A quarter of a million dollars sounds like a whole lot of money to me. But that's the amount an expert in the field of church planting said I should have in the bank before attempting to plant Grace Hills Church.

With that much money, it's possible to rent an awesome facility, purchase quality equipment and blitz a community with enough advertising to gather hundreds for a big launch. It's the American church-planting way ... and it has the potential to shipwreck us.

We've never had a quarter of a million in the bank. In fact, we've never had even one-fifth of that. So spending $10,000 on a media and direct mail blitz has never been an option for us, and chances are, it hasn't been an option for the typical leader reading this article either. If you're there and you have those kind of resources, great! Go all out for God's glory. For the rest of us, hope isn't lost. It's just found in different tactics.

We made a decision when we started planting that we wanted to be highly relational from the start. While there's nothing wrong, and very much right, with reaching masses of people at once with the gospel, we knew that what would work better for us was starting with a few families and praying for the good news to go viral. So we spent a couple hundred bucks on Facebook advertising.

At our first public information meeting, we met about 30 new people with whom we had connected on Facebook. When six months had gone by, we had a core of about 75, who took on the work of spreading the word of our launch and 176 showed up for that grand opening service in our local movie theater. Fifty of them were friends and supporters who were back at their home churches the next week, and we've grown steadily since that day, a few people and a few families at a time.

The reality for most of us is that we don't have the luxury of doing it the easy, expensive way. Instead, we must pinch our pennies, live by a budget and hack our way forward. Here's the good news: When we are disciplined enough to try to do great things within a humble budget, our faith grows leaps and bounds as we watch the God of the universe come through time after time, providing for us in the moments when we've honestly begun to wonder if we're going to make it.

So, in the seasons when you aren't as loaded as everyone thinks you must be, how do you plant and pastor a church with modest resources? Here's my take:

Redefine Excellence

The typical American church leader wrongly defines excellence in ministry as being comparable to the biggest church in the region—the one with the multi-million dollar budget and the building that resembles Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. But excellence shouldn't be defined by comparison to other ministries. Rather, the pursuit of excellence is a matter of doing our absolute best with whatever God has chosen to provide us, and that often involves us intentionally getting creative.

Even from the dream phase of Grace Hills, we've held onto a value that I learned while serving as a pastor at Saddleback Church in southern California, one of the nation's largest churches. Pastor Rick Warren often reminds the staff that "excellence is not a core value here." That doesn't mean we don't pursue excellence, but we refuse to wait for it. With an entrepreneurial spirit, we launch things before we're "ready." As Solomon once observed, "He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap" (Eccl. 11:4).

Learn Something From Everyone

Vance Havner talked once about the man who wanted to be "original or nothing, and wound up being both." In our small start as a church plant, we've learned from everybody we can. If someone is reaching their community with the gospel well, I want to know about it and seek out any transferable principles. That doesn't mean we copy everything we see or kill ourselves trying to adopt every latest fad. It simply means that we don't have time to make all the mistakes ourselves, so we're open to studying what works in other places.

In 2011, we started what we call "We Love NWA" (locals refer to our area as NWA or Northwest Arkansas rather than the name of any one city). It started as a big Sunday on which we would cancel our corporate worship service and send teams into the community to serve various nonprofits and residents in a variety of ways. We did it twice and now we use "We Love NWA" to collectively refer to all the things we do outside the walls of our church to serve the community. We didn't come up with that. You may have seen the idea in action already. We just decided to do it because 1) it reflects our own core values, and 2) it works.

I keep a long list of church websites bookmarked so that I can look around at what other leaders are doing. I have a shelf full of books by leaders who changed the game in their churches and communities. And I feel no shame at all in not being the originator of any particularly great ideas. I'm content to borrow from the wisdom of others so that more disciples may be made.

Love and Value Volunteers

I use the word "volunteer" loosely. We really just value disciples who serve others within the context of the church body. One approach to church planting involves calling upon a core group of people to relocate to a particular field, or borrowing leaders from other local churches to help get things going. While there can be advantages to these approaches, we chose to do neither but rather to "parachute drop" into our community and start entirely from scratch. The laborers for the harvest would come from the harvest. When we held our launch service, the paid staff consisted of me and our worship pastor, Neil Greenhaw, and both of us had supplemental income from other sources.   

