Planting a Church

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0:00:34 – (Matt Smethurst): The same muscles that are required for raising money are the same muscles for sharing the gospel. You’re going up to someone and you’re presenting something and there’s the risk of rejection, there’s the risk of being told, absolutely not, please get out of here. And so I think it’s a good thing and it’s a humbling thing to ask people to consider in faith giving to the work of your ministry. Welcome back to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the Gospel Coalition. I’m Matt Smethurst.

0:01:12 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Luke Duncan.

0:01:13 – (Matt Smethurst): And we are going to be talking about church planting. This is something that every church ought to be thinking about, praying toward, hoping that they get to do at some point. And, and let’s talk about why that is and how to do it. Well, when you think about this topic of church planning, lig, is it something that you’ve heard a lot about just in recent years, or is it something that in most of your ministry as a Christian you’re familiar with?

0:01:39 – (Ligon Duncan): No. Growing up because the PCA was a new denomination. 1973 is when we began. It was on the radar screen from the beginning. There was a recognition we need to plant churches. There was a call for people to consider church planting. Our home missions agency, which initially was called Mission to the US and is now called Mission to North America because we have congregations in Canada and the US from the very beginning was interested in this. Tim Keller was a part of that from the very early days of the denomination. His friend Terry Geiger very involved in this. So I heard a lot about this as a teenager in the PCA and then as a young seminary student. I had a lot of friends that were preparing for church planting. We had a church planting track in the curriculum. We had professors that were experts in that area. Don McNair was a guy who was well known for his expertise in the area of church planning.

0:02:38 – (Ligon Duncan): So it was definitely on the radar screen. And then I got to serve pastors who really cared about church planting. My pastor in St. Louis, Rod Storts, cared about church planting. I worked for A man named Mike Ross in Jackson at Trinity Presbyterian Church, who cared about church planting and actually got to help plant a church in Natchez, Mississippi, while I was working at Trinity Presbyterian Church. So I don’t have the kind of experience you have in a church plant, but I did get to be involved in that wonderful phase where you’re taking a core group up to the point of particularizing as a local church, and that’s an exciting thing. Now, the slog that happens after that is what you understand far better than I do. But I got to at least be in that first fun part of church planning.

0:03:27 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah.

0:03:27 – (Matt Smethurst): In terms of this conversation, I think it’s helpful to remember first and foremost that the ultimate church planter is the Holy Spirit, and also that church planting is not something that a bunch of pastors in the 70s, 80s, and 90s made up. Think about how the earliest Christians understood and applied the Great Commission. Go make disciples of all nations. Well, we see how they applied that if we just turn to the Book of Acts, and the answer is church planting.

0:03:58 – (Ligon Duncan): Right.

0:03:59 – (Matt Smethurst): So that’s what they understood would be entailed in accomplishing the Great Commission. And I’ve recently started a series in the Book of Acts, and I’m excited to lead our congregation to try to think wisely and well about church planting, because I think there’s a lot of hype around church planting that, you know, I’m all for the excitement, but I do sometimes think there can be hype and speed and a rush to just get the results of more and more church plants without really knowing what we’re planting. You know, Vince Lombardi famously said, gentlemen, this is a football.

0:04:37 – (Matt Smethurst): And I think in church planting conversations, we need to be sure we have a moment where we say, gentlemen, this is a church. We have to understand what it is we’re actually wanting to reproduce by the power of the Holy Spirit. So that is, I think, just in terms of table setting for this conversation,

0:04:54 – (Ligon Duncan): it’s helpful to know that, and amen to that. And I lived through that era of the heady days of you still had evangelical population growth that was driving the church planting movement. You had a lot of transfer growth that was a part of that. You had population shifts that people didn’t adequately take into consideration about how much that was going to impact regional church planning. And you did have this sort of triumphalism about it. I think your generation not only looks back and sees the mistakes that my generation made, but you’re in an area where church planting, you’re actually, you are going into headwinds as you plant. And that’s actually maybe a healthier setting to do it, because you have to be really careful about what is a church, what is church membership, what are we here to do, what’s our mission?

