Podcast: The Problem with Church Planting in the US Today (Nathan Knight)

July 22, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Is Your Church Planting Strategy Focused on the Right Things?

In this episode, Nathan Knight talks about his journey to pastoral ministry, why he's concerned about the way that church planting is often done today, and what he sees as a better way based on the New Testament.

Planting by Pastoring

Planting by Pastoring

Nathan Knight

Planting by Pastoring rejects the entrepreneurial mindset of church planting and invites leaders to adopt a far more biblical view of the church to cultivate a community that can “treasure Christ together.”

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:30 - Misconceptions about the Church

Matt Tully
Nathan, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Nathan Knight
Thanks. Good to be here.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about church planting and some of the unique challenges and even temptations or maybe wrong ways of thinking that can sometimes slip in as we think about church planting. But before we get into some of that, could you just share a little bit about your own experience as a pastor and church planter?

Nathan Knight
I was resistant to the ministry of pastoring for a while. My wife wanted to marry a pastor; I told her it’s not going to happen. The Lord, in his infinite kindness I guess, brought me along that path. I was in sales for five years, came out of that, went to seminary, and was just enthralled with the image that the Bible has of the church. That then led me to, early through seminary, an interest in the church and pastoral ministry. And it was through just some wisdom from the elders of my church, along with some good friends and prayer, that led me down the path to pastoring through church planting versus revitalizing, mainly because I think I wasn’t very patient back in those days, and I guess maybe still I’m not. But the Lord led me into pastoring through an interest in the church and planting through just a temperament I think. But as we talk about in the book, I think every planter should be a pastor.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that you were resistant to the idea of pastoral ministry for a while. What do you think was behind that?

Nathan Knight
I remember saying, and it’s funny to say now, but I remember saying to my wife, “The Lord needs people in the trenches!” As if pastoral ministry is not in the trenches! But I thought that I was sort of more made for that. And obviously, business people are, but I didn’t see pastoral ministry as in the trenches, which is ridiculous to think now, but that was why.

Matt Tully
So it wasn’t this resistance to the idea of doing ministry and giving the Lord your life. It was almost like you just thought the best way to do that was in secular work, so to speak.

Nathan Knight
That’s exactly right. And I thought the pastors are back there sort of in the safe area, as if they weren’t doing any work. It was a bad understanding of pastoral ministry.

Matt Tully
This is a little bit tangential to the main focus that I want to talk with you about, but I wonder if we can just press in. What do you think it was about your experience with pastoral ministry or with the church that led you to have that impression before you actually started getting into seminary?

Nathan Knight
It is related to the book in a conversant kind of way, but the way that I understood that pastors were sort of back there, going to retirement homes and putting sermons together, but they weren’t really out there doing the work. I didn’t understand that going to the retirement home and preaching sermons and praying for people and weeping with those that weep, I didn’t see that as the work. And I was wrong to do that, whereas I saw the work really was being out there where the lost people were. And by the way, that’s another thing I failed to understand is that pastors are where lost people are. And so I think there was this delineation that saw the faithful work of a pastor as being tame and not hard and risky and pushing and the like, and the work of the businessman as the opposite of that. And I was wrong.

Matt Tully
So you enroll in seminary, you get through seminary, you get a job at a church, and then it’s through that experience that you first start to think about the possibility of church planting. As you look back at that time before you actually committed to that path and started to pursue that, what are some of the misconceptions that you had about what it meant to be a church planter? To expand that, are there other misconceptions that you often encounter with people, whether they’re pastors, seminary students, or even just lay people in your church, about church planting?

Nathan Knight
First, I would have understood myself like a lot of people I even interact with today. I would have thought that the Bible doesn’t really have much to say about the church. It doesn’t really give much definition. It doesn’t give much information about church membership and church discipline. I never heard of those things before I got to seminary. And so the more I started to read the Bible, the more I started to see these things were actually in the Bible—that church membership was in the Bible, that the importance of particular people being pastors and others not being pastors was in the Bible, and church discipline is in the Bible. All these different things were actually there, but I just didn’t see them and wasn’t led to see them. And then the more that I saw them, the more I became interested in them, not as a church planter that I had experienced. It was more from an entrepreneurial mindset. Namely, it was not really doing all
of that work of putting ecclesiology in its place, but it’s more just getting out there and trying to gather people as quickly as possible. And so the more I saw that the Bible taught ecclesiology—it was there—and secondly, that the image of a church planter as an entrepreneur didn’t really match that, I began to be more intrigued to lean in and try to think about it a little bit more carefully. And that’s when I got interested in church planting.

