Mike McKinley’s new book (with a foreword by Darrin Patrick) is entitled Church Planting Is for Wimps: How God Uses Messed-up People to Plant Ordinary Churches That Do Extraordinary Things. Mike is a rare writer who makes me laugh out loud and also points me consistently to the gospel with biblical wisdom and insight.
You can read the table of contents and the intro and the first chapter online for free.
I’m thankful he was willing to answer a few questions.
Are you a wimp?
Sure. Some church planting books make it seem like you need to be the pastoral equivalent of a Navy Seal in order to plant a church. But I’ve had very few moments in the past 5 years of ministry where I’ve felt very strong and confident. Instead, what I’ve discovered is that as God addresses my failures, weaknesses, and sin, he makes me into what I need to be for the ministry he had given me.
So you think all church planters are wimps?
I meant the title as a good-natured poke. Obviously, church planting is a very challenging calling. But in the book, I argue that revitalizing a church that’s almost dead is even more difficult than church planting. So comparatively, guys who are just church planters are wimps.
Can you walk us through the pros and cons of church planting vs. church revitalizing?
On one hand, I think that church planting presents a cleaner path forward. Church planters start out at “zero” and labor in order to build a church. Church revitalizers usually have to clear out a lot of wreckage and overcome opposition in order to get to “zero” and start planting and building. A lot of revitalizers get worn down and beat up by unhealthy churches. When I was contemplating taking a call to revitalize Guilford Baptist, one of my mentors sent me an email that simply said, “Stay away. There’s a reason why dead churches are dead.”
On the other hand, church revitalization offers unique rewards. You get to both tear down a bad witness to the gospel in a community and then erect a good one in its place. You also keep the church from falling into the hands of people who preach a false gospel. There are oftentimes a lot of resources (land, building, money) sitting around waiting to be put to use for God’s kingdom. There are also a lot of sheep sitting around in these small, dead churches who need a shepherd.
All in all, I think it’s worth the extra struggle to revitalize a church if the Lord provides an opportunity.
If you could sit down with a church planter, what is the one thing you would tell him to remember that he is probably forgetting?
That God faithfully builds his church through his word. When you are planting a church, it feels like there are a million things pressing for time and attention. But what you really need to do is make sure that you are faithfully preaching, teaching, and proclaiming the word of God to believers and unbelievers. That’s going to look a little bit different in different contexts, but it’s far more important than publicity, branding, community engagement, and all the other things that church planters are told to focus on.
What do you think is the one big mistake your average church planter is probably committing?
Not taking good care of his family. Most church planters are going to be entrepreneurial and hard working by temperament. And so the church will present you with endless opportunities to sacrifice your family on the altar of success. But think about it this way: if you think you’re called to be a church planter, it’s conceivable that you could be wrong. But if you’re married and have kids, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re called to love and shepherd your family.
You say in your book that you want to “redefine extraordinary.” Can you explain?
Well, churches should be extraordinary. We have an extraordinary salvation, an extraordinary Savior, and an extraordinary mission. But for too many of us, we define “extraordinary” in the ways the world would define it: the quality of the “show” on Sunday mornings, acceptance in the community, high attendance, big budgets, and splashy programs.
None of those things are necessarily bad, but there’s nothing really extraordinary about them.
What is really extraordinary is a church where people from different backgrounds and cultures love each other in Christ, where the gospel is proclaimed to the lost world, where marriages are restored through God’s grace, where Christians are becoming less selfish and more loving, where people realize more and more the depth of their sin and the beauty of the Savior . . . and so on. Those things are miraculous, they are worthy of being called “extraordinary.”
And the good news is that God loves to use ordinary church planters who are willing to be faithful in order to grow these kinds of extraordinary churches.
In the book you write about an encounter with Mark Dever:
When my former pastor from Capitol Hill Baptist, Mark Dever, called one morning and asked me to meet him that day on the seminary campus, I felt reluctant. I was happy to meet with Mark, but doing so meant staying late at work. It also meant skipping my fifteen-minute afternoon nap, which was often the only thing lying between me and the abyss. But Mark has boundary issues and a way of getting what he wants, so later that day I chugged a jumbo-sized cup of gas station coffee and slumped down on a bench outside the seminary library, waiting for him to arrive.
When he did, we started with a few moments of chitchat, but he turned to business pretty quickly. Capitol Hill Baptist was growing out of its meeting space, he said, and the cost of making significant renovations to their old building was exorbitant. The elders of the church had decided to implement a strategy to plant churches in the surrounding suburbs. Mark was here to float a trial balloon: would I be interested in returning to DC after seminary to be CHBC’s guinea pig church planter?
I would eventually say yes, of course. Mark is a made man in the Reformed Mafia. He has a giant Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals logo tattooed on his back. He has J. I. Packer’s home phone number in his contact list under “Jim P.” You don’t say no to a guy like this.
Can you tell us more about Mark’s back tat?
Well, I’m not at liberty to comment. But let’s just say that when Mark and Phil Ryken were starting out in ministry, their ACE codename was “Los Mellizos de la Noche.”
Thanks to Mike for the inside info, and more importantly for writing this very helpful book. You can get it at Amazon, WTS Books, and elsewhere.