
The Honest Guide to Church Planting
What No One Ever Tells You About Planting and Leading a New Church
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Narrated by:
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Tom Bennardo
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Gabe Wicks - foreword
About this listen
Church planting has become a cottage industry. National conferences, hip planting organizations, and all-in-one resource kits celebrate the thrill of pioneering a church and inspire visions of glorious victories. Yet few who respond to the call are warned what they’ll actually encounter: the relentless opposition they’ll endure; the eventual scattering of their entire core group; the failure of their tried-and-true field-tested system.
Here’s the dirty little secret of church planting: The roadside is strewn with casualties. Many have closed their churches. Some left ministry permanently. Others abandoned the faith altogether.
Church planting is at once the greatest and most grueling ministry work on earth. This audiobook is for those toiling in the trenches, those about to bail out, and those considering jumping in. It’s for the church planters laboring and struggling, seeing little movement, and wondering what they’re doing wrong or why God is failing them. It’s also for mother churches, planting organizations, and denominations as a challenge to rethink and recalibrate the way they approach and measure planting endeavors.
The Honest Guide to Church Planting is a fresh and candid conversation about the challenges and joys of planting new churches. Tom Bennardo speaks the truth so those involved in church planting can embrace a more accurate and realistic picture of what planting a church is really like; one that not only enables them to survive, but to thrive in this wondrous work.
©2019 Tom Bennardo (P)2019 ZondervanListeners also enjoyed...
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Authentic
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Bold and Eye-opening Read!
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Best book I’ve read on Church Planting!
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I appreciate the author's candidness on the topic
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I hate the concept used in the last chapter of “Bait and switch” as God’s strategy to pull us in. Though I would agree with God-given vision not playing out the way we envisioned (I am a visionary and have struggled to understand this for years), I very much disagree that God tried to deceive us into following his plans, and that is very much what came across in this chapter. I think God gives us limited information at times and we fill in the gaps, leaving us disappointed when things don’t go the way we thought, or maybe God uses vision to communicate to us in a way we will understand, but the way he walks it out doesn’t exactly match what we thought it would look like. But I completely disagree with the “bait and switch” metaphor used in this chapter.
Aside from that, this book was greatly appreciated and very helpful as we look to church planting in our future.
Very Good overall
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Great read for mission pastors
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Every Pastor and church planter needs to read this!
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Very practical resource
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The most negative book on church planting ever
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Title deceiving 
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