planting the gospel
I am more and more convinced that the idea of church planting atomatically comes with some associated flaws. And these flaws are bound up with the inherited idea of church, which if unexplored, is simply reproduced without incarnational principles guiding it. I suggest that instead of useing the term church planting, how about we substitute it with ‘gospel planting’. Consider this…
The Gospel is like a seed, and you have to sow it. When you sow the seed of the Gospel in Israel, a plant that can be called Jewish Christianity grows. When you sow it in Rome, a plant of Roman Christianity grows. You sow the Gospel in Great Britain and you get British Christianity. The seed of the Gospel is later brought to America, and a plant grows of American Christianity. Now, when missionaries come to our lands they brought not only the seed of the Gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flower pot included! So, what we have to do is to break the flowerpot, take out the seed of the Gospel, sow it in our own cultural soil, and let our own version of Christianity grow.
–Dr. D.T. Niles of Sri Lanka
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Alan,
I absolutely agree with you on this. I posted a similar entry on my blog last month. I am convinced that we must do away with the mentality of church planting and replace it with the reality of laying the foundation of Christ. These two concepts are worlds apart and mutually exclusive. For to plant a church is to found an institution upon a set of ideals - whereas laying a foundation is to plant Christ as the seed of the kingdom into the hearts of people and allow the Lord to build the ekklesia from that seed.
As an aside - I greatly appreciate your work in Christ. I have had the opportunity to listen to both you and Deb via CA and have been doubly blessed.
Alan-
This dovetails well with Neil Cole’s point about helping new believers “imprint” on Christ instead of a particular form of church.
Thanks for always pointing us back to Christ, brother.
Chris
Great quote. I think we need to break the flowerpot in America, too, in order to plant the gospel among those who think they know what it means.
Allen, et. al,
I like this quote, and generally agree with it but have a question. What is a particular Christianity (i.e. Roman, Britain, American) when a country is made up of various cultures? Are there various plants within the garden, so to speak? And, how do we, as followers of Jesus, live, work, play in such a way as to prevent a monochrome variation of Christianity in the places where the pot is being broken and the seed being planted?
Peace.
Dan
I like the much more encompassing term, “flinging freedom.”
lol. Call me a “freedom flinger” anyday.
“Church planter” has been grating on me for a while. I just can’t make it square with Jesus. I love what He said:
“God’s kingdom is like seed thrown on a field by a man who then goes to bed and forgets about it. The seed sprouts and grows—he has no idea how it happens. The earth does it all without his help: first a green stem of grass, then a bud, then the ripened grain. When the grain is fully formed, he reaps—harvest time!”
Sometimes I feel like we try to micromanage the Kingdom–to approach what we might otherwise call a “work of God” as a mechanical process of button-pushing and level-pulling. We are offered a model, a way of “doing church,” and end up with some windup machine expected to produce whatever we define as “success.” …
…instead of living in freedom and in organic community in such a radically upside-down, freedom-flinging way that other people are likely to try to “spy out our freedom.” I can’t imagine a much greater complement.
I like the idea of focusing on the gosple, Death, Burial, Res, under the larger narrative framework of Kingdom of God, or culture of God if you like.
There is definitiely a bankrupt out there on what the gospel is and how it speaks to us and our relationship with God.
As far as a “pure gospel” I think this is an illusion. It needs to be an ideal we strive for, but the “glasses” we wear in reading the text and applying the story will always produce a tainted version of the gospel. All we can hope for is to let the story be read and interpreted a fresh on a regular basis and let God do his thing with the insights we graps form the story.
Hi Alan
The Neil Cole echoes come through in this don’t they? I have to say that despite the fact that the gospel always does come with glasses (Tim C’s comment) there is something primal about a church plant that only involves non-Christians. We are in the process of planting at the moment and have a team of Christians together, however the process of unlearning is going to take time.
I am much more comfortable at the moment with (and thrilled by) the interaction with my “bogan chick” (Al will understand this one) friend at work who I gave a Bible to and who is devouring it. She absolutely loves Jesus’ comments and his ability to side with the type of person she knows she is. She even figured out the parable of the soils before she got to the explanation! She has twin five year old boys, is 23 years old, single and a big fan of Pantera, Slipknot and Bacardi and coke. The Holy Spirit is really working on her life to the point that she has spent no time watching her new flat screen TV (It’s a miracle!!). I would love to plant a church with her and her friends at some stage because I know I won’t have to deal with comments such as “Won’t somebody think of the children?” when the Christians realise there is no Sunday school in our household church plant.
My mate John Wilmot who is a missionary in Africa has been using this term for the last four years in place of church planting.
I have also incorporated it into my own language as a way to describe the big picture of what we are doing.
The ‘church’ is then a product of the gospel response.
One of the great weaknesses of life in western cultures is individualism. The Gospel confronts individualism by calling individuals into open community centred on Jesus. The alternative to this is ‘closed clique centred on us’!
Sadly, our churches have often become like this. I fear that if we throw away the language of church planting, we open the door, in western cultures, to an individualised response to the Gospel. Rather than dismiss the church planting language, we urgently need to redeem the language of church. The language of ‘gospel planting’ can easily lead to a paradigm of church growth rather than multiplication- ie adding individuals to existing communities of faith rather than starting new ones- then all we’ve done is to reinvent Christendom.
