Sent to Flourish E-Book
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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Church planting is hard work. Planters face a thousand pressures related to leadership, finances, identity, and more. Quick fixes don't produce sustainability. How can church planters and their congregations flourish for the long haul? Sent to Flourish is a unique guide to accompany current and prospective church planters as they respond to this essential but sometimes daunting call. Theologically grounded while remaining practically oriented, it combines biblical patterns and practice to equip men and women planters to develop their own holistic planting plans. Written by a diverse team of scholar-practitioners who have planted churches in a variety of contexts, cultures, and church traditions, this book provides a tested roadmap based on Fuller Theological Seminary's renowned church-planting program. In addition to coeditors Len Tang and Charlie Cotherman, contributors include: - Carrie Boren Headington - John Lo - Tim Morey - Johnny Ramírez-Johnson - Scott W. Sunquist - Nick Warnes - JR Woodward Every church planter needs a healthy "root system" of three interwoven components: a biblical theology of church planting, personal spiritual formation, and robust intercultural competencies to navigate diverse ministry contexts. Each section of this book delves into these areas in turn, covering topics such as - biblical, cultural, historical, and contemporary dimensions of church planting - the missiology of Jesus' ministry and teaching on the kingdom of God - resources to sustain the spiritual formation of church planters, leadership teams, and church members - how to contextualize the gospel message and planting methods in different cultures and communities Filled with real-world insights, stories, and questions for reflection and discussion, Sent to Flourish gives church planters and their teams the tools to be theologically reflective, spiritually grounded, and missionally agile.
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SENT TO FLOURISH
A GUIDE TO PLANTING AND MULTIPLYING CHURCHES
To the next generation of church planters who will come out
Contents
PREFACE
SCOTT W. SUNQUIST
THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN NORTH AMERICA is the story of church planting movements. Although most of us were not taught American history this way, the Christian faith spread not only through the preaching of missionaries but predominantly by Christians migrating throughout North America and beginning new churches along the way. This migration, resulting in church planting movements, was part of the earliest period of modern globalization. Thus migration, globalization, and church planting are the heart of the contemporary North American experience. It is helpful for us today, thinking about church planting in the twenty-first century, to see how our work is connected to ongoing migration and church planting in previous centuries. We would suggest that the modern church planting movement is not an anomaly, but simply a newer and important expression of our heritage. The question facing us today is: Will, or can, North America now be renewed by church planting movements?
In the following pages we want to lift up some of the themes and issues of this unique heritage of the American experience in the hope that they will inform (and at times chasten) today’s church planting movements:
The language that we use of planting a community that would honor God is language that is central to the American heritage.
The earliest church planters in colonial America were among the best educated people in North America—all migrants too!
All these early church planters (or pastors!) shared a common concern to extend the Christian faith by planting churches in new territories.
Most of these early church planters wanted also to start schools (as well as monasteries and seminaries).
Some of the earliest church planters tried to reach diverse populations (including indigenous), but most only wanted to reach their own people.
Although Baptists and Methodists were smaller groups and they started later, they planted churches faster across the frontier because they did not require three years of graduate education.
These themes will emerge from the historical narrative that follows. Let’s listen to the history of the United States, a narrative of national church planting.
Spanish and British Church Planting
The earliest Europeans who came to explore, settle, evangelize, and trade in North America sailed from Spain via the Caribbean. These Spanish explorers and monks sometimes died trying to establish churches in present day Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia. This is an important part of our history—that the earliest Christians coming to what would become the southeastern United States were martyred trying to plant churches. They were missionaries, mostly Dominican. Almost all the earlier exploration along the coast was driven by complicated desires both to settle (and trade) and to evangelize. This is true of the early southern Europeans (Roman Catholics) as well as the northern Europeans (Separatist Puritans, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Quakers).
Most of the early European names given to places, towns, and bodies of water expressed Christian identity and hopes. As early as 1513, Florida was named after the term for Easter (Pascua Florida, “Paschal Flowers”) and within a decade priests arrived with settlers to establish churches and reach out to the Calusa people.1 St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in North America that has been continuously occupied (1565), was named after Augustine because the Spanish sighted land on the feast day of St. Augustine. Other new settlements also were given Christian names, indicating the desire to establish the faith in each place: St. Croix Island (“Holy Cross,” Maine, 1605), Santa Fe (“Holy Faith,” New Mexico, 1607), Salem (“Shalom,” Massachusetts, 1626). On a personal note, I come from Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love,” a Quaker experiment in cultural diversity. In each of these places some of the first buildings were churches.
