Church Planting

Continued -

He then discusses two ways for churches to plant - Natural and un-natural (two varieties). I will just include the natural means and some key points made about the mindset that may "ring some bells" in your head:

Natural Church Planting. A mindset just like in the book of Acts. That means that church leaders will think of church planting as just one of the things we do along with the rest-we do teaching, evangelism, discipling, worship and music, education, and church planting! Church planting should not be like building a building-one big traumatic hiccup and we are glad that's over with. Rather it is to have the mind set of Paul, who always did a) evangelism, b) discipleship, and c) church planting.

This mind-set can be broken down into two extremely important sub-strata. If you can't muster these, you can't have a natural church planting mindset. First, the ability to give away and to lose control of money, members, and leaders. Hate to use a cliche, but its true-Paul "empowered" these new leaders. He gave them ownership, and thus he lost a lot of control. This is a huge barrier for churches. They cannot bear thought of money-giving families being lost, or key leaders, or just friends. Ministers are also afraid of giving away glory. If your ministry adds people, you: 1) assimilate them into your church, 2) turn them into Bible studies under your church, 3) spin them into new 'ministries' in your church, it swells your numbers, and you get both control and glory. If you organize them into churches, you are losing money, members, numbers, leaders, and control. But that is just what Paul did. An additional problem-that when you let go, you lose direct control, but you can't really avoid responsibility for problems. It is like being the parent of an adult child. You are not allowed to directly tell them what to do, but if there's a problem, you are expected to help clean it up. Example: I know of an evangelical congregational church in our area which existed in a small, historic building. They had filled 100 seats twice to max for 4 years in a row. They resisted church planting, fearing loss of money and people. Finally they sent 50 out to a new town to form a new church. Just two years later there were 350 coming to the daughter church. Meanwhile, the mother church filled its seats in about 3 weeks. Now theyare kicking themselves-by now they could have planted 3 churches with nearly 1,000 people in the church-family, able to do missions, youth ministry, and many other things together. They realize that they needed to make the transition from church-planting as hiccup to a church planting mindset.

I am currently reading a paper by Dr. Tim Keller, Senior Pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC. He does a great job of defining from Scripture why the local church should be about multiplying itself. The full article is available from the link on the next page. I will try to highlight a few key points and include some quotes:

Two features are noted about the NT ministry that are key, particularly in Acts - Church multiplying (Acts 14) and Gospel centered (Acts 15). Dr. Keller later goes on to illustrate that two basic launching models were used to start churches in Acts, 1) using pioneer individuals or 2) using church planting churches. In both cases, there was a connection to a living, healthy church. He goes on to show how most people miss the church planting dimension in Acts since it takes place "normally", "naturally" and "constantly". It was not a sudden, traumatic or episodic happening. He shows that it was more normal than church building programs today.

But some would argue that this view of Acts is not correct:

There is a very common objection to reading the book of Acts that way. It goes like this: "That was then! Now, at least in N.America and Europe, we have churches all over the place. We don't need to start new churches, we should strengthen and fill the existing churches before we do that." Here are some answers:

New churches are by far the best way to reach 1) new generations, 2) new residents, and 3) new people groups. Studies show that newer churches attract new groups about 6-10 times better and faster than older churches do. It is because when a church is new, younger and newer people can get in to its leadership faster. It is because when a church is new, it has no tradition and can experiment. It is because when a church is new, its main goal each week is not to satisfy the desires of the long-time members (there are none!) but to reach new people. As a result new churches are enormously better at reaching new people in a city.