and responsibility in your church?

Healthy leaders need people with permission to disrupt consensus. Alan Hirsch describes these “Miriams” as “agitators for change.” Every leadership culture needs trusted voices who can ask whether the group is moving too quickly, overlooking someone, or confusing agreement with the leading of the Spirit. Their role is not to create conflict for its own sake, but to protect the community from the blind spots that develop when harmony becomes more valuable than truth. 

These voices are often the prophetic interrupters that are necessary to ensure we are not aligning the Spirit to our church calendars but that all our best laid plans start first at the feet of Jesus. Often these people are the seers of the church, when isolated and cast aside they can be perceived as disruptive or antagonistic but when held within the ecosystem of shared discernment they are invaluable reverberations of the voice of the Spirit aligning his church and his ministers back to his heart.

Healthy leaders need collaborators who bring gifts they do not possess. These are women and men who do not merely help carry out the leader’s ideas; they help shape the ministry itself. Their different experiences, instincts, and callings expand the church’s ability to discern where Jesus is leading. Welcoming their gifts means giving them more than visibility. It means allowing their wisdom to influence decisions that matter. It takes secure leadership to recognize that God has gifted those around them in ways they themselves may not be gifted. Yet when included, the church is more vibrant and the pastor can rest knowing God is moving through those anointed to creatively push the mission of God forward.

Healthy leaders need friends who know the person beneath the title. Their value is not that they provide another layer of organizational oversight, but that they offer a place where the pastor does not have to perform certainty, strength, or spiritual competence. They recognize exhaustion, grief, fear, and isolation before those struggles become visible from the platform. They remind leaders that their worth is not measured by the size or success of their ministry.

These are the friends with whom we can laugh until we cry, and cry without having to explain ourselves. Throughout our ministries, my husband and I have leaned upon close friends who allow us to speak honestly without judgment, who pray for us, encourage us, and love us when we have nothing left to give. It is an honor to offer them that same friendship in their own seasons of need. Such relationships return us to mutuality: we are not pastors serving everyone else, but members of the body who also need to be known and loved. Scripture reminds us that “a cheerful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:22), and sometimes shared laughter is one of God’s kindest forms of care. 

Finally, healthy leaders need emerging leaders into whom they can pour themselves. Joshua’s presence reminded Israel that God’s mission would continue beyond Moses. This is important for both the people and for Moses. Next-generation leaders should not remain permanently near the edges, waiting for their opportunity. They need meaningful responsibility, room to develop their own gifts, and the freedom to lead differently from those who formed them. 

I am reminded of the great cathedrals and beautiful chapels I toured in the United Kingdom several years ago. Generations worshiped within those walls before us, and God willing, generations will continue to worship long after we are gone. There is something both humbling and freeing about remembering that we are a vapor within the long history of the church this side of the resurrection. Pouring into the next generation reminds us that the church does not begin or end with us. Thanks be to God.

A SOBERING WARNING

Yet even the healthiest relationships cannot guarantee faithfulness. We are not called to create stronger versions of Moses and title them pastor, but to form leaders whose confidence rests in the One to whom Moses pointed. At Meribah, Moses acted from anger rather than obedience, failing to trust and honor God before the people. Aaron stood beside him and did not interrupt the failure. Scripture holds them both responsible. Israel, though physically delivered from Egypt, still carried Egypt in its heart through fear, complaint, and resistance (Numbers 20:7-12; Deuteronomy 34:1-5).

We are taught through this narrative that proximity alone is not accountability. A pastor may be surrounded by staff, friends, mentors, and board members while retaining enough control to prevent any of them from meaningfully intervening. If the leader controls who receives information, who remains employed, and whether correction carries consequences, the appearance of accountability can conceal practical isolation. The question is not merely, “Who can speak?” but, “Whose voice can change a decision, restrain the use of power, or protect someone who has been harmed?”

Healthy relationships and accountable structures create conditions that help leaders flourish, but they cannot produce faithfulness for us. Each leader must still choose surrender, humility, obedience, and discernment. The people around us can tell us the truth, share the burden, pray for us, and intervene when they see danger, but they cannot make us listen. However, if our love for Jesus grows cold and we refuse correction, no board, mentor, friendship, or organizational system can guarantee the outcome.

