A few years ago we created a position on our staff called church planter in residence. It is so healthy for our church culture because we’re always in the process of raising up a potential church planter. We’ve also discovered that it is a great farm system for potential campus pastors as well.

As we think about staff strategy for 2008, we’re hoping to bring another CPR on board in early ’08 and we’re taking applications.

The CPR is like a utility player in baseball. They play lots of positions because that is the nature of church planting. We try to get them some experience playing the role of campus pastor and ideally they help with the launch of a location. It is typically a one or two year commitment. And I’ll say upfront that it doesn’t pay much money! We actually expect the CPR to raise some budget to come on staff as a church planting litmus test. And we fund it out of our missions budget. But then we continue to support the CPR after they leave NCC to plant a church.

We’ve got quite a few applicants already and only one spot for ’08, but if you’d like to apply for the CPR position you can email a resume to Joel Schmidgall at Joel@theaterchurch.com.