I am encouraged by the number of churches in the United States that are getting involved in church planting. Over the past few years, a growing number of churches have started (or considering) training church planters through internships. This is a good thing.
May their tribe increase!
In 2007, I wrote an article for Lausanne World Pulse describing my paradigm used in the classroom. While I still believe this approach is applicable to that setting, I also believe it should be applied to the local church context. Because of this growing interest in equipping church planters (outside of academia), I thought it would be helpful to write this post. While there are many people with more experience and wisdom than I have in this area, I feel that I could share something to help you based on my experiences in established churches, on church planting teams, and in the classroom.
I believe the best church multiplication training approaches are built around P.L.A.N.T.S. Whether you are leading your church to develop a church planter training paradigm or teaching at a college or seminary, apply this helpful acrostic.
P-Provide Biblical and Theological Foundations
It all starts here; and we must provide it. The Book is our guide. We must not focus on the “how-tos” and fail to address the “whys” of church planting. This is especially important since the Bible intentionally does not tell us to plant churches, but to make disciples. A failure to establish a healthy foundation will hinder long-term healthy Kingdom expansion. Remember, we’re running a marathon. While there is much to cover when providing the foundation, I have found it especially important to focus on: 1) Christology; 2) Ecclesiology; and 3) Pneumatology. Some important questions to ask include: “What does Jesus and the Apostolic Church say about and model when it comes to church planting?”; “What is a Kingdom citizen?”; “What is a church planter?”; “What is the local church?” “What does it mean to be a leader in the local church?”; “What is the role of the Holy Spirit in Kingdom advancement?”
L-Layout Missiological Principles
We need to advocate principles that lead to the multiplication of disciples, leaders, and churches. We need to provide training in contextualization, understanding receptivity, locating persons of peace, evangelizing social networks, teaching obedience, and developing leaders. Remember, we are not teaching them how to “clone” a model (even if that model worked well in our contexts), but to apply principles.
From a biblical perspective, the two main purposes of church planters are: 1) evangelizing the harvest field; and 2) developing leaders who have come out of the harvest field. Church planting is not primarily about training folks how to find a building, develop a budget, organize a 501(c)3, develop a web site, and administrate like crazy! Rather, we need to train church planters how to apply missionary principles to their unique contexts.
A-Allow for Hands-on Training
Just as churches are not planted in front of computers, training church planters is not done in the classroom alone. Marry your classroom based approach to field-based training. Provide short-term, field assignments to apply what was taught in the classroom. Allow for survey work, prayer walking, discovering community needs (and meeting them), evangelism, starting Bible studies, etc. The problem with most of our approaches to training church planters is that we train them as if they are going to serve a newly planted church, rather than training them in exercises that must precede the birth of the church! We put the cart before the horse. The result: We have church planters who can pastor established churches (a good thing), but not church planters who can follow the biblical paradigm of doing evangelism that results in new churches.
They must be taught how to exegete and enter a community, reach the people, gather the new believers, and THEN begin teaching the new believers to obey all that Jesus commanded. Many times we train church planters how to teach the people, when we first must teach church planters how to reach the people.
N-Involve Practitioners
Okay. I know “involve” does not start with “N”, but it was the best I could do. 🙂 Our church planters need to hear from other church planters. They need to hear what is working and not working. They need to hear from both church planters serving in North America and in other parts of the world. This will assist them in thinking about their contexts. Involving practitioners puts “flesh” on the theory.
Some (not all) practitioners make good coaches and mentors. You should consider having them to provide such on-going assistance with your church planters.
T-Teach Various Models and Methods
While there is much wisdom in past experience, we are not to teach church planters how to replicate what we did 3, 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. Allow cloning to stay in the realm of biotechnology. Expose church planters to a variety of approaches to missionary work. Help them to think as a wise Kingdom citizen about purpose-driven, house, cell, traditional, etc. paradigms of church planting. Help them to sift through the sediment of the various methods and models, discovering the golden nuggets they can apply to their contexts.
S-Support Multiplication Strategy Development
Do not advocate a church planting approach to plant a single church that may plant another church three years later. Rather, help them to develop and apply Holy Spirit-guided strategies for discipling and churching a region, a town, a city, an entire population segment, or people group. I am amazed at how myopic we are when it comes to gospel transformation and church planting, particularly in the U. S. and Canada (But I’ll save this discussion for a future post.).
I don’t have all the answers, so I’m interested in hearing your experiences. P.L.A.N.T.S. has worked for me; I hope it will be of value to you, your church planters, and your churches.
Your article is on target! Especially the fact that many churches have succeeded in training church planters to pastor an established church rather than preparing them to reach the people. I have found myself in such a situation that the pastor sees himself as a pastor (preacher) and not one who is supposed to be out there witnessing and evangelizing or even discipling. He believes that it is the responsibility of the church members to reach others and he is meant to preach because by him, “sheep make sheep”, and he is shepherd and not a sheep. Accepted, he is a shepherd, but even when the sheep go astray, he believes that the sheep should not be followed, but attention should be given to the ones in the fold and not those who are being preyed against by the enemy. I wish that all pastors are able to read this article and apply it in their church ministry.