Caleb Otto. What is the most important character quality for church planters to cultivate? Yeah, great question. Great way to open up here. So I'll say there's a couple of things that come to mind. The first thing is humility. And the reason I say humility is that it's really, really hard work in doing church planting. And you often feel foolish, don't like what you see. And I think we have to recognize that as church planters, that's on us. And we're going to make a lot of mistakes, so many mistakes along the way.
And to not have that be something where it turns into blaming other people or what's wrong with them, but to truly have that spirit of," Father, what am I doing wrong in here? And how can I learn and grow and be sanctified through this?" I would say that's number one. Number two, I would say, is a deep love for people. And one of the things that I like to say about church planting is that there's actually no direct command in the New Testament to church plan.
It's really supposed to be the outflow, the overflow of disciple-making. And it's easy sometimes when we think about church planting, that sounds very, very exciting and very grand. But to let that be something that overshadows really the primary goal, which is evangelizing and saving people. And really, churches that are the most successful at their best are discipling people well. And so a deep love of people is something that not everybody has.
And a lot of people are in love with the idea of something, the thought of something, as opposed to the people itself. I'll share with you a quote that is one of my favorite quotes from Spurgeon who says this.
He says," If there existed only one man or woman who did not love the Savior, and if that person lived among the wilds of Siberia, and if it were necessary that all the millions of believers on the face of the earth should journey there, and every one of them plead with him to come to Jesus before he could be converted. It would well be worth all the zeal, labor, and expense.
If we had to preach to thousands year after year and never rescued but one soul, that one soul would be full reward for all our labor for our soul is of a countless price. And we want to just keep that love of people preeminent in our efforts here. And then the third, I would say, I'm sort of doing this in rank order, is a love of learning and a love of the truth.
It's something that I believe that no matter where you start in this journey, you're going to need to push higher and deeper in that by learning from one another, reading books, coming to conferences, forums, different events where you can grow and be taught. And I've been at this now for many years. I'm the son of a church planter. My father is a church planter in India. And I still feel like I'm learning so much. I still feel like I'm on the steep part of the learning curve, frankly.
And I often feel like, okay, if I had one more year, I'd get there. And then the next year, I need another year, another year. And I think I've decided that I'm in my mid-40s now. I think I've decided that when I'm 50, I'll feel like semi-competent. But I'm personally not yet happy with my own standing there on that. So I've still got a lot of reading and studying and learning to do myself in all this. So everything I share on here is going to be still part of my own journey on that steep part of the incline curve.
And when you get to 50, that humility might kick back in and start that cycle all over again. I really like that. It is a bit of a self-feeding cycle of beginning with humility and now that grows the love for people and other human beings and what God would have us to do and also the desire to learn and to grow, which then makes us realize how much we need to learn, which humbles us and kind of creates a cycle there. Exactly.
I really appreciate that kind of an internal state to what drives church planting versus church planting being the first goal. Now we have some questions about some practical elements of church building, church planting, going into new places or starting where you're at. I don't know if practical is the right word, but at least questions that are on many people's minds is, what do we need to start? So Alex T has a question here.
Do we have some guidelines on what initial numbers can look like for a church plant to be viable? Yeah, so here I would say that the number that I would recommend is just follows the New Testament guidelines, which is a bare minimum, but I would say it's two, two solid families or it can be two singles potentially. Two is a really good number there. When we think about Paul and Barnabas, Paul and Silas, we have pretty clear examples of that Jesus sending out his disciples two by two.
The one piece I'll put in there is that two is a bare minimum. And it seems like from what we know about Paul's entourage, there were often others accompanying them. So sometimes there would be Titus or Tychicus or other characters in his company that aren't always mentioned. And so it may well be the case that there were two prominent people and some others that played more of a supportive role. So I would say two is a bare minimum.
Normally when we start in new churches, we're in the middle of doing a couple right now. We actually recommend three just so that there's a little bit of cushion there because someone is sick or it can feel a little bit more like there's critical mass. We started followers of the way here in Boston with three families and I thought that worked really well to have three there. It also helps to break a tie, so to speak, if there's a disagreement there. So I would aim for that.
And we'll talk in later questions, I think, about the types of people that they should be, those two to three singles or families.
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