This is why the goal is not to construct a leadership ecosystem strong enough to save us. It is to cultivate relationships that continually return us to Jesus, the faithful Prophet, Priest, and King whom Moses could only anticipate.

WHO IS IN YOUR PICTURE?

Pastor, who is in your picture? Who can tell you the truth, share your burden, pray for you, interrupt an unhealthy pattern, and remind you that the church belongs to Jesus? Who knows the person beneath the title, and who are you preparing to carry the mission beyond you?

And if you are not a pastor, look carefully at your church. How is your pastor supported? Who can challenge their decisions without fear of losing employment, influence, or belonging? Who shares real authority, and who cares for the pastor’s soul, family, and life beyond ministry?

Mutuality does not flatten leadership or erase the responsibilities entrusted to those in leadership. It means no one is placed beyond accountability and every gift is welcomed so that the whole body can flourish.

Imagine a church where pastors finish ministry still loving Jesus and having glorified him with their lives – where they love their families and are loved by them, and where pastors and people share genuine affection and trust. Imagine mutuality embraced, egos surrendered, and headlines telling fewer stories of trauma, pain, and abuse and more stories of faithfulness, healing, flourishing, and Kingdom impact. 

Here, God’s people live into the fullness of the gifts the Father has given them and carry Jesus’s mission together. Together, we proclaim Jesus not only with our words, but through a shared life that becomes his healing presence in a wounded world. When no leader carries the mantle that belongs to Christ alone, pastors can finish well and the whole church can flourish.

As I shifted in my seat, my forearm stuck to the table. Someone had wiped it down, but not well enough. Years of ketchup packets, spilled soda, and hurried lunches had left their mark.

Across from me sat one of my white congregants. He leaned forward before his food even arrived.

“What do you call it?” he asked. “You know… when Pastor Jones is preaching, but everybody’s standing up talking back to him? And the organ is playing behind him? And then he starts singing in the middle of the sermon? What is that?”

A month earlier he had visited the largest Black Pentecostal church in our city. Ever since, he had been trying to process what he experienced. His eyes widened as he searched for words, convinced he had stumbled into some secret category of Christianity.

I smiled.

“He was preaching.”

His confusion revealed something larger than a church service. What felt unique, fascinating, and culturally distinct to him felt entirely ordinary to me. What he experienced as a special event was, for many Black Christians, just Sunday morning.

The same thing happens when people talk about “urban ministry.” Urban ministry is often described as a specialized calling, for specialized people. For many Black Christians, it’s simply what ministry has always looked like.

Urban Ministry Is Just Ministry

When I arrived at my Christian university, I kept hearing people talk about “urban ministry.” I would nod my head like I understood the conversation. You know the nod. The one that says, “I’m tracking with you,” when in reality, you’re completely lost.

“Yeah, we’re doing urban ministry this weekend.”

“Have you ever felt called to urban ministry?”

“We’re taking a team into the city.”

For weeks, I smiled, nodded, and kept moving. I had absolutely no idea what everyone was talking about. Then one Saturday morning, I found out.

Before sunrise, students gathered in a campus auditorium. There was worship music playing through speakers that were just a little too loud. Leaders stood on stage giving instructions. Coffee cups steamed in everyone’s hands.

Then came the announcement.

“Today we’ll be heading into the city to do urban ministry.” There was that phrase again.

Urban ministry.

The way they said it made it sound adventurous. Dangerous. Almost exotic. Like we were preparing for a mission trip to some distant land where people had never heard the name of Jesus. I remember thinking, “Whatever this is, it sounds serious. Somebody is definitely getting saved today.” 

A few minutes later, seven of us squeezed into a tiny Toyota Corolla and started driving. As we left the suburbs behind, the roads became familiar. The storefronts became familiar. The neighborhoods became familiar.

Then it hit me.

We weren’t going somewhere new.

We were going home.

We pulled into one of the neighborhood housing projects in my city. Kids were already outside playing basketball. Grandmothers sat on porches keeping watch over the block. Music drifted through open windows. The smell of somebody’s Saturday dinner was already filling the air.

And then we started doing “urban ministry.” We knocked on doors. We shared the gospel. We invited kids to church. We prayed with families. We ran children’s programs. In other words, we did ministry.

The ride back to campus was quiet for me. My forehead rested against the passenger-side window as I stared out at the passing traffic. 

