Over the course of the last decade, I have been amazed to see how many people have taken up the call to church planting. I truly believe it is a sovereign move of God, similar to the missionary movement of the early 20th century. Thousands of my peers along with my family have exchanged comfortable lives for the rollercoaster ride of establishing a new church.

In October 2011, my husband and I launched Saints Community Church in New Orleans with a small but dedicated team of people. Nothing could have prepared us for the intensity we faced those early months and years. A year into the plant, we received two words of knowledge that began to reshape our paradigm. The first said, “You’re still picking rocks out of the soil.” The second said, “The seed is still in the barn; it hasn’t even gone into the ground.”

With that in mind, I began to understand that what we were doing wasn’t like farming crops. Crops require you to purchase a new batch of seed every year, plant, harvest, repeat. This is the nature of many church plants. It is not for lack of effort, because I’ve never known a church planter who didn’t work himself to the bone. But maybe we had a flawed perspective? How many times, desperate to see growth, do we look for a new idea, only to repeat the process a year later to replenish the people who have gone out the back door? It’s enough to make many leaders want to quit.

One night, while reading to my daughter, it hit me.

We’re not planting crops. We’re planting an orchard.

For many years we have been focused on growth in our churches. But growth is not the same as fruit. Growth can happen overnight, but fruit that produces long term takes years for a church to develop.

I spoke with Tara Baugher, a Ph.D. in plant science and a tree fruit educator from Penn State Extension about orchard planning and site preparation. The longer we talked, the more I marveled at the comparisons. Here are a few insights I learned viewing church planting through the lens of planting orchards:

You must be in it for the long haul.
I asked what the timeline is from a seed planted until it is fruit-bearing and profitable. In traditional orchards, it is a two-year process just to get the sapling from seedling into the ground. Then the sapling is in the ground five years before it becomes profitable and bears fruit for decades. 

Seven years from seedling to fruit.

So often church planters become discouraged, even burnt out after a launch that was underwhelming, followed by several intense years with a small group of people. I don’t think this is the exception; I think it is the norm. I’m not advocating acceptance of small-minded vision. Truly large vision requires long-term thinking.

I seldom hear planters say things like “in 10 years” or “25 years from now ... .” Do we not expect our churches to be around that long? How would it change our priorities if we considered a longer horizon from the beginning? Understanding that it takes several years to establish a church may seem daunting, but over the bumps and bruises of the early stages, it’s more emotionally sustainable.

For many years we have been focused on growth in our churches. But growth is not the same as fruit.

Understanding the context of a particular location also factors greatly into staying the course. Wayne and I recently received a letter from missionary friends in Estonia, Nick and Olivia Puccini. They were brimming with excitement to be running over 100 at Focus Church, in a country where the average church is 19.

We can take a lesson from our friends overseas. Rather than comparing ourselves to Elevation Church (we’ve all done it!), analyzing what a win is in your city makes a huge difference. What does the ground game look like in your city? Are you in a secular, university town? Are you serving a rural area with 10,000 in the entire county? Examining your context gives greater opportunity for wins along the way in the long years before fruit-bearing begins to occur.

Preparation prevents problems.
I started to ask Tara about problems with the elements in building orchards, and she quickly responded by saying, “You try to prevent problems before planting. The land requires years of site preparation. Correcting soil PH and physical problems like water logging take years to rectify and can’t be fixed after the fact.”

The importance of training the leader and preparing the ground cannot be overstated. It has been a privilege to be part of what the Church Multiplication Network is doing to prepare church planting teams through its LAUNCH events. In order to establish fruit-bearing churches, CMN has made a concerted effort to help teams prepare for the launch and beyond.

Teams receive extensive analytics of their communities. Then they are paired with coaches who have been in the trenches for years as planters themselves. Creating a discipleship plan, leadership development, adding staff and even missions philosophy are some of the topics. As a result, more than 3,000 teams in the Assemblies of God have been trained to prepare the ground for the long-term success of healthy churches across the U.S.

There will be challenges — Don’t give up, and don’t disengage.
There are other things we must be aware of that impact the growth and sustainability of a church plant. Preventing weeds of dissention. Wildlife (otherwise known as divisive people) destroying the fruit. Health crisis and financial struggle. Literally, weather can impact church attendance quicker than just about anything. In Minnesota churches it’s a running joke that attendance is bad when the weather is bad, and it’s bad even when the weather is good.

Don’t be thrown off by the week-to-week changes. Saplings are sensitive to the elements. At the same time, we can’t disengage in recognizing spiritual battles. We have to walk among the trees, paying attention when they are at risk of destruction, continually celebrating healthy, incremental growth. One day, there will be fruit that is, in the words of Jesus, “thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as what was planted.” Sounds like an orchard to me.