Feels Like The Second Time: Still Me

A year ago we launched Verve, which is the second new church I’ve started.  I thought it may be interesting for some of you if I shared a few of the things I’ve noticed about starting a church for the second time.  So here’s the fifth (and last):

Last time I talked about the advantages that experience brings in planting a second church.  Because of hard lessons learned through experience, I came into starting this church with firm convictions of how I was going to do it different.  That this church would not have the same weaknesses.  That we would be strong in areas my first church plant wasn’t.  And I worked hard to ensure that those convictions would translate into reality for our church.

There was one problem I hadn’t considered:  I was still me.  And so, yes, I was able to do some things differently and use the experiences I had to tweak a few things this time around.  But, honestly, even more I have seen history repeating itself.  Why?  Because I led there, and I’m leading here, and I’m still me.

For instance:  My personality type is such that I can design good systems, but don’t have the attention to detail to actually run good systems.  In my first church plant, we didn’t establish good systems at first.  In fact, we didn’t even really think about it.  This time around, I swore I wouldn’t make the same mistake.  So I spent tons of time designing good systems.  The problem, we’re not doing such a great job of actually running those systems.  Why?  Well, I suspect it’s because I’m leading this thing, and I’m still me.


Check out Vault, Verve’s conference on church planting.