06:36 - Does the US Really Need More Churches?

Matt Tully
So interesting. And we’re going to get into some of the dominant ways that we ought to think and certainly talk about church planting in our culture today. That’s really the core of what your book is about. But even before we go there, I know one question that I’ve heard expressed, and I probably even wondered this at times related to church planting, especially in the US is, Does the US really need more churches? Why not focus on church planting around the world in places where there aren’t already lots of churches within virtually every city? And obviously, a lot of people are church planting around the world. But how would you respond to a question like, Do we really need more churches in the US?

Nathan Knight
I think on the one hand I would say, yeah, maybe we don’t in certain places. I remember being in a certain city not long ago at Christmas time, just driving around and seeing so many churches and forgetting that. I used to live there, and I didn’t realize there was so many churches. So yeah, I can understand the question. I think what I would say in response is that we don’t necessarily need more churches in the US more so than we need more healthy churches in the US. There’s a big difference in those two things. And the more that we understand a robust, biblical ecclesiology—what the Bible teaches about the church: who should lead it, what is it doing—and we don’t see those kinds of things more carefully practiced, I find that kind of stuff is not as common. And so we need more churches like that. If all of those churches I was driving by in that city were doing all of that stuff, maybe we wouldn’t need as many as we’re saying. But what I find is that it’s not as common to find churches that are trying to do the kinds of things that the Bible is calling us to. And so therefore, we do need more churches as a result.

Matt Tully
So would that be part of what you would talk to a potential church planter about? You’d want to really carefully assess, whatever city we’re thinking about going into or area, are there other really good solid churches that are healthy? And if so, that might lead you to say let’s not try to plant a church there.

Nathan Knight
That’s exactly right, Matt. One of the things that I have in the book is we talk about choosing a place. Living here in Washington, DC, I’ll occasionally have church planners come to me and they will have already decided that Washington DC is the city that they’re going to plant in, but they’re coming to me to talk about where the gaps are. And they’ll give me a few ideas, and I’ll tell them, “Well, brother, there’s already a healthy church right there.” “What about this other community?” “Well, there’s another healthy church there.” And so I think what we can do is when choosing place is we might have this understanding that the city is just this lost place that needs tons of good churches, but we actually haven’t done the homework to see that maybe there’s not a Southern Baptist church, but maybe there’s a healthy PCA church or a healthy Anglican church there that they just didn’t know about. And so carefully choosing cities and locations inside of those cities where healthy churches are is critical. And the way that we do that, I think, is by talking to the healthy planters, healthy pastors that are already on the ground. And the more that we can have those discussions before we choose a place, I think the better we can start to plant churches that are more spread out in meeting needs where they’re needed the most.

Matt Tully
It doesn’t seem uncommon, in my experience, to hear church planters or people who are aspiring to be a church planter, they often seem to have a place that they’ve identified, and they’ll use language like, “I just feel like God is leading me to Des Moines, Iowa. And I just feel like I really need to be there.” Not that many people find they want to go to Iowa, but I’m from Iowa, so I can say that.

Nathan Knight
Build it, and they will come.

Matt Tully
That’s right. So what do you make of that? It doesn’t seem to always fit, perhaps, with what you just said about doing some research and thinking carefully about, Is there truly a need in this area?

Nathan Knight
So important. I think in some planting circles, there is a heavy emphasis on what we call “calling.” As a matter of fact, when you’re going through an assessment, that’s one of the first and most important questions they will ask is, “Tell me your calling.” And by “calling” what they mean is this more subjective understanding from the Lord about where the Lord wants them to go. And I’m just a little cautious about emphasizing that thing, because our subjective understanding of our “calling” is just not very reliable. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evaluate it. But I don’t think it’s as important because if the Lord seems to be calling me to a community where two or three healthy churches already exist, and there’s this other community across the tracks or across the country that has more need, I’m just going, “Brother, it may be the Lord is calling you there, but man, why not over here? Look, there’s more need over here.” And so I would want to underemphasize, not get rid of, but underemphasize a subjective understanding of calling and raise up the kind of thing that we see Paul doing when he says in Romans 15, that he understands his ministry to have been filled in this area, and he wants to go to another area. Let’s have more of an interest in trying to put healthy churches where there’s a need and emphasizing that more so than subjective callings.

