Growing Faith for Church Planting

On March 5th on the Mark Prater Podcast, Mark and Benjamin Kreps chatted about God’s work in growing and testing our faith for planting churches. Here’s an excerpt, and the full transcript, video and audio are linked below.

God loves us, and because of Christ, we are also his children. And that love is expressed in so many different ways, so many good ways. But one of those is he tests our faith because he loves us. He wants us to have our faith strengthened in him, which not only builds your relationship with him, but it helps you accomplish the things that he's called you to do as a pastor or as a member of a church or as a church community. And we need faith to trust God to do those things.

And so I've been thinking a little bit about that as it relates to church planting. Anybody that was at the pastor's conference last year heard me share my heart and burden that we would take risks to plant more churches here in the States. And those are the kinds of testing of faith that I want to talk about. He tests our faith in trials. James 1 talks about that, but he also tests our faith for the purpose of growing our faith by taking thoughtful risks to advance the gospel. And that includes church planting. And when it comes to church planting, we begin to think about planting a church. Maybe an eldership does or maybe a church begins to talk about it. We can go to the practicals and that's not a wrong thing to do. Many of the practicals are important. Like do we have a person to plant the church? Do we have a guy who can do it? Do we have a location? Is that a viable location? Do we have the finances? Those kind of questions are important to do, but we sometimes miss things that we see in scripture that we're to do. And those things in particular I think strengthen our faith. They test our faith and strengthen our faith.

So the first one is prayer. And I think a great example is in Acts 13, many people know this passage. In Acts 13:1 it says, "Now there were in the church at Antioch Prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, who's called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manean, and a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrach, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting", so they're together, they're worshiping, they're praying, they're fasting, "the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and sent them off." So that missionary journey that Barnabas and Paul took, the very first one was initiated through the process of prayer and the Spirit made it clear to them what they were to do.

So what did that do to their faith?