Ok…here we go. Focus. Speed. I am speed.
For any endeavour there is the need for focus. Even Lightning McQueen got that! A clear vision with leadership. A willingness to slough off the unnecessary but attractive. A determination that outlasts even the most severe critic.
So it goes with church planting. The question continually before us is simple: what is essential? Yet I wonder if the question will ever fully be answered…We are asking the question almost daily. Others that are a few steps further down the path are still asking the question. Some who have journeyed so far that they don’t even remember not being established still ask the same question. In one sense perhaps the essential is asking the essential question about what is essential…hmmm.
A couple of things were passed along to me and are worth the 2 minutes they take to read. First is a blog post about the need to define the essentials (here). The author points to Acts 2:42-47 as the bare bones of what a church is. Great job! The second is a code, or values, of a church (here). I absolutely love the language used!! One of the statements caught my eye, particularly the tag line:
We will do anything short of sin to reach people who don’t know Christ.
To reach people no one is reaching, we’ll have to do things no one is doing.
I identify with the tag line as we are in the beginning stages of launching a church. There are things/behaviors/appearances/whatever that will not look like many established churches. This is not our attempt to degrade other churches or movements. It is simply that we don’t want to empty the seats of one church to fill another (ours). We want to reach the peeps that are not in these other churches! To accomplish this, there are many churchy things that we will “slough off.” Please don’t be offended 
