Jon is a church planting candidate who has attended one of the Baptist seminaries in the southern part of the United States. He has studied church planting in class; he has heard teachers and guest speakers talk about their experiences and espouse certain strategies for planting new churches. He has been exposed to church plants in the community nearby and has even interviewed some of the planters to learn what has worked and what has not. As he examines the theory and the practice of these church leaders, he wonders whether he knows enough to determine if church planting is for him. Jon is not alone today. The interest in church planting is immense. Books and magazine articles are being written about the topic all the time; conferences and training workshops are too many to number. Even in academic circles, where it once was considered by students as a last resort, church planting has taken on a high profile opportunity. It draws a lot of attention these days, for a variety of reasons. Some are attracted to the pioneer spirit necessary to start something new. Others respond to the absence of tradition and the way things have been. Headline-making planters across the country keep the profile and impact of church planting front and center in the ministry stories we hear. Some are using amazingly creative ways to engage a Biblically-illiterate society with the relevance of the eternal Gospel. That 's what this book is about. It is an attempt to capture on paper for Jon the heart and imagination of some of the best church planters in the world, those who have served here in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States with our Baptist denomination over the past few years. These men and women have shared their stories and helped us all learn how to plant churches more effectively than before. In the world of church planting there is a common line of thought, suggesting that these three things must be aligned if the ministry is to be effective: right planter, right place and right plan. If this line of thought is accurate, you will have to do the hard work of deciphering God 's call upon your life and the way he has shaped you for ministry to determine whether or not church planting is really for you. If it is what God has intended for you to pursue, then and only then, do the right place and right plan become critical to success. Such contextualization is necessary for us to engage and transform the culture where planters are embedded. And it is this kind of contextual understanding that is critical for taking the theory of a textbook and hammering it out on the anvil of reality in field experience.