The Stone and Church Planting
My heartbeat is church planting. I love Ridge Stone and I pray that God allows me to stay here the rest of my life and see this thing impacts lives in Cherokee County. But…I love church planting. When we started Ridge Stone I knew we would have to be very active in church planting for me to stay focused. You could call church planting my hobby. 
Obviously at our size we are still limited in what we can do in regards to planting but I have been praying about my long term vision for our church in regards to church planting and God has really been giving me a vision in regards to that. I have also been praying about what we can do now.
1.) Starting in May, we are will start holding bi-monthly get togethers for church planters. God has given us an awesome building in which to host these and we feel the timing is right. We are going to cater in lunch, set a topic (marketing, portable church, etc.), invite whoever wants to come, and just hang out in a round table forum style and hang out and share ideas.
2.) We are starting a “Behind the Scenes” blog here at RSC. We literally have 4 or 5 church planters call the office a week wanting to talk to us. That is awesome but I do find that our time is getting busier and busier and we aren’t able to give the time we should. We have also discovered that many of the questions we get asked are the same questions. So we are going to start a blog where our entire staff talks about different topics and how we do things. West Ridge is sort of doing this but it is more focused on what they did and I want to focus on what we are doing now. I think we do Sunday as good as anyone our size and I think our size still makes what we are doing, doable for other churches. I’m not saying what we do is the only way or that we are the best, but we get a lot of calls and this will be easier. I think Preston (children), Tim (worship), Erick (youth), Amy (programming and stage design), Cheri (running an office and cleaning up after us), and myself offer a lot in regards to planting a church with scratch, being portable, and messing a lot of things up. It should be fun.
3.) We are partnering with our first plant this fall. Danny Echols is planting Crossview Church in Rockmart, Ga. and we will be partnering with him. Danny is da bomb and I love the dude.
I have a lot of other things I want to do as we grow but that time is not now. We are also involved in a planting network that is about to start up with West Ridge Church (our mommy church) that has a planting school. I’m sure we will do our own thing one day, but until then I am very excited about the West Ridge thing. It could be a very cool thing, I hope.
Before anyone e-mails me about foreign missions, I understand the Great Commission. Just this month we formed a financial partnership with Haiti Cheri Missions. Dan, the founder of Haiti Cheri is a member at the Stone and is THE real deal. They got it going on in Haiti and I am glad we are partnering with them. Right now it is on a financial level but that will change over the next few months as we teach our people about missions. I want our people to get a heart of this place and see that flow over into us really partnering with them beyond a financial level.
Not sure I have ever mentioned this before but….I LOVE CHURCH PLANTING!