Don’t Wait for Ready: How Immediate Action Forms Church Planters

One of the most consistent patterns I found while interviewing church planters across continents and contexts was not theological or spiritual, it was behavioral. Every participant, without exception, stepped into ministry activity immediately after sensing any level of awakening toward ministry (e.g. calling or desire). Not after a class. Not after an assessment. Not after someone handed them a title. Movement was a key indicator of identity formation.

Movement was a key indicator of identity formation

And that early movement, usually in the form of outreach and some kind of travel, became the starting point of a journey that culminated in long-term church planting. If we want to cultivate future planters, we have to recover the essential formation that happens when people obey before they feel fully prepared. In our current context, I sense that we appreciate formation over action. However, my research shows that action is part of formation.

The Momentum Principle: Obedience Creates Motion

Let’s start with an illustration. Newton’s first law gives us a striking metaphor for the planting journey: a body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. This parallels what nearly every participant described.

A moment, a sermon, a mission trip, a bible study, acted as an outside force that awakened desire. But awakening wasn’t the defining hinge. Immediate action was. Once they took a step, motion created more motion. They entered into ministry tasks, and those tasks reshaped desire, identity, and trajectory.

A moment, a sermon, a mission trip, a bible study, acted as an outside force that awakened desire. But awakening wasn’t the defining hinge. Immediate action was. Once they took a step, motion created more motion.

They didn’t find clarity first and then act. They acted and found clarity along the way.

The church planter journey begins with movement. Simple, imperfect, outward-facing motion that God uses to set a person on a long path of obedience.

Getting the Order Right: Action Before Support

A major implication of the research is this: immediate action precedes preparation, not the other way around. Every participant in the study was active in ministry before they were part of any supportive community like a seminary or missions agency.

This doesn’t diminish the role of training; it simply gets the order right.

Peter Cartwright was a Methodist itinerant preacher who helped growth the Methodist movement in the US. He saw a tendency in his day for young men to prioritize seminary over pulpit in preparing for ministry. He lamented that men feeling God’s call to preach hunted a college to attend rather than a pony to ride to learn to preach (Finke and Stark, 2005). We need both the pony and the seminary, but I would argue we need the “pony” first. Immediate obedience in going, serving, sharing, and gathering people prepared the church planters spiritually and emotionally for deep formation later.

He saw a tendency in his day for young men to prioritize seminary over pulpit in preparing for ministry. He lamented that men feeling God’s call to preach hunted a college to attend rather than a pony to ride to learn to preach (Finke and Stark, 2005). We need both the pony and the seminary, but I would argue we need the “pony” first.

People don’t discern a specific call to church planting by thinking about church planting. They discern it by doing the tasks that church planters do. Identity comes from applied ministry, not textbooks.

So if we want more church planters, we cannot wait for readiness. We invite people into the work and let readiness emerge through motion.

What Counts as Immediate Action? Keep It Small and Outward

Immediate action does not mean giving someone a pulpit without training or a leadership title without testing. In the interviews, first steps were always small, practical, and outward-facing. In short, they could accomplish the task the next day. Most fell into three categories:

1. Accompany: “Come with me.”

This is the simplest doorway into ministry momentum.

• Join a pastoral visit.

• Go on a prayer walk.

• Sit in on a Bible study.

• Ride along to encourage a partner church.

Watching ministry in real time awakens spiritual imagination. It also lowers fear because the burden isn’t on them—yet.

2. Attempt: “You try this time.”

Give people the smallest task possible:

• Share a testimony.

• Read a Scripture and ask one question.

• Pray at the end of outreach.

• Facilitate a 5-minute conversation in a group.

These micro-tasks matter. Participants repeatedly highlighted tiny moments of responsibility as catalytic in forming confidence.

3. Adventure: “Go somewhere.”

Travel, even small travel, may play an outsized role in identity formation.

• A day trip to serve a church plant.

• A weekend visit to a ministry partner.

• A mission trip across a city or across a continent.

Leaving one’s usual context disrupts inertia. It forces people to see need and opportunity with fresh eyes. Every participant reported some kind of travel early in their journey.

The goal is not to overwhelm but inspire. The goal is motion: outward, active, obedient motion sustained over time.

Outreach + Travel: The Two Factors That Show Up Everywhere

When I coded the interviews, two words kept appearing in nearly every narrative: outreach and travel. These weren’t accidental. They were structural pillars of how people actually identified as church planters.

Why Outreach Matters

Outreach:

• forces engagement beyond the church’s walls,

• reveals real spiritual needs,

• creates dependence on the Holy Spirit, and

• gives immediate feedback.

Planters must be comfortable forming relationships with those outside their community. Outreach helps that comfort grow organically. In one sense, this seems to be too simplistic. However, its radically paradigm shifting when we think of how many of our ministry “asks” to our people remain for the building up of our congregation. How many times are we inviting people to experience ministry outside the context of our church in the world. What ratio of our congregation has served in a different context? My research predicts the higher the ratio of people serving outside the church, the higher ratio of “sent ones” a church will have.

Why Travel Matters

Travel:

• interrupts passive routines,

• enlarges a person’s sense of God’s global and local mission,

• exposes them to new models of ministry,

• and creates identity-shaping memory moments.

We all live in routines: daily, weekly, and seasonal. In short, seasonal routines are a time a way of the daily that ends up reinforcing our daily and weekly priorities. Planning travel within the seasonal calendar of the church for mission purposes is vital to set daily and weekly priorities in mission in our lives. Every planter interviewed had some form of relocation or travel in their timeline—whether moving to seminary, serving overseas, or traveling with a ministry partner.

When outreach and travel happen together, momentum accelerates.

The Long View: Identity Forms Through Repeated Obedience

Almost every participant in the study reported a similar arc: early action, a long season in a supportive community, and then being sent. What’s remarkable is that most of them had little or no formal ministry experience before being sent, but they all had functional ministry experience. This research predicts that if we want more church planters, we need more function from the congregation. Going, serving, evangelizing, leading small tasks, and staying in motion inside supportive environments. Calling matured through obedience, not theory.

If we want to cultivate church planters, we must build environments where the next obedient step is always clear and always encouraged. I would encourage ministry leaders to think through every seasonal calendar event (retreat, mission trip, guest preacher, etc) with an invitation to an outreach service that is easy to accomplish (visitation, vision trip, lead a small group, etc.)

Movement forms missionaries and church planters.. And those first small steps, taken long before someone feels ready, often become the beginning of “a long obedience in the same direction.”

I would encourage ministry leaders to think through every seasonal calendar event (retreat, mission trip, guest preacher, etc) with an invitation to an outreach service that is easy to accomplish (visitation, vision trip, lead a small group, etc.)