A century after the Spaniards began their migration to the Americas, a church planting movement began farther north along the coast. The first northern European church planters came to Virginia, and they were business folks who were searching for a passage to China. They were also looking for gold. Like the Spanish a century earlier, these Englishmen (for they were all men at the beginning) entered into conflict with the indigenous people, in their case the local Powhatan people, in 1606. These business people settled for growing tobacco rather than searching for gold. Although they did not start out as a church planting network, they did plant the first Anglican congregation in North America. Others would follow, mostly in Virginia and the Carolinas. These churches were initiated by businessmen, not clerics or monks as with the Catholics a century earlier.
Farther north in New England, Puritans from old England came to escape the pressure and persecution from Christian brothers and sisters: the Anglicans! They came not only to plant churches, but they had a much grander and more complete vision. They sought to establish a church that would become a city set on the hill for all to see, a signpost of God’s kingdom. Their cities were named after their former homes (Boston, Cambridge, Ipswich) and their future homes (New Haven, Providence). Although many came to seek their fortunes, a major reason for risking all to come to North America was Christian motivation. The pilgrims who landed in Plymouth made a compact—before God and with one another—that read in part, “Having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony.”2 The language of planting a community that would honor God is also part of the American heritage.
As with many church planting initiatives, these early churches in Massachusetts were (sadly) often inspired by church divisions. The early pilgrims were called “separatists,” because they separated from other Congregationalists, who separated from the Anglican Church in 1620. Eight years later another group of Puritans landed in Salem, Massachusetts. This group was a little more organized, for they had formed a company to plant their churches in North America: the Massachusetts Bay Company. Of all the church planting movements from 1513 to the present, this was the best educated group of church planters. Most of the clergy and lay people had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge. They even named one of their towns after their alma mater, Cambridge, and there established a school for training other church planters and pastors, Harvard. Later they started another school for training pastors: Yale. These first pastors, church planters all, were the best educated people in North America.
Thus in these early migrations there were different motivations (commerce, persecution), different visions of the church, different educational and economic levels, but all shared a concern to extend the Christian faith by planting churches in new territories. From the beginning they also wanted to bolster the local churches with other institutions: schools, seminaries, monasteries, and later hospitals. Some had concern to reach out to indigenous people, but most sought to establish churches among their own people first. Christian mission was mostly understood as extending Christendom.
Diversity of Cultures
For our purposes here we need to stop and look at the diversity of cultures that were involved in church planting from the beginning. One theme woven through every chapter of this volume is culture: diverse, changing, and multiple cultures. Church planting requires an attentiveness to our own culture and to the cultures we are called to. The earliest explorers in Florida and the Carolinas spoke Spanish, were Roman Catholic (before the Reformation), and were part of a European culture that accepted the proclamation of the papal bull of Alexander VI: “Among other works well pleasing to the Divine Majesty and cherished of our heart, this assuredly ranks highest, that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”3 This meant that it was the responsibility of Christian kingdoms to bring other peoples to faith in Christ, even if by force. It was a strange way to think about Christian mission (or church planting), but in practice it meant that Roman Catholic nations (mostly Portugal and Spain) sent out explorers both to increase the nation’s income and to spread the faith, mostly by depending on religious orders. Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and later Jesuits planted churches among indigenous people. This was the Christendom culture of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking settlers.
The next group of early church planters in North America were the Anglicans in Virginia; they spoke English and were not commissioned by their king or queen to evangelize their new colonies. Most had little to no interest in church planting or any other type of mission work. They did, however, bring their Anglican liturgy, prayers, and style of church building.
British settlers who planted churches in New England differed in that most were Puritan and brought a more simplified worship pattern—for instance, they sang only the Psalms—and plain white church buildings. They built towns around a green with a meetinghouse that was used both for worship and civil meetings. This culture assumed that everyone in town would attend this one church. It was a vision of a homogenous Christian culture: little diversity and no pluralism of beliefs. Of course, this experiment failed in the first generation, but it is important to remember their cultural and theological assumptions. They assumed that everyone in their town should be Christian, that all would worship together, and that they would create a “city on a hill” for all the world to see. This was a Protestant and Puritan expression of European Christendom.
