A Passion for church planting

– by Pastor Cole Deike, Frontier Church in Des Moines (originally posted on FB)

When we planted Frontier Church in 2016, the second sermon we ever preached was about tithing 10% of our church to church planting: 10% of our time, 10% of our people and 10% of our money. After planting Hope City Church a few years ago, we are planting Emmaus Church in Ankeny in a few months.

Below are a few Q&As to make sense of our passion for church planting.

Frontier Church Website

Q: 6 years in and already planting 2 churches? Aren’t you afraid of “planting yourself into oblivion”?

A: Planting churches is a legitimate risk, and God doesn’t promise to protect us from failure. But we don’t get to choose whether or not churches take risks. Being a church is unavoidably risky. To support this statement: it’s equally risky to hoard your best leaders and to hoard your best people, and to ultimately turn inward and grow stale and lose your mission as a church. In our opinion, that risk is scarier than “planting ourselves into oblivion.”

Q: Didn’t you guys just buy a building?

A: Yes. But we didn’t buy this building so that we could become an inward-focused church. We bought this building to turn it into a church planting command post. The building is not a museum for religious people, it’s a launching pad for church planters.

Q: Don’t “successful organizations” hold on to their best leaders?

A: Sure, but we don’t model our church based on successful organizations. We model our church based on the God-glorifying, God-centered, God-obsessed examples of the early church in the Bible. Read the book of Acts: whenever they established a church, they were immediately training, ordaining, and then sending leaders to go plant churches.

Here’s the beautiful irony: when godly leaders get sent by godly churches, the whole church feels the pinch of loss. And in feeling that pinch, new leaders have a fire lit under their rear-end to step up and fill the hole with leadership. Hoarding leaders, ironically, keeps the rest of the church immature and impotent.