[0:00]
We're not going to focus so much here simply on what did you do and how fantastic it was, but we would really like to invite you to share all the horrible mistakes that you made and all the difficulties that you faced. And all the glories that Phil Campbell did to avoid those follies. We want to hear you share about your own struggles and the struggles of the staff who came in under you to plant. As with Don Carson, we want you to feel very

[0:30]
free to invite the stopping recording stuff so that you can speak frankly if you think that would serve this particular group and that will just stay within this particular group if you want to speak. I think those guys can just speak openly frankly. So can we just begin perhaps by introducing just briefly a little bit about each of your ministries where you are and a little of what has taken place over the years. Let's begin with Phil.

[1:01]
Okay, thanks. I'm Phil Campbell from Brisbane, the Red Tools and Chris and we've cleared two brand new ones last five or six years. Bruce Hall, I've been involved in the Anglican Ministry in Sydney for the last one place for 27 years and I've been involved in renewing and planning new churches as well, 15 or all together.

[1:39]
Paul Harrington, I come from Adelaide, Evangelical Anglican Church and a non-Evangelical diocese. We were the first church in the city, so we got all that sort of heritage and baggage that goes with that and we planted four new churches over the last nine years. What would be the advice that you would give to those of us who have come here who are very excited about the power of the gospel and very encouraged about stories of great triumph in ministry and who come to you and go, I can't wait to church plan, it will be great vision, mission, strategy, statement.

[2:13]
What would be the, some of the things you might say just to alert us to the reality of church planning. Okay, now I'm uncomfortable being first in the road because I've learnt a lot from these guys along the way. I'll be talking a little bit this afternoon in a seminar about the good things about vision and being clear about what you're doing. I think that's immensely helpful and it does create noment of me do stuff. The hard thing is, I think it's really slow work whichever way you look at it.

[2:46]
It's really when you're dealing with people in the 18 to 25 age group, we're seeing quite a lot of people converted. But with the grown ups or more certain ways, it's really, really hard soil and you really want to plant churches and see hordes of people being converted. And we'd love that, but it's just, it's far slower and far harder. We do see people converted from time to time, but not just pouring in as we'd love.

[3:20]
The question is, what's some advice to the person coming into church planning, perhaps stars in the eyes? I think that the main thing is to see that the key to church planning is a key that sounds terribly pretentious. Is the focus on the team and the relationships within that, if that's not right, then nothing will work.

[3:57]
And I think that that's often hard work. We've had a number of cases where that's fallen in a heap. So that's the key thing, the hard work of it being a team, enterprise, that the guy might have all the vision in the world or the ability in the world, but he can't do everything. He hasn't got a good team within it, it doesn't work. Can we pause on that and here, could you speak a little to some of those challenges that you've faced in that area, where it has fallen in a heap because of the challenges of working the team?

[4:34]
Well, we had a group come to us from Chinese background looking for a church home, about 30 or 40 people. And we found a pastor for them. So it was not a church plan from us, but a group that came looking for a church home. And we organized things for them. And it's grown very quickly. So it's grown from 30, 35, three, four years ago to close to 200 now.

[5:13]
And one of the things that I did that was wrong, and one of the things that pastor did that was wrong, was not look after him and he not not encourage or relate to his team really well. And currently he's on six months stress relief. Now, the congregation has, it's been really good for the congregation, but it's been a hard lesson to learn. Most of it's my fault. I think there are almost, in parenting, maybe too strong, but is there some degree where there is a real pastoral, personal responsibility you have with your team, not simply managing workers, but you have to.

[5:53]
Absolutely, absolutely. And for a variety of reasons, mostly my short sightedness and busyness, I didn't spend the time with him that I should have. And most of this year I had not spent other than a glancing hollow house at Gain, whereas in previous years I'd spent time with him this year when it was his bad year, things were getting out of control. I was sort of away from him and didn't look after him. What kind of things can help with that? And maybe others could speak to that question. What kind of things can help us in in looking after teams?

[6:28]
Paul, do you want to look after him? Yeah. Understanding who you are as a leader is important as you look after a team and thinking through what it means to a leader team. The sort of model I try and run with, and you can check with some of my team who are here, but we try to think in terms of a family. So how do we operate as a family? How do we sit under the gospel? How do we care for each other as brothers and sisters in Christ in that sort of way?

[7:01]
And it seems to me that that's the sort of Christian family model is the one that staff teams should operate with. So in that sense I have a particular lead role with the family. Part of that is caring for the people around me. Part of it is brokering things when the family aren't getting along as well as they should. And that's actually the job of the lead pastor I think where something is not working. You patiently talk with people and eventually say this is what it's going to be. We'll sort of have to have disputes. We don't let them go on.

