I love church planting. I have dedicated this site to journal my success, failures, laughters and sorrows of church planting. The past almost three years have proved to be faith extending and fulfilling as a pastor. With the gazillions of blogs that I try to follow from fellow church planters and pastors – it seems that the increase excitement for church planting continues to grow – and with excitement comes zeal. Zeal to do church plants left and right and not really thinking about the advantage and disadvantages of each church being planted.

What do I mean? With the onslaught of church planting, we have seen so many churches get into the church planting thing without proper strategic plans and prayer. Since everybody is doing it – let’s do it also. I think it is bad stewardship. I have pastor friends who are currently struglling in their respective churches who are thinking of branching out and planting a new one. Now some of the church planters might disagree with me on this but I feel like that if you have not really maximize your church – (venue, number of people attending – more seats than people), I think you must stop first and think twice of planting a new one.

Diversifying yourself, your volunteers and your finance might nit be the wisest thing to do at the moment. Sit down and count the cost. Ask yourself – have we done everything possible to maximize our potential and resources on this side of town before moving to another town.

Let me give you an example. You are renting or you own a place that could seat 250 people. Your current church attendance is 150 people. It means you can still have 100 people join you. Multiply that by trying to add multiple services on a sunday. If your current worship service lasts for 2 hours then you can do a 9am, 11am, 3pm,5pm and 7pm. That is 250 people x 7 services. That means 1750 people. That means your volunteers are focused, you are focused, your resources are focused on maximizing the potential of your current location.

We recently started our Wednesday service since our Sunday afternoons was 80% full already. In just a month, we have filled the place already. Our Wednesday lead pastor Jayson is already thinking about starting another Wednesday service which means he will be using the same volunteers and the same resources. Check out his blog here

Unless God tells you otherwise – it is wise to slow it down and think it through. Maximize where you are now and then decide on planting a new one after.

PS: The thoughts I have written here are just my personal opinion. What do you think?