The Case For Church Planting

Hey everybody, welcome back, welcome to It's A Pod Deal, Ministry Conversations With Lifelong Pastor Ronnie Worsham. I'm John Bonronin and sitting next to me is William Royal. And I'm Ronnie Worsham and I've been a pastor since I was born. I've been a lifelong pastor. Yeah, I did it when I was little. All right, today we're going to dive into a conversation on church planting.

So if you've been with us the last few episodes, we got to talk a lot about Ronnie's life in his background, his ministry experience, the last couple of episodes we did specifically talked about the history of the Northeast Church and the DFW Metro Family of Churches that we are all apart. And some of the stories involved there. And so we got to thinking and it's a pretty timely episode today because today is September 9th, 2024.

And we have a few church plants that are kind of in the works. One that's coming up pretty soon and then one that we're having prayer meetings and conversations about planting some time in the near future. And so yeah, we thought it would be a good idea to have a long form discussion on church planting the strategy of church planting the spiritual basis for church planting. And just to get Ronnie's thoughts and his stories and experience on this topic. So that's what we're going to do today.

So yeah, I alluded to this earlier, but our family of churches is going to be planting a church in West Richardson here coming up in a month or so.

And then we're also looking at planting a church in the Fort Worth area sometime in the near future. So that's all kind of on the horizon. Why don't you start by telling us just a little bit about what led you to feel that God had called you to lead not just a church, but a church planting movement along with just kind of your call to college campus ministry and young adult missions.

It really is kind of how God shaped me and it would be impossible for me to share all the factors that went into it, but it was it is and was very profound in those early years because there were two movements of foot in the church of Christ that I kind of was born into.

So to speak when I was a kid and I went back to in college and got my start and one was the whole evangelism revival that was going on in evangelical churches coming out of the 50s into the 60s Billy Graham and Bill bride and campus crusade.

There were a lot of these crusades going on mission trips were kicking out people were becoming more unchurched and so that was just a movement of evangelism and it caught in the churches of Christ and so there were these evangelism conferences and there were bus ministries and there were mission trips and door knocking campaigns and they called them gospel meetings in the church of Christ they were called revivals among a lot of the nominations.

And then in the church of Christ there was also a campus campus ministry movement that was originally called the crossroads movement. It was generated out of crossroads church of Christ in Gainesville, Florida with a man named Chuck Lucas who became notorious in the churches of Christ who was just kind of a part of an evangelism movement on the campus.

That campus crusade navigators in a varsity and then lots of kind of smaller ministries were cropping up finding that the campus ministries were a pretty fertile ground for growth which led to a lot of little cults and things that were cropping up on college campuses.

It was the God is dead movement the hippie movement the proliferation of smoking weed and having love ends and all that was going on in the seventies I went to college in 1970 the civil rights movement was still hot and heavy in its earliest days as we've seen a revival in the 21st century as well of some of that in the last five years. But so it created kind of a roiling of not just society, but of church. So I was reborn into that in 1973.

And so I kind of saw all of that I initiated with our Bible chair director Ken Hollingsworth who was a friend and somebody that really blessed me and believed in me and gave me lots of opportunities.

He told me about what was going on in Gainesville and I said why don't we see if we can get him to come up here and we had Chuck Lucas come up I was quite naive as was our church as to who he would be seen as in the church of Christ and the church of Christ was not an official denomination in the sense of say the southern Baptist convention.

But it was very very networked orally and so there was people got canceled regularly and all the churches through word of mouth and then in some they just got defraught so to speak and kicked out. I didn't know that even our church was not aware of what was getting ready to happen but during the years right after we had him there it went crazy so I heard a lot about that again the whole Billy Graham thing and all that it was.

Very prominent the Jesus movement was very prominent so these things were in the press I was pretty isolated in Durran Oklahoma where I went to college but it was not nearly as isolated as Tessio Oklahoma where I grew up on a little dirt road out there.

So learning very quickly and our church supported a little church of Christ mission church up in New Hampshire Rochester New Hampshire and they would go on door knocking campaigns up there in the summer and my first plane ride outside of a little prop jet that I'd ridden my freshman year in college my first plane trip was to end of Austin and I went on two different door knocking campaigns in New

Hampshire and then one to Pittsburgh and so I was getting exposed to a lot of stuff in terms of missions and in terms of campus ministry a lot going on. So we went to these conferences there were some big evangelism conferences in the church of Christ the Tulsa evangelism conference was one that went on in Oklahoma every year and that was kind of a big deal and there were others that I went to the campus ministries kind of had their own things going on.

So I was just exposed to a lot of that and in that being a pretty creative driver trying to figure out it is stuff I was exposed to lots of stuff and which really put me in many ways counter to the seventh and beach church of Christ that I went to and the church of Christ in the area I wasn't trying to be a rebel I'm not a rebel by nature.

But I'm also not a conformist by nature either it's like if I think something is you know useless or dumb or I don't understand it it matters to me I cause trouble in my home that way because I would see things that our family do one of why we do this.

I'm a thinker I'm an analyzer I watched and studied and thought and I was just kind of the way I was wired so God used all that in I was at the L. S. you evangelism seminar which was put on by a church of Christ student group in Baton Rouge there the Louisiana State University campus and it was there after about a year of really hot pursuit of understanding God and church.

And ministry that I felt this calling to go into ministry and it was not a glorious moment as I've shared in a previous podcast but it was a very real moment for me and being a chemistry major and a rationalist by this time a skeptic I've been through a lot emotionally and physically.

It kind of defined me in some ways and so that experience was very unsettling and there were others that were to come because my dad was very deist in his views of God God was not involved and he made fun of pinocostalism and made fun of everybody that was just kind of part of our home life was making fun of other people and so.

I was a bit jaded by that but I also didn't like it and I rebelled against some of that racism was just commonplace it was the culture of whites blacks Native Americans the the Hispanics really hadn't populated up into Oklahoma at that point so I was not really exposed to Hispanics there were a few people from the Middle East that were there which is kind of curious because.

A couple of the merchants there in this little town of Hilton were from I think Syria and so it was kind of curious that I remember those people but we even used their store a few times I can remember going in but with that said I was bringing in my first campus ministry I brought in a lot of black students which.

There were many people in church that were very receptive to that but God had really imprinted on me and prepared me for that and it was a learning experience for me certainly but the racism part was gone that was not to say I didn't have to try to understand people from other cultures but looking at other cultures as bad or good because they look different was dead with me that was just stupid I saw it is where hate niggurance.

Collide in that's all that is but making that work because even black students coming were obviously a bit jaded by believing all these white people would treat them well and you understand that and the white people many of them have never been exposed exposed to black people and then you've got these college students coming in and they're not really getting very exposed to them then so there was just

lots of fewer in that and so I left the Bible belt in 79 I ask God to let me leave the Bible belt because I was causing trouble and I didn't like causing trouble so I was frustrating and so moving to Colorado Colorado is not nearest church still isn't it was much more western than anything else and then the mountains the people are pretty independent and so I ran into a lot of people that weren't really associated with Christianity I studied with people that never read the Bible at all that were

pretty typical white American people and it was that was a foreign thing to me I had met some international students that I had spent time with it were completely unfamiliar but so even in Colorado the first year there we were a part of church and I mean the church was in an uproar my ministry was a I was able to sub optimize on the campus and we were very successful but the whole thing was the

tearing between the new wine and the old wine skin and subsequently I initiated I suggested we start a new church and naively thought I'm going to go over and talk to him I'm going to explain it and everybody will be okay I think and know they weren't I mean they

literally changed all the locks we had to be escorted in to move our stuff out of our office it was hostile and it was shocking how mean people could be the passion in church and identity so that was my introduction to oh gosh this is this is serious business

and then when I went to Arizona then four years later out of frustration with even with the church we started there was so much of that old wine skin mentality that I wanted us to build a rethink everything and the preacher I worked with was not willing to do that he wanted to create a better version of the old church of Christ well I was I would begin to realize I was not that anymore

but what I didn't know what is that what does God want us to be so we started a new church in Arizona that was my first real step out of the old church of Christ but I was getting more and more exposed to all the churches and I was learning from all the churches and this whole doctrine of inclusion as opposed to exclusion was birthing in my own mind as I studied the scriptures about Christian unity so

when I came by the time I got to Dallas I knew in my heart that I'd been called to drive campus ministry I had a heart and a passion for it because that's where the Lord found me and I saw so many people like me that were they were fertile soil for simple Christianity many of us we were tired of the old churches and we didn't even like church growing up

and when you're honest about your church you quit arguing about my church is better than yours and then you start you know commiserating my church is worse than yours and we start telling those stories which neither are healthy but they're just our tendency but you know when you listen to those you start thinking well maybe we could

pull our senses together and learn from each other and do better how do we do that how do we create this first Corinthians one 10 I want you all to agree so that there's no division among you we the church of Christ and pattern theology interpreter that we've all got to agree on exactly how the Lord suffers to be done when we don't really have much instruction and all about how it's to be done we got all agree on what words are being said

when somebody is baptized when we don't really have any instruction on what they were saying or was that was that a deal who can baptize can women baptize or not can women speak or not well we've got this verse and we're just fighting over all this stuff and there's no place for us all to do what Paul said is spiritual people to make discernments and to see that there's tremendous freedom of forms and could we could we operate just like we do

operate just like families do you know John and Christy live next door they do home very different than 10 and I do home is that better or worse no it's just different I don't want to horse dogs in my house but John has to horse dogs and that's his business and I'm glad he can do that if that's what he wants I celebrate that difference but if we have to live together we're going to have to agree on where those horse dogs can be and can't be you know keep them out of my bed keep them out of my house

