If you’re trying to figure out how to plant a church, you can find plenty of strategy: demographic studies, launch teams, preview services. Some of it is even useful. But I want to tell you how our church actually started, because I didn’t plan it. It started with an embarrassing realization and a bar band.
Principles are easy to agree with, and stories are harder to dismiss.
The realization
I spent ten years as a full-time pastor. I was in church buildings with church people, doing what pastors do, preaching and counseling and leading and administering. And I was telling people to go reach the lost.
The problem was that I didn’t know any lost people. At least I didn’t think I did.
That sat in my chest like a weight. I was a professional Christian, surrounded by professional Christians, producing content for professional Christians. The people who most needed Jesus were somewhere else entirely, with no reason to walk through the doors of any building I was part of.
So in 1999 I left. I joined a bar band, went into business to feed my family, and started hanging out in pubs.
I wasn’t trying to start a church
People miss this part. There was no church-planting strategy. I was just trying to find the people I had been telling everyone else to find.
Late at night, people would ask spiritual questions. They knew I was a pastor, and they were curious (sometimes suspicious) about why I was in the bar. Those conversations were more honest than most of what I’d heard in church foyers. Nobody there had the social training to perform religious acceptability, so they just said what they actually thought.
My wife and I started inviting people to dinner, and then we started having bonfires on Saturday nights. People came, the kind who talk about nothing for a while and then, because a fire makes you honest, start talking about what actually matters. They brought friends, and the friends brought friends, and months went by.
Then someone said, “This is like a church. We should probably start meeting on purpose.”
The Live Out Experiment
We called it the Live Out Experiment, and the hypothesis was simple: even broken people can help other people.
So we served together. We helped a single mother move and sat with a guy in recovery and fixed a neighbor’s sink. Whatever practical thing was needed for whoever was in front of us, we did it, with Jesus at the center. People came alongside us just for the sake of doing something good, and we shared the gospel with them as we went.
And slowly, one at a time, people came to faith.
Eventually we started meeting formally for worship, in bars, clubs, funeral homes, wherever we could find space. Later on, a neighboring church that was about to close handed us the keys to their building, and a room full of new believers with an evangelistic streak and a habit of practical service suddenly found itself in a traditional church building.
The building was different, but the DNA stayed the same.
What I’d tell you if you want to plant
I don’t think you have to join a bar band. I do think our story says something about how churches can begin, though, so let me pass a few things on.
Start where lost people already are. Before you rent a space or design a logo, ask where the people you’re trying to reach already gather. Then go there and be a regular. Be known as a person before you’re known as a pastor.
Open your home. Our church really started at a dinner table and around a fire. Hospitality is slow, and it doesn’t scale well, which is part of why it works.
Serve before you gather. We were helping people move and fixing sinks long before we had a worship service. Service creates a kind of trust that invitations alone can’t.
Let broken people help. You don’t have to have your life together to carry a box or hold a flashlight. Some of the people who served alongside us weren’t believers yet, and serving next to Christians was part of how they met Jesus.
Don’t rush the institution. We didn’t start meeting formally until someone else said it felt like church. Structure matters, and you’ll need it, but the DNA you set before the structure arrives is the DNA you’ll keep.
Find your bonfire
If you’re a couple thinking about planting, I’d ask you this. What are the bonfires in your life right now? Where are genuine conversations with unchurched people already happening?
Maybe it’s a softball league or a job site or a neighborhood porch or a motorcycle club. Write down two or three places. Then pick one person from one of those places and invite them to dinner this month, with no agenda beyond a meal.
That might be how your church starts, or it might just be how a friendship starts. Either one is faithful.
Read the rest of the story
This is only the beginning of the story I tell in Second Fiddle, a book for pastors and couples counting the cost of bi-vocational ministry. If you want a practical guide to starting something in your own small place, Turn the Key is written for exactly that.
Twenty-five years later, the hypothesis still holds. Even broken people can help other people.
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