Church Planting

A few days ago, I received a circular email from a website that helps with ‘church planting. I don’t usually respond to such things, but this time I just felt inclined to do so. The statement that caught my eye in the email was: “Church planting is one of the strategies used by the Apostle Paul to grow the early church and even today studies tell us that it is the most effective way to impact a community with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” So I wrote back with just a one-liner, “I’m not sure I agree with the premise here…” The following conversation ensued, beginning with his response to me:

You are welcome to discuss it on my forum if you have questions.

That’s fine… Got too much email now. I just didn’t want to let the assumption blow by…

Okay, however, the statement is not an assumption, but a conclusion based on Scripture and research. Just wanted to clarify your mischaracterization…

Clarify away… I don’t mind a bit.

But what you may consider a ‘conclusion based on Scripture and research’ may still be an ‘assumption based on Scripture and research’. I find no language in Acts or in Paul’s letters that speak of a ‘strategy to plant churches’. Do you? And if it isn’t there, then it is a speculation about his strategy, not a given conclusion.

Isn’t it just as likely to characterize Paul’s travels and teaching not purposed to plant churches, but to spread the gospel and make disciples? I think that is stated far more clearly. The churches he identified and visited later could have been just the fruit of doing the former things that Jesus clearly asked his followers to do. In my view you can plant all the churches you want and never see true discipleship happen or true community. God knows I’ve visited hundreds of those. But you can’t teach people how to walk with the King and not see the reality of church life spring up all around you.

The distinction may sound like semantics, but I don’t think it is and thought it was worth noting or I wouldn’t have responded to you…

But you’re free to see it differently. Many do!

I don’t disagree with anything you wrote in the second paragraph and as a matter of fact I think you are absolutely right. I would add that the same can be said for house churches or any group that calls itself a church! If we do not put first the preaching of the Gospel (which includes the call to discipleship) then all our efforts are in vain.

As to Paul’s strategy to plant, no there is nothing much in Scripture that gives a specific strategy to plant, but of course you also realize there is nothing in there about his strategy for house churches. So I guess we are both in trouble huh? 🙂

Seriously though, let me ask, what exactly do you see as the assumption? What part of the statement do you find to be in conflict with Scripture?

I’m not really a house church guy, so I’m not sure I’m in trouble there. 😉 I see Jesus’ church take on a number of living expressions when people learn to follow him first and love each other second. House church is one of those. And I think it can be done incredibly well. But I also think it can be done with incredible religion and pain.

The assumption I was referring to is that church planting was a strategy Paul used to grow the early church, or that it is the most effective way to impact a community with the Gospel of Jesus. I don’t see them ‘in conflict’ with Scripture as much as I see assigning a priority to them that Scripture doesn’t assign. I’m not saying it is unscriptural, but at least it is extra-scriptural. The fruit of something doesn’t necessarily prove the intent. That churches sprang up in most places Paul frequented is a fact and they all seemed to be based around homes. For example, many people point to the characteristics of the early church in Acts, saying that if we duplicated their life, we’ll experience the same reality. I would argue that their life in Jesus, produced a certain relational reality among them. You can’t imitate the fruit and have the fruit. You have to have the same LIFE in Jesus that they had. That life will produce the expressions of community that Jesus wants. I don’t see that it works the other way around.

This is not a major point for me, and I don’t consider that we are deeply estranged over this. I see it as a matter of emphasis, and I thought I’d respond to your first note just to get you thinking a bit. In the end you may stay with your conclusion and I’ll not lose any sleep over that and hope you don’t.

Wayne, thanks for your thoughtful response. I sense there is a lot of wisdom in what you write. All I can say is that I will need to really think about it and spend some more time reading Scripture.

In my own thinking, The Scripture says that faith comes from hearing and hearing from the proclamation of God’s Word. I take the term “planting” to mean the sowing of God’s seed (His Word) into a community and growing a church from that seed. So in the broadest sense, I understand Paul’s mission to the Gentiles was to go from city to city, preach the Word, and establish a local gathering of believers. That is how I see church planting. Obedience to God’s call to enter an area where the Gospel needs to be preached and then establishing a congregation for the purpose of growing those followers to full maturity of faith.

Again, this is a rough summary of what I have in mind when I talk about planting a church. I will try and weigh this in the balance of what you have shared with me.

Thanks for taking time to share with me brother! I appreciate your willingness to offer some loving admonition and correction.

I appreciate your spirit in talking through all this. But I wasn’t trying to admonish or correct, just offer a different view of things that may nor may not be helpful to your journey.

