CHECK: TOP 5 of challenges for EUROPEAN Church Planters

Page 4 of 8 in lesson Why we train Gospelcoaches

Specific European Patterns?

With almost 80 European planters going through our training, we can already discern some first patterns of challenges for Church Planting in Europe. In our top 5 some of these are not area specific, but others are, we think.

The list of challenges shows clearly why we think a good Gospel Coach would be of great benefit for Church Planters.

List of challenges

Given by Church-Planters in the City to City Network in Europe.

During the Coach Training the group will sort these challenges in five groups.
Relational, Personal, Missional and Spiritual + Other

Which of these have you yourself struggled with?

  1. Money... which leads to limited living space... which leads to family issues/stress

  2. Family issues... tension between work and family

  3. Balancing work/life/family etc

  4. Team problems... their expectations/people leaving/people not living up to my expectations

  5. Feeling alone like it all depends on me

  6. Maintaining vital/healthy relationship with the Lord.

  7. Connection of identity/worth to the "success" of the plant.

  8. Generating and maintaining a shared vision in a group of people with differing opinions and outlooks

  9. Navigating an anti-church culture.

  10. Housing. I’m often asked by those looking in, how can we support church planting? and I say-buy a house! Housing/living costs are crippling factors here.

  11. The feeling of isolation of planter from others in a similar ministry, his leadership team and sometimes his wife and family

  12. The pressures of feeling 'under-resourced' in terms of finance and people and the accompanying feelings of envy, discouragement and bitterness

  13. Taking on too much through failure to train and delegate and therefore the accompanying issues of working overly long hours and feeling 'it's on me'

  14. An unhappy spouse who feels neglected by her distracted husband

  15. Struggling to maintain spiritually healthy personal devotion to Christ

  16. Discouragement: little interest, limited fruit

  17. Opposition: from a hostile culture and from institutional church

  18. Lack of healthy indigenous core group to carry the plant

  19. Limited resources are a constant issue yet not the only barrier-Ireland today does not want to hear anything got to do with ‘church’.

  20. loneliness

  21. limited resources,

  22. lack of support system,

  23. maintaining hope without the outward evidence of quick growth,

  24. difficulty in measuring success and knowing where you stand.

  25. Applying best practices which worked somewhere else and neglect to consider the context.

  26. Busy helping others and neglect applying the gospel/invest to their own life.

  27. Pressure to grow their congregation quickly.

  28. Loneliness

  29. Lack of self knowledge or awareness.