73: Episode 73 – Tim Milner on Church Planting, Reaching Your Community, and Faithful Prayer

On this week’s episode of The Church Leadership Podcast, Mark and Andy had the privilege to talk with Tim Milner. Tim serves as the Lead Pastor of Essential Church in Huntsville, AL. As you listen, you will quickly figure out that Tim has a big heart for reaching the Rocket City, for church planting, and for helping church planters. Tim’s story of moving to San Francisco to join in a church plant, and then being called back to his hometown to plant Essential Church is pretty amazing. If you want to be inspired to love your city better, be challenged in your faith, and simply be reminded that prayer and fasting matter, then this is just the episode you need to hear.

Make sure you hang around to the end of this week’s episode! We will be announcing the winner of our “Bribe to Subscribe Contest.”

Snippets from our conversation with Tim:

“I’m going into that closet, and I’m not coming out until God tells us what to do.”

“Purely on the grounds of logic, I said ‘No.’ Because I’m already planting churches in San Francisco. Huntsville’s got a lot of great churches.”

“So, I took that journal and I hid it behind a bookshelf, because I felt like I was cheating on my current ministry.”

“At that point in my life, I had only preached five sermons, and even my mom told me they were horrible.”

“My understanding is a court would actually rule that a justifiable homicide.”

“I turned to my secret weapon in ministry, and I committed that I was going to pray and I was going to fast about this fifty-five thousand dollar deficit.”

“The thing that we realized is that the mission field is now also the Bible Belt.”

“Deciding twenty years from now that we need churches is gonna be too late. We gotta start planting them today!”

“The first thing I would say for anyone who feels like God could maybe, possibly be urging them to do something, I would just ask them two questions. If not you, then who? And if not now, then when?”

“If something’s important to me, I’m gonna pray about that thing two or three times a day. But if I’m fasting, particularly from food, then I’m gonna use that hunger pain as a prompting to pray. And I’m hungry all the time!”

“If you and your spouse are not both called, then neither of you are called. Because the right thing at the wrong time is always the wrong thing.”