religiousaffections

The Mission of God and Church Planting

A Few Definitions:

1. Mission of God: God’s mission is to bless all nations through his people (the church) whom he has chosen, redeemed and bound to himself in covenant relationship.  His mission is about the redemption of all things - souls, environment, sexuality, media, family, relationships, work etc.

2. Missional: Involves a right understanding of mission.  A Christian, is by nature, a missionary to his/her culture.  Missional living then describes a people who are actively on mission with God.

3. Missional Church: A missional church is a theologically-formed, Gospel-centered, Spirit-led fellowship who seeks to faithfully incarnate the purposes of Christ. The mission of the church is found in the mission of God who is calling the church to passionately participate in God’s redemptive mission in the world - Matt. 28:18-20; Acts 1:8.  The challenge to God’s people (the church) is, first, to recognize the mission of God.  It is because God is on mission in this world that we exist.  Second, our challenge is to form our ENTIRE lives around this mission - responding in ways that facilitate it rather than deny or hinder it.  When a church ceases to be on mission, it ceases to be a church.  On mission is the very nature of Christ’s church, and therefore mission cannot be viewed as one activity/program in church vying for attention (e.g., the missions department or the international missions department). 

4. Missional Community: A missional community is a committed core of believers who live out the mission of God together in a specific area or to a particular people group by demonstrating the gospel in tangible forms and declaring the gospel to others - both those who believe it and those who are being exposed to it (definition from Drew Goodmanson).

Church Planting

Recently, I have had the privilege of entering into some church planting conversations with David Fairchild and Drew Goodmanson of Kaleo Church in San Diego and have been challenged by the way they are thinking about church planting.  The wheels have started turning and the timing could not have been more perfect as we will likely be sent out to plant in the next 8-10 months. 

So, how do you plant a church?  Typically, I have seen guys that are going out to plant a church and I hear phrases like we are getting partners and raising money and we are gathering a core group or we are planning for the launch of our Sunday service.  In typical church planting strategy, the launch of the Sunday service is the pinnacle.  This has been especially evident to me in a lot of Southern Baptist church planting strategies in recent years.  I’m afraid a mindset has been promoted: You are not a successful church/church plant until you have a corporate (open to the public) service.  Therefore, from the start, all of one’s church planting strategy is usually driven by that main goal (getting enough people to start meeting).  There is the planning phase in which a church planter is putting together documents, assessing the financial cost of moving to a city, renting a space, buying sound equipment, and recruiting help.  Questions come up like how are we going to get our name out there?  Or how can we make ourselves appealing to maximize our potential for getting both Christians and non-Christians in the doors? 

Jessi and I were involved with a church plant for probably 2 months.  We were close to joining their team and moving out to help them get started.  Though I was not involved long, the bulk of emails, meetings, and phone conversations about strategy involved the things mentioned above.  We talked about marketing the church, sending out fliers, where we were going to launch, and how we were going to attract people.  All the focus seemed to have been on Sunday.  When you plant a church and put all your eggs in the Sunday basket, you end up focusing on “how can we get our name out there as the newest and best church in town.”  And so these churches send out fliers and put up signs and ads on movie theatre screens and market themselves in the same way the local Ford dealership does, which is not very effective and likely puts a bad taste in the mouths of people who see churches marketing themselves like a product.

When I open my mailbox to another flier from the new church meeting up the road in the movie theatre, I think to myself, “Is this really the best you could come up with in hopes of immersing yourself in the culture of this area?  You send out propaganda inviting people to church, people who have no earthly clue that its ok for a church to meet at the movies.”  It goes in the trash at the same time the Geico insurance offer does.  In my recent experience, these methods have to be used because the supporting churches expect numbers, results - a.k.a. “success.”  In 100 AD there was roughly 25,000 Christians in the world.  210 years later in 310 AD scholars estimate there were 20 million Christians!  The early church blew up in a period of 210 years without military conquests, without influence in academia, and without political influence.  The early church blew up without buildings, cool programs, sexy worship, or children’s ministry!  Apparently Christ doesn’t need us to market the gospel or the church.  What was so attractive about the first Christians?  They lived in the light of the gospel; they believed that Jesus got up out of the grave and in doing so He created a new community, and that new community was not for itself.

The challenge in planting this way is that you can get people in the doors, but then you have a bunch of people coming to a place on Sunday that don’t know each other likely have no idea about what it really means to be the church.  If Sunday is the focus then it will drive everything else the church does.  The thought is, do not go and plant a service after gathering a core.  Because what happens is you are going to have to focus so much time, energy and resources into maintaining that.  What happens to a lot of guys is that they go out and plant and end up going through a period of rapid growth at some point and they are sitting there thinking, “Oh no, we’ve got a bunch of people and they aren’t in community, they aren’t living on mission, they aren’t bought in, they are just coming on Sunday.”  All the challenges that arise from this situation are internal, which makes it incredibly hard to actually impact the city.  These churches run the risk of ending up with a lot of Christian junkies, coming to get a fix once a week. 

So, there is a lot healthy conversation going on right now about revolutionizing church planting strategy to more rightly reflect Scripture’s portrait of the local church.  This is where all the fresh thought is happening. It is not fully developed and we are in the process of discerning what the practical applications of this strategy will be.