You mean to tell me urban ministry is just ministry? Is street evangelism just evangelism? Saturday “Campus Serve” is just children’s outreach? The thing everyone was describing as a specialized ministry category was simply what many Black churches had been doing every week for generations. That day exposed a cultural distinction I had never noticed before.

Many Black Christians don’t call it urban ministry. We just call it ministry.

Not because we are anti-urban. Not because we’re dismissive of the term. The word simply doesn’t carry the same significance when the city isn’t a mission field you visit but a community you belong to. For many Black Christians, urban ministry isn’t a strategy. It’s where Grandma lived. It’s where your cousins still live. It’s where your church has been serving for 50 years.

It’s home.

By the time I was 15 years old, I had already received a master’s class in ministry from my mother. She wasn’t on a conference stage. She didn’t have a podcast. She wasn’t writing books about urban engagement. She was standing on the 500 block of Madison Street making sure everyone knew that block belonged to Jesus.

My mother would call out drug dealers by name. Not because she was reckless, but because she loved her neighborhood too much to stay silent. She prayed for people. Corrected people. Encouraged people. Fed people. Invited people to church.

Nobody called it urban ministry.

It was just ministry.

The Real Urban Ministry Experts Aren’t in the Conversation

One of the strange realities of ministry is that the people who know the most are often invited to speak the least. At the university, I watched bright-eyed ministry students organize children’s programs in neighborhoods they barely understood. The kids were running wild. Some ignored instructions. Some disrupted lessons. Some disappeared into the woods. Some tested every boundary they could find. The college students were frustrated. They had theories. They had textbooks. They had ministry models. What they needed was Ms. Sylvia.

Ms. Sylvia had never attended a ministry conference. She didn’t have a seminary degree. Nobody was asking her to lead a breakout session on urban engagement. But she had spent 30 years raising children, discipling teenagers, serving families, and loving a neighborhood everyone else drove through with their doors locked.

She could have taught half the workshops.

“If you’re firm on the front end, these kids won’t walk all over you,” she’d say. “They know how to behave. They have manners at home. You’re the one letting them get away with it.” What struck me wasn’t simply that Ms. Sylvia had wisdom. It’s that nobody was asking for it.

Too often, conversations about urban ministry happen without the people who have spent their entire lives doing ministry in urban communities. The experts become the observers. The practitioners become the projects. The people who know the neighborhood best are treated as subjects of ministry rather than sources of ministry wisdom. I believe that may be one of the greatest blind spots in the entire conversation.

How Should We Engage in Urban Ministry?

I want to leave you with three thoughts to consider as you continue serving Christ in whatever context God has called you to.

1. There is nothing wrong with calling it “urban ministry.”

The term has become part of our Christian vocabulary, and that’s okay. Just remember that what may feel new, unique, or even intimidating to you may be ordinary life for someone else.

What one person experiences as a ministry assignment, another person experiences as home.

Approach every community with the humility to learn before you seek to lead.

2. Don’t confuse financial stability with spiritual maturity.

Suburban neighborhoods are not inherently more godly than urban neighborhoods, nor are urban neighborhoods inherently more broken than suburban ones.

The fruit of the Spirit is not measured in property values, household income, or educational attainment.

God’s grace is just as present in apartment complexes as it is in gated communities, and faithfulness can be found on every block of every zip code.

3. Look for the people God was already using before you arrived.

There are pastors, grandmothers, Sunday school teachers, community leaders, and faithful saints who have been proclaiming the gospel in those neighborhoods long before your ministry team showed up.

Instead of asking them to come alongside your work, consider how you might come alongside theirs.

The Kingdom of God rarely begins when we arrive.

More often, God invites us to join a work He has already been doing.

Exponential NEXT Podcast Episode 127

Series: Church on the Frontier

Description:

Technology is not the mission, but it can help remove barriers the Church has tolerated for too long. Aiden Britnell of Kaleo AI and James Donley of OneChurch.io share how digital tools can increase accessibility, strengthen collaboration, and serve Gospel movement. From real-time translation that helps people participate across language barriers to city-wide platforms that connect churches around prayer and mission, these ministries demonstrate how technology can support deeply human and relational ministry. This conversation invites church leaders to view technology not as a replacement for embodied community, but as infrastructure that can help the body of Christ work together more faithfully.