You’re rough summary of planting a church is better than most, and I like much of it. But it still has some weaknesses by focusing on a priority that I would consider to be a fruit not an objective. I know few ‘established’ congregations that really help believers experience full maturity. Most times the effort over ‘gathering’ and ‘forming’ suck up the life of believers wanting to grow rather than actually helping them do that. I realize there are exceptions to this, but they are exceptions. I hope you have some fun with Jesus sorting through this as he continues to lead you on. In the end, Jesus told us to proclaim the gospel and make disciples, and he would build his church. We do seem to get that backward. When we take it our ourselves to build the church, discipleship rarely happens and the demands of the institution almost always seem to overrun the relational realities the church needs to flourish. In the end, I think Paul returned to those cities to help them see what Jesus was doing to build the church in his area, and helped them recognize it, rather than to impose an organizational model from outside. That’s why they seemed to develop very differently in different communities.

I’ll give you an example of this. When I taught ‘church planting’ teams for an international missions group, I would break the class up into small groups the first day. I told them they were ‘church planting’ teams. They chose the country and city and then I gave them an hour to sort out the questions they would need to resolve as they were getting started. Their concerns and questions all revolved around finance, building rental, publicity, statements of faith and all the other things that go with a corporate endeavor.

Two days later I broke them into the same teams, told them they were going into the same city, but this time not to plant a church but to demonstrate who Jesus is to the people and help them learn how to follow him. The questions and issues they came up with from that assignment was remarkably different and far more powerful. Now it was about meeting people, getting jobs that would link them to the community, learning how to share their faith naturally not artificially and how to help people connect in a real way with him. Finances, buildings and publicity never came up. That’s the difference I’m talking about, if that makes sense.

I’ve had fun thinking through this again with you. Thanks for being so open…

All good points and I think you are right on! I love that exorcise and will use it with our own people. It is hard in the US not to get hung up on the stuff, and I have tried to do some things to keep us more focused on people and relationships, but it is always difficult to keep the first things first. An exercise like the one you share could be a big help to me.

That’s great! It’s always hard to keep the main thing the main thing!

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We’re Back!

Well, our blissful vacation on the Olympic Peninsula ended early because of the constant shelling of our quiet seaside cottage by the neighbors on the hill behind us, who started celebrating July 1 with thousands of dollars of fireworks that began in the late morning and continued well past midnight on one evening. And it wasn’t even the Fourth yet.

And I’m not talking about a few bottle rockets or some firecrackers, here. I’m talking about the full-on huge starburst explosions that you see generally only at stadiums and community events—scores of them, one after the other exploding over our roof. When Sara and I passed through a Native American reservation about 20 miles short of our destination and saw dozens of firework stands, I wondered if that would be a problem… I had no idea they were selling the really big stuff.

Sara and I could handle it, but our 10 year-old Shepherd could not. She was in a constant state of panic, so we left early and drove home on Sunday and Monday. We actually made it from Eugene, Oregon to Moorpark in one 14 hours stretch on Monday, a distance of 858 miles. Sara drove all but the last 100 miles of that. She’s nuts!

The sudden end, however, didn’t destroy the awesome time we had. We had lots of time just to be together, to read looking over the sea, to hike through the Olympic National Forest to high mountain lakes and waterfalls with our dogs romping on the trail ahead of us. And we didn’t end our vacation, just because we got home. We still laid low, worked on some household projects and continued to enjoy our break. But today, we’re phasing back in and starting to wade into the mountain of things that has piled up in my absence. I thought I’d get a jump on them

And continuing the theme of the latest podcast released today, I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been reading during this veg vacation—my favorite kind! In addition to the magazines I brought along, my book list turned out to be quite an eclectic mix. I arrived still finishing a novel of Vatican intrigue called The Third Secret, which I enjoyed except for the last 10 pages, and Don Miller’s, Searching for God Knows What, which in the end I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as his first, Blue Like Jazz. Then I read an unpublished manuscript called Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer, which will be published later this year. I really enjoyed the honesty and humor of someone’s journey shaking fee of religion to embrace a real relationship with Jesus. Then it was onto Robert McCullough’s 1776, which was not at all what I expected. It is the story of Washington’s Continental Army through that year. It was riveting and I was shocked at how little I knew of the war of revolution during that time. Next up was C.S. Lewis’ ‘Til We Have Faces, which I consider to be his best fiction. It’s a story I’ve read four times before, but it had been 20 years since the last reading. What a story! I’m going to quote a piece from it in a future blog. Finally I started a Michael Chrichton Novel, State of Fear about global warming.

