Good Article on Church Planting

From Why Some Missionaries Don't Plant Churches:

To put it bluntly, churches and mission agencies send out many missionaries who are not equipped or qualified to plant churches. They may be good, godly men, but they are not gifted for the work of planting churches. They have not been discipled in a church planting atmosphere, and they come from churches that have never planted another church. They have never proven themselves in effective ministry before leaving for a foreign field. They have insufficient training and experience in organizing a church in their own culture, much less a foreign culture with added complexity and complications. They have little idea of the challenges of learning a language and adjusting to life in conditions they never imagined. They are with mission agencies that control rather than coach in order to reproduce clones of North American churches.

I have been greatly and increasingly concerned in recent years about the way in which my general circle of churches goes about ministerial training and assessment. Perhaps one day I will enlarge on that in an article, but simply put, I am not sure that we (broadly speaking) get people in places where their gifts can be most effectively used. We accept, as Steve mentions in the article, this mystical "call of God" as a trump card.

I think more rigorous evaluation and a commitment to discipleship and mentorship would be a better way to go. I think seminary training to the Master of Divinity level is a non-negotiable for the most part. But that is not enough. A person can graduate from seminary and not be able to preach, or relate to people, or organize and administrate. He can have a great desire to see churches planted, but not have the gifts to carry it out.

It's great that in the church of God, he has gifted us all differently. People without the gifts to plant a church are still invaluable in the church. But they are a disaster in church planting. So rather than send out to fail, let's make better efforts to assess what they are gifted for, and then mentor them for that.