11:51 - Church Planting Fads

Matt Tully
That’s really helpful. Maybe one other big picture question related to church planting that came to my mind as I thought about this. It seems like there was a time, and maybe we’re getting past that time a little bit, but there was a time when it seemed like the predominant emphasis when It came to church planting was the strategic goal of reaching the city. Cities kind of had this overarching, dominant emphasis in the culture of church planting—the language, the conversation. What do you make of that? Is that still the case? Do you agree with that? How do you think about that?

Nathan Knight
I don’t hear that language as much. It’s funny. Sometimes you can figure out when a church was planted based on its name. There was a time, for example, if it was a Greek word of the church, it was probably planted about twenty years ago. And more recently, if there’s
a city in the name, it was probably planted about seven or eight years ago.

Matt Tully
There are church planting fads, huh? Is that what you’re saying?

Nathan Knight
Yeah, of course there are. I’m sure I’ve participated in some of them. But it’s not all bad. So I do hear some of that emphasis on city, a little less a little bit more recently, but I do think it’s still there and I think it’s good that it’s there. I’m trying to think about the city, but I think one thing that we’ve learned over the course of time, as we’ve emphasized that notion of city for ten or fifteen years, we’re finding that you can do really good work, and find that if you were to leave the community, they wouldn’t know or care. And that’s sort of the language that we sometimes use. We want to be the kind of church that we serve there so well that this community, the city, would be sad to see us go. Well, I’m pretty sure that Corinth and Thessalonica and Lystra would be more than happy to see those churches gone because they’re stoning people and hating those people, and yet they’re doing really good work. So I think the metric of reaching the city and having the city love us as we love them, those are, again, kind of frail places to point at to say that we’re doing our work well. Again, let’s just go back to the Bible, let those be the metrics, and then I think we’ll find the city may not really care that we’re doing much there. They might not even like us. But in the eyes of God, it’s doing well.

Matt Tully
It seems like that whole city emphasis, to me, is often paired with, maybe more so than churches in the suburbs or in the country, it’s often paired with the idea of the influential church—the church that is well known and they’re sort touching maybe the highest reaches of power and influence in a place. Is that part of maybe what has been behind an emphasis on the city?

Nathan Knight
Yeah, that’s a good point, Matt. I do think you find that this is the good influence of Tim Keller and his book, Center Church, and all that you saw there. And one of the things I’ve, again, going back to these people that come to me, they just assume that Washington DC has all this need. There’s three or four places that they kind of want to plant, and we find out there’s actually healthy churches there. And then I’ll say, “What’s going on in this bedroom community outside of DC?” And that city notion is not nearly as attractive. “What’s going on in Germantown? What’s going on in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia?” That’s not the city, as such, as you’re referencing, and yet those are people that need Jesus. Man, they need Jesus. They need a healthy church. Whereas right here in a part of the city, as you said, there’s actually a lot of good churches, or at least sufficient churches, where there are not in Harper’s Ferry and in Germantown or some other bedroom community. And those people are important too. So yeah, maybe that city influence could cause us to lose sight of some other communities that are just as important.

15:29 - The Four S’s of Church Planting

Matt Tully
And obviously, there’s no clear direction on any of this from God. These are judgment calls. Different people are going to have different convictions about things. But it’s just important to maybe call out some of the dominant ways of thinking that I think often characterize. And that kind of leads to one of the main focuses of your book, which is thinking about the ways that, and you use the word “entrepreneurial,” that this certain kind of spirit often characterizes a church planting effort. And in the book you talk about the four s’s of church planting. I wonder if you could just summarize what are those four s’s, and what do they reveal about how we often think about church planting today?