Host:

Tom Planck, Innovation NEXT, Director

Guests:

Aidan Britnell – Kaleo AI, Founder

James Donley – OneChurch.io, Founder

Category: Innovation NEXT

Links shared in episode:

Kaleo AI

OneChurch.io

Before I share what grabbed me, there is something you have to know first. I am a huge Cincinnati Bengals fan. You might ask, “Why?!” I often ask the same question. Pray for me later, but hang with me for a few minutes. 

The Bengals were coming off their Super Bowl run in 2021. Burrow’s stardom was a rocket ship locally and nationally. 

This particular day, he was answering questions about preparing for another NFL season. He talked about how every game requires something different from him. Each opponent presents a different challenge. Each defense has a different set of strengths. 

Each week, he has to determine which version of Joe Burrow needs to emerge for the Bengals to win. Joe then said, “My favorite part of playing football is figuring out which version of me is needed to win that game.” There it is!

A Bengals beat writer quickly asked a follow-up question, “Which version of Joe do you like the best?” His answer, “I like the version of Joe that throws for 530 yards.” Joe did that against the Baltimore Ravens in the prior season. 

I smiled when I heard the version of him he liked the most. Of course, that was his favorite version. Who wouldn’t prefer the version of themselves putting up historic numbers, throwing touchdowns, and winning games (insert your favorite ministry scorecard examples).

But, I could not stop thinking about Joe’s first answer. Every game requires a different version of Joe. This is true in football. I believe it is also true about ministry. 

Different seasons of leadership require different versions of the same called leader. 

The pastor who starts a new expression of church may not be the same version of the pastor needed to lead it 10 years from now. The leader who helps a congregation survive a crisis may need to lead differently when the crisis is over. The ministry leader who creates early momentum through personal energy and relationships will eventually need to build teams, establish systems, and release authority.

The calling may remain the same. The Jesus mission does not change. The leader is still the leader God called. A new season, however, will always require something new from that leader. 

When Yesterday’s Strength Becomes Today’s Limitation

Most pastors I coach do not suffer from a shortage of ideas. 

They often have a long list of sermon and ministry ideas. They are dreaming about new forms of outreach and the next staffer they need to hire. They attend conferences, listen to podcasts, and engage other leaders.

When a church or ministry gets stuck, our first instinct is often to search for the next best idea. We need a new program, structure, strategy, or teammate. Any of those things might be helpful, but let this question linger over you. What if your ministry or church’s next breakthrough is not waiting on a new idea? 

What if it is waiting for a new version of you?

Our strengths do not suddenly become bad. But an unexamined strength can become a limitation when the season changes. The version of you that brought your church or ministry here may not be the version of you that can lead it there. 

The Next Version Is Still You

You do not need to become louder, more charismatic, or even more impressive. We certainly do not need to chase every new leadership trend.

The next version of you is still you. 

It is a leader God has been forming through every win, loss, conflict, and courageous decision. It is a leader God has been shaping through faithfulness and obedience. And yes, even failure.

This is not reinvention. It is emergence. 

I often ask leaders to wrestle with this question: What new version of your needs to emerge for the new season you are entering?

I have a very long list of possible answers to share, but I am going to resist sharing them. My challenge is for you to sit with Jesus. Ask Him that question. Discern what new version of you needs to emerge for what is next for you, your team, and your ministry. 

What Version of You Does This Season Need?

Every football game presents a different defense for an offense to attack. Every season of ministry presents a different set of leadership challenges.

Here are a few questions to help you dig deeper on the last question I asked.

• What is changing around you? 
• What does your church or ministry need now that it did not need three years ago? 
• Which of your strengths may be creating an unintended limitation?
• What conversation have you been avoiding because the next version of you might need greater courage? 
• Who do you need to trust?
• What do you need to learn? 
• What or who do you need to release?

These questions are not about competency. These questions are about stewardship. 

God did not call us only for the season in which we first said yes. He desires deeply to transform us for every season that follows.

A New Version of You

Joe Burrow was right. 

Every game requires a different version of him. The best version is not always the one that produces the most impressive stat line. It is the version prepared to meet the new challenges ahead.

The same is true of us.