Other British and Dutch who arrived had other, but similar, cultural assumptions. Soon German and French settlers came bringing other languages and assumptions about the role of their newly planted churches in this new world. Some, like the German Pietists who were shaped by a renewal movement centered in Halle, Germany, had much greater interest in reaching indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, as well as in Pennsylvania. Their theological and cultural assumptions were different than those of the Puritans, Anglicans, and most of the Dutch Reformed.
In the nineteenth century, the Irish came building their Catholic churches and colleges as they sought to protect their identity in this anti-Catholic new world. Their churches worshiped in Latin and did all other work in the Irish tongue. Culturally (especially linguistically) this cut them off from the Protestant churches. They were also involved in outreach to indigenous populations but mostly through men’s and women’s religious orders. It would be a long time before Irish Catholics and Congregationalists or Presbyterians would respect one another. The major breakthrough was the election of our first Catholic president in 1961.
Those immigrants who planted churches who reached out to indigenous people are important models for church planting today. People like John Eliot should be remembered at least for their theological commitment to reaching out to one’s neighborhood. With no textbook on church planting among the locals, Eliot established Puritan-looking “praying towns.” One of these towns he named Nonantum, which means “Place of Rejoicing.” On Martha’s Vineyard and in Nantucket, the Mayhew family, inspired by Thomas Mayhew the younger, established equitable economic arrangements with the community of about three thousand local people (the Pokanaukets, a branch of the Narragansett). Mayhew learned their language and established churches and schools for children. Thus there is a tradition of moving to a new area, attending to just economic relationships with those already in the area, learning the local language and culture, and using Scripture to lead people to faith.4 Church planting and Christian mission are of the same fabric.
1800 to the Baby Boomers
In the nineteenth century, church planting took a different turn. This was the century of westward expansion and most of the movement west was purely for economic and political reasons. As the United States acquired new territory (from France in 1803 and Mexico in ca. 1845) it was important to settle people in these formerly foreign territories. Few pastors or missionaries were migrating to the heartland or farther west, but some denominations set up home mission societies to reach out to people beyond the Allegheny Mountains. These home missions were establishing churches both among indigenous people and the new settlers.5
Not all churches cared or saw it as a priority to plant churches among the frontier settlers, and as a result there was a sudden shift in denominational strength in North America. During the first decades of the nineteenth century the larger denominations (Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian) were surpassed in numbers by the Baptists and Methodists. The great growth of Methodist and Baptist churches had to do with their commitment to church planting as mission and their willingness to forgo a three-year graduate degree for their church planters. While Presbyterians and Congregationalists required competence in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek language, the Baptists and Methodists did not. Thus, Methodist circuit riders and Baptist evangelists, responding to a call from God and confirmed by their local church, rode to the frontier and planted churches in most new towns across the trails and inland waterways to the west.
Along with the movement west came the forced relocation of indigenous peoples. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 mandated the removal of indigenous people from the southeastern states to regions beyond the Mississippi. This forced migration included members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (or Creek), Seminole, and Chickasaw nations. Because of death from exposure and starvation among the Cherokee, their migration has been called the “Trail of Tears.” Some churches worked among native Americans as they were being resettled on reservations. Both Protestant and Catholic missionary work began in these new oppressive social environments where people were in a foreign land living in hard-to-cultivate regions in artificial towns. However, church planting did occur and, as is often the case, schools were started by missionary church planters on the reservations.
Church planting, at its best, was attentive to moving populations, planting congregations and schools that would serve the newer populations as well as the traditional ones. A similar pattern developed in the early twentieth century following two different movements of people. In the early twentieth century there began a movement from the rural South to the urban North (the Great Migration of African Americans) and from the urban core to the suburban areas. As people moved north, they brought with them their faith and planted churches in northern cities. These were newer churches with newer forms of worship: African American Episcopal, African American Episcopal Zion, National Baptist, and Church of God in Christ, among others.6
Those moving to newer communities outside of cities (often in planned communities) relied on urban churches to help them plant churches in their new neighborhoods. Many churches in urban areas of the East and South have a history of the number of churches they planted over the years. It is a great heritage that began in the early twentieth century and continued through the 1960s. The 1960s were a great era of church building, even as the decline of mainline churches was beginning. The post-war babies were coming of age, so churches were adding on larger sanctuaries and education buildings. But by 1965 almost all the mainline churches were in decline. The decline continues even today.
