Book excerpt: Church planting has become a cottage industry. National conferences, hip planting organizations, and all-in-one resource kits celebrate the thrill of pioneering a church and inspire visions of glorious victories. Yet few who respond to the call are warned what they'll actually encounter: the relentless opposition they'll endure; the eventual scattering of their entire core group; the failure of their tried-and-true, field-tested system. Here's the dirty little secret of church planting: the roadside is strewn with casualties. Many have closed their churches. Some left ministry permanently. Others abandoned the faith altogether. Church planting is at once the greatest and most grueling ministry work on earth. This book is for those toiling in the trenches, those about to bail out, and those considering jumping in. It's for the church planters laboring and struggling, seeing little movement, and wondering what they're doing wrong or why God is failing them. It's also for mother churches, planting organizations, and denominations, as a challenge to rethink and re-calibrate the way they approach and measure planting endeavors. The Honest Guide to Church Planting is a fresh and candid conversation about the challenges and joys of planting new churches. Tom Bennardo speaks the truth so that those involved in church planting can embrace a more accurate and realistic picture of what planting a church is really like; one that not only enables them to survive, but to thrive in this wondrous work.