Our next breakthrough may include a new idea, strategy, or opportunity. However, before we go searching for what is next, we should sit with Jesus and boldly ask, “What new version of me needs to emerge for the season of ministry in front of me?”

And then, listen. Surrender. Trust your Heavenly Father. The God who called us into this work is not finished transforming us to carry it forward.

Onward. Forward!

We have commodified multiplication.

We treat planters like solitary entrepreneurs sent into the wild with a backpack full of debt and a mountain of expectations. When they burn out – and they often do – we blame them and their lack of (fill in the blank here) instead of our flawed system.

The New Testament knows nothing of the isolated corporate plant. The early church multiplied through interdependent local networks bound by shared theology, shared pain, and shared purse strings. It is time to abandon the lone-hero narrative and return to apostolic collaboration.

Think of your network not as a loose affiliation of distinct entities, but as a venture portfolio for the Kingdom.

Relying on a single hero project is a high-risk gamble. By treating your collective resources – finances, facilities, and personnel – as a diversified asset pool, you spread risk, increase your missional velocity, and create the capacity to fund multiple, agile church plants simultaneously. It is time to shift from betting on one outcome to managing a resilient ecosystem of Kingdom growth.

What is a Network?

Definition: A small group of churches who become friends on mission to multiply healthy disciple-making churches together.

Description: A Network typically consists of 3-6 churches joining together in friendship and mission. These churches choose Kingdom over castle, working together to start new churches that make more disciples. Every Network is marked by these values:

• Reproducing – a commitment to reproducing at all levels.
• Relationships – a commitment to being friends on mission.
• Resources – a commitment to sharing what we have to accomplish more together.
• Residency – a commitment to investing in the next generation of church planters.

By embodying these shared values, Networks multiply healthy, disciple-making churches and extend the love of Jesus to every person in their community and beyond.

When three to six churches plant together, funding becomes less of a crushing burden. It becomes a shared joy. Responsibility distributes across existing relational trust. Nobody carries the load alone. Nobody waits five years to raise full funding before stepping into the field.

You do not need a mega-budget or a denominational windfall. You need a handful of committed pastors, absolute clarity on mission, and a ruthless rejection of territorial empire-building.

Stop building personal castles; start advancing the Kingdom together.

Here are practical models for pooling resources, breaking down local isolation, and funding church plants through small networks. 

1. Covenant Giving: Automatic Kingdom Tithing

Every church in the network commits a fixed percentage of its gross operating budget – typically 1% to 3% – into a dedicated, shared planting fund. This is not a special offering. It is a non-negotiable budget line item, prioritized right alongside facilities and payroll.

The failure of the current model is simple: we treat planting as a luxury, not a necessity. When times get tight, planting is the first line item to get axed. That is not a financial reality; it is a theological one.

Theological imperative: Your budget reveals your ecclesiology. If your church only funds its own internal operations, you are practicing financial tribalism. Tithing your budget to the broader body of Christ proves that you value the global Bride over your local brand.

Practical mechanism: Five churches with modest average budgets of $400,000 committing 2% annually yield $40,000 per year. Over a 24-month cycle, $80,000 sits ready before a planter even steps onto the field. You eliminate emergency fundraising entirely.

Implementation Guide:

• Pass formal board resolutions in each network church defining the tithe percentage.
• Establish an independent, shared network checking account managed by a rotated trustee.

Transfer funds automatically on the first business day of every month without exception.

Moving from automatic giving to recycling capital creates a permanent financial engine. It stops the start-stop cycle of funding.

2. The Revolving Loan Fund: Recycling Kingdom Capital

Network churches pool a substantial initial cash reserve to form an internal micro-finance fund. Instead of outright grants, funds are lent to new plants interest-free or at nominal interest. As the new plant achieves financial stability, it repays the loan back to the network fund.

Most church planting is a “giveaway” model. While generous, it fails to teach sustainability. It treats the plant like a child that never grows up. We need to stop giving grants and start providing investment.

Theological imperative: Stewarding resources requires ongoing velocity. Capital buried in commercial banks earns pennies while ministry starves. Recycling money instills financial discipline in the plant while honoring the sacrificial generosity of the donor churches.

Practical mechanism: Four churches contribute $15,000 each to build a $60,000 fund. Plant A receives $60,000 for launch expenses and repays $1,000 monthly starting in Year 2. By Year 6, the loan is fully repaid, and Plant B accesses the exact same capital pool.