The Radical 1960s to Today
The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act changed both the complexion of US society and the nature of American Christianity and church planting. Prior to the 1960s over two thirds of the immigrants were from Europe. The biggest change over the previous century was that more southern and eastern Europeans immigrated and that meant more Catholic and Orthodox churches were planted in the United States. After this important piece of legislation, there were no restrictions on religion, country of origin, or race. Suddenly Latin Americans, Africans, Middle Easterners, and Asians began to migrate to the States. Many more Roman Catholics from Latin America, Presbyterians from Korea, and Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus were becoming Americans. For those paying attention to their new neighbors, church planting would begin to look a little more like overseas mission work.
The same time this new diversity in US culture was taking off, US churches were finishing a decade or more of building and rebuilding their churches, and it was a time of major upheaval in US society. The secular 60s was the decade of sexual liberation, new experimentation with drugs, and black power and civil rights. It was a prosperous decade, but the two main institutional threads of traditional American culture—the family and the church—were coming unraveled. The civil rights movement made it clear that neither the government nor the churches had completed the reform that the Civil War and reconstruction had started. Church planting was in decline, and the planting that was done tended to ignore the reality of cultural plurality in US cities.
However, there were a few exceptions to this church planting decline of the late 1960s. First, Pentecostal and charismatic churches accelerated their church planting both in traditional denominations like the Assemblies of God and in newer groups like Vineyard USA. These churches had great zeal for church planting. They carried a message of spiritual power for transformation and their church planting in the United States quickly (almost simultaneously) spilled out across the nations of the world. Pentecostalism created a new church planting paradigm centered on the Holy Spirit when mainline churches moved to more of a business model.7
Second, newer immigrant churches, especially at the end of the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first century, began planting many churches and even began to experiment with reaching out to other ethnic groups in major cities. Most of these groups began their congregations by meeting in a traditional mainline church building and then they would begin to grow. Presbyterians (or Reformed) from Korea, Egypt, Kenya, or West Africa would meet in Presbyterian churches; Methodists would find Methodist churches; and Anglicans would find Episcopal churches.
The third exception to the church planting decline occurred because of the migration out of the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt that began in the late 1950s. American industrial production was at a peak during and immediately after World War 2, but soon cheaper steel and products were coming from Japan, India, Latin America, and later China, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. When, for example, much cheaper steel was available from Japan, huge factories closed in the industrial heartland from Connecticut to Chicago, down to northern West Virginia and across to Philadelphia. People searched for jobs, and with greater mobility those jobs were moving south and southwest. Cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and some in Southern California began welcoming millions of immigrants. Churches were planted in part to reach some of the displaced northerners. This church planting movement involved all the mainline and Catholic churches, as well as Pentecostal and newer churches. Again, church planting followed migrants.
An important final word about this volatile period in US church planting history needs to be mentioned: division. Pentecostalism, as with most renewal movements, started within churches and other existing institutions, but soon it broke out of these traditional centers. It also started out as an ethnically and racially blind movement, but soon it began to divide according to race. Other groups in mainline churches, both fundamentalist and charismatic, also separated themselves out and began to plant their own churches, even as the ecumenical movement was at its height. From the Presbyterian Church (USA) emerged the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Bible Presbyterian Church, and later (from the Southern Presbyterians) the Presbyterian Church in America. Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Methodists also had similar experiences. Newer churches developed networks and at times denomination-like structures and focused on planting new churches in the last decades of the twentieth century. Today there are numerous church planting networks and associations, but few are connected with the traditional churches that came to North America from Europe or that developed in North America in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. This history of renewal, division, and church growth is not unique to the United States, but we do need to be aware of it as we think about our own church planting in the twenty-first century. We should learn from these past experiences that have hurt the church’s witness and turned so many away from church. Of course, we also want to be attentive to ways that church planting has been done well in the past. Now we are ready to move forward.
Church Planting, Church Growth, and This Book
Before continuing this book, we would like to look at two final issues. First, we’ll explore some key themes that have developed over the past decades for church planters in North America. Then we will address the question: How does this church planting book connect to the traditions of evangelicalism that have come out of Fuller Theological Seminary?
Three key themes in Christian development in recent decades must be part of our thinking about church planting today. First of all, less than 50 percent of Christians in North America today are white or European in background. This means that church planters must be conscious of reaching out crossculturally as well as multiculturally. We take this very seriously. Our church planting program at Fuller Theological Seminary is housed in the School of Intercultural Studies because the study of culture and the view of church planting as missionary work is so important today. While historically there were some church planting movements that intentionally reached out to other cultures and ethnic groups, they were very few. We believe they should be more common in the future.