0:05:48 – (Ligon Duncan): Evangelism is not as easy,

0:05:55 – (Matt Smethurst): secular, secular

0:05:56 – (Ligon Duncan): setting as it was in a nominal setting. And obviously it’s the Holy Spirit that converts people, et cetera. But you can get membership that may not understand fully what it is to be a disciple of Christ in a nominal setting. In a secular setting, it’s harder to get them across the threshold into the gathering of people. So maybe there’s some good things about the challenges that we face right now. Now, tell me, just looking back, when you started church, you didn’t just say, I’ve got to be a church planter, right?

0:06:30 – (Ligon Duncan): How did you get into church planting?

0:06:33 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I did not have a church plant or bust mentality. I was serving as a lay elder at a church in Louisville, Kentucky. And through talking with my fellow elders, they were excited to support me with whatever I sensed the Lord was leading me to do. And I kind of narrowed it down alongside my wife from wanting to be back on the east coast pastoring the east coast is where both of us were from. To kind of narrowing it down to the state of Virginia and then even more so to the city of Richmond. And I just wanted to pastor in Richmond, and I didn’t know how I would do that. So I was open to taking an existing pastorate at a church. But just through conversations with some friends of mine who were already living in Richmond, it became clear that maybe church planting and not just friends, actually a couple local pastors in Richmond.

0:07:24 – (Matt Smethurst): When other pastors are looking you in the eye and saying you should come plant, the rate of new, healthy churches is not keeping up with the population growth. A, that speaks to their catholicity and generosity, but B, that shows you. Oh, okay. This is not just me swooping in, parachuting in, trying to establish the kingdom of God on earth. No, I’m coming in. Wanting to lock arms with other faithful brothers, sisters in churches that are doing good gospel work in Richmond.

0:07:59 – (Ligon Duncan): Did you do assessment before you went into church planning?

0:08:04 – (Matt Smethurst): When I got to Richmond, yes. So it began with announcing to our church in Louisville, our sending church, the plan. So talked it through with the elders, and then we announced it to the church, and we were recruiting people to consider coming with us. So we had a monthly, what I call just prayer and pizza gatherings, where in the hour before our monthly members meetings on A Wednesday night. Anyone who is interested in learning more about this potential work in what was for most people a random state. So in moving to Virginia, my wife and I were moving back to our home state.

0:08:43 – (Matt Smethurst): But for most of the people in our church there in Louisville, this is just a random place 600 miles east. And we ended up by God’s grace, having 11 other adults move with us. And humanly speaking, they were the real heroes of the story because again, I was moving back to my home state to be the lead guy. They were moving to a random state for no leadership position, but they had the ability to take remote jobs and they just had a vision for living a faithful Christian life in another place that needed a healthy gospel preaching church. And those 11 originally came with us and since then, a few others from our sending church have, have come.

0:09:24 – (Ligon Duncan): Do you see other churches in the part of the SBC world that you occupy or the TGC world that you occupy doing things like that, like where a church will actually send people out to another state to plant?

0:09:38 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s happened from time to time. I mean, you think of our friend Ben Lacey being planted out of Capitol Hill Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas, and he had some folks from CHBC go with them. But it’s rare and it’s not lost on me how blessed I am. In fact, one angle on it is God knew that if Matt’s going to succeed, he’s going to need a lot of help. And so the Lord, I really don’t take for granted the amazing help the Lord gave me.

0:10:11 – (Matt Smethurst): And the folks that came with us, by the way, LIG were not just sort of random, obscure members. These were like home group leaders in the church. One of the brothers became a founding elder for so really mature people, just safe pairs of hands, which gave us a huge running start when it came to culture. And one note I want to sound on this is that I think that there’s a huge danger among church planters. And you see this in the literature, you hear this at the conferences, you can be tempted to act as if you’re bringing a new product onto the market.

0:10:51 – (Matt Smethurst): And therefore, in order to sell your product, you major on what makes you distinct. And on a human level, that makes sense. But I think it’s really dangerous within the kingdom of God. So from the very beginning, we have wanted, and I have tried so hard as a pastor to promote catholicity, lowercase C. Every Sunday morning in our pastoral prayer, I’m praying for another local church in Richmond by name.

