Church Planting

How do you get started if you are exploring a calling to plant a Vineyard church?

First of all, there are a number of ways you can prepare yourself for the adventure of planting a new church from scratch.

In order to be trained and equipped for the task, we recommend that you do most (if not all) of the following:

• Get involved with serving and leading in your local church
• Get some theology and leadership training, check out Vineyard Training
• Attend the Church Planting School with Vineyard Nordic when it is available
• Go for an internship with an inspiring Vineyard church for e.g. a year

If you believe that the timing for planting a church is moving closer, go and have a chat with the Vineyard pastor of the local “sending church”.
You can recommend to him/her to follow the guidelines below.
You are also welcome to contact the church planting team and we will help you with the next step.

Please be aware that we do not send church planters out who do not have a “sending church”, meaning a church that takes responsibility for the plant and stands behind the planters with resources and prayer.

Also, be prepared that the feedback from your pastor or the church planting team could be that you are not ready to plant a church just yet.

If you are a pastor or key leader in a local church and someone comes to you with a calling to plant, what do you do next?

In the Vineyard Nordic, we have a clear process and timeline for planting churches which are based on our years of experience of how to plant churches that have a good potential for growth and are sustainable both for the planters and the people joining.

Our church planting team is here to help you through this process and to ensure that we only send out the right people at the right timing!

When someone comes to you with a calling to plant, this is the process we recommend:

1. Personal conversation with the candidate: If you know that the candidate is not ready to lead a church plant, please have a conversation with him/her and lay out the areas in which he/she needs to grow and develop in the future.
2. Assessment process: If you think the candidate is ready or you are unsure, please contact the church planting team for an official assessment. We have an assessment tool that assesses leadership skills, ministry experience, readiness, risk, and much more.
3. Decision of planting: After the assessment process with the candidate, it’s time to make a final decision whether to send the leader or couple out as church planters. This is done by mutual decision between the sending pastor, the national leader, and the church planting team.
4. Communication and timeline: If the decision is to go ahead with the church plant, now is the time to make a communication strategy and timeline. Up to this point, the process has been confidential and not shared with the sending church.
5. Preparing and gathering a team: After the decision to plant, the planter usually spends between 9-18 months preparing for the church plant. It’s essential that the planter(s) are able to gather a team of several leaders to join the church plant. Church planters with no team are rarely sent out.
6. Moving and launching the church plant: Finally, after gathering a team and receiving additional training the church planters move to the designated city around 2-3 months before actually launching the first events of the new church plant.

Our church planting team would love to get involved with each step of the process to offer advice and encouragement along the way.

Please get in touch with us below, if you have any questions!