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Achurch that is an organized organism will exhibit movement dynamics not only inside itself but also beyond itself. So it will naturally be involved in church planting. Church planting is mentioned in many places throughout the New Testament. For example, Paul refers to his work of planting and watering churches with Apollos (1 Cor 3:6 – 7). But the primary place in Scripture to learn about church planting is the book of Acts. All orthodox Christians agree that prescriptive statements of the Bible are normative for us, but the descriptive histories of the Old and New Testaments contain both good and bad examples. Are we always certain which is which? The safest approach, I suggest, is to take the church planting practices of Paul in Acts very seriously while recognizing that it does not give us a fixed rule book for church planting in all times, places, and contexts. It is best to look for general principles rather than rules or detailed practices.1
Natural Church Planting
In Acts, planting churches is not a traumatic or unnatural event. It is woven into the warp and woof of ministry, and so it happens steadily and normally. Paul never evangelizes and disciples without also planting a church. For decades, expositors have looked to Acts to make lists of the basic elements of ministry: Bible teaching, evangelism, fellowship, discipleship, and worship. I have always found it odd that right there in Acts, along with everything else the church is doing, is church planting — yet this element of ministry is consistently ignored! I believe there is a dubious, tacit cessationism at work. Almost unconsciously, readers of the book of Acts have said, “Yes, but that was for then. We don’t need to do that now.” I believe this conclusion misses a key aspect of a healthy church, namely, that church planting must be natural and customary, not traumatic and episodic.
The normal ministry of Paul had three phases that are easily seen in Acts 14. First is evangelism. Acts 14:21 states that “[Paul and Barnabas] preached the gospel,” but it does not use the common word for “preaching.” Instead, a more comprehensive word is used: they euangelizō-ed or “gospeled” the city. This Greek word connotes a great deal more than simply preaching sermons. The book of Acts describes Paul in the act of spreading the gospel through preaching in synagogue services, sharing in small group Bible studies, speaking out in marketplaces, leading discussions in rented halls, and simply talking with people one-on-one.
In the second phase of Paul’s ministry, we see a clear incorporation into community. Immediately after “gospeling” the city, Paul goes to the converts to strengthen and encourage them (Acts 14:22). These two verbs (epistērizō and parakaleō) are also used together in Acts 9:31 and 15:32. John Stott refers to these verbs as an “almost technical” term for building up new believers.2 So how did Paul do this? He taught them “the faith” (Acts 14:22) — a definite body of beliefs and theology. But also he “congregated” them. New believers do not simply go on living their lives as they were, but they are brought into a community that assembles regularly.
Finally, in the third phase, we find leadership development. In each place Paul visited, he chose elders, a plurality of leaders out of the converts, who then took on the task of teaching and shepherding the people in the faith. In other words, Paul routinely organized his converts into churches in their own right — more than just loosely knit fellowships directly under his leadership. These churches had their own leadership and structure. When Paul began meeting with them, they were called “disciples” (Acts 14:22), but when he left them, they were known as “churches” (see Acts 14:23). To put it simply, the multiplication of churches is as natural in the book of Acts as the multiplication of individual converts.
As Tim Chester points out in his essay “Church Planting: A Theological Perspective,” we find two basic avenues for launching churches in Acts.3 In Paul and his companions, we see an example of the first avenue: pioneer church planting. Though the Antioch church sent Paul out, and he was accountable to them for his doctrine and behavior (Acts 13:1 – 3), his work in every city was by definition a pioneering work. Paul did groundbreaking evangelism in each place he visited, without the cooperation of other churches.
The other form is churches planting other churches. This more implicit example is present in the New Testament, but we have to avoid screening it out by thinking anachronistically about the word church when we see it in the text. The churches Paul planted (in fact all of the Christian churches for almost two hundred years) were household churches. For example, Lydia’s conversion immediately became a bridge to the conversion of her household, making her home the first church in Philippi. By Acts 16:40, Paul and Silas were going to Lydia’s home to meet the brethren. The same thing happens in Acts 18 with the household of Crispus. What did this mean? It meant that the church at Philippi, Corinth, and everywhere else could only grow naturally by multiplying new assemblies or house churches. Though Paul wrote to the “church” (singular) at Corinth, it is obvious by the end of the book that he was addressing a number of household churches — Chloe, Stephanus, et al. Because in the early church the household church was the basic building block of the movement, church planting was built into the church’s very nature. You could only grow churches by multiplying new household-based assemblies of Christians who met under elders.
