The art (or the sweat) of the start

This happened a few years ago now but I remember it vividly.

I was at our local recreation ground in South London. A VW van drove into the car park and a tall athletic guy in sports gear, running spikes and a backwards baseball got out. He opened the back of the van and pulled out a harness and cable, put on the harness, attached himself to the front of the van and started to try to pull the van. Like they do on World's Strongest Man.

He leaned forward, strained every sinew, pumped his legs. And nothing happened. He keeps straining. Eventually, the van moves a fraction. He pumps his legs and strains again. Finally he overcomes the inertia, gets some momentum and is able to start walking the van across the car park.

I've no idea what he was training for but whoever this guy was, he was reminding me that getting something started is hard.

That's where entrepreneurship and church planting are similar. Or starting any new thing, any good endeavour, any gospel work. You're starting stuff from scratch. There's nothing there. There's no understanding of what should be there. So you'll have to do a good job of clarifying and communicating vision. There's no team so you'll need to gather them. There are no systems, no awareness, no momentum - so you're going to need (under God, in partnership with brothers and sisters) to generate it.

Praise God that he specialises in bringing things out of nothing. He is the great Starter and it's his zeal that will accomplish everything.

But he doesn't generally do it alone. Amazingly he chooses to use weak sinful men and women as his means and instruments. The Son entrusts his great wealth to his servant-partner-friends and loves to see them invest and risk and multiply it.

So here are a few resources, particularly drawing from the common grace of the business world as well as the wisdom of the Word:

Entrepreneurship in church leadership on The One Thing Podcast (22 min listen) which references this interview with Luther Symons on mission momentum and this HBR article on traits of an entrepreneurial leader
Considering the good - SMART targets (6 min read)
Actually doing it - implementation (5 min read)
Why changing may be more faithful than persevering (5 min read)
What is lean start up? (1 min 45 sec video)
Project Management Triangle – article (9 min read), video (6 min view)

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