Second, most of the church planting done today is not connected with a church tradition, so the worship, theology, and understanding of the church (ecclesiology) may not relate to existing churches or even to other churches being planted. We are committed to the church and believe that every local church is part of the great Christian tradition (connected) and relevant to local communities (context). Thus, we have, as part of our quartet of books on church planting, a book that is just about basic concepts of what a church is and what it does; how all churches are both connected and contextual.8 We recommend that you and your church planting team study this book together to help discern the trajectory of your church. We want to plant churches that are vitally connected to their local communities and to other Christian traditions. We hope church planting will connect and unite Christians in common witness.
Third, beginning in the 1990s, a movement in North America and Western Europe started which has had a great impact on church planting: the missional church movement (see chapter one for more detail). This movement finds its origins in the writings of Lesslie Newbigin after he returned to England from India and from his work with the World Council of Churches. His return to the West was an eye opener for him. Recognizing the anemic state of the churches in the United Kingdom, he wrote extensively about the missionary nature of the church, the West as a mission field, and what it means for the church to be missional: a foretaste and signpost of God’s kingdom and an instrument in bringing the kingdom. The adjective missional was created to communicate Newbigin’s concept of the church in mission for Western culture.9 His other important concept, which has guided many in recent church planting movements, is that the church is also to be a hermeneutic of the gospel. Those wanting to know what the good news is today should be able to see it in the life and ministry of the local church.10
Newbigin’s concern for the church to see itself as a missionary presence in the West connects this book and the four books in this series together. The School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller was originally called the School of World Mission and Institute for Church Growth. Started in 1955, it was concerned to help churches grow, which meant planting new churches in various countries in the world. Most of the early students were doing studies on how to help the church grow in places like the Punjab, Northern Thailand, and Taiwan. In each case church growth meant studying the cultures and societies to make sure that effective bridges of God evident in all cultures would be utilized to help the church grow. New churches would be planted as the church planters understood what bridges God had already placed in each culture.11
This is not exactly our approach here, but we do see church planting as essentially a primary element of Christian mission. Thus we think as missionaries about our task. We study the local cultures in our parish or neighborhood. We look for key places, people, and organizations to connect with. And in the School of Intercultural Studies, we have been studying these movements and preparing people from around the world with this focus for fifty-four years.
So we are continuing to live into the missio Dei (mission of God) as people sent into contexts where the great American twin themes of migration and church planting are still alive and well. We hope that in these pages you will find encouragement for the journey and an approach that is faithful to the gospel message, sensitive to cultures, and deeply spiritual, for church planting, like all mission, is more about spirituality than strategy. We have seen in the past that church planting movements more often than not spring out of revivals or renewals of the church in various contexts. May what follows, from people who have planted churches in different countries and languages, and from different church traditions, be an inspiration and a guide. This is our prayer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIKE THE NARRATIVES THAT FILL THESE PAGES, the story of this book is one of partnership and collaboration, first with the missional God who invites us into the redemptive story he is crafting in creation and second with an amazing team of people intent on following on the heels of this sending God. It has been an honor to be on this team, and it’s a privilege to be able to thank a handful of folks who made this project not only possible but enjoyable.
The concept for this book and the larger Fuller Seminary Church Planting Program itself came from the missional heart of Scott W. Sunquist, then dean of Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies, and the vision and generosity of the original donors whose passion for the gospel through church planting helped make a vision for a church planting program at Fuller a reality. It was Scott who also ensured that our team could gather for a two-day brainstorming and relationship-building session in Pasadena in April of 2017. This book has benefitted immensely from the friendships and collaboration that were first forged over these two days.
We are also grateful for the contributors to this volume, who spent hours working to craft each chapter even as they shepherded congregations, church planting organizations, and seminaries.
A heartfelt thanks to the new churches we lead—Missio Community Church in Pasadena, California, and Oil City Vineyard in Oil City, Pennsylvania—which have joined God’s mission and have embraced us even as we struggle to embody the lessons contained in this book.
