Part 1 of 3
It’s almost a truism that “Church planting is the most effective method of reaching the unchurched for Christ.” It’s been a legendary recommendation for decades now. And it is true, but not for the reasons you might think. In fact, most of the things church planters must do to be successful are the very same things that existing congregational leadership teams could do to revitalise their own churches.
There is a new way of thinking in the church at large about how we might apply the principles of church planting to existing churches to bring renewal and revitalization. I’d like to share some of the principles I’ve learned as a church planter that could be applied in any congregation willing to be transformed by God’s Spirit.
1. Learn to pray with desperation
The church I currently attend has a one-hour prayer meeting on Tuesday evenings, which I often leave weeping out of frustration. It’s a few of the women leaders, and none of the men. It’s driven by the prayer list. You know the one – a list of people who need healing, or jobs, or salvation or comfort. There is no sense of the spiritual battle going on behind each need. Once the hour is up, people get up and go home. Even when The Holy Spirit seems to be inviting us to stay, there is no lingering with God. It’s all about getting through the list.
When I was in training for ministry I remember hearing Jack Cameron, our Church Growth/Church Planting professor, say “Pray as if it all depended on God and work as if it all depended on you” (attributed to either Augustine or Ignatius of Loyola). It seems to me that most of us have learned to focus on the second half of that advice and forgotten the “pray as if it all depended on God” part. Martin Luther apparently said something similar along the lines of “I have so much to do that I shall have to spend the first three hours in prayer.”
The truth is that most churches talk about the importance of prayer, but if we look at what we actually do we see that prayer plays only a small role, sometimes infinitesimal. It’s often performative, with little passion for transformation, for the things of God, or spending time listening for his voice together. We pray “Lord, do the stuff, bring in the lost, meet our needs, heal the sick” but our unspoken parallel request is “please don’t make us change while you are doing it.”
Powerful effective prayer is not rooted in saying the right words but in consecrated hearts hungry to be molded and transformed and challenged, hungry to partner with our God as He works to fulfill his plans in our broken, hurting and desperate world. For most church planters this desperation is easy – because we are desperate. We have nothing, and no program in the world is going to do what only God can do. Once a church becomes established, with the building and the staff and the stable congregation, we forget the desperation that drove us to our knees because somewhere along the way we learned to measure our success according to human goals. This makes us no different from the Jewish people as we find them in the book of Judges, with its recurring theme expressed over and over again: In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes Judges 17:6 (ESV)
One of the wonderful things about COVID-19 is that it left many congregations decimated. What’s wonderful about that? In the midst of the challenges we can find an invitation from our God to return to a place of desperation and to rely once again on his guidance and leadership. The same kind of desperation we bring to the throne of God when we pray for our wayward children, a friend with cancer, and our own personal griefs.
There is a newer song whose chorus expresses that type of desperation really powerfully: Strong by Anne Wilson. If you have never heard it I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it:
I hit my knees with my hands held high
Saying, “Dear Lord, Jesus, you know I can’t do this on my own
I can’t do this on my own”
Lord knows I’ve tried but I’m good at falling down
Thank God you’re good at picking me up off the ground
The world’s gonna try to break me
But I know the one who makes me
Strong
This divine desperation in prayer isn’t something that always comes naturally. But it is something that we can ask for. God is delighted to hear his children ask for the very things they need, the desperation of the persistent widow from Luke 18:7-8 (ESV): will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.
Lord, in your mercy, make us desperate. Desperate for your guidance and not the next best program. Desperate to lay aside everything we think is great about the way we do church and every obstacle to personal and corporate growth and maturity. Make it a joy to sacrifice our time and our resources for your Kingdom as you want it to be in our community. Give us your wisdom. Make your Kingdom and your glory our first purpose. Amen.
2. Develop a more conscious awareness of mission
The nation of Israel was created by God for a specific purpose – to be a nation with laws and customs created by God himself to display His holiness and the otherness of what it was to be the people of God. The church, while not called to be a nation in a political sense (“My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” — John 18:36), is nevertheless called to display the holiness of God and to be peculiar people. Also unlike the Jewish people, the church is scattered out into the world rather than gathered in one place: “And he said to them, go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15). And while proselytizing was never a part of God’s call on Israel, it clearly has been in the church since the beginning.