Nathan Knight
This book, Planting by Pastoring, is trying to be a little bit of a corrective. Not a rejection, just a little bit of a correction, more of an emphasis in the place that Jesus seems to be emphasizing. And so we’ve been talking for the last ten minutes or so about place and how we choose a place and what that place ought to be. So, in similar ways, getting even into the heart of church planting, the four s’s would seem to indicate the kind of “success” that the church planting industry would ascribe to planters. And those four s’s are size, speed, self-sufficiency, and spread. And so size—big. And that big doesn’t have to be thousands. It could just be 100 or 200. Size, speed—get it quickly—and then self-sufficiency—financial self-sufficiency, be able to support yourself—and then spread—multiply. I’d throw a fifth one in there even and say span—the amount of time. So get size, get it quickly, be self-sufficient, multiply your church, do that over a long period of time, and you have achieved church planning success. Again, I want all those things. I trust, Matt, that you want those things, and, listener, I trust you want those things. I want those things. We’ve been working at those things, but they’re not the center. And the same way that if I were to say to my wife when we got engaged, “Listen, success for us is going to be having as many kids as we can have.” My wife would be a little concerned, for good reason, right? Therefore, what I want to do is say that those four things are good, but I want to actually put a couple of things more at the center in evaluating church planning success. And those two things can be found at the end of John 21, when Jesus is meeting with his lead church planter, Peter. Jesus is speaking to his lead planter, as it were. He’s getting ready to leave. Peter is about to be commissioned out after his church planning residency of three years to go start the first church, and he asked him two things: “Do you love me? . . . Do you love me? . . . Do you love me?” And then Peter says, “Yes. . . . Yes. . . . you know I do.” And Jesus’s response is, “Tend my sheep . . . feed my lambs.” What Jesus seems to be emphasizing in those two things before he goes is love for Christ as the motive, as the driver, as the reason, as the aim, treasuring Christ together; and secondly, for whoever it is that responds, you tend to those sheep. You care for them. You feed them. The church planting industry is going to value those things, but they’re going to not stress those things because they’re concerned it’s going to slow them down. So that might get into another line of questioning. But to summarize, the four s’s is good stuff. We love that stuff. But I think it’s important that Scripture is emphasized, and we need to emphasize, in ways I don’t see us emphasizing a lot, this treasuring of Christ as the driver. And then secondly, for those that respond, tending to, pastoring. Not entrepreneurs, but pastors that are caring for the sheep that Jesus purchased with his own blood.

Matt Tully
You contrasted this biblical emphasis on the pastoring work that you just said to the “church planting industry.” You’ve mentioned that a couple of times. What do you mean by that? Where is that? Where do we see that? Because I would imagine if you talk to any church planter and ask them, How important is your love for Christ and your love for your people?, they’re going to say those are foundational and those are central. So where do we see the church planting industry, so to speak, rearing its head?

Nathan Knight
I assume that these guys that I speak to do love Jesus and they do want to care for Jesus’s sheep at some level. So again, it’s sort of a matter of emphasis. You are what you emphasize. And so therefore, we want to bring the emphasis more clearly back into the center. And so I’ve seen things on social media that say the goal of church planting is multiplication. That’s not bad, right? We want multiplication, but I don’t think that’s a helpful way to talk about church planting because the church planting industry, going back to that notion of entrepreneurial, the business world, which we use a lot of those terms in the church planting world. Preview services and launching, which is more ascribed to the business world. When we use those metrics, the business world is measuring their success on size and speed and profit and the like. And Jesus is measuring things not on those things. He’s looking at the small and the weak. Jesus most definitely succeeded, and he’s got 120 people sitting scared in a room after he is crucified. And so therefore, bringing more of an emphasis of biblical terms and biblical ideologies, and not getting rid of but just de-emphasizing the more profit-centered notions, metrics, numerical success. I think what that’s going to do is it’s actually going to make us more healthy. I talk about in the book the three little pigs. In the business world, those metrics are more like sticks and straw, but the big bad wolf is coming. And we need to build churches that are made of bricks, which is more of that treasuring Christ as the center and pastoring the people that respond. And I believe those things will stand up, not so much the church planting sort of industry or their entrepreneurial notions, because those things are more flimsy and harder for us to actually define as success.

Matt Tully
You’ve spoken a little bit about the priorities of the church planter and maybe the way that the leadership of the church views the church coming, coming from this entrepreneurial mindset. Speak a little bit to even the character qualities and the personality types of the church planter himself. I think sometimes in my experience, you hear certain statements made about the kind of guy who is going to be successful as a church planter, needing to have himself an entrepreneurial, go-get-’em, don’t take no for an answer kind of attitude or mentality. Is that part of what you’re pushing back against as well?