In any project like this, there are unsung heroes who do more behind the scenes than most will ever know. This project is especially indebted to Kathryn Engelmann at Fuller Seminary for her faithful and creative partnership in the church planting program and her diligent and insightful proofreading. We are also deeply grateful to Jon Boyd, Rebecca Carhart, and the IVP Academic team for consistently modeling editorial expertise, Christian commitment, and personal approachability.
Perhaps no one better understands the work and the joys of this project better than our families. Throughout this process Amy, Benjamin, Sam, and Josh Tang and Aimee, Elliana, Anneliese, and Benton Cotherman have been faithful encouragers while simultaneously reminding us daily that some things are even more important than book projects. Thank you for your love, support, and prayers.
Finally, thanks be to God for his indescribable gift. May this book be an offering to you and a catalyst to others whom you are calling to join in your redemptive mission.
INTRODUCTION
LEN TANG
CHURCH PLANTING IS HARD. There are a myriad of pressures that squeeze us. There is leadership stress—since I am the visible leader and the literal face of the church, when something goes wrong there is no one else to blame. There is identity stress—if the church plant fails, then by extension I am a failure. And, of course, there is financial stress—if the church plant doesn’t flourish, the seed money will dry up and my family may go hungry. The list goes on and on.
In response, our spirits shrivel under the weight of all there is to do and the exposure of our own inadequacies. Our theology shrinks from majestic to merely pragmatic and utilitarian. People are reduced to organizational building blocks rather than beings of infinite worth in God’s sight. Families are objectified as giving units. The glorious work of church planting shrinks into a myopic view of a small god who brings a reductionistic gospel and an exploitative view of human beings.
Oftentimes well-meaning denominational leaders or church planting networks respond to these pressures by becoming more technical and practical in their advice for the planter: try this, do that, pray more, tweet more, share the gospel more often, cast a bigger vision. But in responding with quick fixes rather than attentive soul work, they unknowingly short circuit the planter’s own formation and the learning moment gets buried under an avalanche of action items. This is not to pretend that church planting takes place in some imaginary, stress-free, ideal world. On the contrary, these very stressors and pressures become the raw material for confession, formation, theological reflection, community building, and even evangelism. The humanity of the planter means that as she embraces her own limitations, she finds herself humbled by Christ and freed by the expansiveness of the gospel and invites others to do the same.
So how can we as church planters be sent to flourish?
Welcome to Sent to Flourish: A Guide to Planting and Multiplying Churches. As I write this, it’s been less than a month since the public launch of the second church I have planted, and the joy of gathering people from across the spiritual spectrum, each bringing deep questions to their pursuit of faith, is still fresh. Despite the perception that seminaries are ivory towers, this book is written from the trenches of church planting for the sake of the next generation of church planters, who are our heroes. The eight authors are a diverse group of church planters, seminary faculty, and church planting network leaders (some are all three). Together this team of scholar-practitioners possesses the battle scars of church planting as well as the capacity to reflect theologically on what we believe God is doing in the world through planting new mission outposts. This nexus is what Tim Keller calls a “theological vision,” which he defines as “a vision for what you are going to do with your doctrine in a particular time and place.”1 Notice that a theological vision is simultaneously actionable (“what you are going to do”), theological (“with your doctrine”), and contextual (“in a particular time and place”).
The particular time and place we find ourselves in is a world that is changing more rapidly than we realize. It’s self-evident that the West is becoming post-Christian, increasingly diverse, and spiritually fragmented. The so-called spiritual nones are on the rise, and many churches and seminaries are training pastors and planters for a world that no longer exists. Our country is increasingly fractured around issues of race, economic justice, and politics. And yet I share Christopher James’s conviction that “these first decades of the twenty-first century ought to be seen not only as a period of church decline but also, and more importantly, as a vibrant season of ecclesial renewal and rebirth.”2 There is an urgent need to holistically form a new generation of women and men from a multitude of cultural backgrounds who are joining God’s mission in the world. In this book we want to give church planters and their teams the tools to be theologically reflective, spiritually grounded, and missionally agile.
Just as a tree needs deep roots in order to grow tall, we believe that the church planter needs a robust root system made up of (1) a biblical theology of church planting, (2) the spiritual formation of the planter, and (3) intercultural competencies to navigate the church planting context. These three roots correspond to the three core values of Fuller’s church planting program (see figure 1). As we’ll see, these roots are intertwined and interdependent, in continuous interaction within the heart, mind, and relationships of the planter. We hope that the Spirit of God will make it second nature to look on ourselves and our mission contexts through this threefold lens. The first three parts of this book address each of these roots in turn.
