Ripe for Harvest

S ESSION 4: N URTURE AND T RANSITION • 429

Charting Your Own Course

Do not underestimate the importance of deciding as early as possible the end of your church plant’s structure and leadership. Horrible conflict and confusion can result from a simple failure to determine what role the church planters will have in the church, once it is launched, assembled, nurtured, and ready for transition. For instance, if your team is doing cross-cultural church planting, you must establish clearly and early the steps you will follow as you transition the authority for the church to its indigenous leaders. The entire work you have done can be undermined by simply ignoring or postponing your duty to shift authority to emerging leaders. And, this will require wisdom. If you turn over authority too quickly, you can ruin the church and lose all traction gained over the course of your plant. If you delay too long, you can discourage emerging leaders and make the members too dependent on your team members. Take plenty of time and prayer to seek God’s leading on the best time to turn leadership over to those whom God has ordained for this task. So, cross-cultural church planters will need especially to oversee a clear transition of church authority and leadership to its emerging indigenous leaders. You will need to pay careful attention to how you seek to address and resolve issues of structure, ministry, and decision-making to ensure a smooth transfer of leadership from your team to the church’s indigenous leaders, its new overseers of the assembly. On the other hand, if you are called as a team to remain and function as full members within the church, it is here where you must carefully consider how you intend to move from church plant team to congregation . Although you will not operate like other teams, you will still need to carefully reflect and outline the steps you will take as you switch from a church plant team to a missions church to a full congregation. These steps and phases must be openly discussed and properly approached; nothing can be more damaging to a church planting effort than a lack of clarity regarding the ways and means of how a team will transition to its final state of church planting. If you are planting a church and intend on remaining in leadership after it is planted, you must continually and wisely communicate what the implications of this will be for all who participate–the church plant team members, the new believers, the emerging Christian leaders, and the community. Let there be no room for either misunderstanding or unclarity. State your intentions as openly as possible, being sensitive

Context Values/Vision

Prepare Launch Assemble Nurture Transition Schedule/Charter