0:11:20 – (Matt Smethurst): I try to not pray generically for them, I try to actually pray for the very passage that’s being preached this morning and praying that the Lord would grow and prosper that congregation. And I’m constantly trying to remind my people that the kingdom of God is gloriously bigger than what we’re doing. In fact, if we’re going to reach Richmond, Virginia for Jesus Christ, we’re going to need all kinds of churches that preach the gospel and, and I’m just happy to be a part of that.

0:11:51 – (Matt Smethurst): And so we always want to say that the most important thing about our church is not anything that makes us distinct. The most important thing about our church is what we share in common with every other true church since Jesus Christ.

0:12:05 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good. Now, you said you did assessment once you got here. Assess, Assessment. Tell me, do you have any advice and counsel for guys that are considering church planning and assessment? What were some of the positives for you there?

0:12:22 – (Matt Smethurst): The main positive is being coached by people who have walked the road you’re about to walk and just the immense wealth of experience that you can get from people, even if some of their theological instincts might be different than yours. So we were assessed through our denomination and I think overall it was helpful. The kind of church we’ve planted is different in some ways than a lot of other churches in our denomination.

0:12:55 – (Matt Smethurst): But I still gleaned a lot from those days of training and assessment, and I’m grateful for it. And also, as I mentioned, there were other pastors in Richmond that really helped me think about church planning in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t have. So for example, I have an Evangelical Anglican friend, a childhood friend here in Richmond named Daniel, and he helped me think about the reality of this counterintuitive reality.

0:13:26 – (Matt Smethurst): If your church plant actually is reaching the people that you say you want to reach, that is non Christians. In other words, if you’re actually seeing conversion growth and not just transfer growth, and I think it’s fine if other believers want to leave their church to come to yours. I should say it’s sometimes fine. There were people who wanted to leave their church and come to ours, and we actually discouraged them from doing so because we weren’t just looking for warm bodies, we were looking for like mindedness.

0:13:59 – (Matt Smethurst): But if you’re actually reaching the lost, you’re gonna struggle financially. This is helpful for talking about fundraising now. Why is that? Well, it’s because the last thing to get converted in a person’s life is often their wallet. So that means there’s going to be a lag time between when they Come to Christ and when their giving catches up to their maturity. And that means you’re going to need immense resources and help from other churches in order to get you going, get you off the ground and get you to a place of self sustainability.

0:14:37 – (Matt Smethurst): And there’s a good little white paper that Tim Keller wrote years ago called why Plant Churches? And something he says in that that was helpful for me is he pointed out that done right, a church plant is actually a win for all the gospel preaching churches in the city. So it’s so easy again to view this in a turfy, territorial way. But Keller writes this quote, the vigorous, continual planting of new congregations is the single most crucial strategy for both the numerical growth of the body of Christ in a city and the continual corporate renewal and revival of the existing churches in a city.

0:15:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Nothing else, not crusades, outreach programs, parachurch ministries, growing megachurches, congregational consulting or church renewal processes will have the same consistent impact of dynamic, extensive church planning. This is an eyebrow raising statement, but to those who have done the study, it is not even controversial. In other words, a church plant is an expression of unity because it serves the other gospel minded congregations in the city. It’s meant to function as kind of an evangelistic feeder for the whole community. It’s the principle of a rising tide lifts all boats.

0:15:56 – (Matt Smethurst): And our church just had the opportunity of supporting a church plant coming out of another church in the city that’s planting south of the river. And I’m so excited about what they’re doing. And just seeing a new gospel outpost here in Richmond that we can champion and get excited about really warms my soul.

0:16:18 – (Ligon Duncan): Did you have a seasoned pastor who encouraged you or mentored you or coached you when you did this? Tell me a little bit about that.

0:16:30 – (Matt Smethurst): Not really. I of course was sent out from 3rd Avenue. I was. And certainly Greg and our associate pastor Greg Gilbert and others, yes, did a wonderful job, but they had not church planted before. We were kind of the first or among the first church plants that were sent out and backed in a really major way. And so there was a lot of kind of figuring it out for myself. But I had the luxury of leaning on really helpful resources, trusted pastor friends.

0:17:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Because here’s the reality. Someone doesn’t have to have planted a church to give you advice on how to pastor. Because fundamentally a planter is a pastor. And in fact, I don’t even typically refer to us as a church plant. I think that when we constituted as a church, we became a church. And I refer to ourselves as a new church. But a planter is a pastor. And there’s a book by Nathan Knight called Planting by Pastoring, which I would commend to.

