{"id":66927,"date":"2023-11-07T14:09:40","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T20:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/?p=66927"},"modified":"2023-11-07T14:26:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T20:26:43","slug":"stop-launching-churches-covenant-together-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/?p=66927","title":{"rendered":"Stop Launching Churches, Covenant Together\u00a0Instead"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think we should stop talking about \u201claunching\u201d new church plants and instead refer to them \u201ccovenanting\u201d for the first time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

WHY DO WE SAY \u201cLAUNCH\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am a church planter myself. I\u2019ve learned from other planters, talked to planters, read updates from planters, and read the books on church planting. And we all say \u201claunch.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I asked a few. Their responses were not all the same. The most common answer I have heard is, \u201cThis is the date on which our planting team \u2018goes public.\u2019\u201d When I follow up by asking if a person from the public could have attended their meetings before the \u201claunch\u201d the common answer is \u201csure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

So what actually happened when you \u201claunched\u201d if people from the public could have attended before? Apparently, launching is different than having a child or getting married. You know when those things happen!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I think we planters have done: borrowed a word from the business world in order to garner energy and inject life into a church from its beginning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

HOW ABOUT \u201cCOVENANT\u201d INSTEAD?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I would like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word covenant will help to shepherd our people into a richer, deeper, and more biblical picture of what the life of the local church is and what it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":637,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[4806],"class_list":["post-66927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-church-planting-revitalization","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/637"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66927"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66929,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66927\/revisions\/66929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}