Nathan Knight
Yeah, to a degree. I can remember going through, and even today you talk to a guy, and maybe he’s more quiet, more reserved, he doesn’t have a track record of starting things from nothing and growing them. And they would look at them and say, You know what? You might be a good pastor, but you’re not a good church planter. And what’s going on in the back of their minds I think is, and even I’m guilty of this too, that in the back of their mind it’s those four s’s. They’re not going to be able to accomplish those four s’s of size, speed, self-sufficiency. They’re not charismatic.They’re not going to garner a crowd. They’re a little bit more quiet and reserved. And so what I want to say is, yeah, I do think a church planter needs to have a little bit of grit to them. Even using the language and the understanding of an entrepreneur on this is not bad or wrong in and of itself. But I think what we need to do better is understand that guy, maybe he’s not very charismatic and loud and going to garner a whole bunch of people and have all that grit that we would like, but when we center more biblical ecclesiology with a goal of treasuring Christ, maybe he won’t have a big church. Maybe it’ll only be ten or fifteen or twenty people. But does that mean he failed? Does that mean that he can’t be a pastor? Does it mean that he can’t plant a church? So I think, again, what’s going on with that notion is those four s’s, and we need to be more careful to say, Brother, maybe you’re not going to be a pastor of 200 people or 500 people in planting this church. Maybe it’s only going to be twenty or thirty, based upon just how the Lord built you and the way the world works and these kinds of things. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t plant. We just have to have those expectations going in it. It it appears as though, in common grace, that it might not be big, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t do it.

Matt Tully
What I hear you saying too is that not every church plant is going to necessarily look the same, and there’s going to be different personalities. And that’s actually okay. There’s not one personality type.

Nathan Knight
That’s even good.

24:07 - Go Make Disciples, Not Converts

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s even a good thing. So at one point in your book you had this really really powerful line that I was just really impressed with. You say, “When we aim so much at reaching more people, it becomes easy to look past the ones that we already have.” And I thought that was such an insightful comment. As I thought more about this, we’re all familiar with this danger. We all fall into this trap of so easily taking for granted those who are closest to us, even neglecting those who are closest to us, for the sake of maybe the not as of yet found people out there, someone who’s further away from us. Unpack that a bit more, that tendency as it applies to church planting.

Nathan Knight
You look at the beginning and end of Paul’s epistles and there are two local churches that he planted, and you’ll notice he’s regularly using names. Even in the book of Revelation, there’s the Book of Life, and our names, our individual names, are written there. Jesus knows us by name. And so therefore, names ought to be our motive, not numbers as such. And so, in fact, I think what we can do is we so overlook people. We get somebody to pray a prayer, we baptize them, we celebrate them, and we should. Praise the Lord! But then we sort of move on. And what I find is if you actually slow down and think about it, just think about the New Testament. Jesus says that there are four kinds of people. There are the people that hear the gospel and reject it, and then the other side are they hear and bear fruit thirty, sixty, or 100 fold. But there are two kinds of people that claim to have received Jesus, but the cares of the world or suffering chokes it out. Jesus even references in Matthew 7 that there’s going to be these people that claim to know him, but Jesus actually never knew them. And then you go and look in the New Testament and find Paul is writing all these letters to churches that he planted, and there’s all this doctrinal distortion and it’s misunderstanding. He writes the pastoral epistles and tells them to be warned that there are people that are going to profess to know God but they don’t. There are going to be people that are going to want to accumulate teachers that actually are not teaching the gospel. The book of Galatians is to a group of churches that have distorted the gospel. We look at the end of the book of Revelation and what do we find? The seven churches. Most of them are not doing good. Ephesus lost their first love. So I think we need to be more careful with the way we use this word “reach.” We reached 500 people last year, when, in fact, we need to be careful to evaluate those four soils. And the more that we pay attention to names, to the people right in front of us, slow down to walk them through the sufferings and the difficulties and the fleshliness of this world, to try to shepherd them on until they get home to heaven, that’s the work. Instead of just sort of getting people baptized and putting them in the church and moving on. We need to be more careful. And the more we do that, the stronger the church gets and the more Christ is glorified.