0:17:37 – (Ligon Duncan): Guys, let me give a hearty Amen to that. Because I lived through the era where it was like a church planter was. This being this apex predator being that was several notches ahead, a mere mortal pastor. And I get it. Church planters have to wear a lot of hats. They’ve got to have a lot of skills. They have to be jacks of all trades. I’ve been close enough to church planting and supported church planning enough to know that that has to be the case. And there’s some lonelinesses and other things that church planters feel, perhaps in ways that pastors have settled congregations, but they are pastors, so that’s an amen. I’m glad.

0:18:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Speaking of loneliness, what advice would you give to a prospective church planter in terms of timing? Should a planter go out and seek to establish a church if he doesn’t have other elder qualified men around him? Is there a number in your mind that’s a kind of threshold for the amount of members he might have in order for the thing to have a good shot at being self sustaining?

0:18:46 – (Ligon Duncan): You know, I have seen all sorts of different sizes of core groups over the last 30 years. And I’ve been amazed some larger core groups haven’t made it all the way to becoming a local congregation standing on its own with its own pastor and elders and deacons. And then I’ve seen some really small poor groups that have grown. And so it’s different situations end up favoring different sizes. My congregation was involved with a couple of other congregations in the area in planting.

0:19:23 – (Ligon Duncan): Deliberately attempting to plant a multi ethnic congregation in Jackson, that was significant for a whole variety of reasons. And it was large enough that we could call a fellow Virginian of yours, Mike Campbell, to be the first pastor. And they had a fairly large core group, like maybe close to 100. And we loaned a couple of elders and a couple of other churches loaned some elders until they could elect their own elders and get to that point. Mike came in and did an amazing job. I’m not sure how long he was there, maybe 10 years.

0:20:01 – (Ligon Duncan): And that’s a church with a really, really large core group to start with. But I’ve seen people go out with very small core groups and the Lord prospered the work.

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0:20:33 – (Matt Smethurst): people they love and lead.

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0:21:16 – (Ligon Duncan): You have a thought about that? About how you decide about.

0:21:19 – (Matt Smethurst): Same as you. I would be hesitant to make any strict rules. One thought is that I think you’re ready to plant a church when you can be confident that the people who would be going out have been with you long enough to have absorbed the DNA and the theological convictions and instincts of your church so that you can have confidence that you know what’s actually going to be reproduced. I think there is a danger of reproducing, planting prematurely, and therefore not knowing, frankly, what kind of church is going to get planted.

0:21:57 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m assuming this not only becomes a burden, a desire on your heart to serve in this way, but some other people confirm that, hey, this is a good idea for you to think about. Walk us through from there to you getting to Richmond, to where you are. Just give us a timeline of that whole process.

0:22:16 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah.

0:22:16 – (Matt Smethurst): The quick flyover would be that in the fall of 2020, when my wife and I had prayerfully come to the realization that we think we want to be in Richmond, we took a little vision trip, just the two of us, to Richmond, and met with some local pastors in the area, some friends that we knew in Richmond who were interested in being a part of a new gospel outpost. And after that trip, we went back to my elders, to our elders in Louisville, and said, we’d like to do this. And they said, great.

0:22:53 – (Ligon Duncan): Were you on staff at 3rd Avenue at the time?

0:22:55 – (Matt Smethurst): I was a lay elder, not a lay elder.

0:22:57 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. Okay.

0:22:58 – (Matt Smethurst): And then In January of 2021, we announced this to the church. We had an informational presentation for about 45 minutes, which we recorded and had as an unlisted YouTube link. And that became really useful because as people in Richmond started to hear about this church plant and would inquire about it and say, can we do a zoom call? Rather than saying, sure, when are you available? I would say, here’s a Link. Watch this informational presentation and if you’re still interested in talking, I’d be happy to.

0:23:33 – (Matt Smethurst): So it was just a frankly efficient way to help just orient people to what our church was going to be about. We had a period of about six months there in Louisville where we were praying, planning, recruiting, having those prayer and pizza gatherings. And then the summer of 2021, we and those 11 other adults and their kids moved to Richmond with a view to planting River City Baptist.