Today as well, these two basic approaches are still the main avenues for church planting (see table).
| PIONEERING CHURCH PLANTING | CHURCH-LED CHURCH PLANTING |
| Ministers/leaders are often self-initiators | Church leaders are selected by church body, but a church can also call and send |
| No core members; pioneer gets all core members through networking and evangelism | Members come from (1) pooling cell groups and (2) hiving off distant families |
| Money from (1) mission agency, (2) raising of personal support from friends and churches, (3) tent-making/self-employment, or (4) two or all of the above | Money from (1) core group pledge, (2) gift/subsidy from mother church, (3) outside grants from distant churches or individuals, or (4) two or all of the above |
| Mentor is a distant pastor or leader, seen infrequently; or reading-only mentor (dead or distant) | Regular meetings with nearby mentor; often peer supervision possible |
| Model is often innovative, forging new models or imitating distant ones | Model is similar to mother church, though never identical |
Making Church Planting Natural
A natural church planting mind-set means church leaders will think of church planting as just one of the things the church does along with everything else. Church planting should not be like building a building — one big traumatic event followed by a deep collective sigh of relief that it’s done. Paul was continually engaged in evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. In fact, I believe church planting is actually a fifth “ministry front” that works alongside the four aspects of integrative ministry outlined in part 2. There we said that every church should connect people to God (worship and evangelism), to one another (discipleship and community), to the needs of the city (justice and mercy), and to the culture (integrating faith and work). But the fifth ministry front is the multiplication of a church into new churches with the other four ministry fronts. So church planting should be as much an ongoing, natural part of your ministry as worship, evangelism, fellowship, education, and service.
A natural church planting mind-set can be described in terms of three key mind-set shifts. The hard truth is that if you and your team can’t make these mind-set shifts, it is highly unlikely that your church can plant churches naturally and effectively.
1. You must be willing to give away resources and lose control of your money, members, and leaders. I hesitate to use the cliché, but it’s true in this case: Paul “empowered” these new leaders. He gave them ownership, and in doing so, he surrendered a lot of control. Many churches cannot bear the thought of losing key leaders, money-giving families, or even just friends. Ministers are also afraid of giving away some of their glory. If your ministry adds people who are assimilated into your church and incorporated into Bible studies and new ministries in your church, it swells your numbers, and you gain both control and glory. But if you organize new people into new churches, you lose money, members, numbers, leaders, and control. Yet this is exactly what Paul did! An additional issue is that when we let go, we lose direct control but can’t avoid responsibility for the problems that arise. It’s a bit like being the parent of an adult child. We are not allowed to directly tell them what to do, but if a problem arises, we are expected to help clean it up.
An evangelical church in our area occupied a small, historic building. They had filled one hundred seats to maximum capacity for four years in a row but had resisted church planting, fearing it would result in the loss of money and people. Eventually, they sent fifty people to a new town to form a new church. Just two years later, nearly 350 people were coming to the daughter church. Meanwhile, the mother church once again filled its seats — in about three weeks! Soon they were kicking themselves, realizing that over the course of this time, they could have planted another three churches with nearly a thousand people in the church family, all able to do missions, youth ministry, and many other initiatives together. They realized they needed to make the transition to a natural church planting mind-set.
2. You must be willing to give up some control of the shape of the ministry itself. Doing so is especially scary for those of us who care deeply about the preservation of biblical truth. But it’s a simple fact that the new church will not look just like the original. It will develop its own voice and emphases. On the one hand, you must take pains to be sure that the difference is not too great, or else fellowship and cooperation will be strained. We must not forget that the book of Acts speaks of “the faith.” There is one body of true doctrine at the heart of Christianity. On the other hand, if you insist that the new church must be a clone, you reveal that you are not willing to admit the reality of contextualization in the biblical sense of adapting and incarnating. Different generations and cultures will produce a different kind of church. This does not undermine the soundness of the mother church; it testifies to it.
