Church planter as entrepreneur

This exposes why there are so many false churches being planted! An entrepreneur uses his or her own skills and fresh, new ideas to draw people in and attract them.

The gospel, however, is relatively old and can become a stumbling block to some who do not believe; so that leaves the entrepreneur to figure out ways to remove the offense of the gospel and modernize it to meet the modern demand.

Point being, entrepreneurs listen to the demands of people, not God. There's your problem.

I didn't get any encouragement toward self-will or reliance on carnal strength from the article. I thought it thoughtfully brought out that a certain skill set finds itself to be beneficial or even necessary to the church planter. Having that skill set or mindset is never going to be a substitute for being called to plant churches, but I don't believe the article was advocating that. I frankly think that much of the criticism raised here misunderstands this distinction.

I don't understand what you mean by "planting" a church. Only God has planted or set forth His Church in the world. All "born again" believers are the Church. So, the issue would seem to be: starting a Christian assembly in a city....right?

The Spirit of God will establish God's testimony in a place as He pleases, and use faithful ones to do the necessary work, I see. If one presumes to go out and do something to form a sect, he may be doing his own religious thing. I think there is a danger of causing more division in God's testimony in the world by setting up another religion to conform to our ideas.

If we look at Acts 2:41-42 and the Epistles we can see what God intended for His Church (one can see something about this at the site: biblecounsel.homestead. com). This is just my view of this matter of our works to do something in the name of the Lord. It is nice to have an exercise to work for the Lord, but we surely need "all the counsel of God" in that, I see.

Of course God always brings the increase. He plants, etc. But, there are church planters. It's a calling. Why not let it go at that instead of symantics? That's like saying, there's no evangelists... God only is the evangelist. Well of course we know that. But don't disregard functions and callings and giftings God has placed in the Body. It's all by Him and for Him, all credit to Him. He does use us human vessels of clay though.