0:23:58 – (Ligon Duncan): Now, when did you know that they were going to come? I mean, when they were identified in the early part of that year.

0:24:05 – (Matt Smethurst): Is it some as early as January, Others were last of all as untimely born. They kind of were buzzer beater situations. But we all kind of came here summer of 2021, and then in the fall and winter, we had 10 core team meetings and these were on every other Sunday evening. So we didn’t want to impinge on people’s commitment to their churches in Richmond. And I didn’t want to also start with our ecclesiological distinctives. I wanted to start with the glory of God. So what I taught on week one was the Glory of God.

0:24:48 – (Ligon Duncan): Now, was that a Bible study or a service in the home? How did you do that?

0:24:52 – (Matt Smethurst): Think a church service meets a young life meeting? So I didn’t want to make it the kind of thing where people. I didn’t want to so simulate a church service that people thought that’s what was happening. As if that checks the box. We’re not a church yet. But I also, for example, I thought about not doing any musical worship so that we wouldn’t lead people to think, hey, you’ve experienced church. But we ended up singing a few songs each time because I realized, actually one of the main things that I’m wanting to promote is congregational singing. And so I want to give folks a taste of what that’s going to be like.

0:25:31 – (Matt Smethurst): But yeah, I started week one teaching on the glory of God.

0:25:35 – (Ligon Duncan): Week two, Sunday evening. That you.

0:25:37 – (Matt Smethurst): Sunday evening. Week two was the Gospel of God. Week three was the People of God, which was a biblical theology survey of God’s people. And then starting week four, we drilled down on distinctives in terms of expositional preaching, congregational singing, regulative principle polity, elders, deacons, et cetera. And it kind of became our membership class for that original core group.

0:26:07 – (Ligon Duncan): All four of those things became the membership class. Or the fourth week, the final session,

0:26:13 – (Matt Smethurst): okay, statement of faith, church, covenant, priorities. And then I did membership interviews of everyone. And then in February of 2022.

0:26:22 – (Ligon Duncan): Including the 11 who had come with you?

0:26:25 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. So we covenanted together as a church in February with 69, and I had two other founding elders, and we voted on members before elders, because you can have a church without elders, but you can’t have a church without members. And so the first action of the church was taking the Lord’s Supper and affirming our first slate of elders.

0:26:51 – (Ligon Duncan): And did you visit around some of the other churches in the area during that period of time?

0:26:56 – (Matt Smethurst): Absolutely. And I encouraged the others who had come from Louisville to do that and for us, not all to go to the same church.

0:27:02 – (Ligon Duncan): What’d you learn?

0:27:03 – (Matt Smethurst): I learned that there’s a lot of wonderful gospel ministry going on in the city and that we are not saviors swooping into Richmond. We’re just reinforcements coming in and wanting to just take a few more yards on the beach, as it were, as we advance against the powers of hell in the city.

0:27:30 – (Ligon Duncan): How did you approach funding? I mean, did you. Were you supported fully out of 3rd Avenue? Tell us a little bit about the funding side of things.

0:27:40 – (Matt Smethurst): Have you ever heard of laying out a fleece? Funding is. Yeah, it’s just. It’s an occupational hazard. It’s just some. It literally is the kind of the cost of doing business. And so it’s not fun, but it’s necessary. And so I just got after it. I basically reached out to every pastor friend I knew of in the United States of America and sent our prospectus and vision for reaching Richmond for Christ. And by God’s grace, a lot of churches were very generous with us, and we also saw a pretty quick growth as a church.

0:28:25 – (Matt Smethurst): So that, for example, our sending church in Louisville had agreed to support us for three years. But after year two, we were able to say, you can put that money elsewhere. And I realize that’s not the reality for most church planners. And in that sense, yeah, I’m just so grateful to the Lord. But, yeah, I would encourage guys not to be bashful about asking for money. I actually think support raising builds muscles of faith which are really good for growth as a Christian.

0:29:02 – (Matt Smethurst): In fact, the same muscles that are required for raising money are the same muscles for sharing the gospel. You’re going up to someone and you’re presenting something, and there’s the risk of rejection. There’s the risk of being told, absolutely not. Please get out of here. And so I think it’s a good thing, and it’s a humbling thing to ask people to consider in faith, giving to the work of your ministry.

