I am a planter of simple churches who also pastors a conventional church. “How does that work?”, you ask. Check out this quote from Steve Smith in the book T4T: A Discipleship Re-revolution:
Giving groups the freedom, even the empowerment, to become new churches takes the limit off the budding movement. You could view yourself as the pastor of a large church. If you are a pastor, how much better to view yourself as a pastor of pastors and your church as a training base for a movement! Take the shackles off. This is what we mean by the counter-intuitive ways of the kingdom!
This accurately describes what we’ve been attempting to do. I love that the Holy Spirit can speak to lots of people at once! Our job is to make disciples. It’s everything. So we could be described as a D-church (“D” for discipleship). In order for our members to make disciples we must equip them and release them from tending shop here so they can get out where wanderers live and hang out. They must be “unshackled.” So, I guess you could say that we are D-church Unshackled!