One of the privileges of church planting is the very tight focus on mission. There are no extra resources for most church planters, certainly not enough to use on anything less than mission. There’s not enough money, not enough people and not enough time. So for most church planters there is a great deal of focus on refining their mission to be efficient and effective with what they do have.
Mission focus for church planters means knowing why God sent them to plant in a specific area. To reach the children? If so, then there is a need for equipped children’s ministry workers and well thought through outreach plans. And then – what do we do with the children the Lord brings to us? Where and how often? What do they need?
A church plant does not need to be all things to all people, it only needs what is necessary to fulfill its mission. And of course the specifics of the mission change over time. A young church that may have been focused on children 10 years ago will change and grow, and different types of ministry become a possibility as needs are revealed, the Lord directs, and resources become available.
What makes the difference between a church plant and an established church is often that the focus on mission moves from a cutting edge to an identity. This is always a dangerous time in the life of any church. The question needs to be answered: will mission continue to drive identity, or will it be programs? If the answer is programs, the life of the church will become bound to its programs and mission focus will eventually fade.
I planted my first church in a denominational context. After two years, our church looked nothing like other churches in the denomination. We were the second-fastest growing church in the country, but there were concerns because we didn’t share the same programs. I was asked to justify our approach by producing a paper proposing what the core values of a church of our denomination should be and how our plant was living out those core values. I was successfully able to communicate that our values were rooted in mission and not program.
God has a general mission for his church and local church communities: to glorify God, to represent him, express His nature to the world around us and to invite the lost into the saving grace of the Gospel of His kingdom. But how we do this is the specific mission of each church. Like church plants, we need to continue to be aware of the ways that the world around our facilities has changed over the years. Rather than lock ourselves away from those changes in the comfort of what we are used to, we must seek God for ways to go out into that world and meet the people who inhabit it.
In some of my training I remember the story about a church of middle-aged people who faced this very problem. They themselves no longer lived near their church. They had moved out into the suburbs decades previously, but continued to meet in their old church building. They hadn’t seen a single new family or individual come to the church from the local community in many years. In fact not a single person in the church lived nearby. As they took a walk through their neighbourhood they realised that they didn’t even share a common ethnicity or language with their neighbours. Most of the new inhabitants were Polish immigrants. They went back to their church and started to pray and ask the Lord what they should do. As they continued to pray and study they discovered a Polish-speaking church meeting in the back of a warehouse. The Lord prompted them to invite the congregation to share their building for a modest fee. Very soon the two congregations began to serve each other. The original congregation felt led of God to help the new immigrants learn English and to help them find jobs. In return, they learned to make and enjoy Polish delicacies and raised money by working alongside the Polish women making perogies to sell. It wasn’t long before they were worshipping together, first monthly and then weekly. As the Polish people found jobs they moved out of the neighbourhood and a new wave of immigrants moved in. But this time, the church had its eyes open and over time became a thriving multicultural congregation with a mission of helping newcomers to the country learn the language and find their place in the ever-changing economy.
Keeping our eyes on specific local mission rather than program is what keeps our churches living and effective in meeting the more global mission of the church.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in keeping local mission fresh is that we human beings tend to resist change. We like our comforts and what we are used to. We like our meetings and our music. A commitment to a living mission means a willingness to continually evaluate what we are doing and why, while being honest about its effectiveness. It means taking risks and taking each failure as a learning opportunity. We will talk more about meeting that challenge in the next article on Intentional Innovation and Small Communities.
Closing prayer
Heavenly Father, open our eyes and lift up our heads. Shake us out of our complacency and comfort. Challenge us increasingly with kingdom values and mission. Make us desperate for you and for building effective expressions of your church wherever we are.
Part 2 to come
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Photo: Capt. David J. Murphy, U.S. Air Force/Wikimedia Commons