To many people “gospel planting” will smack of getting individuals saved, so we’ll need to unpack the language just like we do for “church planting”.
I’m all for retaining the language of church planting, but adding an explanation about Christ-centred open community, so that incarnational principles genuinely guide the foundation and development. Church planting is not founding an institution on a set of ideals, it’s starting a community inspired by Jesus.
Speaking of a church he founded, Paul used the metaphors of ‘planting’ and ‘laying foundations of a building’ in the same passage in 1 Corinthians 3
.
Ian Stackhouse in The Gospel-Driven Church (2004) Paternoster Press, p. 92-96 argues quite a strong case for preaching the Gospel to the `supposably converted’ in a section of his book titled [Re-]`Evangelising The Church’.
Stackhouse argues that, “Given the largely uncatechised nature of the contemporary church, gospel preaching to the baptised is entirely apt” (p.94).
He defines Gospel preaching as that which “recollects and recnnects churches to the main drama of salvation”, which he says “is crucial in and of itself, for the sake of believers, for it is the retelling of the Gospel that the dominant idols of culture are brought to account, Through such preaching the essential awakening of the Christian imagination is made possible, which, as Paul Ricceur reminds us, is the bedrock of all biblical imperative, exhortation and application” (ibid,p.94-95).
His overall point being that unless the Christian Church is continually being discipled with core Gospel teaching, it is extremely difficult to imagine it becoming effectively mobilised in mission beyond the cloisters of its religious-institutional settings. (My interpretation).
What he is advocating for are faith communities that are taught the drama of crisis and the mystery of the Gospel-event, which is realised through `classical preaching’ about “the eschatological future of sins forgiven, of a righteousness received and of adoption into the family of God, now realised in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit” (p.92)
He claims that the focus of most `preaching’in church growth churches has focused too heavily on homilia to a congregation which is presumed to be already established in the faith. Whereas he claims, citing James Thompson, that “such a view of settled, instructed congregations, able to discuss various aspects of Christian life, `was more plausible in 1936 than it is in 2000′ ” (p.94).
I agree with his comment that “the urgent task for preachers of the Gospel is to reawaken the core memory of the church” to its costs, discipleship implications, hope, relevance etc (p.96).
He cites Willimon with this very apt quote: “amnesia appears to be the prelude to accommodation and compromise” (ibid). The implied context being that the core message of the Gospel, with all its harder implications for humans, has often been watered down/softened down to make it more attractive as a saleable consumerist soft-option spiritually eg. without mentioning such such as the need to repent, radically serve, undergo ongoing conversion, etc. etc in the process of making Christ central to one’s life and following Him with all the costs that might entail.
My interpretation of his point being that: yes, we do have a mission-field to reach out to beyond the Church. ThaT IS VERY IMPORTANT. But also one side of this which needs urgent address is the largescale re-evangelization within the Church due to several decades of very poor Christological and Gospel teaching of many essential basics of discipleship due to over-focus on making Church consumeristically attractive to build up numbers in pews by soft-selling and compromising the Gospel in what appears to be too many cases.
I wish to add, that I agree with the original quote. Have been watching an indigenous church being “colonially institutionalised” by a Big Brother denomination in Sydney recently. They sacked a good indigenous leader because he would not play the institutional game, instead preferring to develop a church culture which was more true and respectful to the indigenous nature of the members involved. Flowerpot not cracked so the seed overflowed into new cultural ground because gardeners too afraid that doing it would somehow corrupt the Gospel into something they would be uncomfortable as exponents of a more colonial Westernized culture they interpret as somehow superior and `less heathen’ than the indigenous one they are “playing missionary” too!
Hmmm…
The premise on which we seem to be judging the term church planting is based on an understanding of cross cultural church planting from decades long long past.
Missiology has moved on and the term church planting no longer means imposing culturally inappropriate forms, behaviours values etc on a people group (assuming the people group are powerless to demand otherwise, but that is another topic). Contextualization is not a new thing, nor is the sole domain of all things emerging/missional.
Planting a church in a least reached people group is like a turtle on a fencepost - it takes intentionality.
Dion,
I think I’m going to have to disagree with your remarks. Missiology, as a science (so to speak), may be moving on, yet there continues to be examples of imposing culturally inappropriate forms, behaviors, values etc within missions. Short term missions is a good example of this, especially in the U.S. Moreover, until the churches that were involved in colonialism are willing to admit their part and repent and put feet on their repentance, then I feel that imposing culturally inappropriate forms will continue. For, how can we know the wrongs we are continuing if we aren’t readily willing to admit and repent of the wrongs we did?
Contextualization is not a new thing to some people; there are quite a few people who have never even heard the term, much less have they heard that they need to consider it when trying to figure out what missions work looks like in their context.
You’re right, church planting or gospel planting (whichever term we want to utilize) does take intentionality. Great point!
Peace.
Dan
I’ve had a discomfort with “church planting” as well. Thanks for articulating why.
Beautiful quote.
Great quote Alan. Thanks for sharing that. I don’t think the terminology is as important as to whether or not we’re out there sharing the gospel, but I get your point. I would suggest that the term Church planting includes the task of gospel planting (if we define “gospel” as the good news about Jesus Christ), but it is not limited to that. Church planting is also about building holy community. In fact a healthy approach cannot separate the two.