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Getting It

I’m on vacation in the Pacific Northwest, but got this email yesterday. I said I wouldn’t write blogs while I’m gone, but I guess it’s OK to let others write them for me. I got this email yesterday and my prayer is that it would give hope to others who are still trying to fill their desire for relationship with God by some kind of expression of “church”, be it home or some other variety. I love it when God finally draws the lines in someone’s heart that he has been laying for some time and they realize it is him they have been seeking all their lives long. This is why I say that whatever expression of church God plants us in must flow out of the growing relationship he wants to have with us. If not, it will just be another substitute. Daniel from Florida expressed a a bit of this process better

I left organized religion last year after several years of God exposing many issues to me and I was directed to your site a few months ago by a guy at an online bookstore. After e-mailing back and forth with you once or twice I decided that you were totally missing it because I was on a direct path to the home church thing and you said that home church is not the answer so I moved on. My wife and kids along with another family started a home church thing, after a short time it totally flopped. Then, after reading the Jake book and a time of listening to the podcasts, and then reading He Loves Me, I grew more and more frustrated because you clearly say that it is possible to have a real daily relationship with God and I was not getting it. The last two days I have been listening to the Transition thing, then just last night I woke up at 2:00 AM and listened to disc 7 and 8 of transition, and by 3:00 AM I was having a terrific time with Father and started getting it. I wanted to say thank you for making the transition thing free on mp3. God exposed several things to me early this morning and I could literally feel Him there with me. I realize that hye loves me and I am excited about this journey. Life is more awesome today than I ever imagined, which is odd because the area I live in is in the middle of a drought and I own/operate a small rain gutter business and nobody buys rain gutters in a drought and I do not know at this point if I will have a business when it is over. I have had a lot of time to look at my life and have to trust God. But in the midst of that, I am excited about today.

Don’t think the same process may work for you, just keep looking to Jesus, knowing he will draw together whatever pieces will help you get it too! He wants to know you more than you want to know him. It’s just that he has to get through lots of baggage to make that real. And he is extremely patient even when we wander around chasing our own ideas.

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Transition: From Relgion to Relationship

I am blessed to be able to finally have a recording of the most important teaching I do around the world to help people sort out how to move from religious thinking about their life in God and learn to live relationally as he designed us to. Recently on a trip to Pennsylvania, I did eight and a half hours of teaching over two days helping people sort out how to live out a relationship with God that is not manipulated by our shame nor based on our performance. Instead it is motivated purely out of God’s love for them as we discover how to respond to him.

I felt impressed to make this audio series available to anyone in the world free of charge and without any sense of obligation. We have posed downloaded mp3s of all eight and a half hours on the Transition page of the Lifestream website.

If I could recommend anything to you, it is not to rush through it. Listen to it in bits and as God makes some things clear to you, ask him to work those things into your life so that you can walk in its reality, not you’re your mental agreement. Feel free to make CDs of if you like and pass it along to others as Father leads you.

If you’d prefer to have a CD series of this teaching, you can order it from Lifestream for $30.00 plus shipping.

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Relishing the Freedom to Follow

The July 2006 issue of BodyLife has just been posted at the Lifestream website.

The lead article is called Reveling in the Freedom to Follow, and confronts the difference between observing Christianity and following Jesus as the most significant part of every day life. Jesus invited us to follow him and yet so much of our religious life is designed to erode our belief that he can lead us each as he desires and leaves us instead with lifeless rituals and rules? This article describes the incredible freedom that people experience simply from learning to follow him and him alone.

I hope you enjoy it. Tomorrow Sara and I will be starting a two-week vacation that we are incredibly excited about after a long and busy first half of this year. So, don’t expect a lot of blogging during that time and I will probably fall way behind on my email. So please be patient. However, you can still place order for books and CDs with our very capable office staff.

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Sales or Service?

I’m a bit of a golf nut, so I’m excited about having some time to sit and watch the final round of the US Open today! Go Phil! Or, Padraig! Or, Monty! Or, Furyk! Should be lots of fun.

Reading an article on the open the other day, however, I saw a humorous story about a previous golf tournament that was in danger of being cancelled or curtailed because of unrelenting rains. One of the TV announcers spotted a priest in his clerical collar and called to him, “Can’t you do anything about this?”

“You’ll have to take that up with management. I’m in sales,” he responded with a smile.