As noted above, Paul appointed elders in each church, giving them a certain amount of independence. He was able to do this because the natural church planting mind-set is not as much a matter of trusting new leaders as it is a matter of trusting God. Paul does not call the new churches to fend for themselves or leave them to the care of others. Rather, he “committed them to the Lord” (Acts 14:23). Paul’s heart and character were such that he did not need to keep control; he had faith that God would continue the work he had started in the church. A natural church planting mind-set requires a high level of spiritual maturity and trust in God’s providence.
3. You must be willing to care for the kingdom even more than for your tribe. We see this demonstrated in the way Paul speaks of Apollos, who is affirmed even though he is not Paul’s disciple (Acts 18:24 – 28). Paul refers to him in the warmest terms (1 Cor 3:6; 4:6; 16:12), even though Apollos’s disciples evidently considered themselves a particular party, distinct from Paul’s (1 Cor 1:12; 3:4). We also see this in the way Paul willingly takes his hands off the new churches he plants (see Acts 16:40: “Then they left.”). Paul is concerned not about his or his party’s power (even then, different apostles had their followers and emphases) but about the kingdom as a whole.
A new church in the community usually leads existing churches to face this issue of kingdom-mindedness. New churches typically draw most of their new members from the ranks of the unchurched, but they will also attract some people from existing churches. When we lose two or three families to a church that is bringing in a hundred new people who weren’t going to any other church before, we have a choice! We must ask ourselves, “Are we going to celebrate the new people the kingdom has gained through this new church, or are we going to bemoan and resent the families we lost to it?” In other words, our attitude to new church development is a test of whether our mind-set is geared to our own institutional turf or to the overall health and prosperity of the kingdom of God in the city. Any church that bemoans its own small losses instead of rejoicing in the larger gains of the kingdom is betraying its narrow interests. Yet the benefits of new church planting to older congregations can be great, even if that benefit is not initially obvious.4
We began with a warning that we must be careful not to read the book of Acts as a strict rule book for church planting. Yet our secular, urbanized, global world today is strikingly like the Greco-Roman world in certain ways. For the first time in fifteen hundred years, there are multiple, vital, religious faith communities and options (including true paganism) in every society. Traditional, secular, and pagan worldviews and communities are living side by side. Once again, cities are the influential cultural centers, just as they were in the Greco-Roman world. During the Pax Romana, cities became furiously multiethnic and globally connected. Since we are living in an Acts-like world again rather than the earlier context of Christendom, church planting will necessarily be as central a strategy for reaching our world as it was for reaching previous generations.
Ultimately, though, we don’t look to Paul to teach us about church planting, but to Jesus himself. Jesus is the ultimate church planter. He builds his church (Matt 16:18), and he does so effectively, because hell itself will not prevail against it. He raises up leaders and gives them the keys to the kingdom (Matt 16:19). He establishes his converts on the word of the confessing apostle, Peter — that is, on the word of God (Matt 16:18). When we plant the church, we participate in God’s work, for if we have any success at all, it is because “God has been making it grow.” Thus, “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Cor 3:6 – 7).
Answering Objections
There is a common objection to reading the book of Acts the way we suggest here: “That was then! Now, at least in North America and Europe, we have churches all over the place. We don’t need to start new churches; we should strengthen and fill our existing churches before we do that.” Let me give several answers to this common objection.
Fully Evangelistic Churches
The way to evangelize a city is not through evangelism programs but through fully evangelistic churches.
Evangelism programs aim at getting people to make a decision to follow Christ. Experience, however, shows us that many of these “decisions” disappear and never result in changed lives. Why? Many decisions are not true spiritual conversions; they are only the beginning of a journey of seeking God. (I must add that some decisions definitely mark the moment of new birth, but this differs from person to person.) Many people come to full faith through a process of mini-decisions. Only a person who is hearing the gospel in the context of an ongoing worshiping and shepherding community can be sure of finally coming home into vital, saving faith. Evangelism programs, grafted onto a church that is unable to embrace and support inquirers and doubters, cannot do the job. What the city needs is not more evangelism programs but far more wholly evangelistic churches.