I'm going to have to keep my bed keep them out of my space you know I don't want your cat in my sink which I got to see and I have a picture of recorded that this woman who they were about to kill their son for leaving a bowl and there's letting their cats sit in that same sink and that's okay it's like okay that's your business

look at each other and think why are you doing that well the things that matter to one family or one person don't matter the other can we do church that way do we all have to franchise out so that people in you know a completely different state or country have to do church just like we do

which to me is silly but I understand how it happens it's all about control so in looking at all of these ideas and on top of that I saw church plants and I saw what could be done I saw this new wine skin that was being created

and the kind of people that wanted to come to church plant weren't by nature old wineskins people that are old in their beliefs and faith their churches for that but people that come to church plants they're different breed for the most part and then they usually will cause a fight I decided early on in our church plants to invite those people to leave nicely

to tell them there were churches down the street like what they're wanting don't come here and do that that's not what we're doing to make it easy on them to just exit rather than let them gather around them people that would want to fight so we have a big old split which we've had a few fragments like that that split off but it didn't destroy our churches because we can we mitigated the risks and enough so you know as I looked at the campus ministry how do we put the

campus ministry how do we put a campus ministry on every campus in the metroplex I mean you look at this river going through a city like Dallas of college students and more and more they're coming from all over the world all over the country all over the world

Dallas Texas has easily a quarter of a million students every year probably more I haven't stopped to try to count that we've got some big universities when we started at U.T.D. they had a little over 3000 students now I think they've got a little over 30,000 students and that's every year they're flowing through this stream is renewed by 20 30 40% every year and that's crazy for the church to not be positioned try to reach a few and we have you know getting see Charles

Guel up at that wedding in Newark I mean he'd like to come back here but he couldn't get a visa so we got one to Canada he was converted here I remember Apollo left and he was from Brazil the day he was going to baptize him and that's discussing how are you going to baptize him why maybe the water hose in the backyard follows from a press

background and that gave us a chance to talk about form and why we immerse and stuff and he did immerse him but you know you've got this young Brazilian immigrant baptizing this guy here on a student visa from mainland China and then he comes down to this wedding in Newark New Jersey for Jonathan Rao who is from India marrying a girl from India it's a Christian Indian wedding and I'm sitting there with all these people I'm the foreigner now

and I get to experience that and we experience that because of a lot of the flexibility and with our campus ministry but Charles knows me because I was his pastor he was at U.T.D. but he was also a member of our church and so he knows me and loves me and it was a real sweet moment that we saw each other I can tell more of those but it's a huge blessing to him to see this all white American man that really loves him and is glad to see him and so excited to see him

that you're friend and India right now that you're still accountability partners with I think and you know William that those are those relationships that we get to have but our churches get those experiences you look at so many of our older people I I've got one good friend man he was very anti immigration

and he was ready to kick him all out until I sprung it on him some of his favorite young people that he got very close to were here out of status they were illegal and I see you ready to send them back and it stopped him called I've never again heard him talk about that ever again because he realized we got all these kids grew up here there are Americans whatever that politics is somebody else is going to fight that

but so I said that to say this whole calling had really crystallized in my mind we need to create new wine skin churches that are kingdom churches and we need to partner with campus ministries and we need to build a loop from nursery to nursing home so that our people can move through our churches and navigate those waters with some sense of sameness even though these changes are radical going from elementary school to teen ministry it's a radical change

William you know that John you know that watching these kids come up it's scary going from teen ministry into campus ministry a young adult ministry it's perilous and then when they graduate from you realize they're now adults it's shocking you know now I've got adult I'm adult thing now and it's like you know and Satan knows that these are like crocodiles in a river waiting for you know the antelope come down and get a drink something

bite their head and spring on them there's these evil spirits are waiting for our people and then even as we get older like I am now and encountering just the changes and the challenges of aging and it's perilous perilous and you need people that respect that appreciate that help with that and we'll do what you guys do we joke a lot but you guys treat me so special and honor my experiences even though they're not yours

and your world is different but you respect that and you want that to be a part of the narrative of the church just like our Bible records our world is very different than Paul's world and yet we honor that he did the best he knew how with what he had in the world that was laid before him and we can hand that to our children and teach them to hand it to our children's children and create a church that's not

terminal which a lot of our methods have created terminology in our churches so that's the deal and God has affirmed that to me over and over that is my calling and that's why beat the drum and drive you guys crazy with it but I know you guys have owned it now do you want to talk just a little bit about the current organization of our DFW Metro family of churches and focus and how those are all in a related you got to be a big part of that john and we kind of work through that

together because we didn't know how that ought to be organized but it became very apparent that by staying under the same corporate banner a few people get on the board of that one entity can exert a lot of control in places where they must go on so when we planted wily there was a bit of a dispute over that which I mentioned in that podcast about how much influence the church at Garland should have over the church and wily that you were leading

on as well as focus which was rapidly expanding and out growing our churches because I told the church in the early days that focus will outgrow the churches in the early days because you can just reach so many people and focus is still bigger than our collective values and it it it helps constitute the number in our churches it would be hard to figure that count out and it doesn't matter to any of us anyway because we just don't do those kinds of

senses that we don't need so we're not competing and we're not counting so our corporate name at Garland has always been the DFW Metro family of churches and that was an umbrella corporation that we created and the Garland church northeast church is a dba it's a doing business as and that's how we operated but the thought was is when we planted wily wily would be a dba under the df

that df w metro family of churches as would focus but when this discussion started I thought we got a problem and I talked to you guys about it and we just kind of backed off of a whole lot of stuff and said hey we think this would be a good idea and sold a few people that took ownership over something they otherwise hadn't agreed with but it really did kind of free them up from having to worry about wily

you don't have to worry about it we'll just you don't worry about focus and so because we were just discovering this and in the end the spirit led all of us to agree on doing that so garland is still our corporate name is still the df w metro family of churches

we at all we went through an attorney firm here that has been doing this for churches for a long time and we spun off wily and focus and I think dinton was already planted we didn't want they john so and and then and so we focus is its own corporate entity the the family of churches all have a group ruling in which that we operate under the same 501 c3 and that's just a practicality that unites us in no way other than wily doesn't have to go through the rigors of doing that spend the money

yeah and I think the technical term for each of us operating underneath that group ruling is that we are integrated auxiliaries into no it isn't actually and the an integrated auxiliary is what ctf will be to the wily church an integrated auxiliary is what the df the the north Texas Christian counseling center or something that al Pickering works under it is an integrated auxiliary to the original corporation

we're it's called group ruling y'all completely independent but it's a group ruling I think it was the assemblies of God that did this and she was a member the main attorney was a member and she told us about it you guys could go do that today if you wanted focus did go get their own 501 c3 because they seek funding from a lot of sources and consequently if somebody goes in and looks at your 501 c3

it's not for focus they're not seeing the fw metro family of churches and suspicious as the what are we doing here who are these people but focus still also can operate under hours it's just it's just a it's an art that's an RRS thing and how it's done so every church is independent but what God really taught us and really again through focus and through wily is our connection is relationship

those that know no john and I live next to each other for nearly 20 years now and we've been getting together one on one for over 25 years now and really over 20 gosh john 20 over 26 years now you've watched my kids grow up and I've watched your kids grow up and you're just kind of one generation behind mine but your kids are involved with my family

in multiple ways the same with your family will you but so so that organization wily is independent plan O East Plano fellowship is independent denton Arlington for the time being Arlington is just now incorporating they have technically been under the garland corporation but they are in that process I don't know where they are but they've always had the freedom to do that

and I would suppose that probably Richardson will operate that way until they decide to spend the money and incorporate themselves all of the focus ministries operate under one corporation but there's tremendous independence at the campus level brand is I suppose probably his title is executive director but I don't even know so they have their own board and everything

but will you talk a little bit about just what's in the strategic pipeline in our metro family of churches well I mean for me it always was in my lifetime to help you guys kind of get the base church planted

it was just God's deal that he decided to start us in the industrial district of garland that's just God's way and it's funny and we enjoy that because he gets a credit and you know Garland has always been a commuter church we have a few people in garland but where we are even people at living garland live a long way away from that building

so we I mentioned we plan wily we really planted Plano and Denton out of wily we planted Arlington sort of out of garland and sort of just out of focus because focus was over there and Arlington was out on an island so we had focus students that were part of focus but they weren't part ever part of the garland church we had a few that were driving over though so it was kind of that but

through Garrett Davis Garrett and Erica moved to West Richardson and there's kind of a revitalization going on in some of those old Richardson neighborhoods and so Garrett and a bunch of his buddies a lot of him he met at CrossFit Jim they've been kind of feeling it and there was an

opportunity with a Christian church there that God kind of opened and so we are actually starting next Sunday afternoon they're going to begin regular meetings in the afternoon for the rest of September and then in October they're going to start meeting in the morning at

nine o'clock at the Community Christian church on Mamosa in Richardson and then on the 21st you're going to be involved with that as your wife is one of the leaders of the TCU ministry will you we're going to have a procession over at Brian and Peter basses house who actually live in Fort Worth but

Peter is a co minister co pastor of the Arlington Central Church that's part of our family churches and she and Brian have been Brian was a part of focus and they are leaders in that church over there so we don't have any specifics as far as how that works it really is to go seek God's will and see who God might be leading to be a part of that and when and so this is very much an exploratory prayer session and so we don't have a time frame we don't

have any of that but again with focus already cranking at TCU that makes us want to start something and again because of the way we're built we can do that pretty fast and that's part of being able to flow low and fast and we can so if an opportunity arises we weren't planning on starting this Richardson church although we talked about starting Richardson church years ago because we have a lot of people in that area and in the North

areas so but so Richardson and then Fort Worth we've talked about McKinney quite a bit I'm probably the only one but I really have had my eyes on commerce greenville area and Texas and you know commerce but again it's that'll have to be a God deal we don't have people out there but that's how God works somebody comes and says hey we'd like to do this and you know we could be up and running at start

school next year if if the right people out there that had a like mind with us and wanted to you know discover the best of big best the little you know strategy that we operate under we would help them yeah that's what's in the pipeline right now yeah okay let's transition maybe to more of a not that this is not a spiritual conversation but just more of a yeah instead of talking about plans and kind of what we're doing let's step back and talk more about church planting as a whole

what what is the spiritual or biblical case for planting churches well for for me it comes back to laying a foundation of Jesus its first Corinthians 3 the problem with the Corinthian church was that were disunified the reason they were disunified is they were getting distance between individual

members and groups in Jesus that's why Paul said I'm hearing that there's some of you saying I'm of Paul I'm of see us I'm of a Paulus I'm of Christ he says it is Christ divided and then in chapter 3 he chads them he said I can't address you as spiritual you're still worldly yeah because you're fighting well that we're fighting because their foundation was wrong

