Home > Blog > Persevering Through Challenges as a Church Planter

February 10, 2021

Persevering Through Challenges as a Church Planter

By New Churches Team

Becoming a Church Planter

The road to church planting wasn’t a smooth one for Adam Reardon. He always felt like he was called to be a youth pastor. But then he felt like God was leading him to something new, though he didn’t know what it was at the time. A former lead pastor thought Adam would end up leading a church someday, so he gave Adam more leadership and preaching opportunities. Adam began considering if God wanted him to start a new church. So, he went to a church planting assessment center and was approved with the condition that he gain some experience in a church plant before starting a church of his own. This led Adam to a one-year interim associate pastor job that he was still working at six years later. Eventually, he began to feel a holy discontent that God was calling him to something else and he left to plant a church.

Expectations vs. Reality

Before planting his church, Adam spoke to many church planters and watched them have healthy, successful churches. People were being saved and discipled and serving their communities. Adam expected that within a year they would have a strong launch team and within a year or two, have a healthy growing church. Some of those expectations were from what he was seeing in other people’s experiences, and some were from what he was hoping God would do.

And at first, things were going well. They quickly had a launch team of about 50 people. They signed a contract with a local school to begin meeting there and the bills started arriving. Then reality hit.

One week before they were scheduled to have their first meeting in the school, one of the launch team members brought Adam a generous donation but also told him he would be leaving the church. Half of the launch team left with him. Shortly thereafter, Adam’s son was injured in a playground accident and expensive medical bills caused Adam to need to seek out another job and become bivocational.

Calling and Commitment

Soon, the stress of launching a church with a small team and working two jobs caught up with Adam and he had a breakdown.

To read the rest of this article, and to watch the entire video training, click here for the full videos and post.

These videos are part of Plus Membership. To get full access to them, and much more, I encourage you to become a Plus Member. Click here to see all the benefits of becoming a Plus Member.