“Only 4 percent of Southern Baptist churches in America will plant a daughter church. Extrapolated across the denominations, that means that 96 percent of conventional churches in America will never give birth.” (Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways)
Not only have I been a part of 2 separate church plants, most of my other vocational “churchy” experience has been in young churches (less than 5 years old). From my point of view, it’s easy to see why our efforts at church planting (and thus our efforts to embody the missio Dei) apparently have failed: just look at the efforts, preoccupations, and resource allocations of the typical “new” church.
Of the young churches I’ve been a part of, the governing efforts have always been oriented around things like:
• getting the Sunday experience (attractional ministry, but that’s another story) up and running, making it compelling (in the best situations) or exciting (in the most worrisome situations)
• getting the children’s ministry stablilized
• finding some leaders to do bible studies
These always seemed to be our most burning concerns, and they dominated staff meetings, our one-on-one efforts, and ultimately our resources (“Hey, we have to have a decent P.A. system, right?”) We would hit the ground running as hard as we could in order to quickly get these ministries into an acceptable, stable place, so that when people visited our church, they would be impressed, comfortable, and therefore likely to return. We put all of these early “eggs” into this basket, because numbers needed to be sustainable and bills needed to be paid.
Though most of the time we were successful (in a short time period), what rubbish.
What if, instead, we had simply developed and maintained a focus on reproducing and sending out leaders to start a new church? I don’t know about these 96 percent of churches that Hirsch references, but I can honestly say that, even though planting churches was definitely in our minds, we quickly sacrificed that focus in lieu of developing our attractional ministry base. What if church planters poured an overwhelming amount of energy, time, and resources to finding, challenging, and sending out apostolic leaders?
Of course, the next question that begs to be asked is, “How well-equipped are church leaders to find, challenge, develop and send out other leaders?”
Just a thought.
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2 comments:
Funny--that's been done before. Isn't that like the first century church? They didn't even have time for the attractional ministry stuff. They just kinda did it.
It's probably (at least partiall) that whole Western business mindset getting in the way, but it wouldn't hurt to put it into good use, as you said, by just being more targeted with church planting.
Keep spreading the Gospel!
It makes me wonder how much time and money we have wasted in procuring and spreading a bogus gospel. Where would we be if we simply read scripture with open minds and not infuse it with manipulation? Perhaps somewhere else. Let's try to get there!
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