The Church Planter and the Sending Church
Answering the first church planting question (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see here).
What should the relationship between the planter and the sending church look like (assuming the sending church is already on the field)?
It depends a little bit on the model that you are using for church planting. If you are simply sending a guy out on his own with some financial support, then the relationship is fairly simple: the sending church provides funding, some expertise, accountability and encouragement for the planter. Other than that, he is pretty much on his own.
I don't think that's the best model, however. Ideally, church planting should be one healthy church "giving birth" to another healthy church from its own congregation. When I planted from Capitol Hill Baptist, I spent time on the church staff doing regular pastoral ministry tasks. This gave me a chance to know the church culture well and build relationships with people who became our church planting team. The sending church invested a lot of money (in salary) and time (in allowing me to preach, teach, and minster) for which it received little direct benefit. It was all aimed at getting the church plant launched in a healthy way.
It is important to make sure that you know in advance what is important to your church. Presumably you like your model of church and want to plant another church that looks something like it. I suppose you could try to plant a different kind of church (for example, a traditional church could plant a missional church in order to reach a different part of the community). But you need to be OK with those differences up front.
So when I planted from CHBC, we had an understanding that the new church would be baptistic, reformed theologically, and congregational with plural eldership, and centered on expositional preaching. Those things are important to CHBC, and so the elders rightly insisted that any church they planted have those characteristics. You need to figure out what's important to your church and work that out with the church planter.
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