Innovative
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Essential Reading on Church Planting 

Books:

Planting Churches: A Framework for Practioners - Stuart Murray

This brand new book on church planting brings Stuart Murray’s 30 years of church planting experience together with his cutting edge research. murray is disarmingly honest about the motives and methods used in church planting and challenges potential planters to explore some key questions before starting out. This book is written in an engaging way - it does not patronise the reader, but is written for the practitioner rather than just theorists. This is the currenst state of the art reflection on church planting. See the paternoster site for more details.

Planting Mission-shaped Churches Today– Martin  Robinson

This is a book I bought recently – the title challenged me because sometimes church planting is simply rearranging where existing believers worship God. A few friends of mine have hit this problem – that a church plant is simply breaking off a small number (of sometimes disgruntled) believers and aping the mother church’s style of worship in another building (often a school hall).  This book challenges this mentality and forces the reader to think what it would mean to plant a church modelled around mission.

Exiles - Mike Frost

I prefer listening to Mike Frost live. But this is the book behind the material he presents – the challenge is to plant churches around evanglelism and the practices of living  out the Christian faith. Mike presents an all encompassing vision of Christian mission covering everything from food to surfing…

Mission-Shaped Church

This is not strictly a book about church planting but a helpful rethinking of the nature of church in a UK context. It is written with Anglicans in mind but could be helpful for the rest of us too.Graham Cray offers pertinent insight as usual.

Web resources:

Here is a range of different church planting resources online from a broad range of evangelical schools.

Messy church - a UK based church planting initiative based around an all age worship experience.

List of church planting courses - a helpful list from the church army’s website.

resurgence-church planting - Mark Driscoll’s Seattle based church planting initiative.

Porterbrook Network - church planting consultation. Tim Chester and Steve Timmis’ new church leader training initiative.

Cafe Church Network - a UK based initiative to plant churches in coffee shops

Together in Mission - Missional Leadership course a

Redeemer Presbyterian Church Planting Centre - Tim Keller’s New York based church planting initiative.

Deep Church Planting - Three Ingredients by Jason Clarke a short article from Jason Clarke formerly of emergent.co.uk

Bethlehem Baptist’s Church Planting Covenant - John Piper's church planting initiative