Matt Tully
It seems like another way to talk about maybe part of the core of what you’re getting at is we need churches that emphasize discipleship, ongoing discipleship, more than just evangelism or even just growth or new members. Is that getting at the core of what you’re saying?

Nathan Knight
That’s exactly right. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase before, Matt, this notion that Jesus says go make disciples, not make converts. That’s the idea. “Teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.” I’ve heard a thousand evangelistic sermons from that passage, and rarely do we get to that second half of discipleship—“teaching them to obey.” And apparently, giving that thrust of what we just gave, that’s going to be really hard for people taking the name of Jesus, much less those that are obviously apart from Jesus. They can’t do it apart from his saving work. But yeah, it’s the work of discipleship. And discipleship, as a pastor and even friend that’s listening to this, is really hard work.

Matt Tully
And it’s inefficient work. You can’t do it fully in a big group context where you’re just preaching a message to 100 people. It eventually boils down to one-on-one or one-on-two kinds of conversations.

Nathan Knight
Yes, that’s right. So that’s why things like membership and pastoral oversight is so important because it’s so hard. Discipleship is slow and it’s difficult. We have a monthly group where church planters meet here once a month just to help each other and encourage each other, and years ago a church planter that had a larger church that was his biggest financial contributor drop him as a financial contributor when they found out he was doing membership interviews and membership discussions, because they thought that it was unhelpful to the spread of the gospel. I see it the exact opposite way, that the more that we see people, love people, walk with people, warn people, love people through the goods and the bads, the stronger the church gets, the better the evangelistic witness as we walk with people, not only evangelistically, but discipling them from the moment they’re born again to the day that they die or Jesus comes back.

29:00 - Treasuring Christ Together

Matt Tully
Help us think through the balance, though, between what you’re talking about, this emphasis on day to day pastoring and shepherding on faithfulness to the gospel and reliance on Christ for growth and fruitfulness. How do you do those things without neglecting to think strategically about things like growing my membership and our finances as a church and engaging visitors well so that they maybe want to come back—all of those things that can sometimes feel like maybe there are a little more tactics versus the core of pastoral ministry? How do you keep those things in balance?

Nathan Knight
That’s such an important question. When you look at the great church planter named Paul, and you look at how he talked and what he talked about, he said things like this in Philippians 3: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” In other words, he was so enthralled with the glory of Christ and knowing Christ that it then had him to spend himself for the churches and those outside of those churches that he wanted to come in. So Matt, to answer your question, I think the more of an interest we have in knowing and enjoying Christ, treasuring Christ together, the more that we will do the work to make sure and care for the sheep and not lose sight of strategically advancing that gospel. So in other words, I really do believe the more of an interest we have not in strategy, not in just making our church bigger and multiplying our church more, the more that we have an interest in seeing and savoring Christ, the more that we will do all that we need to do. That seemed to be the case for Peter and for Paul that are planning most of these churches. Take more of an interest in Christ, and you will not neglect anything.

Matt Tully
How common is the opposite danger? Maybe a way to talk about it would be the church or pastor that is over-spiritualized in how they think about their role in a place, where they don’t do any kind of strategic outreach. They say, We’re just going to be the healthiest church we can be in terms of how we operate internally, but we don’t need to think too much about how we’re going to effectively reach out to others.

Nathan Knight
I would say to them that they have a truncated view of their love for Jesus. You’ve heard this example. I get a great gift. I want to tell everybody about it. I love my wife. I have the most beautiful, most amazing wife on planet earth. Give me just an instant, and I’m going to tell you all about her. So in the same way, if you truly treasure Christ like you say you do, then you will not be satisfied with mere church health. You’ll want to spread that news to more and more people, that your Jesus that you love will be lifted up and more increasingly treasured amongst communities, church communities, around your city, and around the globe. So to treasure Christ is to be strategic and to spread. If you don’t understand that, then I’m wondering if you’re really treasuring Jesus.

Matt Tully
Nathan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and help maybe sharpen a little bit in all of our minds the role of a church planter and even the purpose of the church, what the church is meant to be. We appreciate you taking the time today.

Nathan Knight
Thanks for having me. Hope this has been a blessing.

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