In this article our focus in on the preparing season. The focus in this season is on the church leader as the sower, the one who will sow the seed of the gospel that will grow into a healthy growing, reproducing church. The goal of the preparing season is to raise up and equip qualified church leaders with a clear mission, vision and strategy. To help you best understand this preparing season we will survey some of the major milestones.

The first one is to confirm your vision and calling. In the earlier lesson on vision, we studied the vital importance of church leaders having a God honoring, kingdom advancing church focused gospel centered vision. It's during this season that leaders need to be prayerfully developing their vision for the glory of God, seeing the supremacy of God in all things, among all nations for the joy of all people and the honor of his name.

Leaders need to be developing a vision for the kingdom of God, to see the reign of God over all things, making his invisible kingdom visible over all spheres of live, spiritual, social and cultural. As well as a vision for the church of God, seeing the embodiment of the rule of Christ on Earth through his church, to be a blessing to all nations and a foretaste of God's kingdom to come and a vision for the gospel of God. To see the good news that God's kingdom has come into the world through Jesus Christ, by his spirit, to redeem and restore all things that were lost in the fall.

Another vital part of this milestone is confirming not only the leader's vision but confirming the leader's calling to church planting and development. In the earlier lesson on calling, we learned how there are normally four primary components that help clarify and confirm the calling of a church leader. The first one is maturity. It's during this season, church leaders are tested to see if their personal lives and spiritual maturity measure up to God's standards recorded in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.

The second component is proven gifts and abilities. To be effective in developing a new and a growing church. Normally stronger than normal gifts in outreach and preaching and leadership are confirmed during this time. The third component is sincere affinity. Normally church leaders desire to be involved in developing a new church. This is a check of heart motivations. And finally the component of opportunity. There are people who recognize the leader's gifts and calling and want them to work alongside them, but it's not enough simply to consider how you feel about these components of a call to ministry. The process of confirming your call needs to include the objective assessment of church leadership, those in spiritual authority over you. They included family, peers and mentors in ministry.

The second milestone is to determine your focus group and area. This has to do with your understanding of the people whom you will be serving in the church development. As you learned in the earlier lesson in this core series called "Focus," this is the season where you should do much more than merely determine a place and a people to whom you will go. This is the time when you become a student of the community you plan to serve, carefully studying not just their behaviors but their values, their beliefs, their worldview, the things that keep them up at night.

A third milestone during this preparing season is for you to establish your prayer ministry and support plan. During this season, leaders draw on what they learned in the earlier prayer lesson in this course in order to establish and maintain a strong prayer support base and keep in contact with their prayer partners regularly. This includes not only recruiting a prayer team of normally hundreds of people, it also includes the church leader developing a deeper personal prayer life regularly, praying with and for others, especially in the ministry focus group. To see God be glorified, through the advancement of his kingdom in this church they are developing.

A fourth milestone during the preparing season is for leaders to receive effective training and coaching in church development. This often includes attending conferences, seminars or workshops, taking courses like this one, but the most effective way to learn how to develop a church is not in a course or at a conference or by reading a book. It's through actually doing the work of church development under the oversight of a qualified church or mentor. This is why it's always best for a church leader to have at least a one to two year church planting apprenticeship or internship before developing a church.

A fifth milestone during the preparation season is for leaders to develop a preliminary philosophy of ministry and establish their ministry models. This is when church leaders are able to draw on the outcomes of all the earlier lessons that produced their church's first philosophy of ministry, biblical purposes, core values as well as their future of ministry models and styles. This includes their ministry flow chart that shows all the church's essential ministries and how they work together and a discipleship strategy that describes how someone can go from being an unbeliever to being a fully devoted follower of Christ and responsible growing member of the church.

A sixth milestone during this season is for church leaders to create a church development master plan or proposal with a strategy and a one to two year timeline. The good news is that all the various parts of this plan or proposal have already been completed by the church leaders who have completed all the earlier lessons in this core series. After all the earlier lessons are completed, the development of this master plan or proposal is normally done by simply compiling all the earlier lesson outcome statements and plans into one document. This document is then designed to answer questions like, "Why start a new church? Who will be impacted by this new church? What are their needs? What kind of church will this be? What will the ministries of this church be? How will you start this church? Who will be starting this church? How will it be supported? How can someone support this church plant in prayer and giving? And what is your projected timeline for the next one to two years?"

You will be able to use this proposal as not only a means of vision casting but also goal setting, recruiting and support raising. The final milestone is to establish the financial support base. This includes creating a wise responsible financial budget for the next two to three years, both a personal budget and a ministry budget. You'll need to determine your financial ministry support model, whether it is through personal fundraising, denominational support, network support, a sponsor church or a mixture of these. The end of this season is normally the securing of all the necessary funds and pledges before moving to the field.