and the answer that he gives them to every one of these divisive issues that they were having was Jesus now the question he asked them in chapter 1 is Christ divided which is of course he's not and in chapter 3 he says I laid a foundation of Jesus and there are other people building on it but neither the one that plants the foundation or the one that

water the plants that have been planted neither is anything but only God who makes things grow and so I look at a lot of churches and there's a lot they just seems to be a lot of distance between the church and what they're about and really the spirit of Christ this rugged determination to be just Jesus people where we're branded so it's very much rooted in just the great commission right that we're we're not commanded to go make churches were commanded to go make disciples

you know just like the the Adam and Eve were not commanded to go build families they were commanded to reproduce to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth will families are the way we do that will to make a matured to sign was you've got to have spiritual communities it's not an individual sport you got to have mamas and daddy's you got to have people you got a big brothers and sisters you got people to protect you from the bullies the real enemies that we

fight because somebody trying to come to Jesus on their own some dirty demon is going to take you out and you don't even know what happened to you why you're so better now because some unseen force has knows your weakness and you know took you down in a hurry but you know that there's there's this power in the unity so you know the case for church

and I have a list here I'm just going to go down this list and the number one is to create new wine skins rather than constantly bursting the old ones people that are given this new spirit when God wants to do a new thing can we just build new churches rather than splitting and and really bless each other so trying to build new wine skins and allow people

to make you will you have a new dream and that's why so many of our axioms are to propagate that go make a new mistake just don't repeat the old ones you know the best ideas are still out there what am I saying that we're going to reinvent the Bible no but the Bible was written to occasions and situations but the truths of God aren't occasional they're not situational there are there eternal their existential but there's tremendous freedom in forms based on you know people

used to walk the little churches in their neighborhood and then they wrote their covered wagons to churches churches in America were built around an agrarian culture and we're still doing things that they did based on writing to church in a wagon when we're writing to church in SUVs you know it life changes and we need to look and say does this even make sense anymore but we're so dog it in that and we raise our kids in these traditions they want to change

so that's number one number two to partner with focus it is crazy that churches are not seizing this opportunity I believe every church near a campus ought to be over there working because we can't we we got to 300 people in a ministry you to do this 30,000 students they're walking in and out all day long they're from all of the place and when you practice one on one's house then we can't possibly even touch most of them that's what creates some of the hostility

without sideers that I hear about on red at their mad at focus because we're trying to reach people and we've got signs up in their mad if the more churches that have little nurturing groups that the better the better you don't have to have 200 if you just have five or 10 with somebody there to we're just too much we hire people we want people to bring people sit on our pews and it's like no this is mission work you may get a few and if you love a few people you'll get some of

but we're not willing because that doesn't make us look good and so many of the big churches in the city we got to pay for our buildings and our property and our big salaries we just put pressure on people to produce numbers on the pews and that's the language we speak and that's that is at best

worldly but in our partnering with focus we've given focus the freedom that we don't put pressure on to do that in vital we'd love to have them but we're not even where we could handle all of the people from focus in our churches and it's also been away for us to bless other churches right and it's created good will from lots of parents and other people that are members of churches and they come and they treat me with great

honor because they know that I was involved in starting this ministry the jewel the bless their kids who don't go to one of our churches but they've matured and now they're leading in their church so it is a partnering with focus and and so that focus can get the best of both worlds we're not going to hog tie them but we're going to be there help

them and so I get to be the old man and I can help Brandon and Mandy and Garrett and all of the directors of focus and I've protected them by the way from some bigger people as they were younger from within our churches and from other places to say no you don't get to have them for lunch

there's no bear behind them and I will not let you attack them so if you want to fight come over here and you can fight me number three is to build a loop from from the nursery to the nursing home to build this loop from from the nursery on because the church has been losing our teenagers in droves and you know we're all hyped up about abortion and we're losing babies that for evangelicals we believe those babies are in good standing

with God whatever that looks like to God but these teenagers aren't and nobody is really a gas that it will try to get them back later 75% percent the last that I've seen are leaving church when they leave home and only 20 to 25% are ever coming back well gosh if we we're we're bleeding our own kids and it is given us a chance again for people like you William to have a loop that you can come up and we can kind of coach you through those times in life and help you and you have role models of

you know how to go to college and then how to leave college and you've been able to do that with teen ministry and college now and you've got plenty of role models like John of how to get married and how to have a family and keep doing ministry not be taken out by these

life changes that take people out and we have that loop now as we see some of our I call them focus grandkids that are coming up it's like cold on run and being at the U.T.D. ministry he came through your ministry you still help the siple so do I but he's over at U.T.D. now going her miles an hour and they know they've got a different breed of kid coming over there he's there and he's working and he knows us and he may be on the focus staff but but he's a

cell for us he could lead anywhere he wanted he goes to jam camp and he's one of our best workers so that's our kids ministry for those that don't know what that is so number four is to build additional opportunities for singles to meet and marry that is a big deal it's one of the most perilous things and we've got so many young Christians that are getting on social media which we support it's a way to meet people I'd rather meet them

there than in a bar and yet some of our Christian singles groups having worked with those it's a little scary because there's a lot of predatory Christians out there and so vulnerable naive people that really would like to meet and marry are you know a little too eager and they get taken advantage of here if somebody can't meet somebody in the church they're part of we've got four or five other churches we got a network

right and so while some are meeting people we just had an engagement of one of the leaders here in our Riley church that met a girl through I believe social media but they're going to the Arlington church together so we have churches for them to be a part of and there's a good chance he might move over and help lead Arlington or even for worth which it's just these opportunities that it creates there's some

really sweet stories but you know we've got to get out of just this romantic mindset about marriage there's lots of people that would like to be married and have families and but they want to marry somebody with a like mind and there's some really hard stories that we have of people that married people from other churches that were not of the same mind and they've just been dragged out by that which is sad to us but that's God's deal number five is to repopulate communities with dying older

churches God showed us that that was not part of my vision but in what happened in Garland with the old walnut village church and them giving us that building and just what a laughable funny thing God does but the communion Christian church were able to help with that

with what's going on in Plano with the Episcopal church there with the East Plano Fellowship and potentially could happen out here as as you guys have been talking to the North Point church of helping them keep their property and we don't want trying to conquer own colonize too many churches though with our campus mentality we are colonizing and whether it's an intentional problem or not it's a problem that the church is going to kind of deal with in some are dealing with it already

but helping repopulate in these communities that are revitalizing and still have community churches there number six is to open the door to God to do new things we don't have to just constantly be fighting with trying to change try it go try it when you're out here in Winele you guys can try stuff

they're weak we've never done that before you don't even have a history so you can do lots of stuff and there's been lots of things tried that week came back so that probably wasn't our best idea but nobody fell apart in the church didn't split over it you can try some stuff go make a new mistake

if it doesn't work stop number seven is to create opportunities for new emerging leaders to grow and even outgrow older ones I could have kept John under my wing we could have started Wiley and you guys could be listening me on video every week but as it is you guys have

ten people that are outstanding speakers and Wiley probably more but at least that can deliver really good messages to a church that doesn't expect to be entertained and spoken to by trained seminarian the church just knows that this is the way we're going to do ministry

it's a variety of voices a variety of speakers and now with five praise teams and each of those praise teams have multiple people flowing through every week because we don't do performance preaching and performance praise we're on a consumer church we're a God church and so the way you guys

can do ministry you've bloomed in that you know a lot more about that than I do and you get to learn that and then teach that to other people as does John leading a church and Wiley doesn't do church just like Garland does and that's great didn't doesn't so to provide opportunities

for new emerging leaders we've been able to raise up through our churches and focus has a staff of over fifty people but those people learn church in our churches right and because they get to interact with us and it's like your wife Lindsay she's on the focus staff she didn't

grow up in our churches but she's a member out here so she gets lots of experience and oh it is important focus is a mission and it is a church of sorts but it's a temporary one it's a tent community that's moving through here and as one that graduated from T.C. you she

sees the importance now of having a church and then when you want to raise a family you want a family around those kids not just a campus ministry you need more than that she can keep doing campus ministry is where hard is you can do teen ministry and church ministries

where your heart is and you can work together and that number eight is one of our strategic statements to build the best of big and the best of little that when there's a major need we can all come together and we can do some stuff together we see there's lots of resources

that we can borrow from and help the West Richardson church you're losing one of your best praise leaders out here that's going to go over and lead that thing and while that's frustrating to you and you've got to recover it does give you a chance to raise somebody

else up here and then let him go over there and raise somebody else up and then who knows he might be back out here leading the widely church in a while and you might be leading the Fort Worth church in a while or maybe he moves the Fort Worth with you next and is your

praise leader over there that's the opportunities we create when we don't have to have the big time preacher preaching to 10,000 people a week we don't have to have the professional praise team that's you know with people with ears that are listening to make sure the

rhythms are right and somebody's not flat it's like it's just us it's people that are gifted in it and then you've got focus praise teams that just go nuts and they continue to help us which is obviously stay owns a focus pastor but that doesn't matter I look up every week

at Garland and I see you know because Kylie who is on the focus staff she is also the worship coordinator at the Garland church we have regular stream of focus students now that are up helping lead worship in Garland because she and Peter both are bringing people in and

it's just this sweet need and they brought a lot of of cultural and racial diversity from the campus to the Garland church which sadly in this predominantly Hispanic and black city we were an all white church and we couldn't we couldn't do anything about it until focus provided

that diversity that create a safe place for now anybody comes there and they're not going to feel weird and as has widely had to kind of deal with a couple of different times so it's the best the big best the little is just fun number nine is to provide diversity and similarity

because while you know you know it's like John and Shannon coming from Garland to move up to help you guys pastor this church they've been with us from almost our very beginning Shannon's been on staff john's one of our elders down there he's coming up here

while he's a different church but there's enough similarity that it's not for until they know a lot of you their best friends with john and Christie it's not the transitions not hard Kylie grew up here mostly she's down leading in Garland now because she's a part of the

service of staff at U. T. D. you could transfer back down there and lead the whole church Garrett came back after having been gone all those years and has been one of the senior pastors at Garland now for nearly two years it's that best the big best the little that is powerful but it creates diversity and similarity that is really a neat cross pollination.

