Whoever said, “Experience is the best teacher,” overlooked another important teacher: Someone else’s experience, especially someone else’s failure. Tom Bennardo has written about his own ministry successes and failures in his new book, The Honest Guide to Church Planting: What No One Ever Tells You about Planting and Leading a New Church. In the current climate of church planting, Tom offers his hard-earned experience as a pastor, a church planter, and FEC’s Director of Pastoral Development and Church Multiplication in the Western Region.
When Tom took on his current FEC role in 2017, he brought 35 years of ministry experience with him to help equip men and women who were planting and leading churches west of the Rocky Mountains. In the past decade, church planting has boomed into a big industry with organizations and conferences offering kits and “how-to” advice. As helpful as those organizations and conferences are, Tom knows that church planters often experience unexpected opposition and sometimes failure. For those struggling with challenges, his book provides a heart-to-heart conversation.
According to Tom “this book is for those toiling in the trenches, those about to bail out, and those considering jumping in. It’s for the church planters laboring and struggling, seeing little movement, and wondering what they’re doing wrong or why God is failing them. It’s also for mother churches, planting organizations, and denominations, as a challenge to rethink and re-calibrate the way they approach and measure planting endeavors.”
The Honest Guide to Church Planting is available now on Amazon.com.
