For churches & leaders
Plant a whole
congregation.
Everything taught here works one person at a time. It also works from a pulpit — on one Sunday, in five weeks, across a whole year. Your people are already faithful. This gives them language for the thing they have been carrying quietly.
The annual event
Planting Sunday
One Sunday a year when a congregation stops asking what it ought to do next and finds out what it is already carrying.
It is not a campaign kickoff and it is not a pledge drive. It is a declaration, a diagnostic, and a table — inside one service.
Preached from the pulpit
Matthew 25 with the napkin in it. The third servant did not disappear, did not walk away, and did not lose a dime — and still heard what he heard. Then the sentence the room came for: what God planted in you will not die in you. Nobody is scolded. Something gets named.
Taken in the pews
Ushers hand out the Napkin Test on paper. Seven checks on one gift, four minutes, pencils in hand, everybody at once. Nobody shares a score and nobody stands up. The answers stay on the page, in the hand that wrote them — and every page ends with one step that has to happen inside seventy-two hours.
Groves formed on the spot
Before anyone leaves the room, fours. Four people who will meet weekly and run the same four moves — Report, Reflect, Recommit, Rejoice. Cards go in the seat backs, names go on the cards, and the first meeting is on the calendar before the benediction. Nothing survives the parking lot that did not get a date in the sanctuary.
Planted by the rivers of water — and the leaf does not wither, because of where it is standing.
The five weeks after
One bridge a week.
Planting Sunday names the condition. The five weeks that follow are the crossing — one bridge per Sunday, with the small groups meeting on the same bridge midweek. Pulpit and table say the same thing for thirty-five days straight, and people move.
- Week 1
The Portrait
Romans 8:15The hard master → The true Father
What you believe about the Master decides what you do with the deposit. A hard master produces a hidden gift; a good Master produces a trading servant. The wound from earthly masters was real. The transfer of that wound onto God is the error.
What the group does that weekWrite the portrait you actually operate from — then find where you got it.
- Week 2
The Napkin
1 John 4:18Fear unnamed → Fear named and unwrapped
The servant did not store the gift. He wrapped it in a burial cloth. Naming what is around your gift is the first cut; the seven checks tell you where the cloth is.
What the group does that weekThe Napkin Test, then one corner off within seventy-two hours.
- Week 3
The Scorecard
Matthew 25:21“Nothing lost” → Faithful increase
The third servant thought he passed. He returned the deposit intact and called it stewardship. There are two scorecards in this parable, and only one of them the Master is keeping.
What the group does that weekTrade the preservation metric for a tending metric you can log weekly.
- Week 4
The Table
Psalm 1Comparison and isolation → The Grove
The five-talent servant and the two-talent servant heard the identical commendation — word for word, not one syllable of difference. Comparison is a shovel. Company is a condition of growth.
What the group does that weekGet into a Grove: four people, weekly, Report — Reflect — Recommit — Rejoice.
- Week 5
The Trade
Matthew 25:27Frozen → One small venture on the Master's capital
Even the fearful servant had an option he never took — the bankers. The smallest legitimate move was available the whole time. It is still available.
What the group does that weekOne micro-deployment, small enough to finish inside seven days.
Week six is not a sixth sermon. It is the first Grove meeting with no series holding it up — which is the week you find out whether the season took. The leader’s guide says so out loud, tells you what usually wobbles, and gives you the two sentences that steady it.
What a church gets
The church license
One license, one year, everything the season needs. Priced so a two-hundred-member congregation and a two-thousand-member congregation can both say yes without a board meeting about it.
The sermon series
Five weeks, one bridge a week. Full manuscripts, the exegesis behind each text, illustration banks, and the germination science with its citations — so a pastor can preach it in his own voice without starting from a blank page.
The small-group curriculum
Five sessions matched to the pulpit weeks, written for a leader who is not a teacher. Discussion questions, the Grove liturgy — Report, Reflect, Recommit, Rejoice — and a leader’s guide that tells you what usually happens in week three.
Workbook licenses
Print-ready Napkin Test workbooks for the whole congregation, licensed by size. Reprint them as long as the license is current. No per-copy counting, no royalty math on a Saturday night.
The Harvest Festival liturgy
The order of service for the December Sunday that closes the season: the reading, the sheaves brought forward, the seed-saving charge, and the handing of one seed to somebody who does not have one yet. It ends in a feast, not a report.
The range is congregation size, and nothing else. Everything above is included at every tier — the small church does not get the thin version. Renewals carry the next year’s revisions, and a church that has run the season once keeps its workbook rights while the license is current.
How this spreads
The diocese track
Nothing goes wide before it has grown somewhere. One church first, then a district, then a denomination — in that order, on purpose, with a full year in each stage.
The pilot
One church, one yearOne congregation runs the whole season — Planting Sunday, the five weeks, Groves through the year, the Harvest Festival in December. We stay close to it. What comes up gets counted, and what does not work gets fixed before anybody else touches it.
The diocese
A district or regionThe pilot pastor becomes the one who tells the truth about it to his peers. A diocese adopts the season together, with a shared Planting Sunday date, a joint clergy Grove, and one regional Harvest Festival at the end of the year.
The denomination
The long seasonA denominational calendar adoption: Planting Sunday as an annual observance, the workbook licensed at the national level, and certified Vinedressers seeded through every district so no congregation is running it alone.
A denomination cannot adopt a season no pastor has lived through. So we start with one, and we let the field do the arguing.
Opening 2028
Vinedresser Certification
Somebody has to dig around it and put on manure. Luke 13:8 gives that person a name, and this is the training that makes more of them.
A Vinedresser is the one who tends a Grove — a pastor, an elder, a ministry leader, a mature member who has run a season of their own and can now sit with four people a month without rushing them.
The training covers the whole spine: the portrait behind a hidden gift, how to run the seven checks with somebody across the table, how to name a mid-season quit-point before it arrives, and the one skill that matters most — how to sit with a person who has not moved yet and not shame them.
Certificates are conferred at the Harvest Festival, in front of the congregation, in the same service where the sheaves come forward. Nobody gets certified in an inbox.
- Who it is forPastors and mature leaders who have already run one season themselves
- What it trainsRunning a Grove, tending one person, keeping the year honest
- How it is conferredIn person, at the Harvest Festival, in front of the church
- When it opens2028 — after two full cohorts have finished a year
Ask for it in the packet request below and your name goes on the 2028 list.
The next move
Request the pilot packet.
The packet is the whole season on paper: the Planting Sunday order of service, the five-week outline, a sample Napkin Test workbook, the license tiers with your congregation’s number already in them, and the December Harvest Festival liturgy. No call required to read it.