Number 10 is to propagate propagate this creativity in rethinking church culturally and generationally it's just sometimes some of the things the churches have done it kind of raised my eyebrows it even raised their own I remember somebody at Denton thinking it was a

good idea at Christmas to I don't remember what they had they had a gnaw and Danish for the upper up there they were exercising maximum freedom of forms but everybody went with it for the day and my knowledge they never done that again and that's probably not our best

idea but we also didn't split over it you know God knows were a bunch of kids and he knows that we're not sure I mean do we have to if that was real fermented wine they were drinking are we wrong by just using grape juice you know the church of Christ had a split literally

there were group of churches is split off because they believe because the Bible Jesus handed one cup around when he instituted the Lord's Supper that the Lord's Supper had to be a single cup that went through the whole church and a picture that in a mega church you definitely

not going to get big doing that and there were many so well God would supernaturally keep people from getting sick and it's like you know is this really what the scripture is trying to bind us to but we want creativity we don't want our African students coming over

here to have to look and act like a bunch of white people from Oklahoma we had a Zimbabwean seventh day Adventist church meeting our building for a long time and they would they were singing the same songs I sang as a kid in the church of Christ just in Zimbabwean I wanted

to see him rocking real they didn't at all they look like a little southern Baptist church cross you know down the road from where I grew up that's who they look like and it was sad to me and they had all become Christians through that mission work of that church in

Zimbabwe and they had immigrated here and we had a really sweet friendship with them for a few years until many of them had to go back and help their family so it's just to propagate that to like go do go try some stuff number 11 is to allow for a kingdom experience without

denominating or branding most people's kingdom experience is going to their denomination conference and it creates inbreeding not interbreeding God is very big on interbreeding it creates a hardiness of of populations we get too close to interbreeding we start

having damage to the species and so it allows us to be spread out and and each church has its own name each church is independent but when we come together there's a commonality and a similarity from very different most of our members at Wiley don't know members in

Garland now the people in Denton they may hear about our churches but they've never been down here we're having this joint service at care church on November 3rd and they'll get to see a huge sampling come in and we'll have a praise team that's diverse and a speaker

from outside and we'll do some stuff you know and it's like oh okay so it really is it allows our kids my kids and grandkids to have a sense of what kingdom looks like yeah there are brothers and sisters too and we're for them as much as we're for ourselves

and that's a big deal to God number 12 is to grow churches ministries and leaders from the ground up and the inside out Paul didn't want to build on other people's foundations the problem in building on foundations you don't know how cracked they are right it's like buying a house you can do a certain amount of investigating but you don't know what's under it there's no way to know what's under it the house we built in Plano had 22 peers down to rock that I put under that big two story house

on a corner lot because I knew they had moved a lot of dirt so that that foundation wouldn't crack but in Plano Texas there's a lot of houses whose foundations are cracking open because they're built on sifting sand and nobody took the time to do that and you can only grow as big in his highs

you build deep and so we want to build with solid foundations of people that we know love God Jesus people they're not trying to build a name for themselves make a name for themselves from the inside out is just this heart of Jesus you know Jesus said clean the inside of the cup first

don't neglect justice mercy and faithfulness in favor of making sure you count the right number of to give to the leave so to speak with your tithe give take care of people but make sure that the heart of the ministry is about a fierce dedication to doing Jesus things Jesus way number 13 is to create the environment for growth and conversion from those outside of churches the majority of unchurched people that are coming to Christ

are coming through small and new church plants it is hard for truly unchurched people to come to Christ in big church there's a place for those there's a place they're serving communities that we can't serve I'm not here to slam anybody I'm here make the case for this though and we need to have churches out there and there's also a fear of denominations now people have heard lots of some of them just purely slanderous news reports about the various denominations and you know the Baptist have

taken it on the chin in the last few years well most of the Baptist I know or sweet dedicated godly people but yeah I mean there may be some things but most of what's being said is at best a twisted true they care about people and they've done wonderful things for people but new people don't know that so when they come in there's a there's a safety and no I'm not joining another denomination well my

people are kind of Methodist but I'm really not but I know some people and I don't want to be a Baptist yeah those churches and why so many churches are taking their denominational names off of their buildings so it

just creates opportunity number 14 is to keep our churches relatively small so that people there's an atmosphere of the love of Christ Jesus said this is how people will know you're following me and by their fruit you will know them well in our churches people can know me they can look at my fruit

it's not hidden somewhere behind you know state walls you can see the fruit of my life and interview my wife and my kids and people like you William is known me since you've and you know my family you work with my daughter you know the stories I love my grandkids it's like that

creates this place for people like Tessa and other people that are you know coming to Christ and growing in ministry to look she sees these relationships she gets to see Tyler and Brianna and their kids she gets to see the relationships we all have and see that this is real this isn't

fabricated there's no performance going on we know each other's flaws we can joke about each other you know John Bonn run on her senior pastor and your friends with him and it's like there's no pretense and all that these are just real human beings that are living real lives but it's

clearly visible yeah and they can see that we really have these relationships and they're real and because you hear the stories so that atmosphere number 15 is to distribute power and innovation and the otherwise subvert power grabs power evil goes where power grows and when you create

these big institutions they wreak havoc on the infrastructure and none of us are able to handle that one of my axioms to leaders is the people you let put you on a pedestal are the very people you have given the power to kick it out from under you and don't let people put you up there

yeah you know me I share my stories with you my weaknesses you have no illusions about where on is here because he's got it all together and his life is perfect and he only used to struggle with sent no I struggle with sent today and this is reality I need the grace of God more than you do

because I ought to be better and no better and I'm still struggling and that's why Paul would say I'm afraid after I've preached others I myself should be a cast away I know my vulnerability and there's no faking that's why my testimony to you guys has always been listen I'm not here

because I'm good I'm here because God is good and that's my testimony so don't put me up there I'm not going to sit up there I'm not going to be put up there let me let me be down the ground right with you so if that's important that we do that and that we subvert these power grabs Satan

can't find a place to come in we don't have this domino effect potential like Mars hill did up in the northwest when the mother church fell all these other churches got in trouble and so even you know there's been a couple of the village church here kind of spun off all of their campuses

a few years back now because I think they saw some of this and I loved them for that because we're all trying to learn and those are case studies for all of us as well to say yeah we can learn from each other we need each other and we need to quit making these bad statements to the

unbelieving world that cause problems for all of us number 16 is to mitigate lots of the risks that are inherent in big churches I'm talking about that right yeah denominations and just institutional is I am anti institutionalism and for a lot of reasons because the bigger it gets

the more bureaucrats you get we're going to mitigate that we're going to keep our structures flat and we're going to keep them organic and yeah do we lose some stuff and that yeah you do but I think we can leverage our collective strengths to get the best of big

with out this over organization and creating bureaucracy it's just exciting to me we've got a couple that's been trying to get married in the Catholic church she comes from a Catholic family and Vietnam it is just sad that what's going on with them trying to do that and the way they're being

treated in this big old you know centuries old institution that doesn't communicate well and again not trying to slam Catholicism it's just in the west it's our oldest institutional church number 17 second to last is to allow the spirit to do his work in producing freedom of forms

in organization in ministry operation and worship I do believe in freedom of forms and what Paul says in second Corinthians three is where the spirit of the Lord is there's freedom and instead of trying to go to our Lord's supper passages and try to create some kind of concrete rule where there

isn't one we can we can have a freedom of forms we can do that but what works best in this culture in this time in this place freedom of form in church how big does the church have to be freedom of form in what we call our leaders we use a lot of churchy entity stuff that are just old words

it's like the word church it's just a word that comes from a common Greek word for assembly meaning the called out assembly we use elders our communities don't have elders anymore and we're still using an ancient word that was based on village the older kind of patriarchs

of the village can women be elders will take the word elder on say can women be leaders and it's like oh pastor it's a word that's used one time in our New Testament it's a unique word it's a Greek word poimane I think is a way it's pronounced I'm not a Greek scholar but that's

the way it's spelled and it just means feeder but it's not even the same word that's used for shepherd other places but that's become the official title well we take a word that's not even defined in our Bible and we can find however we want and and then we're saying can women be pastors

the southern Baptist just kicked the whole church one of their best and biggest churches that's influenced all of us out at Saddleback out of their organization because they had a woman teaching pastor well she'd just been called a woman teacher we wouldn't have an issue but we had

to put pastor on there and now we're gonna we're gonna cause more division over a name Paul said told Timothy avoid foolish disputes over words and we're awful about it it's like the word baptize we've turned it into a religious word it just meant a curse that's all it meant

and it was used in various ways lots of places but it's become religious and there's lots of those things communion Eucharist they all came from common words if we can stop that and create these freedom of forms people know what to do with that and that's a good thing because it

allows the spirit to create freedom as you can see in our churches we love the Bible we use the Bible a lot and it's liberated us to love the Bible because I jokingly have told people about the Old Testament I can only read the Old Testament through every four or five years because my faith

can't stand up to it because it begs so many questions from an inquiring mind is what is that even about and I don't have time to research at all and it leaves me with lots of questions about why would it be okay for a prophet to call a predator out to kill a bunch of teenagers that

was calling him a bald man is that okay for people that don't know God and don't know the Bible those are stumbling blocks and so you know we we create this freedom to think and to rephrase things in ways that we don't have to divide from the old church but we don't become somehow

just liberal and deny these ancient scriptures that have been carefully inspired not dictated from God and dropping out of heaven the way again conservative Christianity presents the people it's the word of God when you read it as an outsider you're thinking I don't hear God talking

at all here I hear a bunch of people talking while he inspired it well I mean they tell different stories different ways they tell their personal stories if God is dictating it where they're literally 3000 people saved on Pindacos was that crowd literally 4000 and that other one was 5000

literally because if God was dictating he knew the exact number that was not a problem so why would it be why do one of these estimates once you see how it is inspired I believe it's a loftier view of it and I think we kind of collectively are able to hold that in a way that's helpful

and not hurtful yeah and then the last one 18 is to be able to flow low or to flow high I mean right now we're operating at SMU one of the most NTCU two of the most prosperous wealthy little campuses in the country in the heart of Fort Worth and Dallas where there's a lot of money pool

not everybody that goes there is but there's a lot there and you know Garrett has been asked to be the chaplain of the swim team there and one of the things that the campus chaplain did an introducing Garrett to the swim coach with all these little probably mostly wealthy or scholarship

