- Hit 200 people around 2 years in. Most ministers are shepherds. But to grow beyond 200, we need to become ranchers. Shepherds answer phones and go to hospitals and everything. We go into ministry because we have a heart for people and the gospel. We want to be shepherds and we should. But unless we become a rancher over a group of shepherds, we'll never grow.
- Being a shepherd makes you feel significant, needed and important. It's hard to let go. Others want the senior minister to serve them as well. Every 2 years in the ministry, I've had to go through a retraining process, and rethinking who I am. That has been very painful.
- If you're at 50-60 and you're not visiting people strategically, you might not go past 100. (Al Stewart : 'When you're small, you gotta be hungry and chase those new sheep.'). In the early years, you gotta do everything. But if you're not thinking how to move back from doing everything, you never will. Cathy was very good at this. She'd tell me to go away for a day or two, step out of the urgency, get some perspective read and reflect.
- On our budget from the start, we paid for an MTS apprentice. From the start, we wanted to be a multi-staff church. We broke lots of moulds in the first 8-10 months.
