Email re:Skinny on Church Planting
Jared Williams: I've used the phrase "church planting" for several years now to denote my life-long passion to offer my gifts to shape and form messy little communities of faith . . .Everytime i find myself using that phrase, i feel like i need to escape it, like i''m referencing some contrived connotation. It's really the word "planting" that i'm struggling with. When i think of/talk about church planting, i kind of grimace, hating to admit that the natural missionality of my life and those around me has an agenda to it. Especially one that presumes to occupy a space that the 'church' doesn't already exist in. But i know that the concept of "church planting" DOES hold water at some level! I guess the question is, should we have a word or phrase denoting the act of "church planting"? If so, what would it be? What do you use right now? How exactly does one "plant" something? Is that notion even too contrived or ambitious?
Me
Andrew: Hi Jared
I think I know the tension. "Planting" is an organic gardening word, which makes it sound better than "Implementing" or "Establishing" which sound more instititutional. But it is bittersweet.
Some years ago, the focus of church ministry moved from evangelism to discipleship and then from discipleship to church planting. It was further strengthened by C. Peter Wagner's famous sentence:
"Church Planting is the most effective form of evangelism under heaven".
Wagner's phrase was so profound that the American church was stunned into a dumbfounded silence. Angels in heaven starting bickering over why they did not think it up before humans. The living creatures stopped saying "Halellujah" and instead began chanting Wagner's mantra.
And a new term was accepted among men.
Still, when people today hear "planting", they often see it in insitutional terms. ie., "Theres a problem, lets PLANT an institution to deal with it"
It can also be a step away from holistic ministry that deals with the whole person towards a numbers oriented, strategy based, merciless missions strategy that says "new churches planted at any cost". Some mission organizations have recently been criticized for telling their medical doctors to start planting churches or return home.
There is also the temptation of ecclesiocentrism, which reduces the goal of mission and its measurement of success purely on the number of new churches planted, without recourse to whether those churches are life-giving or impacting the wider arena of the city and its structures.
Anyway, there may be other reasons why you respond negatively to the "planting" term.
Maybe you are just a lousy garderner???
You will be happy to know that Spencer Burkes new book ("Making Sense of Church", will be released this September) will have a chapter on moving from the warrior metaphor to that of the gardener.
What do I use right now? In missions circles, I still use "plant" or "start" but I try to move the focus from individual churches to movements ("ignite" is a cool word) and from institution-starting to the holistic impact that comes when the Kingdom of God is downloaded (reloaded?) into a space.
Response
BeyondPostHuman
"Brad: okay, a rant. here comes: i think c. peter wagner's famous statement is not so true as american christians would like to think. i think a better phrase these days would be "discipleship is the most effective method for evangelism under heaven." church planting and the growing of capable leaders are both a byproduct of discipleship, so why don't we start with the "real" thing, which is discipleship? i hear a lotta people out there complaining about the lack of leadership in their (traditional and/or transition) churches, but then, it doesn't look like they have holistic discipleship either. so why should they expect they'd have any leaders raised up from within? they're performing and creating spectators still."
