Investigating & Implementing
The following pages will help you go from interest in GO to implementation of GO as we walk you through the key stages of how to set up GO including investigation, preparation, implementation, growth and multiplication. We have designed these pages to provide you with an overview of GO’s value for churches desiring to become church planting churches that train and equip leaders while simultaneously providing you with a practical step-by-step picture of what it would look like for you to implement GO in your local church context. While this guide will answer many of questions regarding GO and its purpose, philosophy, and implementation process, we encourage you to interact with us after you finish reading with whatever further inquiries or questions you may have.
Why GO? | Reasons the Program is Valuable
1. Reproducible
One of the key marks of a church planting movement is reproduction—meaning church planting churches are essential in gospel reproduction. GO is strategically designed to help churches become church planting churches through rapid, healthy reproduction by emphasizing the development of church planters, leaders, and church planting team members. We have built a system for church multiplication and leadership development that includes not just preparation, but also integrates ongoing coaching, shepherding, resourcing and networking as residents and teams are sent to plant.
2. Scalable
The GO residencies have been designed with flexibility so depending on the culture of a local church, the context of a city, and the needs of emerging planters, parts of the program can be added, removed, or modified as needed. This makes everything we do and offer simple, scalable, and reproducible. The residency programs are even designed in such a way that once a resident takes a course, they can teach a course.
3. Local Church-Based
We believe that church planters can, and often should, be made in the local church. We also believe that the local church is uniquely structured for rapid multiplication and leadership development. GO provides leader development in the local church that is theologically rich, missiologically focused, and ecclesiologically grounded in order to help churches train leaders effectively and locally for gospel multiplication.
4. Accessible
The GO residencies are designed to provide training and leadership development for leaders, planters, and pastors at a financial cost that encourages, rather than limits, emerging leaders and churches in their ability to be trained and provide formal training and equipping of leaders, pastors, and planters. The GO residencies have been designed with a 2-Year Church Planter/Pastor Program and a 1-Year Gospel Leader Program for purpose of being equipping men to plant and pastor but also to equip men and women to be gospel-centered servants and missionaries who make disciples through the 1-Year Gospel Leader track. In this way, the GO residences provided great access to potentially all members in the church that desired to be trained.
5. Leadership Development
GO is incredibly valuable because the program creates a leadership pipeline in your local church by producing and training potential leaders that we often overlook. While it’s a common and unsustainable practice to go about leadership development by exclusively finding prepared leaders, GO is designed to produce and train potential leaders by creating a leadership pipeline through both residency programs. The men and women who enroll in the 1-Year Gospel Leader Program soon become a group of trained potential leaders in your church who, through GO, are prepped for multi-pathways to potential service and leadership. At the completion of the Gospel Leader Program, the following are just some of the potential pathways to leadership:
- Gospel Leader Residency Instructor
- Missional Community Group Leader
- Deacon/Deaconess
- Potential Candidate for 2-Year Church Planter/Pastor Residency
- Theology for Everyone Instructor
- Core Member of a Church Planting Team
Additionally, it is often the case that as we desire to plant churches we look to find potential church planters in our church instead of also seeking to produce potential church planters and train them in our church. However even from the content emphasized in the 1-Year Gospel Leader Program, men in your church will be exposed to the importance and need of church planting and will be able determine their role in planting in the future—whether as a possible lead planter, as a core team member, or another role.
The 2-Year Church Planter/Pastor Program is similarly designed not only to find potential planters but to produce and train them as well as this track is geared to train men already called to planting and those just beginning to explore a call to plant.
6. Sustained Relationships
GO is designed to not only train leaders and planters but to provide resources, coaching, and supporting relationships as leaders and planters complete GO and begin new works. Networking, coaching, and support are built into the DNA of GO even to the point that the second year of the 2-Year Church Planter/Pastor Residency is focused on prepping, pacing, and providing for the GO Church Planting Resident as he works to begin a new church in the near future. We are not content with just providing effective content, our plan to is continue in relationship through coaching, networking, and support with all GO planters and GO planting teams as they plant new churches all around the globe.