[7:32]
I mean that's just what you're doing with a family. You know you didn't let it hang around. So there's those sort of things I think you do with teams. That's what you're doing with a family. You don't let it hang around. But maybe some have come from families where they do that. But then you got to establish the family norms for our family. Yes. And just say this is the way this family works. And we're family committed to each other. And this is the way we're going to do it. And you do it great love and a smile and sometimes not smiling. But you know you just sort of get on with the life then.

[8:05]
The other thing I was going to make a comment on in the sort of preparation, the stars and the eye stuff. When I've dealt with people who've been planting and including these two guys here, they are extraordinarily positively impatient. What I mean is they want to plant a church yesterday not tomorrow. And that is a good quality and you want to have that quality if you're going to plant a church. But I think what I've worked out over a few years now is that you know it's the old story, you measure twice cut once.

[8:37]
So a lot of the work is done before you actually get to that sort of launch phase. And if that work is done well, it's set you up well for the actual plant. And some of those things, I'm not thinking it's just mechanistic. You get a right, it'll work right. But for example, spending a lot of time praying with your teams. So one of the interesting things being here, it would have been here for 24 hours. And the guys at the front of pride, but no one else has. And I think is this a good thing, you know, as we meet together like this, should we be spending more time and groups praying about what we're doing rather than just thinking about how we're going to do it and being encouraged to do it.

[9:19]
That's one of the thoughts that it occurs to me because it's not so much meant to be a criticism as an observation of what we tend to do. Church planting people by nature, want to get things done. That's the way plant is awired. But we need to be extraordinarily dependent upon God. And so one of the questions I do I was helpful people who are thinking about planting is, are you praying as much as you're planting? Not that I think it's a quota thing, but do you really think it's God's ministry?

[9:53]
That'll be reflected in your praying, I think, yeah. A couple of thoughts. Just going back to your original question about things that help. One of the things we've found quite hard with team dynamics is if there are real issues going on in the background, it's really hard to bring them out openly and talk about them. And there's some useful stuff out there just in secular leadership stuff for crossing over into church leadership stuff.

[10:25]
Guys like Patrick Lentiani has done stuff on the five dysfunctions of teams. And so we sat down and watched his video that I think he did at Willow Creek or somewhere like that. And yeah it was helpful just because it let us name the dysfunctions we were going through at that time. And we were four out of five, five out of five really, you know, we were dysfunctioning big time. But just getting the mechanisms to name it and get it out there and talk about it was really hugely helpful.

[10:58]
Yeah. In the actual church plants that you've been involved in, what are some of the things that have been there, especially difficult challenges that you've seen take place and how has that affected the people who've gone into those church plants? What are some of those really dark times that you've had to work with planters with? So I would have to say the outset, our couple of plants have gone pretty positively in terms of results and outcomes, probably better than we expected.

[11:33]
But keeping a team connection when someone goes to plant, just in that interim time between start off and becoming completely independent, it's hard to keep across over a mutual interest going. So if you try to do a team meeting sort of thing, the guy who's planting very quickly loses any interest in what's going on back at Mother Church and the Mother Church people very quickly lose interest. So the dynamic just doesn't work anymore, you want to keep that mutual encouragement going and the network and going for a lot of structural functional reason in the interim.

[12:13]
But you're so vitally interested in what you're doing to plant that everything else is exceedingly dull. And so it can be a painful transition, all sorts of transitions are painful even the good transitions. And that's another thing. When Garnett Swan, who was running our first plant up at Eden's Hill on the north side of Brisbane, we have these parish boundaries on a map. When he came to me and said, OK, we've agreed we're moving towards independence, here's what the map looks like now.

[12:46]
And he'd drawn a big line through and my parish had suddenly shrunk to a mere shadow of what it used to be. I sort of did this deep intake of breath and went pale and took a while to adjust to that. And that's a silly little thing. As they increase we in a very real way decrease in all sorts of ways. That's hard from the mother church point of view. The Garnett, I think taking on the responsibility of getting the plant happening was really costly.

[13:21]
And I think it would be OK with him if I said he actually didn't sleep for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. And so I'm near kicked in with the stress of that. I maybe wasn't as sympathetic as I could have been because I was thinking, great you're learning what a leadership feels like now. I mean, suck it up, it's just here. But that was a very real thing. I think we were distracted off the stage. But on the other hand, you know, as he came back from time to time to ask us the mother church and do stuff,

[13:59]
feeling on the preaching or whatever, how he took that pain on his stature as a leader visibly grew and people were saying, boy Garnett's different now. And it was just that growth in responsibility and taking stuff on. So the question was, what are some of those dark times that you've seen in those 15 churches? What are some of the things that were very difficult to work through together? Dark times, again, I come back to the dark times have been staff discontent times.