swimmers down there he said something guys and ask a he's not weird and and Garrett told me that and I've thought about it since I know what he's saying because sometimes we just act and look weird and why is we don't need to we're peculiar enough to use an old King James translation of

first Peter 2.9 where we're we're peculiar enough just being Christian we don't have to work at just being weird with it you know Paul says as far as it lies within me I've become all these things to all people so we're gonna go to the edge with people that's why Jesus was called a

friend of centers and that's why he was seen as a glutton and drunkard neither but he went to those people so we can flow low you know it's Garth Brooks I got friends in low places I do I have some friends in low places and they will drop F bombs with me and say things that's like oh okay well

that probably wasn't very nice but I didn't fall apart I'm not sinned by loving them in spite of that I've been Jesus to them I've shown them grace they know me they know what I stand for and they know when they say that that's not me and my world but I don't have to you know if they

get a little tipsy at dinner you know drinking their wine or their margaritas well I don't yeah I grew up with people drunk I know what drunk people and I'm not impressed with that but I don't have to be the spiritual patrol I can express grace because God doesn't strike them dead he's

watching them get drunk and he's not striking them dead why do I have to condemn them Jesus said I didn't come to condemn the world I came to save it so I don't have to be condemning even though I look but if I'm not condemning to you in your mistakes I can look in the mirror after a

particularly bad day and I have to be condemning of me I can accept that God is just that good and say God I'm just not very good today I didn't do good I'm so sorry I wish I were better I look forward you making me perfect I'm ready man I am ready for that day but in the meantime I'm so

glad for your grace but you my son be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus second Timothy 2 verse 1 I've learned to be strong in the grace of God and we're able to flow low wing flow high I've had lots of dinners at country clubs I've gone to highfalutin weddings and I've done weddings

in scary places I can either I can put on my grubbies and I can go talk to my friend that's a glorified ditch digger you know and love him that's been married three plus times and hang out with him and be his best friend or I can go talk to my CEO people that I've been not just their business coach

but their pastoral coach for a lot of years so yeah those are the 18 things I wrote down and you know me well until I could keep talking but we can probably with that take a break yeah that's great man needs a break for sure let's take a break and then we'll come back and keep rolling okay we're

going to jump into just some specific questions about church planting and the things that come along with it and that first one is going to be just what are some determining factors in targeting an area for church planting and just determining factors in church planning in general

well there are a number of things and they're going to vary it's pretty nuanced in some ways because again we're a pretty organic church by design and desire to let God keep us in a flexible way that we can move quickly and that we're mobile enough and trying to keep our members in that

mindset so we don't crystallize and then you know we're like a frozen river we're not going anywhere the one factor is where are our members coming from we planted the mission church in Plano about three years after we started northeast because our church grew so quickly and we were

you know up around 300 people when you counted children and there was a lot of kind of margin in our church still in the early days because there were plenty of people coming and and that's not a good thing but because it creates a lot of bloat in your organization that's a lot of hot air

you can't rely on those people for much but but I lived in Plano and a lot of our conversions were coming from Plano U.T.D. was a lot closer to my house than it was to our church building and so we had the Richland ministry for the Nauk Dallas colleges and then we had the U.T.D. ministry

and I took our small U.T.D. group with me to to mission in Plano and John led he was already our teen minister and he took the teens that were from up there and we appointed new people we had somebody at the Richland College and we had a teen ministry in Garland and we had teams there

and I remained the evangelist so to speak the coordinating evangelist over both churches and we were still under one organization and all of that with it was our first run at it I'd done this twice but not the way we were doing it here so it was a new experience for all of us

so we did that based on opportunity where our people were plus we had U.T.D. but we also had Colin College there which we were targeting with focus and so it put us back up in Colin County but we ended up because the planting church out at Garland kind of went in sharp decline and it

cut in half in a little over a year and we were in trouble there the mission church was doing quite well but we brought the churches back together and reconstituted the church and kind of use that as game film to talk about and watch it and what were the experiences what work what

didn't work what should we kind of be thinking about next time so God gave us that opportunity the church plant was very successful it was the planting church that we really had to think a lot more about so then after that John well Joey and Bob were the first people from our church that

moved to Wiley and then John and Christy really Christy and Tanna were looking with a people at Camelville the idea of living next door to each other but because we were thinking about doing that it all worked out for us to move out here together and we moved where we are now and

very quickly our ministry started growing in Wiley some of it was through Brianna and Christy Christy was leading a girls group over here at our house and we had a number of conversions and things coming out of that some families and through all of that we had a number of really key

families that came in plus why he had people like your family in Murphy which is much closer to Wiley than it is Garland so we had quite a few people still up here and even people in Allen and McKinney and places like that and then we had by this time the Colin ministry was starting to

really grow and Garrett was I think Brad and Kale were some of the early people there Tyler I think Tyler went over and planted the Colin ministry didn't he was with them yeah Tyler was one of them there were quite a few of our guys that went over there and were a part of that Brad was I

think the first official campus pastor there and then subsequently Garrett was over there when we I don't know if he was already there by the time we started Wiley or not but anyway so Wiley was again a community church plant Colin wasn't even out here yet now they've got a campus built

for 10,000 students right down the street here and we knew they were coming that already projected to go here and Princeton and other places and so all over Colin County but so we were looking at strategic opportunities with what was going to happen we believe UTD was going to do what it's

doing and so we positioned ourselves and that's where we put our God really but it allowed us he let us to do that at UTD so lots of that going on but John I think it would be really helpful for you because as having been a part of mission really when you were just getting started going back and then deciding to lead the Wiley church plant you've now been a part of two of our other targets and some of the experiences and as we were talking about even some of the challenges

of both the church plant and the planting church you might stir all that in. Yeah we had a group here in Wiley that was growing like you mentioned out of just kind of some outreach and relationships that were happening around here and I think it was around end up being around 70 people and one of

the things that I think was really talked a lot about in those first five to 10 years that we planted the church down in Garland is that we wanted to be a church planting church and so we did the mission thing again came back there were a lot of conversations around that and how that could

have gone better but it just was what it was you know and so then when we started thinking about moving up to Wiley it was mainly because we had this group of people up here and so I think I mentioned in a previous episode but we planted first in Tranlor Thomas's house and then moved over

to Christie's cheer gym when it was in its original location and yeah we just didn't really know a whole lot about what we were doing and I think even some of those first Sundays the energy was pretty low and we realized pretty quickly just that we needed the campus ministry Colin had decided

to stay at Garland at that time and so then we made the decision to bring them up to the Wiley church and that's when things really changed for us and it was exciting you know being the ones that go out is really exciting there's you know you've got all new people there's just a tremendous

amount of joy that goes along with that you're doing something new you're thinking about ministry and maybe a different way because you know down in Garland I wasn't responsible for the week to week things Ronnie did all that and here in Wiley you know the preaching the sermon

series and all that stuff it came down to me I had to you know figure all that out myself and so and then building a team that was also really excited about doing that so all of that is just really fun and it's almost I would maybe liken it to a kid going off to college you know you're

leaving home and kind of the structure and rules that were there and going and figuring out okay what does this look like what does life look like now and so that was a really exciting time and pretty quickly there was a group of people that were coming within a few years or a group of

people that were coming from Denton to Wiley and we started talking about planning a church and Denton and I remember those folks like really trying to find a church and Denton that they could go be a part of and they tried several different ones for extended periods of time and then finally

ended up coming to Wiley now that's about an hour drive for people who don't know it's 45 minutes at least and and so that's a long haul for people to go that direction and and so pretty quickly you know I say quickly it was three to five years I don't know if you remember Ronnie specifically

but it was somewhere in that kind of time frame let me interject something here strategically one of the things we realized with Wiley very quickly is we didn't have a pipeline from the universities with you guys having Colin the kids were leaving Colin at you know after a couple of years and

they were going to university and they were attaching to other churches but we needed to as we populated our churches with focus grads part of our strategy for matching Denton and bringing them to Wiley instead of Garland was to create some attachment and it really has helped yeah oh

absolutely we even kind of continue today to be the one church and our family of churches that doesn't have a university a major university leading into it Plano has a lot of UTD students and SMU and their and SMU yep Garland has UTD of course didn't has North Texas and Arlington has

UTA so one of the neat things I think that's happened at Wiley because you really just have that community college set is that not all people who start going to Colin or community college end up going on to university we have a growing number of folks in our church that really get plugged in

and God captures their heart and focus and they start coming to the Wiley church and then they decide maybe that college isn't for them and they want to do something different and not finish out at university and so then they stick around and stay with us and that's that's been really

neat so we went and planted the Denton church it wasn't a huge group of people that were driving down to Wiley every Sunday but I would say it was in the 20 to 30 range would be my guess some were kind of right in there and so we helped with that and planted that and sent one of our elders

up there to do that and that was kind of how the Denton thing started. Well I think it's important to note how we started collaborating there was no pride of ownership part of the other part of starting out of Denton is Garland again we were getting too big so rather than trying to do that

out of Garland it also made sense for any of our members that wanted to be a part of the Denton plant to come to Wiley and that's when Kurt and Leslie Rowe who were founding members moved up here and live with you as a matter of fact with their boys and there were some other people

from Garland don't remember who they were there was another handful of people that that moved up and so we've been allowed to I mean we've been it's we we have helped by recruiting for each other people that it makes more sense or maybe so you know I was joking with you about Mark Morola but