It made me smile, too. I love the idea that God’s in management and we’re not him. I even see Jesus living in that freedom. He wasn’t trying to get his Father to do what he thought best; he was living in the things he saw his Father doing. On a number of occasions when questioned about the timing of future events, he would respond, that he didn’t know for those things were in the Father’s hands. I guess when you know the Father you don’t have to sweat the future.

As I thought about this more, however, I was troubled with the priest’s view that he was in sales. Believe me, if I had heard this story 15 years ago, I would never have thought twice about that. Religion is something you have to ‘sell’ to people and I wouldn’t have caught that. Today, however, the idea of being in sales as an ambassador of this kingdom turns my gut.

Perhaps it would be better said, “You’ll have to take that up with management. I’m in service.”

That, I like! Imagine the freedom of living that way. Even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve. He wasn’t selling anything either…

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Where To From Here?

I got this letter the day after the last one I put on my blog. This one is from a senior pastor as well and letters like his more than make up for letters like the previous one. When our religious institutions get in the way of a simple hunger to live deeply in the life of Jesus, then we have to rethink what we’re doing…

I am a minister in my 50s. I was ordained as a Southern Baptist, was a Navy Chaplain, turned charismatic, involved most recently in a “apostolic church” with a strong emphasis on “fatherhood” (which I have decided is the shepherding movement warmed over), and I just separated myself from my “headship.” Part of me would like to walk away from Christianity completely and just take care of my young family, put my Bible away and tell God when he has something for me to light a nearby bush! My question is where to from here? I feel as though I can’t trust anyone. ( I also had my own business, to support my ministry, which some “christian brothers” left me holding the huge debt debt that resulted in personal and corporate bankruptcy.)

I became a Christian and a minister believing that the gospel could make the world a better place. Needless to say I have been disappointed. But I can not forsake Jesus. I just no longer know how the work of Christ in the world gets done in a tangible manner. Perhaps I am most disappointed in myself in that I have no idea any longer of my destiny or my calling. I am most disappointed in my lack of the love like Christ in my person. I feel totally inadequate for ministry (even with my college and seminary degrees and years of experience).

Got any suggestions?

Your story breaks my heart. Unfortunately it is not an uncommon story, even down to the betrayal of close friends and bankruptcy. You are not alone, Bro! What Christianity has become in our day is often a painful reality that doesn’t help people be transformed, just manipulate the system for their own gain. When it finally falls out it is incredibly destructive.

I’m blessed you would write me. I don’t feel like I have any adequate words at times like this and certainly can’t map out the next steps for you. I can affirm your statement that I can’t trust anyone. Jesus even said something like that in John 2. But you can trust him. You may not feel like that right now with so many disappointed hopes in him, but he has set himself to deliver you from a system that was doing more harm than good, even with the best of intentions, and is now inviting you to know him in ways you’ve only dreamed of before. 50ish is as good a time as any to let him take you through this transition and learn how to live in the freedom of his love rather than in the religion we call Christianity.

Where to go? To Him! To Him! To Him! Every day you wake up, just ask him to reveal himself to you as he really is. Ask him to lead you one step at a time to whatever he has for you. Follow the convictions of your heart and ignore the voices that seek to manipulate your sense of shame. Who knows what that will end up looking like for you? I’ve known so many brothers in your shoes and the outcomes are always different, but they all have this in common. We all look back and say, “Why didn’t I go on this journey earlier?” While the result are rarely what any of us expected, they are always far more spacious and filled with grace than our own dreams ever would have.â€

I know that may be hard to believe, given where you sit today. But he is pretty good at what he does. You’ve been dis-illusioned by what you thought his life was, but that is a GREAT thing. You (like all of us) had illusions about him and church that needed to be dissed. Now you stand on the brink of seeing this Father as he really is, and the bodfy of Christ as she is really taking shape in the world. It is more incredible than you’ll ever know.

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Pity Me? I’m Not Sure I Need It!

Yesterday I got to Pennsylvania and found this note in my inbox from a ‘Senior Pastor’ in North Carolina:

So tragic that heresy can look repectable (sic)* on the web. Your thots (sic) disagree with scripture, church history, the expression of the church on any continent of the world, and the thots (sic) of any great Christian thinker thru the ages. Wake up Wayne, your (sic) deluded – I pity you.

Such emails make me incredibly sad. No doubt, something I’ve written has caused him some pain. I don’t know how in his case, but often when I get letters like this, it is because those that pastors like him feel responsible for are passing out some of my articles to others that are creating some disaffection from the institution he manages. Sometimes people do that innocently and with God’s leading, at other times people do it in a way that is divisive.