Growing the Number of Churches in the City
The way to grow the number of Christians in a city is not mainly through church renewal but through church planting.
When stagnant churches go through a renewal phase and begin to grow, it is typically through transfer growth from other churches. Strong programs attract believers who are suffering under poor preaching, poor discipleship offerings, or other signs of unhealthy discipleship elsewhere. But even older renewed churches cannot integrate unchurched persons like a new congregation can. Studies confirm that the average new church gains one-third to two-thirds of its new members from the ranks of people who are not attending any worshiping body, while churches over ten to fifteen years of age gain 80 to 90 percent of new members by transfer from other congregations.5 The average new congregation, then, will bring new people into the life of the body of Christ at six to eight times the rate of an older congregation of the same size. Why is this so?
As a congregation ages, powerful internal institutional pressures lead it to allocate most of its resources and energy toward the concerns of its members and constituents rather than toward those outside its walls. This is natural — and to a great degree desirable. Older congregations have a stability and steadiness that many people (especially long-term residents) thrive on and need. They also have the trust of the local community. Older congregations are inevitably more influenced by the people groups that have been in the neighborhood for a long time. They do not contain (or typically open their leadership ranks to) the members of the growing people groups in the area — new ethnic groups, new generations. As a result, many people can only be reached by churches with deeper roots in the community and with the trappings of stability and respectability.
Nevertheless, these same dynamics explain why most congregations thirty to forty years old or older are experiencing numerical decline. Older congregations of necessity must focus on the needs and sensibilities of the churched and the long-term residents, even at the expense of any appeal to the unchurched or newer people groups. New congregations, by contrast, have no organizational traditions they must honor or oppose. In general, they are forced to focus on the needs of their nonmembers simply to get off the ground. There are no members with many years or decades of tenure, and so new Christians and newer members are able to get their voices heard in ways that would not happen in an older congregation. This is generally why new churches do a far better job of outreach.
Thus, the only way to significantly increase the number of Christians in a city is by significantly increasing the number of new churches. Here’s a thought experiment that illustrates this point. Imagine Cities A, B, and C are the same size, and each has one hundred churches. In City A, all the churches are more than twenty years old, and so the overall number of active Christian churchgoers in this town will be shrinking, even if four or five of the churches catch a wave and grow in attendance. The most likely reason is that they are pulling Christians from the other churches. Most churches in City A will be declining, and the renewed churches will likely simply be retaining Christians, not reaching the unchurched. Overall, the number of Christians in town is shrinking steadily.
In City B, let’s say ten of the hundred churches are less than ten years old. Roughly one new church is being planted per year — a mere 1 percent. These churches will likely be bringing in three to five times more unchurched people (proportionately) than the rest, and some of the renewed older congregations will also be winning new people to Christ. But it is likely that the growth experienced here will merely offset the normal declines of most of the older churches. Thus, the number of active Christian churchgoers in City B will be staying the same or perhaps slowly declining.
Finally, in City C, twenty-five of the hundred churches are less than ten years old. In other words, new congregations are being planted at 2 to 3 percent the rate of the existing total per year. In this city, the overall number of active Christian churchgoers will be on a path to grow 50 percent in a generation.
Renewing Existing Churches
The way to renew the existing churches of a city is by planting new ones.
In any discussion on new church development, these questions often arise: What about all the existing churches in the city? Shouldn’t we be working to strengthen and renew them? The answer is that planting a lot of new churches is one of the best ways to renew existing churches.
1. New churches bring new ideas to the whole body. They have freedom to be innovative, and so they become the “Research and Development” department for the whole body in the city. Often older congregations are too timid to try a particular approach, convinced it “could never work here.” But when the new church in town succeeds with a new approach, other churches take notice and muster the courage to try it themselves.
