Church Planting Is for Wimps: How God Uses Messed-Up People to Plant Ordinary Churches That Do Extraordinary Things by Mike McKinley. Crossway. 128 pages. 2016
***

I read this book to prepare for an event with several seminary students who will also be reading this book, some of who may become church planters. In this book, Mike McKinley shares his story of planting a church. He writes that he has learned that God uses messed-up people like himself to plant churches that look utterly unremarkable to the world, and in His kindness, God does amazing things through those churches.

He hopes that the book will inspire some people to become church planters, encourage others who are in the middle of the church planting journey, spur pastors of existing congregations to invest heavily in church planting, and give all church members a better sense of how they might love and pray for church planting teams.

McKinley tells his story of spending a little over a year on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC), and then planting a church that would be called Guilford Baptist Church with seven other people thirty miles away in Sterling, Virginia.

As he tells his church planting story, he addresses subjects such as diversity (the church was in a location in which there were several Spanish speaking people). He goes on to state that it seems like we should intentionally plant churches that will, as much as possible, welcome and engage people who are different and diverse with respect to age, gender, personality, and nationality.

McKinley takes us through the “game plan” that he developed while on staff at  CHBC. This would include meeting with members of CHBC who might be interested in church planting. He would also meet with other church planters and pastors in the area where we were going to plant, and become more involved with the public teaching at CHBC. The long-term goal was to start a gospel work about forty-five minutes outside of Washington, D.C.

He looks at both church planting (starting a congregation from scratch) and church revitalizing (reviving the ministry of an almost dead church). They share the same goal: raising up a faithful gospel witness where none exists. He shares advantages and disadvantages of each. In the end, he pursued church revitalization.

He would begin as the pastor of Guilford Fellowship on June 1, 2005. On his first Sunday, they changed the name back to its original name: Guilford Baptist.

He writes that what Guilford Fellowship needed most fundamentally was someone to preach God’s Word to them.

He writes about the importance of church membership, indicating that it is essential to know who belongs and who doesn’t, and who is accountable to whom. So, one of the first things they did was to establish a proper membership roll. He then worked on the church’s existing mission and vision statements, statement of faith, and constitution and by-laws. Overall, they spent about a year and a half cleaning up the church’s organizing documents.

He then addressed the issue of church leadership, deciding to implement, like CHBC, a plural eldership. He discusses training men in the church for small group leaders and new elders (the training outline is included in an appendix).

They would eventually plant a Spanish-speaking church, called Iglesia Bautista Guilford Mission Hispana.

He honestly addresses the problems in his marriage during the time he was planting the church. He states that planting a church can be brutal on your marriage.

This was a helpful quick read about church planting and revitalization.