Starting a church from scratch? Start here! Launch offers specific strategies for beginning a church with no members, no money, and no staff. Readers get clear, practical how-to strategies for quickly raising funds, creating a team, planning services, effective evangelism, and rapidly developing a growing membership. Specific advice is included for reaching that often difficult-to-target demographic, the 20- to 40-year-old. Now thoroughly revised and expanded to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of church planting.
"Our desire to learn all we could about church planting led us to conversations with successful church planters acress the country. What we found was not surprising: They had the same feelings as we did about current church-planting books. While all these books had their areas of usefulness, there was simply no comprehensive roadmap that showed how to build a new church from scratch. Many of the planters we interviewed had gone "off road" and were growing their churches with little guidance from current methods or resources. Because they often discovered their processes and principles through trial and error, most were excited to share their insights in an attempt to save other future church planters time and energy. Their generous points of view led to the discovery of an essential church-planting precept that is at the heart of this book." – Nelson Searcy & Kerrick Thomas, Authors
Dr. Nelson Searcy is an experienced church growth strategist, pastor, church planter and coach, serving in ministry for more than 25 years and consulting with churches around the world.
• As founder of Church Leader Insights (www.ChurchLeaderInsights.com) and the Renegade Pastors Network (www.RenegadePastors.com), he has personally trained more than 50,000 church leaders in over 45 denominations through live events, seminars and monthly coaching, helping them break common growth barriers like 125, 250, 500, 1000 and beyond, all while maintaining personal life and ministry balance. For more accelerated growth, pastors also participate in Nelson's Senior Pastor, Evangelism, Stewardship, Assimilation and Advanced Coaching networks.
• Nelson is also the Founding and Lead Pastor of The Journey Church, with locations across New York City and in Boca Raton, FL. Nelson and his church routinely appear on lists such as "The 50 Most Influential Churches" and "The 25 Most Innovative Leaders." He is the author of over 85 church growth resources and 15+ books, including The Renegade Pastor: Abandoning Average in Your Life, Ministry and The Difference Maker: Using Your Everyday Life for Eternal Impact, The Renegade Pastor's Guide to Time Management.
Kerrick Thomas serves as pastor at The Journey Church in NYC (www.JourneyNYC.com) and leads its 3 Manhattan locations in the Village, Upper West Side and Upper East Side. He and his wife, Lorie, moved to New York City in July 2001 to help start The Journey Church.
• Kerrick has co-authored two church leadership books with Nelson Searcy (Founding Pastor of The Journey Church) - "Launch: Starting A New Church from Scratch" and "Activate: An Entirely New Way of Doing Small Groups." Kerrick regularly invests in other pastors by leading church systems seminars and coaching networks for Executive Pastors, Church Planters and Small Group Pastors.
• Kerrick graduated from Furman University with a degree in History & Political Science and earned his Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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