Killer Questions is a series of blog posts designed to help planters and starters have transformative conversations with themselves and their co-labourers.Also check out some killer questions on finding Clarity and examining Matters of the Heart.

Is Your Denomination Actually Ready to Plant NEW Kinds of Churches? In theory, all denominations want to engage in forming new kinds of churches. Many will state publicly that their future depends on it. But saying something is different than doing something. The future we all face as the Church in Canada means more diversity, not less. It can be hard work to maintain unity while, at the same time, allowing new expressions of the kingdom to co-exist with more established forms. New expressions of church can stretch denominational systems to the breaking point. Here are some questions to help your denominational develop its self-awareness:

• Has our denomination ever changed its mode of operating, by-laws, policies, or other denominational systems to better accommodate new forms of church?

• Have our established churches ever changed the way they operate because a church plant developed ideas or practices that they saw as worth adopting?

• Has our denomination ever sat down in a formal way to ask “what is our ecclesiology, now, in light of what is going on in our church plants?”

• Does our denomination include a significant diversity of church forms already?

• Can we point to a time in our history when there was?

• Does our definition of “diversity” include communities from distinctive Canadian subcultures (bikers, hipsters, urban, suburban, rural, Star Trek fans, etc.) and people from other ethnicities?

• Does our denomination focus on the needs of the Nones and the Dones?

• Does our denomination equate church planting with meeting those needs?

• Do we invite pioneer planters to help us shape our current church planting processes around assessment, training, coaching, networking, and funding?

• How much “down field blocking” do we find ourselves doing in order to protect pioneer church plants?

• How would we rate our denomination’s overall need for immediate success stories in church planting?

• What is our general tolerance for failure or mid-game course corrections?