The planter before the plant.

Identifying your why

Identifying your why is all the process before you step out to plant. While you’re in this season, it may feel like a waiting period. You have vision but you aren’t in the place of outworking it yet. A lot of that waiting, I’ve come to believe, is God forming a deeper why within you. We so easily want to avoid the struggles and just get on with the thing, but God wants to use the struggles and the waiting to test our vision. When you realize that, your purpose becomes deeper.

Before we moved to New York I flew over from Sydney for a vision trip. I wanted to be in the city, pray, meet people, let God continue to form the vision in us. The most formative part of that trip was lunch with a pastor who had planted in the city years earlier and was now leading a thriving community. I wanted to learn from him. And in that lunch he gave me one of the greatest lessons of my life. He told me, if you don’t have your why, don’t come here. The city is too hard. Too many people have failed.

That hit me. Am I really called? Do I just like the idea of planting? Is this a fad, a trend? These are the questions you have to ask yourself while you’re in the forming process, to weed out the desires of the flesh and find the God-breathed why underneath.

Georgie and I had to go through a process of yeses and nos as a couple before we moved. We had moments where Georgie was a yes and I was a no, and moments where I was a yes and she wasn’t. Walking through those, communicating through them, refined us together and refined our why together.

As you weed out the questions, you get to the root. And then you can see if the root is strong enough and ready enough to be planted and form a tree. That’s when you know your why has been identified, when the root is cleansed of the selfish desires around it, when it’s been watered by God, and it’s ready to dig deep.

The heart

Heart for the city, burden for the people. That became the summary for me of what every pastor needs for the place they’re called. If when I say that phrase your spirit leaps, if you know exactly who your city is and who your people are, that’s when you know it’s within you.

When we speak of heart, we’re talking about passion, emotion, love for the place. The city is this macro made up of cultures, backgrounds, and centuries of history. It’s beautiful when you dive into all the layers of the place you’re called to. In our story we were called to a city we already loved. But that’s not everyone’s story. Sometimes God calls people to places they don’t love yet. He can give you a heart for a city over time. He will build the love within you.

A burden for the people is a sense of weight. You can’t have empathy if you don’t feel the pressure, the brokenness, the stories, the heartache, the dreams, the ambitions of the people in your city. It’s their souls, their hearts, their minds, their talents, their callings, all of it wrapped up in one that creates the burden.

You will preach and lead differently when you have a burden for the people. This burden isn’t meant for you to carry alone. It’s cast on God, but you’re called to carry it with him. Feel the weight, so that there is significance and depth, but know it’s not all on you.

The burden also carries this truth: people aren’t the means to the vision, they are the vision. This has to be your revelation. So often leaders think, I’m going to build a church, fill the building, grow in size, but they don’t treat the people like they are the vision. They treat them like the way to achieve it. Your people are the vision in action. They are the core of why you’ve been called.

So let this question sink deep as you lead, plant, strategize, and pastor. Do I really have a heart for the city? Is my burden for the people? Or is it for what I want to build? Let that question clean, clarify, and convict you. Come back to it years in. It still has to be the heartbeat.

The couple

The biggest opposition is going to be against your marriage and your family. And the key to the church is going to be in the health of your relationship as a couple.

Early on we were at each other. I felt like the walls of New York were closing in on me. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and it would fall out onto Georgie and our son. She would tell me to get out of our apartment and go pray. I felt the pressure of trying to save the city in a day. All these voices in my head of what I should be doing, what I could be doing. What I actually needed was to pray, which she knew before I did.

So I got out and walked around the streets of New York, and the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, it will be according to your prayer and one divine connection a day. I was trying to save the city out of my own strength, my own gifting. But God has a plan. He has a way. He uses you, but it’s not your strength that carries it. That word is still what I stand on over a decade later.

That word also kept our marriage healthy and light at the beginning, because it freed me from trying to save the city in a day. Plant around the divine connections, build around prayer, and let your marriage have air.