Either way, I never rejoice in the pain my words cause others, unless it leads them to a greater joy and freedom. I know how threatening my thoughts can be to those who think they have the only expression of church life that God sanctions in the world. Theirs is a darker prison, unfortunately, and I always hope to write something that might put a crack in the door to a brighter world. Here’s how I responded to this one:

“I’m so blessed you had the courage to write me with things you are obviously very passionate about. And believe me, I understand your concerns. A number of years ago I would have even shared some of them. I’m not exactly sure what your labeling as ‘heresy’ from my site. I doubt it is Father’s great affection for his children and his desire to transform us into the image of his Son. Could it be the fact that I embrace many expressions of church life as the Spirit would lead people? I do have a shelf full of books that suggest many others have struggled with similar concerns down through the centuries, and I have visited Christians in many countries where they live in a relational demonstration of community that expresses the truth and the power of the Scriptures. You could look at China alone to see what God can do in alternative expressions of congregational life.

So, I know we see this differently. And if my deluded soul needs to awaken, you’re welcome to pray to that end. I think Jesus is quite capable of taking care of that, if need be. But I already feel as if I have awaken from the rigidity of human effort to the reality of abiding in the vine that has significantly transformed me in ways I only pretended in the past. In every way I have more life in him, more shared life with other believers and more engagement with a lost world than I ever thought possible in this age. I’m not about to go back on that…”

________
*sic – thus or so, used within brackets to indicate that what precedes is written intentionally or is copied verbatim from the original, even if it appears to be a mistake.

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I love this!

I got this in my inbox the other day, in response to a recent podcast. I LOVE the last sentence and shout a hearty AMEN to the proposal. Let us be such people!

I listened to the “Are You a Christian?” podcast today and loved it. I was especially touched by your story of the 2 hour conversation with the woman you were at political odds with. And I loved that you could tell that story about yourself and it come out so clean and honest and humble. That is a work of grace.

It’s similar to how I feel when I talk about (what he is doing in me.) This adventure is not about me but Jesus, and apart from Him and the grace of the Spirit and Papa’s love in this process, there would be none of it and I would be only lost and destroyed, or dead already.

So let’s be people who rock the world, who fight for the unity of the heart, who embrace powerlessness and a love that is so wondrously painful that it threatens daily to pull us out of this age and into the presence of the One we so desperately love.

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The Dangers of GroupThink

In a comment on my blog about Christian Magazines, Eric left a comment thinking I’d been a bit rough on the industry and painted with too broad a brush. I thought his comments had some validity, so I want to try to clarify that previous blog here:

Eric, Thanks for writing. I love you’re perspective and your heart. Maybe you’re right. It was a bit tough.

I certainly do not believe nor mean to intimate that folks who work for Christian magazines are evil. But this piece was not directed at individuals who work in the industry, but at the industry as a whole and how groupthink can make the subobjective of making a profit more important than helping people discover the truth of God’s work on the earth. I tried to make it clear that they don’t see it that way, and as you say are doing what they think best to spread the kingdom.

But isn’t that what is scary about it? When I was a pastor I was deeply convinced that by building my institution, I was buildilng the kingdom. My passion for God was the same then, but the groupthink of the institutional enviornment took those passions and twisted them into manipulating people with guilt and commitment, saying what would not offend even if it wasn’t quite the truth and thinking the success of the institution was more important than the growth of individuals. When the subobjective of buildling an institution replaces the key objective of living loved and loving, horrible things can happen by well-intentioned people. I wasn’t writing about anything I haven’t also experienced firsthand. And yes, that is a confession.

I wrote the original blog because of the number of people that thought I could influence Charisma to give more weight to those thinking outside the box. I know the futility of that given their readership. I don’t know the editor there at all, though I have tried to write him on a number of occasions and have never had him respond. I have LOVED a lot of his editorials that challenge religious ways of thinking. I’ve often wondered how he stays there given the overall humanistic and materialistic feel of the magazine and those it covers. I stopped reading it years ago because it beckoned the wrong motives in me.

That said, I do think there is a huge difference between people reading what I write because it resonates with them, and me writing what I write to draw the largest audience I can. Very different. Pleasing people is not a trap I hope to fall into yet again. I’ve been in that pit way too many times before. It’s muddy at the bottom and the sides are steep and slippery. There’s no way out without a firm and loving hand from above!

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