While Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven” church-growth methodology may be familiar, people may not know there’s a “Purpose Driven” church-planting process as well.
More than 160 people learned about that process during a Jan. 4–8 East Coast “Purpose Driven” Church Planting Conference at southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
The conference taught church planters how to start congregations based on the five purposes for a church as enunciated by Warren, pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church, Lake Forest, Calif.
The purposes encompass growing warmer through fellowship, deeper through discipleship, stronger through worship, broader through ministry and larger through evangelism.
“It definitely exceeded our expectations,” said Ed Stetzer, director of Southern Seminary’s Church Planting center, which sponsored the conference.
The conference was the first of what will be an annual event emphasizing different methods of church planting, all based in biblical truth, Stetzer said.
This year’s event focused on the most utilized church growth and church-planting model, the “Purpose Driven” model.
Conference speakers included Dan Morgan, Saddleback’s church planting strategist; John Worcester, an internationally known church-planting consultant who has trained more than 1,800 church planters worldwide; Kerry Shook, pastor of Fellowship of the Woodlands near Houston; and Stetzer.
Conference leaders trained attendees in the whole “Purpose Driven” church-planting process, which consists of five stages: preparation, pre launch, launch, crowd to core and multiplication.
“The ‘Purpose Driven’ strategy is just a strategy to accomplish those five purposes at the same time so that the church is ever growing in size but also ever growing in depth,” Stetzer said.
“The ‘Purpose Driven’ model is not about Hawaiian shirts and contemporary music,” he said. “It’s about focusing in on the five purposes of the church and having a strategy and a methodology to meet the needs in each of those five principles.” (BP)
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