[14:36]
The congregations that have begun, they've been falling out between members of the team and having to work through that. That has ramifications everywhere. The people who come see the staff team not operating well together, even when they don't speak about the problem, the problem is there and affects everything. So having to help these guys work that through, so that's one thing that's obviously and that's happened at least twice.

[15:12]
And then I suppose the other thing is when the way we plant is allowing the plant to go to all the congregations and gather harvest from people, people living in a particular area or would like to go and begin a church plant in a particular area, maintaining good relationships. He's going to take the best people from my congregation and he does sometimes.

[15:43]
So we really discover that the humanness and the sinfulness of envy, the fact that that's all there, even in ministers. Yes, that's right. And so making sure that guys are open enough with each other at that plantal level to say, this is hurting me and trying to work it through. Can I just chip in that? It may not be envy that's driving that, just the sheer hard work and the sadness of losing people who are a KDU.

[16:15]
So you know, I wouldn't want to put that totally negative spin on it. Great. Thank you. Yes, did I really, though? One of our plants this year, February, was the granddaughter of a, you know, like a granddaughter from our home church, the church plant planted. 25% of that congregation moved off to plant again. Now if you're the planting pastor and 25% of your congregation disappears overnight, you feel that intensely.

[16:50]
Actually, you can't help but feel it, even though you have the best gospel heart in the world, because everyone's working harder. Your finances are taking this huge hit. And you're just smiling because it's good for the kingdom, you know, and it's just hard. And every time we planted, that's the experience we've had. That good hearted, best will in the world. But you send a substantial block of people away who normally are best, we try and send the best. Then you just, it's like cutting off your arm and saying, please take it, you know, it'll grow back.

[17:26]
It sort of actually does, but it takes time, you know. Is there a season of almost, I think you mentioned this as one of the plants. It sees an almost, a bit of a slump, a bit of depression in the mother church. Yeah, we've had that sort of cycle regularly. Now, in our mother church now, we actually are a color much faster, I think. I think we've built up some gospel fitness. And so we, you know, sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly like that. I think the first time we did it, we just went, oh, that hurt. We never do that again, you know. And then after about a year, we thought, oh, no, we could think about it, you know. Now you're wealthy. Now, yeah, this year we planted two congregations.

[17:58]
Everyone thought it was okay, you know. And you still think you're faster, aren't you? You're still unhappy. I'm frustrated that it's so slow. That's my frustration. We're back. So we're just, yeah, what we're trying to do is work out how we can speed it up. So I've talked publicly now about trying to think through what it would mean to plant 20 churches in the next 10 years. I don't know if we can do it. But I think it's a good way for us to think what stops us now. How can we break through some of those barriers and set things up so that we can do it more rapidly?

[18:30]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're trying to work out some of the stuff. We talk about some of the challenges with family. I'll start with you again, Paul, because when Nikki and I came and visited you in 2005 for a short time, one of the things that really helped us, especially in talking with your wife Sue, was that she said one of her jobs on the staff team was basically just to tell all the other staff wives that they all are allowed to be different. Yeah. And that for us was enormously freeing. And for Nikki, who's not the kind of speak on the conference type of ministry wife, was a real permission to serve God as she was.

[19:01]
Yeah. And as we were as a couple rather than to emulate another thing, is that still something that is an important part of what are some of the challenges of family and marriage in church planting? Yeah, absolutely. I think that I'm sure it would be actually good if Sue is here talking about this, but she's not able to be. But I think many wives married to ministry, willingly love it keen for it, but are trying to work out who they are with the lack of job description. When you're planting, it's pretty clear what you're aiming to do, how it will be shaved.

[19:33]
When you're married to planting, it's much more amorphous, I think. And there seems to be a greater struggle to work out what all that looked like for me. So one of the things we've tried to do, so our staff teams may be 25 or 30 now. So Sue meets with staff wives in two groups, about six in each group on a fortnightly basis, to meet, to pray, to look at the Bible. And part of us to say, look how different we are and isn't that fine.

[20:03]
And each of them are different in terms of their background, their capacity, their desire to be upfront or in the background. And it doesn't matter if it's really. As long as the couple have worked it out, they're comfortable with the way it works, and they've worked out how ministry looks like for them and a godly one as a household. But working out that household shape and then being adaptive because households change in shape as kids go through different phases. And at times you need to protect your boundaries a bit more depending on the age of the kids.

[20:36]
Other times when our kids were primary school age, we had hundreds of people through our home constantly and the kids just loved it. They hit high school, the kids used to say, what the people are coming around against and awful. They love ministry, they love being a gospel family, but we just had to rain into it differently at that stage. Our kids now are adults still living at home, they love the fact that we have people, although they like warning. So if we've got people staying in our flat at the back of our house, remember our youngest son came in one day and said, oh this is George, he's staying with us the next three days.