0:29:28 – (Ligon Duncan): What do you wish that you had understood earlier about the importance of clear pathways for newcomers to belong and to serve and be discipled in the church?

0:29:42 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, two levels to this. So one for me, I think I, looking back, wish that I hadn’t assumed that we had to be hitting on all cylinders on day one. So I wanted to kind of have all the offerings, all the programs, all the things day one. Whereas I had an elder challenge me and say, hey, let’s just get Sunday mornings right. That was very liberating and it was very wise and I needed to hear that. And we can add other stuff as we’re able, home groups, Sunday school, et cetera. But we started just with Sunday morning and a Sunday evening prayer service every other week and we went from there. And I think that’s okay in terms of the kind of pathways to membership.

0:30:36 – (Matt Smethurst): I just kind of resolved at the beginning that we were going to engage in truth and advertising. So that’s actually one of the reasons I put Baptist in the church name. That’s very rare to do. In fact, my church planning assessors and coaches with the state convention were basically like, are you sure you want to do that? Just because no one does that these days. But counterintuitively, Lig, I’ve found that that has actually served and promoted gospel catholicity. And here’s why we’re being upfront about who we are and who we’re not.

0:31:18 – (Matt Smethurst): And it’s a way of saying we’re not trying to be the right church for everyone. I planted at the age of 39, which is, which is old for a church planner. I think if I had planted at 29, there’s no way I would have had Baptist in the church name because I think. And there are 29 year olds out there who are a lot more mature than I was. So I’m just telling all myself. But I think that I would have tried to be all things to all people in a way that 10 years later I didn’t feel the need to be.

0:31:48 – (Matt Smethurst): And so at our membership class I have a list of things that I always tick off that might tick people off basically here. I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to waste my time. So here are a few distinctives about our church that might surprise you that you may need to think more about or might just be off putting to you. We just try to be upfront about that kind of stuff. And I found that is born so much for.

0:32:19 – (Ligon Duncan): Let me commend you for that and let me gently commend that to my Presbyterian brethren. Don’t try and hide that you’re a Presbyterian and bring in the unsuspecting multitudes and then sneak your Calvinism out of your back pocket. Just put it on the table up front and let them know what you are. I think that’s much healthier way of. I actually think that helps you in theological identity and it keeps you from having to overcorrect so that you don’t have a proper Catholicity. Right.

0:32:50 – (Ligon Duncan): If you haven’t put your cards on the table where you are theologically, you end up having to compensate for that at certain points down the line. Whereas if you just, hey, here’s where we are. And by the way, way we’re very thankful for all the other evangelical churches in this area. We’re going to pray for them, pray that the Lord prospers their ministry. We’re not them, they’re not us. We’re different. We’ve got these convictions, but we really appreciate the fact that the gospel is going out there.

0:33:18 – (Ligon Duncan): I think it’s just a much healthier way of starting out and the way of continuing in ministry.

0:33:25 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. As it’s been said, have clear fences and shake hands over them often.

0:33:30 – (Ligon Duncan): What about cultivating leadership? You know, you’re starting with a core group. You have 11 folks that come with you. You’ve got the folks that join you. By the way, when did you have your first worship service?

0:33:42 – (Matt Smethurst): That happens February 22nd.

0:33:44 – (Ligon Duncan): Okay, so you’ve been here for a year and some change, is that right?

0:33:49 – (Matt Smethurst): Less than that. Yeah. Nine months. Yeah.

0:33:51 – (Ligon Duncan): So February you start. What about. And then the very first service, you have the Lord’s Supper and then you elect two elders. Ok, how about leadership cultivation after that? Tell me what you do.

0:34:06 – (Matt Smethurst): As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think you have to have elders in order to have a church, though a healthy church is going to have elders. I didn’t know during the core team phase if I would have the benefit of having other founding elders. And I kind of went back and forth on the wisdom of that, especially because we were being planted. It’d be one thing if we were planted on the east end of Louisville, 20 miles away from our sending church. We were being planted 600 miles away.

0:34:34 – (Matt Smethurst): It went well having other founding elders, in part because they were two really godly brothers, one from Louisville, one from Richmond, which kind of tells the story of our church. But I would say that it’s so practically useful to be able to say from the very beginning, we decided not I decided so if at all possible, prospective planter, try to identify other elder qualified brothers who can kind of be that band of brothers that you’re going to need in those lonely days of uncertainty which might last a long time before you realize, is this thing really going to get traction?