Implementation Guide:

• Draft formal promissory notes with flexible payback terms tied to attendance and budget milestones.
• Include a 12-month initial grace period before principal repayments begin.

Reinvest all returned capital immediately into the next planned church launch.

This creates a self-sustaining cycle where your initial seed money multiplies itself over time, rather than disappearing into a singular sinkhole.

3. In-Kind Asset Pooling: Mobilizing Hidden Wealth

Churches possess vast non-cash resources sitting idle throughout the week. Networks inventory and deploy physical spaces, specialized staff labor, hardware, and professional services directly to the new plant, slashing start-up overhead.

The “Lone Ranger” planter often pays for services that already exist in the network. They pay market rate for graphic design, legal help, or sound equipment rental. It is a waste of Kingdom resources when that talent is sitting in a pews just three miles away.

Theological imperative: God has already provided everything the local body needs. Hoarding underutilized facilities and professional talent while a new work starves is bad stewardship. In-kind sharing breaks down territorial ownership of tools and talents.

Practical mechanism: Church A provides free office space. Church B’s CPA handles payroll and tax compliance. Church C lends sound gear. The new plant saves $35,000 in first-year operational costs without a single dollar changing hands.

Implementation Guide:

• Conduct a rigorous audit of all physical gear, vacant space, and professional skills across the network.
• Draft precise service-level agreements to prevent staff burnout or facility conflicts.

Assign dollar equivalents to in-kind gifts to ensure transparent budget accountability.

When liquid cash is tight, leveraging physical and human infrastructure unlocks massive hidden value and accelerates launch speed.

4. Asymmetric Sending Covenants: Asymmetrical Generosity

Network equity does not mean financial equality. A larger, better-resourced network church carries a heavier salary burden for the planter, while smaller network partners provide auxiliary funding, relational coaching, and volunteer teams.

The “equality myth” kills networks. Smaller churches feel they cannot contribute, and larger churches feel they have to do it all. We must move toward a model where every church contributes what it can, not what everyone else is contributing.

Theological imperative: Paul instructed that those who have much should not have too much, and those who have little should have no lack. Asymmetric giving reflects gospel equity. It destroys competition and honors the body’s varying capacities.

Practical mechanism: Anchor Church carries 60% of the planter’s salary for two years. Three smaller partner churches each fund 10-15%, plus commit launch team members. The planter achieves full salary coverage rapidly without risking isolation.

Implementation Guide:

• Establish a binding written agreement detailing the financial ramp-down schedule over 24-36 months.
• Ensure smaller churches have equal voting power in governance, despite contributing less.

Protect the anchor church from overriding network consensus due to its larger financial stake.

For networks lacking an anchor church, shifting the employment model entirely offers total financial liberation.

5. Bi-Vocational Strategy: Uncoupling Ministry from Payroll

Bi-vocational planting is not a compromise; it is an offensive strategy. Planters maintain secular careers while the network provides critical supplementary funding, healthcare stipends, ongoing executive coaching, and operational support.

We have idolized the full-time pastorate. It creates a class system in the church. It also puts undue pressure on a planter to produce immediate numerical results to justify a full-time salary.

Theological imperative: Paul made tents to preserve financial independence and embed deeply within local commerce. Professional clergy models often isolate leaders from the very secular culture they seek to reach. Bi-vocationalism restores apostolic presence.

Practical mechanism: A teacher plants a church. Secular employment covers basic living costs. The network contributes $1,200 monthly toward healthcare and retirement, plus covers 100% of venue and ministry gear expenses.

Implementation Guide:

• Target assessment specifically toward leaders comfortable operating across marketplace and ministry sectors.
• Cap planter working hours strictly at 15-20 hours weekly for church tasks to prevent total burnout.

Deploy network administrative volunteers to relieve the bi-vocational leader of back-office paperwork.

Whether plants are full-time or bi-vocational, central network infrastructure requires predictable operational funding.

6. Infrastructure Membership Dues: Protecting the Seed Fund

Churches pay predictable operational dues, separate from planting seed money, to maintain core network infrastructure. Dues cover shared software, assessment tools, legal filings, and leadership coaching, keeping planting capital untouched.

