The Cowboy Fellowship of Atascosa County is a high-impact, soul-winning, church-starting congregation. It was a decade ago when I first joined the core team, and we set out to plant a successful church. God moved in amazing ways in the early years of our church plant, and He continues His amazing work to this very day.
As a result, I have personally taken part in helping start a dozen other churches over the past ten years. One of the major problems many church planters face is knowing when they are no longer a church planter.
There comes a time in the life of every church plant when you are no longer a church plant, but instead, you are viewed simply as being a church. This transition can be difficult to spot because it has little to do with attendance, tithes, or the size of your staff.
Generally, the only way to know when this transition takes place is to watch and listen for cues from the community that surrounds your church. When the community at large no longer views you as being the new church in town, then the transition has probably taken place.
As the leader of a church plant, if you fail to recognize this transition and adjust your leadership, you will find nothing but frustration and disappointment as you try to lead like a church planter, when in reality you are now a church pastor.
Below are a few of the differences I noticed as I made the transition from planter to pastor.
Planters evangelize future disciples; pastors disciple future evangelists.
When you first plant a church as the leader, you are the main, and in many cases the only, evangelist. You do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to sharing the gospel, not only from the pulpit, but on a daily basis in the community as well.
Generally, those who attend a church plant in the early days are not equipped or confident enough to actively share their faith on a regular basis. Therefore, by necessity, you are the one evangelizing and winning future disciples.
As a pastor, however, your thinking and strategy must change from evangelizing future disciples to disciplining future evangelists. You must help equip, train, and encourage every believer to become an evangelist in order to ensure that your congregation becomes a healthy, growing, vibrant church.
