This week I begin a semester-long training course for church planters. I always look forward to it. One of the first things that the participants experience is that I quickly tell them that our work is not about church planting.
Now, I recognize this is a strange statement for a church planting professor to make, especially one who has written books and articles on this topic. So, let me explain.
No Command
There is no command in the Bible to go into all the world and plant churches. The Church is never told to plant churches until the end of the age or search out all people groups and plant churches among them.
It seems everywhere we turn today, both churches and mission agencies in North America and outside this continent, are training and sending missionaries to plant multiplying churches across the globe. Over the past twenty years in North America and Europe, numerous books and articles have been published addressing this topic. Conferences and practical resources are being provided every year to potential church planters. More and more seminaries are offering courses and emphases in church planting.
Then why is there so much talk about church planting if there is no scriptural mandate?
Missionary Endeavor
Our Lord is very clear about the Great Commission. The Church is to make disciples of all nations (literally, “peoples,” not nation-states). The best way to fulfill this mandate of evangelizing, baptizing, and teaching obedience is through the planting of contextualized churches among the various people groups and population segments of the world. For it is in the process of evangelizing, baptizing, and teaching that local churches are planted. Church planting is a missionary endeavor. Our Lord gave the Great Commission before his ascension; and it was the apostolic Church that later followed in obedience, setting the example of church planting for others to follow.
Start in the Fields, not the Barns
Biblical church planting is evangelism that results in new churches. But, churches can be planted with little to no evangelism being done.
For example, if our annual goal is to plant 12 churches, then all we need to do is gather some long-term Kingdom citizens together into twelve groups, lead them to covenant together as 12 local churches, and we have accomplished our goal. And if we do this, people will sing our praises and invite us to speak about church planting, telling them how they can plant 12 churches in a year. And no one will ask us about making disciples.
But it’s not about church planting. We are called to make disciples—and the first step in making disciples is doing evangelism. For it is out of a disciple making movement that churches are birthed (e.g., Acts 13-14).
Unfortunately, most church planters in North America are more involved in gathering together long-term Kingdom citizens than doing evangelism that results in new churches.
Try This
Let me give you a little exercise. The next time you hear about churches being planted, I want to encourage you to be radically biblical and simply ask, “How many people recently came into the Kingdom of God before these newly planted church came into existence?” If you are talking with church planters in North America, do not be surprised to find out that the answer is generally few to none. Rather, than finding a church planter who saw a church birthed out of the harvest field, you are more likely to find a church planted by the shuffling of the saints around in the Body of Christ.
Today, we plant the church first, and then (hopefully) lead the church to do evangelism.
If our goal is to plant a church, then our goal has been accomplished. Let’s have a party and celebrate.
But it’s not about planting churches.
The Coolness Factor
But planting churches is cool! It is cool to quickly start a worship gathering with high quality music and preaching. It is cool to quickly develop church programs for kids, families, outreach, missions, etc. It is cool to be able to write to our partners in the ministry and show them “tangible” things that prove we have been at work—making good use of the resources they have sacrificed for our labors, and hoping such partnerships will continue.
But it’s not about planting churches.
Our mandate is about evangelism, baptisms, and teaching those new believers how to be the local church in their context. It is about teaching those new believers how to gather for worship. It is about teaching those new believers how to preach, how to pastor, how to lead children, families. It is about teaching those new believers how to do missions. There is not much that others can see, feel, and hear in the early days of a church recently birthed from the harvest. . .
. . . not much other than a group of new Kingdom Citizens, agreeing to learn and live by this new Kingdom Ethic in covenant community. And this is messy, oftentimes slow, gives us little to report to those back home, and is definitely not cool.
Planting churches is cool. . . making disciples from out of the harvest that will become local churches is not.
But it’s not about planting churches, is it?
Great post. Good reminder. Thanks.
This would be very relevant reading for American Christians who wonder why church planting goes so much faster in the U.S. than for the missionaries whom they support (who are working in a majority Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu, etc. area). Are the missionaries incompetent failures? Probably not. The answer is that when you’re church planting in a non-culturally Christian culture, there are far fewer sheep to shuffle around to form new churches.
Something I have been looking at for the last several years is the gifting of the church planters we commission here. We keep sending pastors and teachers who do what they are gifted to do – gather students and sheep! We need to find apostles and evangelists to commission as church planters so they can do what God gifted them to do. Then we might see evangelism that results in new churches!
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Hey JD,
Great word here – very sobering. I would be curious if in a later article you might unpack the various strategies for evangelizing people who are already “churched” but aren’t really saved. I’m obviously thinking primarily about the Bible-belt. I guess I’m wondering if you think church planting can (or should) actually be an evangelistic tool. In other words, is it wrong for a group to covenant together to be a church so that they can work to reach a community that’s just coasting out their pseudo-Christianity at the popular country clubs that are passing for churches?
Thanks again for the article. God bless.
Thanks for the encouragement and the suggestion!
Yes! I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and figured I wasn’t the only person trying to turn church planting on its head. This is very confirming and encouraging. Churches grow out of disciple-making, not the other way around.