A team member asked me: what are the most common mistakes starting church planters make? It wasn’t totally clear to me why he considered me a particularly good source for information of that sort. However, here is my recipe to fail as a missionary church planter:

1. Start ministry in an area where you know nobody, where your friends don’t know anybody, and where there is no opening for the Gospel that you know of. Then you can start with absolutely nothing, and do ministry exactly the way you like. It is also nicely slowly paced, so you won’t be too busy.
2. Make sure your friends are mainly in your home country. Because of Skype, your weblog, and Twitter there is no need at all to know your neighbours. Nowadays it is becoming more and more fashionable to have high wall around your house. That also helps to keep unwanted influences on your family at bay. The more time you spend at home, the more energy you will have for the evangelistic parries that you will execute every once in a while from your castle.
3. Find your off-line friends among fellow-missionaries. Maybe it is possible to have a large missionary team. In that case, you will have no problem. But even if other missionaries are living further away, it is possible to quench your thirst for fellowship with them. In that way, you will be able to keep regarding the local people as evangelization objects.
4. Be very impressed with how well you speak the language. Convince yourself that people really enjoy your funny accent. Then you are justified to lead all church acitivities yourself, and you won’t need anybody else. The people who stay away no doubt do so because of hate against the Gospel, not because they don’t understand you.
5. Organize as many activities as possible, so your community understands how useful you are. English lessons are best for this purpose. It also helps to feel really busy, so you don’t need to worry about how to reach people with the Gospel the whole time.
6. If you talk to people, always tell them to ‘believe in God’ and to ‘accept Jesus’. Add Bible verses to taste. Don’t tell them too much about who God is and what He has done. Also, don’t think too much about what ‘accepting Jesus’ means, otherwise you might find out you don’t know yourself. Tell them to believe the Gospel without telling them what the Gospel is. Simple is always better.
7. Use all your time for children’s ministry. Within two months you will be immensely popular, and everybody will see you as the kindergarten teacher, or, even better, their nanny.  Added advantage is that the adults will not listen to you anymore. So if you start a church, your oldest member will be 11 years old, and nobody will contradict you.
8. Don’t listen too much to local Christians. You know best how the church should look like, don’t you? Besides that, it’s so difficult to find out what they really think, that it’s hardly worth the trouble. When you are very clear about your own opinions, they will follow you without questioning. Some, maybe most, will disappear, but they probably just would have been troublemakers anyway.
9. When looking for leaders for your church, make sure they study a lot of books, and don’t worry about the quality of their life or their experience in ministry. Everybode knows all good things come from books. And you just waste way too much time by mentoring and coaching people for ministry.
10. Never travel outside your own town to outlying villages. There’s plenty to do right where you are. The people you know all have a large part of their social network in other villages, but those people won’t be able to travel to your church anyway. So that really is not helpful.

Besides these 10 commandments, make sure you have a plan and stick to it. For there is only one right way, and that is your  way. It is important to be consistent in this. If you want to plant a house church and see that it does not work, don’t even think about finding a building. If you rent a building but notice that it is too expensive for your church, never change to the house church concept. Always keep to your schedule. Don’t let that be disrupted by random opportunities that you encounter. You will create clarity for yourself and others.

If you follow these rules, you should be able to plant a church that is exactly like you want it and that will not cause you difficulties. It might even be possible that you will plant the ultimate house church: only your own family!

Photo: Storm Crypt