I didn't know Mark and you really didn't and he was doing that apprenticeship and I told you we got to keep him up there because he started dating Tearsah who was working down in Dallas and they Tearsah's very strong will and she's very planted in Garland yeah but we needed markup here

with Atouji listen he's a keeper you want Tearsah too because she's spunky and smart and strong but we've got a recruit so we did a we you know we doubled up on a number of people the Votas and people like that even James Sanderlone and Melissa and people like that that we would I would

encourage them and tell you you got a recruit they don't let them leave yeah and and I'll just kind of highlight something you said about Curtin Leslie I think they were one of the first families that we saw that was willing to upend their family living situation to go be a part of a church plan

you know for us and Wiley when we planted the Wiley church most of us already lived out this direction no one really had to move but when Curtin Leslie felt called to go plant the dent in church they sold the house that they had lived in for a long long time down in Garland and they

came and lived with us on that little transition period which was such a blessing like just the benefit to our kids and to their kids the the relationship the bond that we have between our two families is just really special and it's because of that it's because they wanted to be church

planners they wanted to live in the city where they're going to plan a church and so they made a stop here in Wiley and then moved up to Denton and have been up there ever since and that was probably ten years ago now and so it's been really neat to see that and and I think they just

set such a great example for us and Leslie's become one of our best preachers and our churches and she would have never done that if she hadn't gone out to that church plan but as it is she had to yeah and then she collared Brad Davis and we all felt better about Brad collared as a church

plan to annoying Leslie was up there with him our church mom is going to be up there and Brad adores Leslie and their great friends you know Curt works with Brad those relationships run deep yeah yeah and it really has been neat to watch how how the people who have stuck around have

have been a part of the overall vision and mission of you know planning churches and making maturing disciples to the glory of God it's and and everybody's involved you know the people who buy in they buy in and they love it and they're not doing it for any person they're doing it for

the kingdom yeah they feel called to you know to be a part of what we're doing for the kingdom and there's a lot of people who've decided not to be a part of that along the way and I'm sure they've gone on and done what God wanted them to do but it's just been really neat to see the friendships and

the relationships that have grown over the past almost thirty years that we've been doing this and it makes me wonder just what that looks like thirty years from yeah or 150 years from now and just how wide that can actually go and it really gives me a vision just for what I think Jesus

meant when he talked about the kingdom of God and in the relationships within those and the family of God and how it's meant to be so that's just been a really a really neat thing and so then shortly after we planted Denton Casey Worshim Ronnie's son came over and became our associate

pastor at Wiley and by that time Mark and Seney Williams parents were already at Wiley and the church just continued to grow so there was a time in there where we had to leave the schools and so we met at a local church on Saturday afternoons into the evening time for about a

year and that was new hope church overall for Brown Street there were very kind very generous to us and let us meet there so we met there for a year and then ended up moving to a building near downtown Wiley that's kind of through another story but again the church continued to grow and

and I think what was really neat is the whole loop closing terminology that we use when we talk about our family of churches and you know starting from the ground up seeing kids start young and work their way through all of our ministries that loop was closing but also what was happening a lot

is focus was reaching out and making disciples on the campus and those people were leaving the campus a lot of them and looking for a church to get plugged into and Wiley has just been a beneficiary of focuses hard work on the campus all across the Metroplex I mean the people we have

in our church body it just blows me away to think that we would have that many just really good really godly people and in a high percentage vast majority probably has come out of the focus ministry and they're looking for a place to start their families and and to you know to grow

you know just to kind of be adults and grow up so so that's been really neat and so as that was happening our building started getting really full and we started looking to plan another church I love the idea just that we talk about a lot that you know if one of our churches gets around

250 people we start thinking about okay instead of building a bigger building or adding on to a building we are going to take a group of people and plan church and so so Wiley got the opportunity to plant dintin but that was again a smaller group of people but with Plano

we really sent out like core leaders and Casey who had come over to be the associate pastor and then eventually co-paster with me a Wiley left and he took a lot of people that that our church really loved and adored with him and with our blessing we planned all that like

we really thought about that and prayed about that and tried to think of who would be best to go help him do that but we really get Wiley really got to feel kind of the impact of sending of planting church out and it's hard like I remember talking to Ronnie shortly after that going wow

it's it's why I miss those people you know not that I didn't miss the dintin people but again it was a different type of plant it wasn't like what we were doing with the Plano church and so yeah so we got to feel a little bit more of what it felt like to be the one sending out and again

there's just there's sadness that goes along with that and and difficulty you know that is a part of that and you know you have to figure out how to process through those emotions and the pandemic hit just a couple of weeks after the re-exlator so it was like it was a devastating blow to all

of the churches but for you guys in for Plano it's just a testimony to the power of God that both churches survived and thrived I remember coming to that y'all did kind of like a little morning I don't know what you're called beg of the ought beg of the allogy yeah and I came up and spoke and

I just remember feel sad I felt for you guys y'all were out in the parking lot and we were all out there and it was my first time of being with you guys since Plano had left and um you know it was it was an experience but again it's part of our ability to be mobile I kind of got on

your little bit and told you let me help you a little more next time because again you mentioned this earlier and I think it's important because you know Plano I wily it's a suburb and it was a pretty white suburb and through focus you had gotten a better racial mix out here and because so

many of those people were coming from west you lost a lot of your culture and color here yeah and so you might even reflect on that but I just remember myself how sad I was for you and I was laughing because you're you know I for people that don't know again I mentioned in a previous

episode Williams mom is the one then invited John and Christie to church so John and Christy knew Mark and Sini Williams parents and Mark and John could not be different they're both two my dearest friends in the world and I'm a master style flexor so I can kind of adapt to whatever

being the youngest of a big family I had no choice to but to get good at that or get killed but so Mark working with John I helped kind of facilitate that because we needed some more people and your family was a really a natural choice the friendship and everything existed but

Mark even got frustrated with me over because I'm I'm pretty ready to move you know I can be mobile and fast too but John not as fast as John and so Mark would call John strategic method the the shoot aim ready method of planning and just drove Mark crazy and carry and some of those guys

I've come up a couple of times keep them from killing you but you know but I told you that was a pretty fast deal because when you told me y'all already decided but we scrambled because you know we were growing too so it was a strategic for all of us and and ended up you know helping shore

up Plano with another you know 20 or 25 people but after the fact I was kind of wishing I had considered sending a few of those families to Wiley but those are some lessons we've learned in doing this like oh yikes we probably ought to talk a little bit more yeah but we still learned

yeah as I reflect on the the Plano plan I believe 100% it was from God there's some need stories within all of that that kind of worked out in a really neat way but the one thing that I will be more mindful of next time we plan is just who of our people of color go on the church plan

because Wiley ended up with no people of color or maybe just a few Hispanics and I didn't like that I wanted to reflect a little bit more our community which wasn't perfect before we didn't have a perfect reflection before but it was a lot better and we didn't when we're kind of

talking about okay who's gonna go do this plant we didn't assign all of our people of color to go but what ended up happening is a lot that we did assign the people who were left ended up thinking you know I think I might want to go over to Plano also and and we're not going to tell anybody

like no you can't go you can't go to church with them or anything like that there wasn't any controls at that level we would never ultimately people needed to decide where they're going to go to church you know directly with God we can make some suggestions but if people are feeling

called somewhere they need to go and do that and so yeah so it just left Wiley with with no people of color and and we've been that's been being you know prayed about and worked on for you know since they left now and I think we're in a better place now but yeah that's the one thing I look

back at and I kind of reflect like man I think we could have at least had some more conversations with some people to try and help them understand the vision a little bit better and what was happening at the from the planting church perspective so but other than that I try and put it in front of

the body from time to time that we want to continue being a church planting church and if we reach back to the 250 range we're going to start talking about that and looking at that and we're sending just a few people over to the Richardson plant and then we'll see what God wants us to do

with sending people to Fort Worth at some point so that's some of that history there. Yeah and that's part of the whole church planting thing as we get bigger we can collaborate like we're doing and really help with some people going without just devastating the planting church we can take some

graphs and put them other places and I think there'll still be some more opportunities like you did with Plano and like we did with Wiley but a lot of our church plants even the Fort Worth thing it's probably going to be a collaborative one right we'll try to start that springboarded out of

Arlington Arlington has some people in Fort Worth and then with the TCU group growing we don't have to go over there with 200 people yeah there are plenty of people that have an interest in that and what our little thing that God is doing is catching some interest some people like the people

they're helping us with the Richardson church plant our story is pretty compelling for them and one of the older guys that has been helping Garrett named Randy Marshall has been in ministry well he's older than I am and has been involved in ministry in a number of the things Garrett's

told him that's going on he said Garrett this just doesn't happen because and I know that too and now you guys the more you get exposed you realize yeah God did do something you know kind of unique here and we don't take credit for it and and we don't take credit for it because we don't

deserve any credit for it we just kind of react and go oh okay well we're gonna do this now we're gonna start a church with a bunch of people from across fit Jim okay well we can do that and we can try it and if it doesn't work and you guys can I mentioned in previous

question John when you stepped out that when he all's best praise leaders this is gonna go help be the praise leader over at Richardson and you got to recover but somebody else is gonna step up and you'll train some other people and I was mentioning that Kylie your daughter is she's the

coordinator of our praise and worship in garland when I look up there and there's people I don't know down leading praise but she's brought them from UTD and other places she knows people and they're just really talented neat people so we this this thing that's going on is really a neat God deal

definitely that just kind of got me thinking well you were talking about Wiley and Plano just and Ronnie you mentioned this in your list earlier of of reasons for planting churches just how many people with some development and an opportunity can grow into great leaders

and yeah I was thinking about Wiley and Plano and how and we'll touch on this in a minute just the challenges that that come up with planting but now look at both of these churches and the leaders that have developed since that plant and they'll just the last four years how many you know and

across all all of our church and jam and ctf and focus and worship and tech and sound just how many people when you plant there's openings that need to be filled and people get to step up and say well I think I could do that I think I could help out here and just how cool that is to not to

do to be someone that doesn't show up to church every Sunday with potential and ability and you're just sitting in a seat you know you get to step up and go okay I can partner in this area I can partner with God in this work and I think it's such a neat opportunity and I think it is attractive to people there's people with really good hearts that go like I want to do something I want to help out and I think our model gives people that otherwise would never get that opportunity and opportunity

so yeah I'm blown away at the quality of people who do what you're talking about so I think a lot of times you have people step up and say oh well you know I can help run the soundboard and I look at the people who run our soundboard and these are like really smart really capable people you know

they're electrical engineers and mechanical engineers and you know computer programmers and they love God and they want to serve I just I love that looking across our family of church is same with our praise and worship team same with our pastoral teams you just see all these people

with all this talent and who just really love God and they want to be his man or woman and they're going to you know jump in and do what they can yeah so I think that's really neat yeah the stories are are really at a more granular level or what make this exciting our axiom 101's how it's done is so

important to us because we've learned that it's like sitting in this room with you guys y'all are just inner views y'all are my friends and my sons in the faith and our relationships run deep and you impact all of my family and my grandkids and it's like you know the way the body grows it