2. New churches raise up new, creative Christian leaders for the city. Older congregations attract leaders who support tradition, have tenure, appreciate routine, and have kinship ties. New congregations, on the other hand, attract a higher percentage of venturesome people who value creativity, risk, and innovation. Older churches often box out people with strong leadership skills who aren’t comfortable working in traditional settings. New churches thus attract and harness many people in the city whose gifts wouldn’t otherwise be used in the body’s ministry.
3. New churches challenge other churches to self-examination. Sometimes it is only in contrast with a new church that older churches can finally define their own vision, specialties, and identity. Often the growth experienced in a new congregation brings about humility and repentance for defeatist and pessimistic attitudes.
Indeed, it is also often the case that a daughter church does so well that the mother church is renewed though its influence, resources, excitement, and vision. Though some pain may be involved in seeing good friends and gifted leaders go away to form a new church, the mother church often experiences a surge of self-esteem and an eventual influx of new enthusiastic leaders and members. Some of the new leaders, ministries, additional members, and income “wash back” into the mother church in various ways and strengthen and renew it.
4. New churches can be an evangelistic feeder system for a whole community. The new church often produces many converts who end up in older churches for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the new church is exciting and outward looking but is also unstable or immature in its leadership. Some converts cannot stand the tumultuous changes that regularly happen in the new church, and so they move to an existing church. Sometimes the new church reaches a person for Christ, but the new convert quickly discovers that he or she doesn’t fit the socioeconomic makeup of the new congregation and gravitates to an established congregation where the customs and culture feel more familiar. In general, the new churches of a city produce new people not only for themselves but also for the older church bodies.
To summarize: Vigorous church planting is one of the best ways to renew the existing churches of a city, as well as the best single way to grow the whole body of Christ in a city.
Addressing Diversity
The way to reach the sheer diversity of the city is through new churches.
New churches are the single best way to reach (1) new generations, (2) new residents, and (3) new people groups. Young adults have always been disproportionately located in newer congregations. Long-established congregations develop traditions (such as time of worship, length of service, emotional responsiveness, sermon topics, leadership styles, emotional atmosphere, and dozens of other tiny customs and mores) that reflect the sensibilities of longtime leaders who have the influence and resources to control the church life. These sensibilities often do not reach the younger generations.
In addition, new residents are typically better reached by new churches. In older congregations, it may require years of tenure in the city before a person is allowed into a place of influence, but in a new church, new residents tend to have equal power with longtime area residents.
Finally, new sociocultural groups in a community are generally better reached by new congregations. For example, if white-collar commuters move into an area where the older residents were farmers, a new church will probably be more receptive to the multiple needs of the new residents, while older churches will continue to be oriented to the original social group. And a new church that is intentionally multiethnic from the start will best reach new racial groups in a community. For example, if an all-Anglo neighborhood becomes 33 percent Hispanic, a new, deliberately biracial church will be far more likely to create “cultural space” for newcomers than will an older church in town. Brand-new immigrant groups can normally only be reached by churches ministering in their own languages. If we wait until a new group is sufficiently assimilated into American culture to come to our church, we will wait for years without reaching out to them. Remember that a new congregation for a new people group can often be planted within the overall structure of an existing church — perhaps through a new Sunday service at another time or a new network of house churches connected to a larger existing congregation. Though it may technically not be a new independent congregation, it serves the same function.
You see, church planting is not only for frontier regions or pagan societies that we are trying to help to become Christian. Churched societies will have to maintain vigorous, extensive church planting simply to stay Christian. One church, no matter how big, will never be able to serve the needs of such a diverse city. Only a movement of hundreds of churches, small and large, can penetrate literally every neighborhood and people group in the city.
Self-Sustaining Ministry
The way to establish ministries that become self-supporting and expand the base for all other ministries in a city is through new churches.
A city needs many ministries — youth work, Christian schools, missions to new groups, and so on. All of them are charities that need to be supported from outside of their own resources. They will require funding from Christian givers indefinitely. A new church, however, only requires outside start-up funding at its inception. Within a few years, it becomes the source of Christian giving to other ministries, not its target. Because new churches bring in large numbers of nonchurched people, church planting is by far the fastest way to grow the number of new givers in the kingdom work in a city. New church development helps all the other numerous ministries in a city thrive and grow. These ministries need a constant stream of new volunteers, workers, and givers to keep them going, and new churches are the headwaters of this stream.
