Days of Small Beginnings

Some days I wake up and everything about planting a church seems overwhelming. We have been at it for nine years now at NewSong and we’re still averaging less than 200 people in worship on any given weekend. Each week it seems like we have to reinvent the wheel about some facet of our service as though it has never been done or thought of before. Even the simplest things, which should have been worked out years ago, still cause us to stumble around as though we are caught unawares or unprepared.

I recognize church-planters don’t have a monopoly on discouragement. Anyone can get discouraged. The hill looks too high to climb. The ditch seems too broad to jump. The odds seem too overwhelming. The finish line seems too far off to even matter.

The book of Zechariah tells us that this is exactly how some of God’s people felt as they went about a task that seemed too big and too difficult for them to accomplish. Zechariah, a prophet of God, was with his fellow Israelites back in Jerusalem after the temple Solomon had built was destroyed.

The Israelites had already rebuilt the walls around the city, but the rebuilding of the temple was still incomplete even after many years of fits and starts. Zechariah struggled to encourage the people to get the temple rebuilt, but progress was slow. The work was inconsistent, and the people’s motivation seemed to come and go. Inner discouragement hindered their ability to consistently follow through with a slow-and-steady building plan. They wanted their efforts to produce more immediate, noticeable, "bigger" results. Boy does that sound familiar!

In the midst of these events, God asks, “Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings?” (Zech. 4:10). The question reveals the cause of the Israelites’ discouragement: impatience and short-sightedness. The truth of the matter is, as we have known since the days of Aesop, “slow and steady wins the race.” Building a church involves far more slow, “tortoise” days than fast, “hare” ones. The perception that all you need to do is to get a good praise band together and some cool media and you’ll be the next Northpoint in six months time is simply not true. In fact, the statistics that are regularly quoted indicate that 80 percent of church plants don’t even survive their first year. Church-planting is a day-in, day-out, “grind it out” undertaking. Church-planting is a “two steps forward and one step back” proposition. Church-planting is not for the faint of heart or the weary of step.

And so today I choose to refuse to despise these our days of small beginnings. Today I commit to stay at the wheel, believing our small beginnings will someday produce a great ending. I will choose to hold on to God’s Word even when it seems as though what we’re doing is not making