up builds itself in love as each supporting ligament does its work these connections that Paul talks about in Ephesians for there are powerful and it's hard to get people to be strategic enough to let that happen most church plant shut down because we're trying to recreate an all the

grary and church structure or a mega church structure churches like Preston would Baptist their phenomenons or Willow Creek or saddleback their their phenomenons out there and they're the exceptions most churches couldn't be that if they did everything right but too many people are

trying to be that again rather than let's just go do some ministry here and then if God makes things grow God gives increase the things and to be good with that if 10 people show up we're going to have a good worship we're two or three are gathered in my name I'll be there he's saying

you have my authority I'm present in that in a special way is the message that Jesus was giving not that he's only there if there's two or three people he was with each of you individually before you went but there's something collectively powerful and so you were talking about those I

was just hearing Griffin and Kelsey Taylor Griffin came in he's a biracial guy really smart kid that came in through our ritual ministry and then went to U.T.D. and finished school there will Kelsey came with Brianna to to our teen ministry years ago and Christie studied with Kelsey

and subsequently you know now Brianna is married to Kelsey's brother who is Casey's best friend and Griffin has married Kelsey now and they've got two kids well those are my granddaughter's cousins and so I hear lots of stories about Lenny and just how much how funny he is to reason Ryan and

well Griffin has been running our soundboard and he does this professionally he works in all of that stuff professionally and we've just got some professional up there that knows you know you go back to our early days of sound and it is just one of our favorite jokes we've

all lost hearing over it we if we didn't have a super loud squeak screech every week it just was on a typical church service but I don't remember the last time that has happened at Garland and now Griffin and Kelsey are probably going to be part of the Richardson church plant now

and and you just see that repopulating and moving in they live over there in that area yeah if Griffin moves over there I would not be surprised to see his mother who lives over by UTD and has been she became a Christian at Garland after after Griffin started coming we've got

hundreds of those stories yeah hundreds of those stories and you just look at how God it just kind of moves underground and you're thinking and then suddenly we look up and you know one of our kids is sparking on somebody else's kid and you're thinking oh here we've got

this going on here before long you know we've got a whole new family going at any given time now we've got five or six pregnancies at Garland and you know we've been praying for two or three more that are wanting to get pregnant and we're thinking you know and that's building from the ground up

that's just one facet of that so we've talked a little bit about this but there's a couple of questions I want to hear about just challenges that come along with planting a church so in general what are those when we're planting churches what should we expect what should we expect as challenges and then kind of alongside that what are also the challenges of being in the church that sins out the plant and really both of you guys can talk about this a lot.

Well the first thing that hits me is in terms of you know what do you need you need leadership you need people who are not doing it for a job they're doing it as a calling because there's a lot of days where if it's a job if it's just a job you're going to quit.

So there are the just the challenges that come along with working with people and so you need leadership who's committed to that who understands that and is willing to put in the hours put in the resources put in the things that are necessary to try and make that successful that's the first

thing that pops in my mind. You know you need unselfish people you know I call it the Tower of Babel Syndrome that we all kind of want to yeah we want to be fruitful for God but we want some credit for it and we want to enjoy that fruit rather than producing it for God we produce for God

me and it's like well it's like raising our kids and sending them out it's freaky to try to keep them brought with you and in the house with you we get really in bread again doing that and you just see the richness of that but you need people that are unselfish if we take ownership over the

other churches then we do enjoy the benefit we can celebrate when we see I guess I mean telling the last couple of weeks about Denton hearing they had right at 300 people at their Thursday night focus worship night I'm just going oh my gosh you know that's great well I know a handful of those

people but I don't get any credit for that typically until I do and then I'm going I've done nothing you know Aronnie's one to start it but no God started focus everything I did about it was crappy and it the church it was crappy and God but God did it anyway I did the best I knew how

you know I cast my net on the right side of the boat it was on Jesus side and you just keep doing that when Wiley left John had been with me he was the closest person to me and he was closer in terms of proximity and time to my own kids because John and I we worked at the bank together

too we met together twice a week for years for our one of ones I worked with him in teen ministry I trained John on the job I went to Lear Meangs all the time I did training for his leaders that's how he learned ministry and he became my closest confidant and man I was going through a battle

with depression in those early years after my nephew died evil came after me and John was my counselor I talked to John about that it wasn't ideal for me but it's just what God did and John told me that he had felt called to come along beside me and help me and that's why I

called him my title so it's like he came from out of nowhere and he came from a very different world than I did but we did that for each other I got to be what he didn't have and he got to be what I didn't have and my own kids didn't have to try to do that because I sure couldn't have done with

my boys what I did with John the kinds of things I talked him about and told him about were you know just things your kids don't want or need to hear so yeah the benefits are are super rich in that but it's heartbreaking when you send them out yeah we had to build a whole new team and

with some real problems on both ends with the team ministry you got to get all new children's ministry people our praise team suffer there's imbalance in the people that go again I don't think we'll have near as many of those kinds of church plans moving forward yeah but

there are those kinds of issues that arise and again everything we do as a family of churches this is the best of big we can go to school on each other focus has been a laboratory for us focus can get by with stuff that a church would get written up over condemned and nobody cares

because it's a bunch of college kids on a campus here's glad they're not drunk and they're over there worshipping yeah so we've been able to try these freedom of forms and stuff on campus in ways that are isolated but are very helpful and we've been able to do that in our churches

we borrow sermon series from each other we share ideas we resource at our meetings and it's just really rich in that but it's hard when some of your best friends you don't see them church anymore and you know I was I'm not going to get to because so much of our relationship with so many of

those people is we only see them on Sunday yeah now we can get with them another time but we can't get with everybody every week yeah right and so yeah it is hard and it's like with Garrett coming down and being there two years he's one of our co-senior pastors and Garrett is close to

all of us and you know I will still spend time with Garrett weekly but there are a lot of people that you know when you have multiple pastors they kind of look to one or the other kind of is their favorite not choosing favors but that they just kind of speak their language more

they connect with them better or maybe they have a connection so we we've done a panel conversation the last two weeks about this at our Garland church is kind of getting ready and again this is not going to be a major you know group of people leave our church but again

Kelsey's been a member of our church all time as has Griffin and you just lose a few couples like that and it we may notice it some of us but the people that are close to them their friend groups will really notice it and so they can feel sad and then you think well why are you not excited

and they're missing somebody you know yeah for sure what about something unexpected some and that could be a challenge it's unexpected or a benefit that's unexpected just from church plants well I mentioned a couple already it was unexpected to me just how much energy the college ministry

brings and so I would strongly suggest anybody who's considering planning a church looking for you know including young people as a part of that and then again just the idea of like trying to make sure you manage to the degree that you can who's leaving from the planting church to go and plant because again it can leave a ripple effect because the planting church is now a church plant as well and so you've got you might have new leaders or you will have new leaders and new roles

especially when you do it small like I don't know how mega churches do that when they go out and plant another big mega church somewhere in another city but when you're doing it small like we have been doing you have to figure out who's doing what so those are a couple things I think that we're

unexpected for me well I think there's always unexpected people that step up I would have never really thought that James Sanderson and Melissa would be co-pastors here not that I once I saw them thought they couldn't they're both bright really talented people

but in traditional Christianity neither one of them are likely leaders but you believed in them and you look at the substance they bring to the table and they're very respected in their own rights in traditional settings they might not lead with focus going out with Brandon doing his

deal some of the people that he picked I'm going oh it's like when he told me you know Mandy I kept hearing about Mandy Launchani McWilliams before she got married I knew Mandy but I put now what what are you doing who is she and what's she doing with you and you know what a

huge blessing Mandy has been in our churches but you you let people because we can do this cookie cutter thing the people that I might recognize abilities you might not in vice versa and we get this really beautiful variety of people out there and it's just exciting to me to see people stepping

up and see what people are doing it's just funny to me that colds over at UTD and now you know he does a two on one with Brandon every week cold was a baby I remember our little Christmas is together and Colin Jeren would buy you know they would buy gifts for people John would take

him a dollar general and that get a gift for everybody and now he's over there with pretty solid that's a good idea they're they're they're John's children definitely but no it's it's yeah you you you see you know those things start happening and those opportunities now that here's

called John raised him I've been over here on the side being the granddad mentor and playmate all these years hanging out with him and now he's over there being discipled by Brandon and working with Kylie who is on the staff at UTD and it's like the richness of that experience is

priceless we couldn't design that into yeah that's what by surprise am I surprised not in the sense that I knew God would do amazing things but it's those it's a surprise in the sense that we couldn't strategize to that degree that we would have a loop I could I envision that that

was part of the plan but how that loop would work and play out and just to get to be a part of it yeah you know I was I just one of the pictures I sent Josh Josh and Leslie did a sermon series up at or you know they're doing a certain Josh was wanting some pictures of our early days

because Leslie was having trouble putting on one of my scent was a picture of you and Kylie with Bill Rex and I bill had on his security guard outfit and he was holding you and Kylie's in front of it and I'm just looking thinking you know Maria's back with us now and of course Bill has

been dead now quite a few years he loved you y'all were his grandkids and and you loved him you and Bill would hang out and you wouldn't have anything to meet back then but you'd hang out with Bill Rex I made you cry over that I don't know but those are the but then there's just people that

fall out on you you know there's been some families up here that we orchestrated coming up there to help you that left I was just like what is going on here that when we needed them it's like no I mean God is the vandresser and he moves people and it's okay well so it's going to

surprise you you'll be both delighted and disappointed with things because again you turn it over to God you know we cannot go on a mission like this and not take some bumps and bruises I kept telling some of my leaders that have never done this guys I can't guarantee everything we do is going to

work out like we want it to we can't do that it's like a coach with a rookie quarterback I remember John L. Way coming out of college and that guy was obviously a hall of famer in the making but there were days he didn't look like it I mean he played his rookie year which was just not done

back in those days in the NFL and sometimes he would make plays that were just like you just shaking your head you know he was doing the Patrick my home stuff before Patrick my homes was doing it but then other times he would do the dumbest things Roger Staubach with with Tom Landry Tom Landry

was Mark Royal Roger Staubach was John Von Rennon and Roger I mean he would come out sometime but I mean he was a gunslinger man that's where the Hail Mary came from because he would pull things like that and it was just amazing what he did but he was fun to watch so yeah you can't play rookies and people like that and them not do stuff I have protected John more than once from some of the stuff he was doing it's like John you know that's where the axiom came from if you mess up call

me if you mess up really good job call me really fast that is the truth I told him that the first time so did it start if you mess up call me and then John did some really bad stuff and I added that I added both of them came out at the same time because he messed up really bad the first time

