As we prepared to parachute plant, my husband read countless church planting books and talked to a few experienced planters to get their perspectives and wisdom. I picked up one or two of his books and even read over his shoulder a few times, but the strategies and how-to’s that filled the books didn’t seem to pertain to me at all.
What exactly does the wife of a church planter do? I shrugged my shoulders and plunged into church planting with approximately zero idea of what to expect, and a few vague predictions of what this endeavor might mean for me and for our family life.
Wow. I probably should have talked to someone or done something to prepare other than jumping in blindly. Because what happened in the first few years was nothing like what I had imagined or expected. And because it looked so different, I thought I could possibly be the worst church planting wife ever.
To save you perhaps a year or two of confusion and questioning your sanity, I’ll do what the church planting books filled with ideas and strategies didn’t do for me. I’ll tell you what you, the church planting wife, can expect in the first few years. Here goes:
1. It’s going to be hard. Hard work. And discouraging, want-to-give-up hard.
You already know it’s going to be hard, but you’re thinking it’s going to be hard for a little bit and then miracles are going to happen that erase any discomfort or difficulty. This miracle probably won’t happen. Instead, it’s going to take ongoing, intense hard work for multiple years to get this thing off the ground. This hard work is not reserved for your husband. Your work and responsibility level will be different than your husband’s, but church planting will require almost an equal amount of hard work out of you.
There will be times that you will want to give up or get out from under the burden that you’re carrying because of how weary or discouraged you are. You may question yourself, your husband and God. You may wonder if you will ever see fruit from your efforts.
And these are all good things, part of the process of sifting you and crafting you into the minister that God wants you to be. If God has called you to this work, He is calling you into a process of refinement that is both difficult and sweet. Expect it and embrace it.
2. You’re going to have a paradigm shift.
The end result of God’s sifting through the difficulty of church planting is a paradigm shift. You can expect that God will give you new eyes for people, toward your own heart and, especially, toward Him. You will learn that, just as John 15 says, you truly cannot do anything apart from Christ in you. You will learn to depend on the Lord in a way that you have never been challenged to before. You may realize that your faith has never been truly tested until this point.
At some point, you will recognize that Christ and His gospel are the only things keeping you in the process, working hard, striking up one more conversation, and having one more family over. And you will recognize the infinite worth of Whom you’ve given your life to and Whom you’re working for.
This is both difficult and sweet. Expect it and embrace it.
