A Plea to Church Planters: Think Not More Highly of Yourself Than You Ought

In the latest of a great series of posts on the subject of "What I wish someone would have told me", Perry Noble of NewSpring Church addresses one of the fairly-obvious-yet-easily-overlooked pitfalls of successful pastors and church planters - arrogance - and shares how he "almost allowed pride AND insecurity to completely destroy God’s work" before God humbled him in 2005.

In my interactions with young church planters, this is THE most distressing characteristic that I've observed. It is distressing not only because it is so subtly destructive, but because it is so pervasive. Noble describes a shift in his thinking in which "our way of doing church was the only way–and that if ANYONE was not in line with OUR vision as a church then they were wrong." I can't tell you how many guys I talk to who feel this way. And these are mostly guys who, like me, cannot really claim to have had any ministry success yet. In fact, all most of them have is an abundance of enthusiasm and a handful of seemingly ingenious, yet still personally untested, theories about church planting.

Brothers, none of us have anything to be prideful about. May we resolve to boast in nothing but "the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world." But don't just take it from me. Take it from Perry.