That means the effort of going from launch team to thriving new church was successful because of the investment of time, talent and treasure of people who were coming to know Jesus for the first time, or coming back to Jesus again at Grace Hills. Our volunteer-to-member ratio still amazes me. We'll always need more help—that's the plight of every church staff—but we're incredibly thankful that God keeps raising up those who want to serve out of gratitude for God's grace and love for what God is doing.

Todd West, a friend of mine who planted Oasis Church in North Little Rock, Arkansas, says rather than handing out positions, we need to challenge people to take on a project. When they prove faithful, we offer them another project. After they've shown a heart for serving, an official position may be the next step. When you're doing ministry on a budget, you can't hire all the work done. You must ask God for help and love and lead people into a discovery of their God-assigned role in the body. Then you must celebrate them, congratulate them and express gratitude for them.

Develop a Hacking Mentality

Hackers amaze me. On limited resources with laptops in basements around the world, they learn to exploit security measures that took millions of dollars to build. While I certainly don't condone illegal activity, I do think there's a parallel for church planters and pastors with smaller budgets. Figure out ways to do things that look expensive in inexpensive ways.

We would love to have videos produced for use in worship and promotional materials that are filmed on premium equipment by trained videographers and edited with expensive software by a genius with a room full of Mac Pros. But we're OK buying stock footage, effects and graphics and fusing them together with video shot on a smartphone using iMovie.

We'd love to pay a creative firm tens of thousands of dollars for the ideal, unique website, but for now we're sold on the benefits of using Wordpress, which is open source and free, with a slightly modified premium website theme.

It's too easy to say, "We can't afford it, so why even try?" but leaders whose churches thrive say, "We can't afford it, so let's figure out a way to do it for free."

Spread the Word the Old-Fashioned Way With Social Media

I know what you're thinking. Social media? Old-fashioned? Absolutely. Social media isn't new. Twitter is new. Facebook is new (in dog years at least). But the concept of sharing information socially dates back to the Garden of Eden. God talked with Adam and Eve. He used Moses to motivate the Israelites to pursue freedom from slavery. He sent prophets to speak face-to-face with Israel's leaders. The New Testament is partially the story of 12 guys training a volunteer army of early missionaries to travel the Roman roads to every city in the empire carrying the gospel along the way.

When God wants a movement, He uses people. We want outreach to happen the easy way. We love technologies such as television and radio because they allow us to communicate to masses of people quickly. The problem is, many of the technologies we have rightly chosen to use for evangelism are also impersonal, and in the age in which we live, personal is everything.

Earlier this year we launched a series of messages called Healing. To promote it, we shot a few videos with a smartphone, edited them with inexpensive software and then put them out on our Facebook page. We asked our members to share them and we sponsored some advertising using them. On the first Sunday of that series, we met 70 new people (out of an attendance of 240).

We've used Facebook and Twitter heavily for three years now. We've never done a direct mail campaign or paid for advertising in local newspapers or television stations. We're not in the Yellow Pages because we don't have any landline phones. Yet we have had first-time visitors every single Sunday for three years now, and about 80 percent of them indicate that they heard about us through Facebook. Another 10 percent found us on the web and the rest came because of a personal invitation. That 80 percent actually came for relational reasons. They only discover us on Facebook if their friends like us, share our content and post about us publicly.

A small budget is never an excuse for a lack of effectiveness. We have the truth of God's Word. We have the power of God's Spirit. We have a volunteer army of amazing volunteers. When we add in a passionate conviction about the Great Commission, there's nothing we can't accomplish for God's glory and for the spread of the gospel, even while we're pinching our pennies.  

Brandon Cox is the lead pastor of Grace Hills Church in Northwest Arkansas, which he and his wife, Angie, planted in 2011. He also serves as editor and community facilitator for pastors.com and Rick Warren's Ministry Toolbox. He's been a pastor at Saddleback Church as well as small community churches. His book, Rewired, was published by Passio in 2013 and guides church leaders in using social media to spread the gospel.

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