US Church Planting Cohort
An update from Andy Farmer, Pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills Pennsylvania USA.……
This month we are finishing up the 2021-22 Church Planting Cohort. The church planting cohort is a program the North American Church Planting Committee has been running for a number years to help church planters take the final, crucial steps in planting Sovereign Grace churches. To date fifteen men have participated in the cohort over the past five years.
Church planting is both a glorious and a challenging endeavor. In Sovereign Grace we have always desired to plant and build well; not just starting but establishing new churches that play an immediate part in our mission together. The idea behind the cohort is to give planters a focused preparation for the pastoral and personal and family implications for starting a new work. We do that through a combination of monthly video calls interspersed with three retreats over ten months preceding the launch of a church. One of the retreats involves wives, and is focused on helping planters lead and care for their families in the stressful experience of beginning a new work. The cohort aspect - connecting men on similar paths for support and fellowship has proven to be tremendously valuable. Guys are learning from each other, supporting each other, praying for each other over the time. As we’ve done this over the years we’ve seen these cohort relationships grow into friendships across regional lines. We also utilize gifted men throughout our family of churches to lead discussions and advise planters in our monthly video chats and on our retreats.
The main ‘project’ for the cohort is the development of a Church Planting Prospectus. The prospectus is a tool to help church planters do what they have to do to plant well - understand their target area, structure a vision and strategy, and create a plan that can be communicated to the region and to potential team members so that the plant can be fully vetted and supported by a sending church and a region. We use the cohort to walk through that prospectus development and help the planter prepare his plan for approval by his region.
This year we have had four guys in the cohort. Where there is space we are experimenting with what we are calling ‘re-missioning’ plants in the cohort. The term re-missioning applies to an existing healthy church that is transitioning to a next generation lead pastor who is being asked by the church to help it focus and implement a new mission strategy for the future. Our cohort this year includes one ‘traditional’ planter, Nick Kidwell, who is planting Valley Creek Church outside of Philadelphia in Malvern, Pennsylvania. In addition we have three re-missioning pastors: Bart Lipscomb at Christ Church in Conroe Texas (outside Houston), Adam Campbell at Living Hope Church in Gambrills Maryland and Jesse Phillips at Redeemer Church in Orlando, Florida.
We are scheduled to begin the next cohort in September. It looks like we will have up to five planters in this year’s cohort including possibly two who will be planting churches that will be reaching folks whose primary language is not English. Please pray for this upcoming year for the churches I mentioned above and for the men we are gathering for the 2022-23 Cohort.