How Many Churches Does the City Need? Far More Than You Think.
So how many churches does your city need? The reality is that churches are institutions. Some of them endure because they are continually revitalized, but all of them lose some flexibility; many of them stagnate for long periods between revitalizations, and a certain percentage die every year. We have seen, then, that it requires at least modest church planting in a city just to keep the body of Christ from steadily declining, and aggressive church planting is needed to grow the whole body — meaning ten to twenty relatively new churches in relation to every hundred existing churches.
There is a problem with answering the question in this way, however. The goal should not be to conserve Christianity’s “market share” in a given area; it should be to serve, reach, and influence the entire city. How will this be done? Studies and anecdotal evidence indicate that if there is one church per ten thousand residents, approximately 1 percent of the population will be churchgoers. If this ratio goes to one church per one thousand residents, some 15 to 20 percent of the city’s population goes to church. If the number goes to one per five hundred residents, the number may approach 40 percent or more. The relationship of the number of churches to churchgoing people is exponential, not linear.6 We should not, then, simply aim to maintain the church’s traditional place in a city or society. We long to see Christianity grow exponentially in conversions, churches, and influence in our city. While it requires many kinds of ministries to achieve this outcome, aggressive church planting is the trigger for them all.
The Stages of Church Planting
In the final section of this chapter, I offer practical advice about how to approach the church planting journey. What are the stages in the process of preparing to launch a new church? You must learn, love, link, and then launch.
Learn
First, it is necessary to learn as much as you can about the people in the community where you feel called to plant. Seek to know the people you will serve and the culture they live in as effectively as you know the gospel. Create a profile of their interior life. What are their greatest hopes, strengths, aspirations, and pleasures? What are their weaknesses, fears, idols, and prejudices? Begin with personal interviews and make use of relevant periodicals and sociological research.7 You will also want to develop a “contextual life” profile. Which people groups live in your community? Which groups are declining, and which are growing? Use demographic studies to discern the economic groupings in your area, the arranging of social structures, and the power relations evident among people, as well as the education and psychological groupings of people.8
You will also want to create a profile of the common worldview of the people in your area. What aspects of truth do they have some grasp of (through common grace)? What aspects do they deny or miss? What symbols or myths function deeply? Where are tensions or pressure points in view? What is the people group’s narrative and identity? Who do they see themselves to be — where are they from and where are they going? Understanding the common worldview of the people will help you develop the raw material for apologetics.
You will want to ask questions about the process of contextualization:
1. What are the “defeater beliefs” that make Christianity implausible?
2. What are the tension/pressure points in their defeater beliefs (i.e., where do they fail their own criteria)?
3. What are the “A doctrines” (biblical beliefs similar to what they already accept as true)? What are the “B doctrines” (biblical truths they reject but that are in line with “A” doctrines)?
Finally, you will want to create a profile of the various religious institutions in the area that are involved with the people you seek to reach. How are the religious bodies and churches within this people group doing? How are they organized? What ministry models seem most effective? Successful church planting begins with learning as much as you can about the people you wish to reach with the gospel message.
Love
The second stage of the church planting process is continuing to grow in your love for God through learning to maintain a healthy spirituality. It is necessary to be actively engaged in healthy spiritual disciplines, maintaining balance as you implement your strategy for evangelism and mission. Apply the gospel to yourself regularly and grow through the tearing down of your idols. Begin to share the gospel and spiritually direct people in your neighborhood and community. Model the gospel through community service and in your family life. Pray through the gospel as you bring your requests to God, and begin to experience the gospel in deep community as you develop friendships.
Link
The third stage in the process is to link as you build your emerging insights into a contextualized strategy for reaching people with the message of the gospel. The goal of this stage is to develop a strategy to serve the particular needs of the people (embodying the gospel) while also challenging the flaws, fears, and hopes of the people (communicating the gospel). Think carefully about how to go about effectively linking the gospel to the heart. How will you incorporate Christ’s story into the people’s story? Consider the viability of communication modes for the culture: Are they rational, intuitive, or concrete-relational? Consider how you will make your points at each stage of the communication process. Begin with the familiar and point to the culture’s strengths, proceed to challenge and destabilize around the points of weakness, and then offer comfort with the gospel.
