The Multiply Project Podcast
Sent from the Seats: Get Ready While You're Not Ready
The planters you're looking for are already in your church. The Church Planter Scouting Guide shows you how to spot the one: https://multiplyproject.org/church-planter-scouting-guide/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=s02e11_vogel Nobody is ever ready. Aaron Vogel waited 24 years from the day God first put a church on his heart to the day he actually planted one — and he'd tell you that's not a failure of timing. It's the whole point. Aaron is the lead pastor of Grace Church in New Orleans, a church he planted in September 2025 at age 43 — in the city where five generations of his family have lived, within five miles of where he sits today. But before the pulpit came the marketplace: bivocational restaurant server, then general manager of a $1.2 million operation, then co-founder of District, a New Orleans restaurant group that opened a new location nearly every year until 2020. He knows what it costs to build something. He also knows what it costs to lose one — his group poured over half a million dollars into an upscale vegan restaurant two months before the pandemic and lost nearly a million before closing it. Here's what makes this conversation land for any pastor who thinks the clock has run out: Aaron isn't a 26-year-old with a great voice and a launch team. He's a 44-year-old who spent two decades getting ready while he wasn't ready — and arrived a better planter for it. Craig names the stereotype directly: church planter as young, gifted, thirty. Aaron dismantles it with wisdom you only get from failure, hurricanes, and 17-hour days. And then he does something most pastors never do — he tells you exactly how he scouts. Aaron walks into a room looking for potential, not readiness. The kid who couldn't carry plates without soaking the floor became a general manager in five years, because Aaron saw something and gave it time. Now he's running the same play at Grace: give a guy the microphone to host on Sunday, let him bomb, watch who leans in. "I don't think he's that guy — but he could be the one right beneath that guy." That's the lens. That's the work. This is an episode about the long game — for the marketplace leader wondering if it's too late, and for the pastor who's stopped seeing the potential already sitting in his own rows. Start with one. Grab the Church Planter Scouting Guide — it shows you how to spot the planter already in your church. Name and email, and it's yours: https://multiplyproject.org/church-planter-scouting-guide/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=s02e11_vogel Not sure your church is ready to multiply yet? Take ten minutes and find out the honest truth with the Readiness Assessment: https://multiplyproject.org/readiness-assessment/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=s02e11_vogel Know a marketplace leader who thinks he's missed his window? Send him this episode before the day ends. Stop looking somewhere else. Become the church that sends. Church planting · church multiplication · bivocational ministry · marketplace to ministry · New Orleans church plant · disciple-making · sending churches
