Things I Learned at Church Planter Assessment
Last week Ashley and I were at the PCA Church Planting Assessment Center. Altogether, it was a great, exhausting, and immensely helpful experience. We learned a lot about ourselves, about church planting, and began what I hope will be a few lasting relationships.
As a way of processing the whole experience, and to ensure that I don’t forget the things I learned, I thought I’d enumerate here the lessons learned at Assessment (I may add to or edit some of these as I continue to process(…
- Self-awareness is critical. Knowing who I am, my strengths and weaknesses–especially as a pastor–is absolutely essential. I think I am–and the assessment confirmed this–pretty good at this. Still, I learned a lot about myself. In particular, I saw very clearly the connection between between the weaknesses of my character and their practical outworking in my weaknesses as a leader. My desire to plan and my perfectionist tendency combine to make me come across as cold or condescending in a group setting.
- Due to my desire to formulate a plan in light of “all the facts”, I am often indecisive as a leader. While there is an obvious benefit to this, at times I just need to act.
- Because I like to collect information, and because I tend towards being a perfectionist, I often feel less-prepared than I really am.
- My preaching may lead people to think “he is right”, but it needs to lead people to worship. I desperately need to work on this.
- My practice of evangelism (lack thereof, really) is pathetic. I guess I didn’t really learn this, since it’s pretty obvious. Still, not good.
- I have a natural ability to envision and enact a plan.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:35 am
[...] of the things that came out of our time at the Church Planting Assessment Center is that I to work on the gospel-application portion of my sermons. I don’t have much problem [...]