Shawn Lovejoy joins us for our next Equipping for Multiplication podcast. In this session from Exponential 2016, Lovejoy focuses on how churches can send well and thus avoid getting a “black eye.”
Drawing on his hard knocks experience as both a church planter and then leading a parenting church, Lovejoy tackles the four best practices of church planters while equipping sending leaders to have coaching conversations with the church planters they send out. In this podcast excerpt, he shares that the No. 1 best practice for sending well is to not only know how to launch churches, but also how to steward and nurture church planters’ vitality.
Shawn Lovejoy: Send Well
“The best church planters I have found do a great job of paying attention to their own health, their vitality. In other words, they lead themselves first. Pastors need help in leading and managing themselves, church planters especially … We need to really look into these church planters’ lives and assess whether or not they’re healthy.
“Do they have scars? If all they do is talk negatively about their last experience and the things the senior leader did wrong, then pay attention to those comments. Many times, that cynicism is coming from deep scars. As leaders of sending churches, we need to help them process through those scars. Are they self-aware? Do they know their weaknesses and limits? Did they learn from these blind spots?
“Most importantly, are they teachable and coachable? One way to find out is to tell them “no” on something and see how they respond … We can’t plant these guys and then be too busy to nurture them and steward our investment.”
Shawn Lovejoy is the directional leader for couragetolead.com, a coaching ministry for pastors and churches, the former lead pastor of Mountain Lake Church, and directional leader of churchplanters.com. Shawn also serves as the channel champion for Exponential.org. He is the author of The Measure of Our Success: An Impassioned Plea to Pastors (2012) and Be Mean About the Vision: Preserving and Protecting What Matters (spring 2016).
