Your Church is Closer to Planting than You Probably Think 5

One of the reasons why most churches do not participate in church planting is that they believe it to be something grandiose and outside of their reach.  Pastors often listen to the exceptional, ten-talented, high capacity church planter and assume that one must be like him to do church planting the “right” way.

“We don’t have a guy like that in our congregation; we can’t plant a church. Our church is made up of managers, teachers, bankers, electricians, welders, servers, stay-at-home moms, college students, mechanics, accountants, physicians, painters, and contractors.”

We hear of complex church planting methods and elaborate systems and assume that such is necessary for a church to be planted.  We look at our people and think the task is just too great for our congregation.

In my last post, Church Multiplication Begins with Middle C, I shared my concern that we often cast a church planting vision before our people and leave them there.  While the vision may be good and right, it often requires the execution of complex methods that only the rare ten-talented guy can manipulate.

In this post, I want to help us understand that church planting involves a series of small steps that are not beyond the grasp of churches.

Since we are talking about planting a church and not starting worship services, gathering a crowd, organizing kids programs, renting property, buying buildings, preaching a sermon series through the book of Leviticus, developing a web site, creating a mass mailer to be distributed to 10,000 people, raising enough money to start a small company. . . . (You know, all of those potentially good things that come with established churches comprised of long-term Kingdom citizens.), let’s begin with the basics.

Your people can see themselves involved with the basics.  You can see your people involved in the basics.  After all, the fundamentals are simple.  They are basic.  They are absolutely necessary.

Recognize the Basics

Church planting is very difficult work.  It is a ministry that is on the edge of Kingdom expansion.  It involves intensive spiritual warfare.  We only need to look at the missionary labors of Paul to understand that the spiritual oppositions are great.  Church planting is hard.  Very hard.

However…

Church planting is not complex. In fact, it is very simple (see 1 Thess 1:1-10 for the requirements).  It is a task for both the educated and uneducated, the literate and illiterate, the full-time employee and the unemployed.

Church planting is evangelism that results in new churches.  The beginning point for the church planting team is not with long-term Christians.  The team begins with unbelievers.  Glancing at my diagram above, you are able to see the movement of a church planting strategy along the major mileposts toward a church gathered.  The movement begins with sharing the gospel and does not move to a gathered group of Christians until new disciples have been made.

The new believers are then taught obedience in community with one another (i.e., small group).  Finally, the small group is taught from the Bible what the church is and does.  The new small group is then challenged with the question, “Is the Spirit leading you to unite as a local expression of the Body of Christ?”  And, if so, such begins a wonderful journey of the team with the new church to raise up and equip elders–who will then equip the church for the work of the ministry.

Questions to Ask

If you are trying to lead your people to be involved in church planting (or maybe you still have not caught a vision for it yourself), then ask your people a few questions–considering the diagram above:

1) Can you and two or three people from our church share the gospel with other people?  Can the three of you set a twelve month goal–by the grace of the Lord–that you will work to see nine people (for example) come to follow Jesus (three new believers per team member)?

2) Can the three of you gather those new disciples into a small group whereby you will begin to teach them how to follow Jesus? Can each of you mentor these nine outside of the weekly group time (three new disciples per team member)?

3) Can you and your team model the Christian lifestyle before this new small group while leading them through an intentional study of God’s word regarding what is the local church?

4) After studying through the Word about what is a local church and modeling individual and body life, can you and your team ask the small group if the Spirit is leading them to be a church?

5) If they decide to self-identify as a local church, then can you and your team begin working with them to raise up elders whom you and your team will begin to spend more time developing as leaders for this body?

Small Steps

Pastors, are your mechanics, teachers, stay-at-home moms, managers, and college students sharing the gospel?  Are your plumbers, servers, and business owners teaching one another the Word and having fellowship in small groups (Sunday School, home fellowships, family groups, etc.)?  If so, then your church is much closer to church planting than you probably think.

Whenever we remove much of the hype, quantitative expectations, and North American cultural expressions of church planting, we come to recognize that church planting is not very glamorous. It involves small steps.  It is about making disciples from out of the harvest and teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded.  If your people can do this, then by God’s grace, your church can plant churches. . . . many churches.

But, if we cannot make disciples, gather them, and teach them to obey, then we have a problem. . . a problem much deeper than believing that our church cannot be involved in church planting due to the lack of money, high caliber leaders, excellent musicians, etc., etc., etc..