Perhaps you are aware and perhaps not, but Ben Katt has received a grant from Christian Reformed Home Missions to pursue potential new church locations throughout the city where he could use his great leadership skills to help start new church plants.
Ben is a catalytic leader of leaders. His church plant, Awake has become very solid and he has the bandwidth to share his gifts more widely in the church planting community. Ben has been talking to some emerging leaders in South Seattle and Ballard about potential missional church plants. One might begin in a church building with lots of programming space, another might begin in a house. The glory of what Ben is doing is finding leaders in contexts that are unique and allowing them to dream about “becoming” church in new ways in specific neighborhoods around our city.
Church planting in the future is going to be quite different than we have seen in the past. Many plants will begin and stay small and grow organically and relationally over a period of anywhere from 5-10 years before they are noticeably larger congregations. This has been the pattern for Awake (Aurora Avenue), Sanctuary and the Harbor (Crown Hill). Also, many church planting leaders will be bi-vocational and will work part time at church planting in the early years.