mwallette,

I wholeheartedly agree that a church plant, even a failed one, can help very many people. I’m glad it’s spuring you on to consider it further.

My statements had nothing to do with the avoidance of pain, or that pain itself is a reason to not be involved in a church plant. If you read them that way, then I’m afraid the communication got jumbled up somewhere. I meant, quite simply, two things:

1) We do have a responsibility to our fellow human beings to do our best to do things well. While we never can guarantee everything, we should look very hard at what we are doing in a church plant (or other endeavor), and how that affects others. I for one do not want to be the cause of pain to someone else because I was careless about what I was doing (I am not implying that you are careless!) I was also not asserting that closing down a church must be painful or leave long term scars, but only than it can be, and sometimes certainly is. Learning from this "pain" is indeed something that I wholly agree with you on, but I think that part of the learning should be a self-assessment, certainly of those responsible for the church plant. 

2) Failure at planting a church is just that, a failure. Name it. Own it. Call it what it is. Learn from it and see if you want to try again. Take the good that you can, certainly. But if at the end of the day you were trying to get a church off the ground and running and it doesn’t work, that’s failure at that task. Encouraging and blessing people was part of that total task, and maybe that part has gone well. But the organizational/structural reality is that if the plant closes, the church as a community entity is over. It’s not the end of the world, but it is something to look hard at (that’s also a slow road of learning: growth through failure).

In my mind this it is in the matrix of gifting/calling/community that
we begin to see what our role in a church plant can be. Sounds like that’s happened wonderfully for you: I’m very glad for it!  But I do not want to divorces calling from ability, but weigh calling with ability and experience, to help understand and prepare wisely.  Part of that is learning to judge the difference between calling and excitement (or even pressure/expectation), but that is a very different discussion indeed.

Like I said, I’m glad that things crumbling once hasn’t deterred you, and I’m glad that it helped others.