I went I went good he wasn't a churchy kid he went to church but he wasn't a churchy kid he was ranger and had problems but really seriously I joke about them but he loved God and he had a heart for God and it was it was David and God had had his hand on him and that's what I was able to see

because I wasn't born in season either I kind of came from a weird place in Christianity too and so yeah it all of the surprises that come up but you have to be ready to clean up messes you know I had people kind of rubbing the when we planted mission having to put the churches

back together as a failure I see it's not a failure we're doing okay right we said this is what we were doing that's what we did and we learned from it and we've applied those things and so I don't let people put that on us you can't do that that's why when we started

dinton right when we planted dinton a good pastor friend of ours that was part of a bigger church in Plano that church was planting a church in frisco out of the same model kind of a mega church model they were working from a quarter of a million dollar budget they literally planted the same

time we planted dinton who had a twenty five thousand dollar budget because that's what between blylee and garland we gave them some money and they went off up there and took off but we're still kicking up there not a mega church but I mean we got a neat little church up there that's a lot of

fun and partnered with focus and like I said focus had 300 people you know two huge campuses up there and and that church plant didn't last a year um that's what we're doing we leverage our strengths and we mitigate our weaknesses and there's no failure in Richardson Garrett will continue to be considered on the staff at garland they'll be as far as emotionally an extension of the garland church as long as I want to work under our corporate umbrella will all spend time with them Garrett can

still speak into what's going on at garland and then if that doesn't work out the way we think it will Garrett still at garland it's not we're we're not gonna we're not gonna again we're gonna mitigate our risks so the surprises it's if you do it with God though the surprises will all be

good and even the things that are disappointments God will work it out for good you'll learn from it it's okay well we won't do that again and the next time we'll do a lot better I'm sure there have been people who potentially we're pushing against the idea of a plant maybe that happens less now I'm

not sure but what are the obstacles and the objections that are raised with this model with the idea of being a community of churches that plant other churches what what is the pushback to that well there's there's a lot of people that are risk averse there's a natural selfishness

in all of us we want to have our little houses and our little things we take a lot of pride in we're number one we want to root for the number one franchise we want our franchise to win the Super Bowl we forget though for them to win the Super Bowl there has to be one and for it to be

a fun game they have to be competitive so we don't like our best players going and playing for somebody else but that's what makes it a good thing and you know I heard a coach one time as they were talking about it was actually Bob Stoops for the Sooners is who I heard I were talking

about this hatred between oh you in Texas well for people that have followed those robberies those are fun you know for people that left football you want them both to be undefeated and and whether it's a blowout or it's a you know right at the end of the game that's what makes football fun

but he said something to the tune of I'm just one of those people that that don't believe you have to hate your the people you compete against and I think that it's that same spirit not only don't think we have to hate them we have to believe that by propagating this in the end we're all going

to be blessed by it but so I think the two biggest thing is is risk aversion because there risk when you go out it's going on a trip but the risk of not going is a lot worse in my mind and then just selfishness we don't want to share with anybody else but if I'd kept John with me then

Wiley wouldn't have him and a lot of what he's been able to do in business and ministry up here wouldn't have happened and as it is I still get to be a part of it though you cannot give God I was thinking this morning in my prayer time just about God telling me you keep praising man

I'll keep blessing you and it's just laughable how he blesses me and I I mean man I can't wait every chance I get I give God credit I praise God I tell people I good he is and it there's almost a selfishness in that because I've learned when you trust God you just can't out give him

love him with everything man when you realize he gives back a hundred fold on investment you don't want to hold back anything anything I can scrape up to give to God I want to give it because he'll give it back you know a hundred fold and he just does because even in this time of Tana being so sick

and you know just dealing with this chemo right now and just how sad it times it is us going through that we're so richly blessed with the kind of healthcare we have access to and our kids are all around and having you guys around the phone running next door I don't ever have to worry about need

even as I think about Tana and I as we all right we get old and we can't look out for our kids I know y'all will I know John will look out for them they're not going to go hungry they're going to be looked out for and when he's gone he knows he has people like you're going to look out for his

kids you know and you got relationships you've got those relationships that no we won't you know the the man of God in this kind of church kingdom church will never go hungry so the benefits are you know the challenges are there the costs are real but those costs are investments

because even the thing in the short run that cost us it's still an investment you you lose all of your people of color but you go to the Plano church and just see how hard how hardy and neat it is in the midst of all of that and well that's okay you know you you invested you you did something

here and and now it's recovering it's recovering you know you you come to Wiley now and you're not an all white church and our community I look at our neighborhood right here how all non-wide it is it's it's Wiley is changing so it's really a neat kind of thing yeah let's go ahead and wrap up

can we do one more question yeah we can do one more question let's do that yeah I was just looking at this list I really want to talk about what is the long term goal here what's the long term strategic objective both with our churches but also with focus what's the goal well the 2020

vision was 50 churches in 20 years and I laid that goal out never meaning the number 50 but as I look around the Metroplex with what we're trying to get done with the number of community colleges and they're only going to grow this Metroplex is projected to double in no time and it's just

because we got plenty of land there's plenty of resources with technology people can move here and work and so if we get our strength together we can do a lot of creative things I think we're going to do some I think you guys will do some house churches out of like Wiley rather than plan

a whole new church out in Levant and Nevada or Princeton you could have a house church up there they're still part of Wiley that still gets pastoring and some of the support might be comes in for church does some things together but I could see Wiley becoming its own little many family of

churches out here on this north east corner that's just growing gangbusters to the point that Wiley then might be able to springboard and lead a church plant out to Greenville commerce and that big college out there and provide some pastoral support just like what I do with so many people

the things you can do in your sleep now as a senior pastor john you could help them and provide some age and experience where you've got some young green people out there trying to build a church and then you've got some forces out there taking them on you can go out and help them but for me it is how do we fulfill our mission to make and mature disciples best and I think it's through church planting movements I think it's propagating spiritual families and I think it is a model my 2200 vision

that I only shared with a few people is to have 50 of what we're doing in other metropolitan areas around the world just go plant let's just take a little offshoot of what we're doing and that may be one of you guys one day that moves to Austin or Houston or not to compete with other

churches not at all but especially places like Boston where there are all those universities and you know we don't compete with anybody else but we can do what I keep saying other churches need to do build campus ministries with us help us let's partner let's reach them so yeah I

think that God is rejuvenating his church like he's always done and I think we're one example of that fresh wind fresh fire that the book title spoke of that came out of a church in Brooklyn or the Bronx or wherever he was when he wrote that book and what's going on in that church it's

a New York City church it's just it's what God's doing but with this especially the sun belt cities like this how do we rejuvenate how do we go back in and reclaim these church properties where nobody wants to go there because they might be in crime ridden neighborhoods well that's probably

not where we're going to send our young families to raise their kids but when you've got some you know single people and some tougher people that have a heart for inner city they can go back in there and then we can partner with them so they don't have to raise all their support we could have a

cowboy church we can have a blue collar church we can do track church because we can have a church that's all red lot district people workers we might not want to bring all those people to our church with our little kids but we could build a church we can do storefront church we could go down here

to Wiley right now and rent a storefront and just call it the gathering place and have a good coffee machine and a nice machine and some water and have game tables and we can do communion every day and support groups every day and the church completely different and provide workers from our

various churches heck you do that I'll go down there and do pastoral counseling a few hours a week for sure and some of our counselors would donate time to go do free pastoral counseling for people I think that we've got to get bigger we've got to get smaller we've got to quit thinking

in terms because so expensive big is so expensive but little is not people aren't expecting the nicest the best the biggest you know heck you know I think that by creating this freedom you guys are going to front see opportunities God is going to make you laugh at just what he can do

as he told the Israelites in Malachi test me on this and see if I won't open the windows of heaven it's what Paul in his prayer said in Ephesians 3 that God can do more than we can ask her imagine I think there's opportunities but we have to build churches that will support those

opportunities that we know I am the fundraise so much to just you know heck do a few things what what what I don't know I don't know what but I think we just we're going to go back in and we're going to do amazing things and it's just not going to look like it's ever looked before

the metropolitan of angelism doesn't need to keep propagating what formed as fundamentalist conservative Christianity did in an agricultural world of America and that's why the church is even in Europe are dying because they're not hardy they're not I wanted my kids to grow up in the

city I look at some of my kin folk and their complaints but they don't want to drive in Dallas it's just hard to drive my kids on the about driving in Dallas I grew up here it's their home and so yeah it's some crappy stuff in the city but there's also a bunch of really neat things our kids get

to do you look at the concerts and the entertainment and places to eat and just the massive number of friends you guys can make and just the fun you can have there's wonderful places here if you're not intimidated by it but then you can reach out to massive numbers of people and and be lights

in a city where there's so many people in darkness so yeah I think that God is doing and it's not we're just a little speck over in the corner of it but you know the thing that God does with a speck he calls it a mustard seed it's a mustard seed and God can do some wonderful things that

provide a lot of shelter and a lot of refuge for a lot of people through a little mustard seed faith and I'd take great joy in that yeah that's awesome that's all super exciting all right well we'll go ahead and wrap up there this was a fun one I enjoyed this with you guys if you want to

reach out to us for ideas or topics go ahead and do that if you'd like to donate to the podcast to help with future equipment and things like that you can reach out to us as well my nursing home expenses are coming probably coming up that's yeah pretty soon I would I would imagine yeah feel

free and thanks to Josh Robinson for editing and helping us get all this thanks Josh thank you Josh and we'll close there you want to sing a song you want to pray what you think you know catch me off guard every week on this I prepare for the podcast yeah I will I'm

going to sing the song that I sing to God the day he told me you keep praising man I'll keep you a lot of listening you you are beautiful beyond description who marvel us for words who wonderful for comprehension like nothing ever seen or heard who can grasp your

infinite wisdom who can fathom the depths of your love you are beautiful beyond description majesty and thrown above and I stand I stand in awe of you I stand I stand in awe of you holy god to whom all praise is due I stand in awe of you thank you God Amen