Most networks fail because they are under-funded. They try to do “mission” on a shoestring budget while ignoring the basic operational costs of keeping the network alive. This leads to burnout and inefficiency.

Theological imperative: Proper infrastructure honors God. Mixing operational administration with mission capital breeds confusion and waste. Sound structures protect sacred resources and ensure long-term, institutional durability.

Practical mechanism: Six partner churches pay $250 monthly dues. The resulting $18,000 annual fund covers legal retainers, background check systems, website hosting, and quarterly pastor retreats. Every dollar in the planting fund goes strictly to plants.

Implementation Guide:

• Separate operational network accounts strictly from church planting seed accounts.
• Tier dues according to church attendance thresholds to keep fees fair and manageable.

Publish annual financial audits to build total transparency and partner confidence.

A strong internal financial foundation positions the network to unlock external institutional funding.

7. Network Matched Grants: Unlocking External Institutional Capital

Denominations, regional associations, and private foundations love network collaboration. Networks leverage their pooled internal capital to secure 1:1 or 2:1 matching grants from institutional funders who demand proven local accountability.

Why do institutions hesitate to give to single church plants? Because the risk is too high. A single church can fail. A network – a group of committed churches – is a much safer bet.

Theological imperative: Demonstrating unity attracts blessing. Institutional funders are tired of financing isolated, risky projects. Presenting unified network commitments shows wisdom, stewardly oversight, and genuine Kingdom alignment.

Practical mechanism: The network raises $25,000 for a plant. It approaches a regional church planting foundation with a proven local track record. The foundation provides a $25,000 match, instantly doubling the startup fund to $50,000.

Implementation Guide:

• Build a unified network prospectus showcasing collective baptism stats and financial health.
• Apply to denominational grant bodies as a collaborative network rather than a single church.

Structure matching funds to release in milestone-based tranches tied to church health metrics.

Beyond institutional grants, established churches can capture massive financial momentum during internal capital drives.

8. Capital Campaign Carve-Outs: Capturing Momentum

When an established network church conducts a capital campaign for building renovations or debt retirement, it pledges a fixed percentage (5% to 10%) of total campaign receipts directly to the network planting fund.

We build monuments to our past while ignoring the future. If your church can raise millions for a lobby or a parking lot, it can raise an extra 5% for a new church. If you can’t, you have a vision problem.

Theological imperative: Cursing your building campaign with self-indulgence breeds spiritual decay. Tithing your capital expansion to church planting ensures that physical comfort never replaces missional expansion.

Practical mechanism: A network church raises $1.5 million for a worship center renovation. A 10% carve-out directs $150,000 into the network planting fund—fully financing a new church launch without launching a secondary campaign.

Implementation Guide:

• Embed the church planting carve-out explicitly into the primary capital campaign marketing literature.
• Feature the church planter during capital campaign vision nights to inspire donor generosity.
• Remit the carved-out percentage to the network account immediately as pledge payments arrive.

Shared capital campaign proceeds can also fund joint human talent that serves all network members.

9. Shared Staffing Pools: Fractional Talent Architecture

Instead of forcing every plant to hire full-time staff, the network co-hires specialist talent – worship leaders, youth directors, administrative assistants – who divide their hours across the network churches and the new plant.

The “every plant for itself” model is the ultimate barrier to entry. It forces a planter to be a preacher, a musician, a graphic designer, and an admin. They aren’t wired for all that. And the church suffers because of it.

Theological imperative: The Spirit gives diverse gifts to the body, not to individual country-club congregations. Sharing staff breaks down possessive employee dynamics and builds a unified apostolic labor force.

Practical mechanism: Three network churches and one new plant jointly employ a high-caliber graphic designer and an administrator. Each entity pays 25% of salary costs, gaining professional executive-level execution at a fraction of the price.

Implementation Guide:

• Draft precise job descriptions outlining exact hourly allocation and priority expectations for each church.
• Designate one pastor as the primary direct supervisor to prevent multi-boss paralysis.
• Utilize central project management software to handle task requests transparently across churches.

Finally, redirecting existing benevolence practices turns routine generosity into an aggressive missionary engine.

10. Mercy & Benevolence Redirect: Mission as True Mercy

Churches collect regular communion or benevolence offerings for local relief. Networks redirect a predetermined slice of these existing offerings directly to plants targeted in under-resourced, low-income, or unreached urban corridors.

