The DIS-advantage: Turning Church Planting Challenges into Your Greatest Strengths

For our From the Front Lines series, we asked several pastors to share the stories of their church plants. These pastors will be checking in online with regular updates on their churches and experiences, allowing readers a front-row seat to the ins and outs of church planting.

Mosaic Christian Church: Update No. 4

David and Goliath. You know the story: Runt of the litter who’s too young to join the army challenges the champion Goliath. David is short, Goliath is giant. David has no armor, Goliath’s armor weighs a ton. David only has a sling, while Goliath has the typical sword and spear of a warrior. And you know how it ends: Goliath taunts David and Israel, but David slings a stone that knocks Goliath down, leading to a full rout of the Philistines. It’s the classic underdog story, and has even has become common parlance in culture, as small teams seek to defeat the top dogs in sports.

The problem, as Malcolm Gladwell points out, is that everything you know about the story is wrong.

Goliath was built for close combat. There was nothing he could do to defend himself against a warrior armed with a sling, who could hurt you from far away. Many medical experts now believe that Goliath suffered from acromegaly, a benign tumor in the pituitary gland. This causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would make you exceptionally tall. It also leads to bad vision. Remember when Goliath says, “Come over here,” so he can fight him? It is likely he needed David to come near so that he could see him well enough to fight.

So in the end, everything that, on the surface, looked like a disadvantage for David was actually an advantage. He was smaller, so he could move quicker. He didn’t have armor, so he could run. He only had a sling, so he could strike from far away. He was shorter, so he didn’t have a disease that caused bad vision.

Undoubtedly God was on David’s side, and that’s the point: When God is with you, everything that people dis you for becomes an advantage. I call it the DIS-advantage.

‘Dis’-advantages I’ve Complained About

We’ve seen this over and over in our church, and you’ve seen it in yours. Here are typical disadvantages I’ve complained about over the years:

• We live in an expensive area. So it’s harder to attract staff.
• We live in a nonchurched area, where the receptivity to the gospel is much lower than most parts of the country.
• Our area is transient: 20 percent of our church moves out of state every year.
• Our facilities aren’t impressive. I’ve walked into some church buildings where just the building alone communicated, “Wow, something big is going on here!” That isn’t our reality.
• I’m not a naturally great preacher. Some of my friends spend WAY less time in sermon prep than I do … and then get up and preach better sermons!