The problem with modern church planting …

Church planting is broadly thought of within today’s church as the most effective way of “growing” the church, kind of like the way Al Gore proclaims global warming to be settled science.

The problem with both is that science hasn’t settled the issues surrounding the arguments for and against global warming, and the Bible doesn’t point to planting new churches as the means of building the church.

If we look closely at how the church came into being, and then grew rapidly and expanded throughout the world, it was not by our modern concept of planting new churches.

Today, there are multiple church planting agencies that will tell you exactly how to successfully plant a church. Some have scripted a few hundred steps a church planter “must” take, and will even provide project management services to help a church planter make sure these steps are accomplished. They will tell you how many people you need to have as a “core group” if you want a successful launch. And they’ll help you find a building to meet in so you can come together and “be a church.”

That isn’t how the church started or grew.

Instead, it started with a core group of Christ’s followers, emboldened and empowered by the Holy Spirit, preaching and teaching the Good News of Jesus Christ to the lost. Thousands responded to the message, and the first local church family emerged. Soon after, a persecution of these new Christians resulted in scattering the believers to other lands, but they preached Christ wherever they were scattered to.

After that, as few as two or three believers were sent out to preach Christ to people in places who had not heard the Good News. The mission was to preach the Good News and disciple those who believed.

In the biblical account of the church, the mission wasn’t to send a church planter to a city, develop a core group, rent a building, create a brand, market a trendy-named church, and then draw people to a place with the idea that those who came and stayed would be the church. Instead, those who were sent out went to evangelize, baptize, and disciple. From the fruit of those efforts, a new church family would emerge.

Today’s church planting efforts try to reverse this approach, starting with a core group about the size of today’s average church congregation, and then start as a church. Perhaps that’s why there sometimes is a lack of emphasis on evangelism and disciple-making. New church plants can become inwardly-focused quickly because they often have had little time to be outwardly focused. With the larger the group they start with, the more attention is given (if not demanded) to creating programs for the group; these people want to be served, which leaves only so much time, resources, and energy to look outward. Often, a determining factor of whether a new church plant eventually “succeeds” or “fails” is whether the core group starts and stays focused on preaching Christ to those who don’t know Him, or starting as a church that quickly turns inward.

I’m certainly not saying that today’s church planting efforts haven’t had their share of “success.” But if a more biblical approach to church planting was pursued and supported, what might the fruit of those efforts look like?

Scotty