0:35:18 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good. Again, I would, speaking into my world, just commend to young Presbyterian Church planters the glory of the plurality of elders. You actually want folks that don’t say yes to you all the time. You want folks that’ll give you the freedom to just concentrate on the service, get the service right. Matt. Matt might have in his mind, we’ve got to do X, Y, Z. But wise elder says, no, let’s just do this. And you think, you know what, you’re right. And I think I see even in my tradition, which highly value values of plurality of elders and requires that there be elders present before a church is particularized, there can be a tendency amongst church planters to delay that as long as possible.

0:36:09 – (Ligon Duncan): And I think your pattern is very, very commendable in wanting to see that at the very outset.

0:36:16 – (Matt Smethurst): And just a reminder, you’re looking for shepherds. I think it can be easy in planting a church because it’s by nature an entrepreneurial thing. It can be easy to think that you, the planter, have to be the ultimate alpha male entrepreneur. And it’s certainly helpful to have some of those tendencies, some of those gifts. But fundamentally, you and the other brothers around, you need to be shepherds because again, that’s what you are. You’re a pastor and this is a church.

0:36:48 – (Matt Smethurst): And at the end of the day, it’s just ordinary. Yes, there are some unique challenges that come with it, but sometimes I think those uniquenesses can be overstated. At the end of the day, we’re just pastoring a flock that Jesus has entrusted to us and for whom one day we will give an account.

0:37:05 – (Ligon Duncan): Now, you mentioned, you know, I didn’t have a mentor pastor, but I did benefit from really good resources. So tip us off on some of the resources that you found most helpful.

0:37:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, I mentioned Nathan Knight’s book Planting by Pastoring, which didn’t exist when I was planting, but that is worth reading. Clint Clifton, who actually tragically died a few years ago in a helicopter or plane crash. He was a church planning coach and he actually interviewed me on his podcast. I think the title is the Zero Year of Church Planning, where I kind of after year one, shared the story of just in greater detail with what I’ve shared with you today.

0:37:49 – (Matt Smethurst): He has A book called Church Planning Thresholds, which is really good. Clint Clifton, Church Planning Thresholds and that podcast episode is called I think the Zero Year of Church Planning Planning on the new churches podcast 9 marks has a good journal on church planning. It’s a little dated. I think it came out over 10 years ago, but some good articles in that. Tim Keller has some good stuff on church planning, but to be honest, I kind of had to cobble it together and there is not one resource that I point everyone to. It’s kind of is based more on what question and I’m being asked, have

0:38:29 – (Ligon Duncan): you ever posted anywhere all the stuff that you cobble together?

0:38:32 – (Matt Smethurst): I don’t think I have.

0:38:34 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, you should do that and then tell us where it is sometime.

0:38:37 – (Matt Smethurst): Maybe it would be worth doing. I was asked to write a forward for a book on church planning when I had been doing it for like a year and I said no because I just felt like that’s like being asked to write a book on parenting when you have a single toddler. So let’s give it some time and I’ll continue learning from others.

0:38:57 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s good. Any last pieces of advice to someone who is considering doing the work of church planting?

0:39:05 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I would say it’s going to be hard. It’s going to at times be discouraging. Don’t forget to have fun. It is an immense privilege and joy to get to see a new outpost of the kingdom of heaven established. And there is an energy and a momentum and a shared sense of purpose that you have in those early days and months that you’re going to one day miss. And so don’t take it for granted. Lean into that, lean into the excitement and use the opportunity to teach and disciple your people to play the long game.

0:39:48 – (Matt Smethurst): Because getting to spread the gospel, you know, getting the gospel, we talk about getting the gospel right and getting the gospel out. And we want to be a church that does both again for the good of the whole city and of all the churches in Richmond that are lifting high the name of Christ.

0:40:05 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s great.

0:40:07 – (Matt Smethurst): Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Everyday Pastor. We hope it’s been encouraging to you as you’re thinking about planning planting churches. And we pray that you would not only find it helpful yourself, but maybe send it to a friend who’s thinking about church planting so that we can continue helping pastors and future pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.