09.03.09
4P’s for church planting
I was sitting with a brother who mentors church planters, both in Canada and in Europe. He was concerned too many agencies have continued to clone American models rather than allowing the new works to be shaped uniquely by the Holy Spirit in response to unique contexts. The first question church planting agencies often want to discuss is governance. Who is in control? How does leadership function? What structures are in place?
I was reminded of the “wine and wineskin†analogy in Matthew and Luke. It seems like we want to give priority to the wineskin – perhaps familiarity gives us a sense of security. Sometimes perhaps we don’t genuinely trust God or the people he anoints for the work, so we want control. Maybe it gives us a sense of usefulness, or justifies our position, to maintain that level of input from some centralized office. Cynical perhaps?
Wherever we come out on this, it seems to me that it is simply naive to expect that we can take Florida oranges and grow them in Port Rupert, or in Saskatoon. We have to be sensitive to the soil. We need more than good strategies and more than models that have worked well in the past. We need to become genuinely open to following the movement of the Spirit in each neighborhood. In the outstanding little book The Open Secret Leslie Newbigin expressed it best: “the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decision about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources†[rather] the significant advances have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge.â€
In short, our best planning won’t suffice. Instead, we should focus on preparation. Our best strategies will often fail, based on what has worked in the past; we live in a new world. So what are the unique factors we should pay attention to as we plant new churches?
* Place – or Context. What is unique in this soil? We exegete our neighborhoods, listen to the stories.
* Purpose – or Telos. Where do we want to end up? What is God’s purpose in the church? How does ecclesia relate to the Missio Dei?
* People – What is God’s provision for this place in the gifts he has given in people? Ministry and mission are incarnational.
* Pneuma – Spirit. Mission involves discerning what God is up to in our communities then partnering with him. It also means priority to wine over wineskin. Form should not be imposed and structure should follow the mission.
These 4 P’s will help us to allow God to uniquely shape the work he will do in each new location. We don’t need to clone more churches. Every biologist knows that cloning gradually reduces genetic diversity until we lose the ability to adapt to new environments. We gradually lose something we can no longer replace. In Mission Shaped Church the authors write,
“The Anabaptist writer and practitioner, Stuart Murray Williams, has been the most trenchant critic of the tendency of older church plants to copy the outward forms and style of their sending church, without asking whether the new mission context was different. This can result in failure to let the shape and form of the new church be determined by the mission context for which it was intended. The call for new kinds of churches can become subverted into the production of MORE churches.â€Â (20)
While this captures the method and the need to exegete culture, it needs to move one step further to explicitly recognize the creativity and freedom of God the Spirit. New initiatives will not be unique simply because of the new context, but because God is endlessly creative. And if we allow the Spirit the freedom to move among us, he will continually surprise us. The uniqueness of new initiatives will rise in large measure from the unique persons who compose the living body, from their unique gifts, perspectives, passions and relationships. As William Cavanaugh aptly put it, “We are God’s body language.”
It is simply wrong-headed to place questions of leadership or governance up front when planting new churches. Rather, we should let forms rise out of the unique matrix of people, place, and purpose in each location. The wine will shape the skin. Jesus is the living Lord of the church and he will build his church as he sees fit. We need to trust the Spirit to do this work, and trust the workers he calls into the field.
Mike O said,
September 3, 2009 at 7:27 pm
There are two paradigms that differ between the US and Canada. One is the tax code, the other is Section 8 housing.
In the US, interest and property taxes are deductible from income tax. As a result, there is a huge emphasis to buy, versus renting. And, generally people buy either the most house they can afford, or the best school district they can afford. Usually, both the husband and the wife are working when they buy the house they intend to raise their kids in. With two incomes, they qualify for a more expensive house. After a few years, and a few raises, mom can quit and the family budget permits one income. Many neighborhoods consist of houses about equal in price and size. In general, school districts that regularly send their grads to the best colleges usually require the incomes that college grads earn. One challenge for church plants is that it is almost necessary for the pastor’s wife to have a degree. Otherwise there is a difficult conflict and bad feelings with the church women and the pastor’s wife. The whole tax code creates an unusual environment for church planting.
Another church model involves Section 8 housing. In the US, a landlord gets a subsidy for renting to low income people. It is easy for a church to reach out and form a congregation from the (usually) large number of people in these apartment complexes. Without additional support of another church or denomination, the economics of these people make it difficult for a church plant to be self sustaining.
Certainly, the purpose of church planting is many-fold. One purpose is to break “hard ground” and provide established churches with new members, and many “failed” plants send members on to other venues. The organization goes away, but the people remain Christians and grow in a new setting.
A look at leadership is in order. Generally, suburban church members are commuters to corporate jobs, and are familiar with line and staff management, utilizing many MBTI types. A choleric, top-down, my-way-or-the-highway is not relevant to them. Sure, they may make use of “religiious products and services” but they generally don’t get involved, or contribute much money unless they feel that their intellectual knowledge and experience is utilized.