Share our Lives Together
• As we go to plant our church, our core group will become to you a sense of great friendship. No doubt many will come for a time and leave. Jesus experienced this as well. Hundreds of people followed him and left. But there is an inner circle of people you will find strength from and who will own the vision to a much greater extent than your average attendee will.

Be The Sent Ones: Missionaries to our own culture
• One of the most missed facts of all ecclesiology is understanding the sentence of the church. Our primary identity is we are the sent people of God. We see this identity beginning in the Godhead. The Father sends the Son, the Son sends the Spirit, and the Father, Son, and Spirit send the church. We catch a glimpse of this as Jesus sends the twelve and the seventy-two.
• This is a great distinction. The church today has an understanding that the pastors are the ones who do the work. The congregation's job is to show up. It turns the tables on them to see that on Sunday the church gathers to worship the God who has sent them into the world the rest of the week to be the hands, feet, and voice of Christ. What happens when people begin to understand this as a primary identity? They will see that they are the missionaries.

Pray
• Jesus calls the disciples to pray. Pray that God would send workers into the harvest. We can imagine that as these raggedy people went into villages to preach the Gospel with nothing but the shirt on their back, the prayed a lot.

• We underestimate the power of prayer. The reason we don't pray is that we still believe it is something about us that is making it work. God is not impressed with us and our efforts. What he is looking for are people who will humble themselves before him and let him be Head of the church. We believe that if we have the right look, music, style, building, - then our church plant is going to work. That is heresy. God moves where he wants to move. He could use the lamest service, worst sermon, and most backward event. Why? Because he chooses to. So our job is to be dependent in prayer. We should always be growing more and more in the work of prayer and creating a dependant core of people who truly believe that a church that bears fruit is God's thing and not ours.

• Prayer also reveals how much faith we have in trusting God. If you don't have key leaders right now, do you ask God for them? He will move them in from other states and countries if he has to. Do you believe that? Prayer must permeate all we do. He will save us from ourselves and from creating yet another church that does not reflect his heart. If we truly desire to create a church that reflects his heart than we have to get close to it. We do this in prayer.