New Churches Podcast | Season 1 | Episode 795

Church Planting in the Face of Personal Challenges

Ed Stetzer & Adam Muhtaseb

Episode 795

Host Ed Stetzer meets with church planters Adam Muhtaseb and Richard Pope to discuss their best practices when it comes to facing hardship while leading a new church plant. Here’s why rest, repentance, and reliance on God and His people are essential for planters as they seek to lead others to Christ’s truth amidst life’s greatest difficulties.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

  • Ways to impactfully communicate hardship to your congregation
  • The power of simple gospel prayer within biblical community
  • Why sabbath is essential for church planters today
  • The role God’s sovereignty plays into your calling as a leader in the church
  • How God can use all things—even terminal diagnoses—for the furtherance of His gospel to the world

Helpful Resources:

Please subscribe to the podcast and leave a rating and review on iTunes.

Sharable Quotes (#NewChurches):

Successful church planting is a series of successfully resolved crises because there’s always a crisis and something that’s falling apart. — Ed Stetzer

Embrace strategic failure, knowing that God is still working when you can’t crush it this week. Once I recognized and got to a place of peace with that, it enabled me to rest and sabbath a little bit more. — Adam Muhtaseb

Suffering gives us a weird opportunity to show grace, love, kindness, and mercy. When you show and allow people into your suffering, keeping the gospel forefront, it’s a teaching moment for your church. — Richard Pope

God can do more in six days than you can do in seven, and He wants you to do six. — Adam Muhtaseb

Obedience and faithfulness to the Lord is always more fruitful than doing things our way. — Richard Pope

Published on January 11, 2024

The Heart Relationships Mission The Church Pre-Launch Growing Multiplying
About the Podcast

New Churches Podcast

The New Churches podcast offers practical answers to your real ministry questions. We aren’t going to provide lofty pie-in-the-sky theories. Instead, we are going to help you in your real ministry context, with your real thoughts, questions, and issues.

See All Episodes

Subscribe

Meet the Authors

Ed Stetzer

Ed Stetzer, Ph.D., is a professor and dean at Wheaton College where he also serves as Executive Director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.  He is the incoming Dean of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. He has planted, revitalized, and pastored churches; trained pastors and church planters on six continents; earned two master’s degrees and two doctorates; and he has written hundreds of articles and a dozen books. He is Regional Director for Lausanne North America, is the Editor-in-Chief of Outreach Magazine, and regularly writes for news outlets such as USA Today and CNN. His national radio show, Ed Stetzer Live, airs Saturdays on Moody Radio and affiliates. He serves at his local church, Mariners Church, as a Scholar in Residence and Teaching Pastor.

More Resources from Ed

Adam Muhtaseb

Adam Muhtaseb is the founding pastor of Redemption City Church in Baltimore, Maryland, and an M.Div. graduate of  Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Sherrie, have three sons, Aiden, Judah, and Micah.

More Resources from Adam
Related Content
Article

Doing More with Less

Chris Phillips

I was exhausted and burning the candle at both ends. No one had taught me a simple, practical command that we see in Scripture countless times: doing more with less.
Article

Planting is Tough, but Jesus is Enough

Clint Clifton

Suffering is part of the church planting package, but we can agree with the Psalmist that God is the strength of our heart and our portion forever (Ps. 73:26).
Article

Why I’m Taking a 3-month Sabbatical After 3 Years into Planting a Church

I want to be joyfully ministering for the long haul.