[21:10]
And he was very friendly and then after he said, I just want four days notice before people just turn up. And so just that sense of including the family at different phases, ages, stages, adjusting, it's really important to do that. So the impact on family, I think I've better than you extra to say. That was great, wasn't it? Yeah. Which in itself apparently is a skill of bruises, to no end to be quiet. That's advice for making comedies rather shorter. Yeah. How do I split them?

[21:40]
Yeah. I will just say, though, when you create systems that have constant change, build into them, it's really hard. My wife Louise, I think finds it hard. She likewise is working with our team lives and getting together. But there's always someone going or coming and it always kind of hurts one more another.

[22:11]
That's a real challenge. Yeah, adding someone and the other thing is sometimes the team men being alpha male types are doing a bit of headbutting. And around the circle of wives, their male and male and opium awareness is that. That's a part of awkward to negotiate and keep. Yeah. Yeah, but they can sort us out largely. They make the plans, we behave ourselves often. That's good. We've got five minutes for questions.

[22:41]
What is the propagation wise on these other children? We've plateaued in about 1990. We've plateaued for about 10 years at 700 adults until 2000. We started planting in 2000, sent 10% of people away from the mother church three times. And we're now about 800 adults in size. So it's about 800 spread over five congregations in the mother church.

[23:16]
About 1500 members over five sites and 13 congregations. We're much on the small size of that. We've got two morning congregations with about 1348 adults in each. And our first plant came mainly out of the second morning service, which probably had 160 back then. Paul Harrington came and told us we needed to send at least 60 people off to do a church plant that was going to work. We sent 30 adults and 30 kids, which wasn't optimum, but it still hurt us.

[23:51]
A Presbyteria in 60, right? It was still, that's right. It was still really painful. We've got evening stuff as well. It's not included in that. But the main planning congregation was probably 150 when we set off that group. Then we planted out of our night church this year, which had about 120 in it. And we split it into two sixties. It's good isn't it here the differences there here and then here? What we've got in the drawings?

[24:23]
I just haven't heard any. Failures. Or glory brother. Failures. Failures, yes. One. I just shut up a plan. Yeah, shut up congregations. Plants. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I think they're getting depressed now. Five. Five. So yeah. Wow. I think there's one closing this year.

[24:53]
Nice round six. One close last year. Yeah. Because we, they get closed. We start them and. But variety of reasons they go or grow and sometimes they don't. One of our renewals, the couple running that are really tired. The progress has been significant over six years. But they feel.

[25:24]
It's been really slow. And. So the jury's out on whether that's really fired or not. Yeah. I want to encourage them to say in a lot of key ways it has. But they're not so sure. Yeah. And when our mother church planted, so we sent off about 75 people to plant. The mother church at that time really struggled because it exposed.

[25:54]
Well, all the people would get up and go, got up and went. And it exposed some weaknesses in our ministry that we then had to. Re-shape reorganize and look at that was a struggle. When we planted that first congregation, I said to that pastor, I said mate, this needs to work. You know, so I didn't want to put too much pressure. But I think we hadn't planted for about 175 years. This didn't work. It was probably going to be slow getting the next one up. So we worked really hard to try and kick that one along.

[26:27]
So everyone would go, oh no, this is not a bad idea. And sometimes I hear people say, if you're not failing, you're not trying enough, that sort of phrase has been banished. I think that's absolutely rubbish to be quite honest. I hope I'm not offending anyone who says it here. But I'm not saying you won't fail when you're trying stuff, but you ought not aim to, which seems to be built into that thinking. That is, you ought to plan for ministries to work if you can. Now, under God, that moment I happen.

[26:57]
That should be this sort of anticipation, because often plants don't fail because God's not at work. They fail because people just haven't put in the spade work to help set it up properly. There's a lot of practical stuff you can do to put people on the same page, harness common purpose vision and get it going. So some ministries aren't going to work and stuff like that, which is just the way it falls and God is sovereign and good. But yeah, I'm planning for that to happen.

[27:29]
I think. I kind of need to agree with you. I think in any of these hubs sort of set ups, if the first one fails, you probably won't do it again, just because of the way people are wired, or you won't try it again for another 10 years, or 170 years, or something like that. So it's kind of edgy. You've got to get proof of concept out there before people buy in. Look, we could go on for so much longer, but in part that you just hold onto that field. In part of the value of this is just to actually profile these men who are available again

[28:00]
to talk with you, to have a lunch date or a dinner date or a chat. Please, come up and ask them. You're not wasting their time. They're here for you.