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You Might Be Crazy Enough to Plant a Church If …

How do you know if you might make a good church planter?

There are great online tools to help determine your readiness to plant, and every church planting network and denomination has some form of formal assessment; if you feel called to plant that’s where you should start.

But what if you don’t know if you’re called? What if you just kind of wonder if planting a church (or helping plant a church) might be in your future?

Here are eight traits based on eight biblical characters that might indicate you have the stuff to start a church from scratch.

(SPOILER ALERT: IT STARTS WITH BEING CRAZY!)

You might be a church planter if… 

1. You’re crazy like Noah.

Noah didn’t know how to build a boat, gather animals or run a floating zoo, but when God said build the Ark, Noah grabbed a hammer and a saw and went to work. His neighbors were right, Noah was a little nuts.

Church planters are a little nuts.

They look at people far from God and see future church elders. They look at a run-down middle school and see a great place to have church. They look at a tatted up bar singer and see a potential worship leader.

Most of the successful church planters I know are a little crazy.

2. You’re arrogant like Nehemiah.

Nehemiah had the audacity to believe that a ragtag group of rejects could be turned into a top-notch building crew. He thought this newly assembled crew could rebuild a massive wall, that laid in ruins for 70 years, in a matter of weeks.

And Nehemiah thought he was just the man to lead the project. Nehemiah was a little arrogant.

A church planter goes to a city where the vast majority of people don’t attend church, where dozens of churches with massive budgets and bloated staffs are slowly dying, a community where a dozen leaders before him have failed to build a sustainable church. He looks at the dismal statistics and says, “I can do this.”

Surviving as a church planter requires a little arrogance.