Mark Batterson 
was born in MN and is a church planter extraordinaire who is admired by many of us planter types for his imaginative, innovative, visionary leadership. He is the Lead Pastor of National Community Church in Washington, DC. In his blog (worth adding to your blog reader), yesterday he had this inspirational post:
“I just felt like I wanted to make a plea to other churches. A few years ago we created a position on our staff called church planter in residence and I think it’s one of the best staffing decisions we’ve ever made.
We get a motivated staff member for 1-2 years. And they function like a utility player in baseball. They have their hands in everything! And then we send them out to plant a church and we continue paying them a stipend. Here is what is so healthy about that: we’re always in the process of planting churches!
Now here is the challenge we face: we’ve got dozens of church planters who would love to come and do a CPR at NCC, but we don’t have the financial model to pull it off. I’d love to have a dozen church planters on staff all the time! But we have to figure out how to make that work financially. We’ll keep working on it, but I want to challenge emerging churches to consider adding a church planter in residence position to their staff! So many church planters are looking for a place to get their feet wet. They want to plant, but they need to be in a church system for a couple years!
Imagine a thousand churches with a thousand church planters in residence!”