Embodying the gospel involves discerning how best to link the gospel to the community beyond direct communications. How will you work for the common good of the neighborhood? What will make the people in your neighborhood be glad you are there? Connect with individuals and leaders in the community and begin to meet the perceived needs of the community. Be sure to show the people there what they would look like as Christians. Strive to have your leadership structure, infra-community structure, and music incarnate the gospel in that culture.
Launch
Finally, you are ready to launch your church. Begin by developing action steps and goals that can be used as benchmarks to track your progress. In your planning, always be sensitive to God’s sovereignty. What matters is not so much the final detailed plan itself as the actual process of planning. Reality will always alter your plan, but the planning process will equip you to deal with surprises and new realities in a way that is informed by and consistent with your model and vision. Your specific action steps and plans should include these basics:
• goals for funding and how to reach them
• goals for concrete ministries/programs and how to reach them
• goals for leadership development and how to reach them
When it comes time to finally launch your church plant, there are generally two approaches you can take — the top-down or the bottom-up approach. Each has strengths and weaknesses, depending on the context and the gifts of the planter. Consider the approach that is best in your situation, and brainstorm ways to employ the best of both approaches in your launch strategy.
The top-down approach typically begins with a formal worship celebration (congregational singing, teaching). This works well for daughter plants where a substantial group from a mother church is present, as well as with a church planter who has strong onstage speaking gifts. If left unbalanced, this approach carries within it the temptation to skip the learn and link stages and simply focus on reproducing the mother church.
In the bottom-up approach, the church planter lives in the community and begins with some evangelistic ministry. He sees some conversions and organizes people into either midsize parish groups (fifteen to sixty people) or small groups (four to ten people). After growing into several small groups or two to three midsize groups, the church launches a Sunday worship time. This approach works best with church planters who have good interpersonal, empowering, and evangelistic gifts. If left unbalanced, this approach can make it difficult to attract people who want to “see something happening.” Often the church planter feels significant financial pressure because the congregation may not be producing much income to support the work of ministry.
New church planting is the best way to increase the number of believers in a city, and one of the best ways to renew the whole body of Christ. The evidence for this statement is strong — biblically, sociologically, and historically. Nothing else has the consistent impact of dynamic, extensive church planting. This is not, however, to demote all the other things we must be doing — church renewal, theological education, justice and mercy, cultural engagement, and many other kinds of ministry and mission. To show how all these things fit together — and how sectors of the whole body of Christ in a city can begin to exhibit movement dynamics — we turn to our final chapter.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. This chapter asserts that in a healthy church, “church planting must be natural and regular, not traumatic and episodic.” To make church planting a more natural aspect of ministry, begin by honestly considering three questions:
• Resources — Are you able and willing to give away resources and lose control of your money, members, and leaders?
• Control— Are you ready to give up some control of the shape of the ministry itself?
• Fear — Are you more concerned about the kingdom or the opinions of your own tribe?
Which of these three areas presents your current ministry team with the greatest barrier to planting a new church? If you are preparing to plant a church, how can you build these considerations into the life of your church from the very beginning?
2. How would you answer the objection that “we don’t need to start new churches; we should strengthen and fill our existing churches before we do that.” Do you find this chapter’s answers to this objection compelling? Why or why not?
3. Keller writes, “The only way to significantly increase the number of Christians in a city is by significantly increasing the number of new churches.” What insights do you draw from the comparison of cities A, B, and C in this chapter? When you consider the kingdom math involved, are you convicted? Is your city more like A, B, or C?
4. Review the profiles described in the “Learn” church planting stage (interior life, contextual life, common worldview with defeater beliefs and “A” and “B” doctrines, area religious institutions). What can you learn from this process? Regardless of whether or not you are currently involved in church planting, how might creating these profiles help you apply what you are learning in new ways?