We are rethinking what it looks like to live in a city as the people of God.  I mean is the Sunday worship service the pinnacle of what being the church is actually all about?  Or does it have more to do with the life of the community day in and day out?  What does it look like to move to a city and start, what we will call, a missional community (see definition at the top)?  There are 5 of us on our church planting team right now (4 adults and a 1 year old).  We move to the city, we work in the city, learn about the city, become citizens of the city - we will all this with gospel intentionality, that is, living on mission with God for the redemption of all things.  A missional community (MC) is not primarily a small group, a bible study, a social activist group, or a support group.  An MC is a group of people who are living life together with gospel intentionality.  In light of the mission of God, this means that an MC does not exist primarily for itself!  However, this does not negate the fact that an MC should be a means of accountability and discipleship for believers. The MC does not exist only to make better disciples.  The small group that I lead has been good at making better disciples, but at the gross expense of making new disciples. 

Strategy - Decentralization

We move to the city and begin a missional community (currently 5 of us).  We are working, building relationships with our neighbors and co-workers.  Our goal is not to attract primarily other believers, but to make new disciples by sharing and living out the gospel in tangible ways (though we obviously will not turn away Christians who decide they would like to join us).  We are missionaries.  Think of the centralized programs and ministries that are often available at local churches.  There’s counseling ministries, social justice or mercy ministries, ministries for men and women, discipleship ministries, community service/volunteer ministry etc.  The programs are endless and exhausting to even think about.  We are working to push those traditionally centralized ministries of the church out into the life of the church from the very beginning.

Church is not a place you go to find an organized relief effort that has been programmed and is headed up by a staff member.  Church is who you are, living out the gospel in community with other believers.  And so, we believe that such ministries should be pushed out into the life of the church.  They should be adopted, lead, and organized by the MCs.  Our desire is that the MCs would be like families.  We would live life together - sharing meals, celebrating together, loving one another’s children, speaking truth to one another, taking care of the sick and poor etc. There are a lot of “one another” passages in Scripture.  Honor one another, love one another, submit to one another, forgive one another, encourage one another, confront one another etc. 

But how do you live out these “one another” passages unless you are living in consistent, close community with other believers?  You cannot forgive one another unless you are living so intimately with other Christians that you actually offend and hurt one another, right?  We will seek to live as the people of God in a culture that is ravaged by consumerism and individualism.  Our hope is that our lost friends and neighbors would know and admit - “if he lost Christ his whole world would fall apart, he would be pitied among all men!”  Our hope is that they would recognize the gospel in our lives and not be tempted to say, “well he has a nice house, a good car, and great kids so he will probably be ok.”  No! 

As our initial MC grows, the plan is that the missional community leader would be developing another leader and preparing him to be sent out to start another MC.  Let’s say a year and a half later we now have 3 or 4 MCs of roughly 15-20 people meeting in the Cameron Village area in Raleigh, NC.  Only then do we begin to even consider the possibility of bringing all the MCs together for a corporate gathering.  In a recent conversation, Drew Goodmanson (goodmanson.com) said something to the effect of you have to actually be the church in the community before you earn the right to start meeting as one. 

At this point, you have all these people who used to live life together and they miss one another because they have been separated into different MCs for the purpose of spreading the gospel throughout the city - you have all these people who are eager to gather together for corporate worship! 

In this way, our hope is that the people of God would view the corporate gathering of the saints as a HUGE privilege and not as a right.  Sundays are no longer the days when Christian junkies come to get a shot of gospel adrenaline for their week because for a year now they have been actually living out what is means to be the church.  They have been serving the community, loving unbelievers, sharing the gospel, and being challenged by brothers and sisters in Christ to pursue righteousness and flee from sin.  Sunday becomes a day on which the community gathers to celebrate the victory of what Christ is doing in the life of the church through the MCs living life on mission together.  It becomes a day where we unveil our triune God, worship Him together and commit ourselves to the teaching of Scripture.  And we go out from this time of celebration/teaching and figure out how to work it out in community - take God’s word and live it out as a community day in and day out.

Our desire is not to diminish the importance of the corporate gathering at all, but to rightly understand that the corporate gathering of the saints is only one of many expressions of being the church - not necessarily the primary expression.  How do you have favor with all the people unless you are living among them as a community (Acts 2:47)?

At this point, now that we are meeting weekly for corporate worship and people maybe start to show up to that gathering apart from having first experienced life in a MC - we encourage them and thank them for coming, but challenge them to go out and live this stuff out in the life of the church.  Having decentralized the ministries of the church and pushed them out into the MCs, people cannot come on Sunday and pick from a lunch line list of things they want to get involved in.  They have to go out and join a MC that has adopted a specific mercy ministry, community service project, convalescent home etc.  They are encouraged to GO and join with the others who have clearly defined patterns of living out the gospel and what it means to be the church in the city.

Potential Questions

1. Who leads this whole deal? Elders? 

• The thought right now is that you move to a city with a team.  For us, we are 5 people strong right now.  Justin, Jackey, and their daughter Abigail plus Jess and I.  We will lead the church as a plurality of elders (Justin as lead elder, myself as an elder).  We start a MC and eventually Jess and I will be sent out to start another MC.  When we reach a point where we are ready to gather corporately, we already have a pastor/elder in Justin. 

2. Church Planting? Multiplication?

• Our desire is not to grow through expansion, but to impact the city through multiplication of local churches.  When we are ready as a local body to plant - we would simply send out one or two MCs to another part of the city (with an identified future lead elder/pastor and a second elder) and the process simply starts over again.

If anyone has comments or questions, please post them below or email me.  Be a part of helping us work through this because there are a lot of questions and dynamics that we have yet to think through.