We often separate “mercy ministry” from “church planting.” That is a false dichotomy. The most merciful thing you can do for a neighborhood is to plant a gospel-preaching, community-transforming local church.

Theological imperative: The ultimate act of mercy is planting a gospel-preaching community in a spiritual desert. Relief solves immediate hardship; local churches transform neighborhoods permanently. Linking benevolence to planting restores holistic gospel mission.

Practical mechanism: Five churches take monthly offerings for benevolence and mercy. They agree to designate 50% of all collections to an urban church plant. The combined stream provides $2,000 in reliable monthly funding.

Implementation Guide:

• Educate congregations clearly on how planting acts as long-term community mercy work.
• Ring-fence redirected funds specifically for plants located in under-resourced communities.

Share quarterly testimonies showing both spiritual conversions and tangible community relief.

Your Action Mandate: The Readiness Audit

Stop debating theory. The lone-hero model is dying, and building personal empires is spiritual folly. Real Kingdom advancement belongs to pastors courageous enough to integrate their finances and share their strength.

To evaluate your network’s readiness for immediate collaborative planting, execute this four-step readiness audit within 30 days:

• The Trust Inventory: Can your network pastors review each other’s operating budgets without defensiveness or secrecy? If not, build relational honesty before pooling money.
• The Asset Audit: Have you cataloged every vacant office, unused sound system, and professional skill across your churches? Complete this inventory this month.
• Model Selection: Choose exactly ONE model from the list above. Do not attempt three at once. Master a single collaborative funding mechanism first.
• Board Resolution: Pass matching formal board resolutions in each network church committing to your chosen model within 60 days.

The shift from the lone-ranger model to networked, apostolic collaboration is the most significant pivot you will ever make as a church leader. This isn’t merely about adjusting spreadsheets or finding efficiencies – it is about aligning your church’s heart with the heartbeat of the early church.

The temptation to retreat into the safety of your own building and brand will always be present. But the Holy Spirit is inviting you into something far greater.

When you choose to link arms with other churches, you declare that Jesus is worth the risk of vulnerability. You declare that your neighbor’s community is just as important as your own.

Do not let the fear of complexity or the comfort of isolation hold you back. You have everything you need to start: a handful of friends, a shared conviction, and a risen King.

The harvest is massive, and the fields are ripe. It is time to stop playing it safe in a silo and instead embrace the messy, beautiful, and profoundly fruitful reality of mission-driven collaboration.

Gather your network, pick your model, and step into the field. The future of the movement depends on it. Your neighbors are waiting. The Kingdom is advancing. Will you lead the way?

A Call to Kingdom Collaboration: A Visionary Next Step

The path toward a 16 percent tipping point of multiplying churches across our culture will not be carved by solitary heroes or isolated projects. It requires an unwavering, paradigm-shifting commitment to apostolic collaboration – where local bodies unite as true friends on mission, intentionally pooling their wisdom, leadership, and financial resources to accelerate God’s movement. When we choose Kingdom over castle, we replace fragile single bets with resilient ecosystems of growth that unlock the full potential of every leader and church planter.

As you take these practical steps within your network, keep the bigger picture clear: every shared budget, co-hired staff member, and recycled dollar serves a greater missional mandate. God is inviting us to move past survival and territorial thinking into a bold, unified strategy that turns local networks into catalysts for global movement. Gather your team, commit to action, and align your leadership with the heartbeat of Jesus to ignite a lasting legacy of multiplication.

Exponential NEXT Podcast Episode 126

Series: Church on the Frontier

Description:

What happens when the Church stops asking the next generation to come to us and begins recognizing where God is already at work among them? Michael Swalley of Break Free Ministries and Austin Rockwell of Kamp Love share how they are cultivating Jesus-centered communities within hip-hop culture and on college campuses. Their stories reveal the power of trusted relationships, culturally rooted leadership, and meeting young people where they already are. This conversation challenges churches to move beyond attracting the next generation and begin equipping young leaders to create missional movements from within their own communities.

Host:

Tom Planck, Innovation NEXT, Director

Guests:

Michael Swalley – Break Free Ministries, Founder and Executive Director

Austin Rockwell – Kamp Love, CEO

Category: Innovation NEXT

Links shared in episode:

Break Free Ministries

Kamp Love