The unseen side of leading a church plant

‘The harvest is plentiful but workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’

Matthew 9:38

In September 2024, we planted a church. It began small with an amazing team and a lot of prayer. We had been praying every week for a year before we launched and meeting as a leadership team each month to plan and prepare. Then finally launch day arrived and we haven’t stopped since. Orchard Grove is a new housing development between Taunton and Wellington in Somerset. Once completed, the development will have 2000 homes but as it stands there are between 350 and 400 finished and occupied plots. Orchard Grove Church seeks to be a Christian community at the heart of a thriving local community. We do life on the development, in and out of each others’ homes, up and down the main road for the school run, and out and about with our coffee bike. 

Planting is on the Church of England’s agenda. Over the last decade we have had church planting bishops, church planting strategies, and specific church planting funding. The CofE has a 2020s target of establishing 10,000 new worshipping communities to meet its vision of a ‘mixed ecology’ church. The increased awareness of planting is in part down to the incredible work originating from HTB in London. Now under the Revitalise Trust, HTB plants continue to thrive through a resource church model in towns and cities across the nation. But planting looks very different in different contexts. And not every plant begins as a resource church. There is, dare I say, a less flashy side to church planting. There is an unseen, often unacknowledged work of establishing community that must happen for new churches to flourish. This, unseen side of planting, is what I want to share briefly here. Not to complain, or show-off, not for a pat on the back, or for a gold star; but to be realistic about the work required to successfully enact the vision of 10,000 new worshipping communities. 

So here are some of our stories.
 

Our home 

Our home is our church office, our community kitchen, our side chapel, our small group meeting room, and our toddler group hall. This means our home is often busy with people in and out throughout the day. If we want space to gather outside of our Sunday service (held in the local school), then we meet here, or up the road at Annie’s, or round the corner at Matt’s. Our homes are our access point for connection with our neighbours and as the gathered people of God during the week. The three garages we have between our team members are also essential storage for church resources in the week, including a huge coffee bike for our community midweek outreach. Keeping our house in a relatively tidy state with two small boys is not straightforward. When we hang up washing we make sure our pants are relatively discreet. When planning the food shop, we check how many evening meetings with food we have in the diary. When the boys are asleep we have perfected the quick sweep of the sitting room so that the prayer meeting can feel prayerful and not bombarded with Paw Patrol paraphernalia. Much of this is true for any clergy home, but perhaps even more so when our homes are our only midweek space for church gatherings.
 

Our time

As with all Christian ministry, our work time bleeds into our home life. The boundaries between work and home are blurry when work is at home and our home is so often the location of work. Planting takes time. Our leadership team is made up of two ordained and six lay leaders. All of our lay leaders are in their 20s and 30s and all have chosen to work less than 100%, in part to facilitate and support the church plant. My husband, as our stipendiary minister, is the only one officially working for the church. I am ordained but not paid and probably give about 15-20 hours to church work each week. Planting takes lots of time. It takes time to build relationships with the community, it takes time to plan teaching and write children’s sessions. It takes time to learn actions for our intergenerational worship and it even takes time to iron the communion sheets on a Saturday night. In an established church, lots of these things are done automatically by people who have sometimes been serving for decades (this too is often an unacknowledged ministry!). But in a church plant, initially everything has to be done by the startup team: from flower arranging to gluten free bread finding, from kids’ craft cut-outs to risk assessments. It is hard work. 
 

Our faith

Planting builds faith like nothing I have ever done before. In most contexts you apply for a job, discern throughout the application process and with the interviewers, and then receive clear confirmation. Planting isn’t quite like that. It is more like pushing a very heavy door for many months until at last it moves an inch. Once you celebrate the inch you get back to pushing the door and waiting for the next inching movement to emerge. Every plant is different, situated within different funding possibilities, ecclesial structures, priorities, and under different authorities. Our plant was well under way before we had confirmation that the minister’s post would be funded. This kind of planting tests faith. Have we heard right? Is this really where God has asked us to be? What happens if we don’t receive the funding? There were weeks when my husband and I were on job search websites trying to work out ordination’s transferable skills! Though we didn’t have clarity on how the plant was going to happen and how we were going to pay the mortgage, we did have clarity from God on where he was calling us to be. The doors into our community were flying open and we have continued to see God go ahead of us on the development. He has been at work here before we moved in. He has been at work in hearts before we got to know them.
 

So what?

Although this is one particular context, there are things, I hope, that can be applied across a wide range of church settings. Firstly, commit to community. As church leaders we are often uprooted, moved from place to place, asked to learn a new community again and again. This begins if you relocate for residential training, but can easily become a ministry norm to commit to a place for 3-5 years, rather than any longer period of time. This has an impact on our relationships. Going into a context, knowing that we will only be temporary residents, affects how we form friendships, how we root ourselves in a place, and how we minister there. If we go in prepared to be there long-term we will build deeper connections in our community and have a bigger impact.

Secondly, be vulnerable. Others have written more extensively on this elsewhere, so just to say that being vulnerable matters. When we share our lives with the people we minister alongside, we step off the proverbial pedestal and sit down in the mess of life with them. This is real. This is incarnational. This is what Jesus did. 

And finally, be willing to learn. Don’t go in with all the answers. Listen to the movements and murmurings on the ground. Listen for signs of God’s kingdom, for moves of God’s spirit, for signs of the harvest and the workers for the harvest field. In all communities we are called to be witnesses to God’s work in the world. This is an ongoing task of watchfulness, one that does not end with a three-point alliterative vision, but that continues each day as we walk, live, and learn our communities. 

So church planting is not all shiny balloons and confetti canons. For us, church planting has relied on our home, dominated our time, and challenged our faith. Church planting is the unseen 7am shift on the coffee bike, it is the conversations on the school run, it is the frantic tidying before meetings, it is the open door policy and piles of shoes in the hallway. And church planting is amazing. It is the biggest privilege of our lives and we wouldn’t change it for the world. Because when we live as God has called us to, when we commit to community we are living in the blessed place. God sees all these unseen, unglamourous moments and I hope he smiles. The harvest is ready and so here we are reporting for duty, the workers for the harvest field. 

December 2025 Lead On article by The Rev Imogen Ball. Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest based in the South-West of England.

She studied Politics at the University of Bath, a Theology Masters at Trinity College in Bristol, and has just begun a PhD. Her research interests include women's bodies in the Old Testament, trauma and birth, and Christian community. 

Her family have recently moved onto a new housing development and planted a church. She enjoys coffee, building community, and poetry.