BUILDING AN INCUBATOR

Church Planting at Fellowship Bible Church

Scott Santmier

The boxy incubator sits in the central foyer of the school, heat lamps glowing and temps hovering around 100 degrees. The fourth graders turn the eggs and check the temperature religiously for about three weeks. Suddenly the first chick pecks out of its shell, and new life emerges. But the work is far from over for the fourth graders. These new chicks rely on them for everything to live and thrive. The key to chicken-hatching success is not the 9-year-olds, the teachers, or even the school’s hatching history – it’s the incubator. The incubator provides the perfect environment for life to flourish.

Fellowship Bible Church has planted two completely different churches in two completely different ways in two completely different contexts. The process for each plant was unique and most likely unrepeatable. The course of action worked, but it didn’t leave a reproducible path to follow for success. There was no incubator providing a perfect environment for life to flourish.
Discipleship provides the perfect environment for spiritual life to flourish. Discipleship varies as the participant matures. A new believer needs different spiritual food than a ministering believer. Future leaders, and specifically church planters, have a host of skills to learn and confidently grow toward before beginning the steps of planting a church that plants churches.

FBC is heading toward becoming a church that plants churches. What will it take to be a church that plants churches that plant churches that plants churches? Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, AR, has become that kind of church, a church that has a generational family tree of churches that continues to multiply and reap a spiritual harvest. FBC Little Rock spun off a non-profit called Fellowship Associates in 1999 that exists to train leaders to plant churches. In recent years they have established a new leadership training experience for churches who want to create an incubator for church planting and leadership development.

Fellowship Bible Church will partner with Fellowship Associates over the next year to learn 25 years’ worth of time-tested successes to create a leadership-developing church planting incubator. This “Church Planter Residency Program” will be a path for emerging church planters to prepare themselves and core leaders to plant churches that plant churches.
The Lord has led us to understand that church planting is in the future of Fellowship Bible Church. Where? We do not know, but first, we will create an incubator that will prepare and deploy church planters and core leaders—while looking for opportunities to plant churches in other communities, changing lives and changing worlds because of Christ.