On the practical side, setting your marriage and family up well from the start is critical, and it’s something I’d do differently if I could go back. Some of the places we lived early on, the drama and heartache in some of those situations could have been avoided. There is sacrifice and surrender in planting as a family, but there are things that are avoidable if you set the right things up.

Make sure your housing is safe, reasonable, and comfortable. While everything else is new and changing and maybe even hard, your home can’t be compromised. Make sure your wage level is honest about the cost of living where you’re planting. There will be stretch seasons, but as far as it’s up to you, don’t be so squeezed that you can’t focus on the work God has for you. Those two things keep balance in your personal life and health in your marriage so that you can give to the church without being eaten alive by it.

The revelation

If you’re going to plant a church, you have to know you are called. The romantic side of planting wears off fast. The city, the intensity, the opposition, all of it hits you in the face. But if you know you are called, that grounds you. Get rid of the feeling and dig deep so that it’s a revelation, not an emotion.

A lot of leaders get caught in the in-between, the now-but-not-yet, and start to believe the delay means it isn’t from God. But following Christ is full of now-but-not-yet moments. In our story, I got a clear confirmation that we were called. So when it didn’t happen right away, it was never if, it was when. That security let me enjoy the four-year process and deepen the revelation rather than force the timing.

The vision

Your church’s vision statement can feel like a daunting task. Maybe it came easily. Maybe you’ve wrestled with it. For us, when we were planning the launch I felt the need for a catchy statement. I saw all these churches with big powerful phrases and I felt like mine needed to be unique and trendy or no one would come.

I was stuck in that feeling, but God knew better. I was driving in Sydney before we even moved to New York, and the old hymn Be Thou My Vision came on the radio. In that moment the Lord spoke to me and our vision statement was birthed. He is our vision. Our vision is Jesus Christ. I pulled over on the side of the road and wrote it down. We’ve never steered from it since.

So when you’re trying to write out your vision, come back to the basics. Come back to your first love. Make it simple. Don’t try to overcomplicate it or feel you have to come up with something hip. Jesus is long-lasting. Jesus is forever. If your vision is centered simply on him, that’s a foundation people want to be part of.

The place

When people told us Williamsburg was a graveyard for churches, I thought the soil must be very ready for a new one. Our story in planting is one of dying to self and living for New York City. We were told so many stories before moving: of churches failing, of pastors leaving, of how the city was too tough. You need to know the background and history of your city, but not to be deterred by it. To be informed, so you build in a way that can uniquely reach the place you’re called to.

You can’t come in thinking you’re the answer. Many have gone before you. Some were fruitful. Some didn’t make it. You aren’t the answer. God is. The approach has to be a learner’s posture. What can I learn from the people who have gone before me? What can I learn about the city, the churches, the spiritual climate? Get into positions and relationships where you can learn. Safe places to grow and glean.

When we were moving to Brooklyn we looked at key stats from 2012 to understand the people we’d be reaching. 350,000 adults were high school dropouts. Homelessness had doubled the year before. 50,000 young adults were unemployed. Those were just a few, but they sharpened who we were called to.

Another key is the spiritual history of the place, the last hundred or two hundred years. I was studying revivals in New York City before we even came. Jeremiah Lanphier was one of the figures I kept returning to. He was instrumental in the New York revivals of the 1850s. His whole story was birthed in prayer. He handed out 20,000 flyers and six people came to his first prayer meeting. The next week it was twenty-something. Then quickly it was six thousand people gathering daily to pray. He started that prayer meeting on September 23rd.

While I was studying all of that, I wrote in my journal a date, September 22nd, the Sunday closest to the 23rd a year from then. I believed that was when we would launch our church. And look what God did. When we landed in New York, ran our first Dinner Parties, and started looking for a venue for weekly services, we found a space and worked out the contract. They told me they couldn’t start before October. Then out of the blue they called back and said we could start earlier. Our first rental would be September 22nd. I went and looked at my journal. That was the date I’d written down a year earlier.

God was in all of it. He confirms the smallest details when you give them to him. In that moment I thought of Lanphier, and of getting to continue a legacy he’d started in this city over a century before. The history matters. It can be part of how God shapes and builds your heart for your city.