Part one will offer thoughtful reflection on the biblical foundations of church planting. This foundation is rooted in the very nature and character of God, not merely a few evangelistic or social justice prooftexts. Part two’s priority is the holistic formation of the planter and their team, since we can only minister out of who we are. Church planting is demanding work and it’s crucial to help planters stay grounded in their identity in Christ and develop a missional spirituality that flows out to the world, rather than ride the rollercoaster of numbers or success. Part three will explore missional competencies that equip planters to embody the good news of Jesus Christ in an increasingly post-Christian and multicultural world. Finally, part four will help develop a practical church planting plan while keeping planters’ eyes on the broader goal of creating a church-planting ecosystem.
Figure 1. Fuller Church Planting logo
In God’s providence, Fuller is uniquely positioned to equip church planters for kingdom impact in a changing world. The wisdom and expertise of Fuller’s three graduate schools (theology, intercultural studies, and psychology) map perfectly onto our church planting program’s three core values of theology, missional skills, and formation. Frederick Buechner famously writes that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”3 The deep gladness and depth of competency of Fuller Theological Seminary lies in the very places that we feel the church planting world hungers for.
Throughout our history, Fuller has sought to integrate scholarship with evangelism, theory with practice. It’s no wonder, considering that the seminary was founded by Charles Fuller, a radio evangelist, and Harold John Ockenga, a pastor and theologian. In 1947 they founded Fuller Seminary to train evangelists and missionaries. Then in 1964 Charles Fuller wrote of his desire to start the School of World Mission (now known as the School of Intercultural Studies):
I feel that the time has come to found a school of worldwide evangelism. . . . Such a school would provide dedicated people with a chance to study under scholarly and godly [people] who have had rich experience in establishing the church of Jesus Christ in the various nations of earth. Here they could learn how to use the means available today for communicating with the masses, such as radio, television, and the printed page. Here they could receive training in how best to meet linguistical and cultural differences so as to be increasingly effective in proclaiming the Gospel.4
We take a great deal of inspiration from the fact that over a half-century ago, Fuller envisioned a setting in which professors who had themselves been involved in God’s mission would train students to innovatively share the gospel using the latest technologies (which at the time were radio and television). At the same time, a deep intercultural awareness meant that students needed training to understand and respect the “linguistical and cultural differences” in such a way as to point various people groups to saving faith in Jesus Christ. In like manner, our team of scholar-practitioners seeks to harness our own church planting experiences, using an intercultural approach, so that the gospel might be respectfully and boldly proclaimed and demonstrated.
We at Fuller Seminary are honored to walk with you as you respond to the unique and daunting call of catalyzing and forming a new community of faith for the sake of the gospel. This book is called a guide because it offers a broad roadmap of church planting. It’s neither a how-to manual nor a theology textbook. It’s meant to point out some theological potholes and spiritual points of interest, but not in an exhaustive fashion—merely enough to whet your appetite and give you encouragement along the way. We encourage you to read this book with other church planters or members of your church planting team, using the discussion questions at the end of each chapter.
Let’s explore the relationship among the three roots of formation, theology, and mission, understanding what each one means and delving into their continuous interplay. As you read, consider how these roots function in your own life, ministry, and church planting context.
PART 1
WHAT ROOTS DOES A CHURCH NEED TO FLOURISH?
A BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF CHURCH PLANTING
BEGINNINGS MATTER. In life, ministry, academics, art, sports, books(!), you name it, the early stages of development are important. Sure, as Christians we follow a God of redemption, so there’s no beginning that can’t be altered nor early wound that can’t be healed, but as good as healing is, we all know there’s also a deep goodness and grace to avoiding wounds in the first place. That’s why we care for our children and introduce them to Jesus at an early age. We don’t want them to be wounded. We know beginnings matter.
Beginnings matter for churches too. From the birth of the church in Acts 2 to the beginning of church plants today in cities, suburbs, rural villages, and at the end of dirt roads all around the world, the roots we put down in the early stages of a faith community’s life set a largely unnoticed but hugely important trajectory for the visible life that will follow above the surface. In church life, as in the natural world, roots precede fruit.
That’s why the first part of this book focuses on establishing deep, life-giving roots anchored in Scripture and the goodness of the triune God who is working through his Holy Spirit in the church and in all of creation. The first chapter sets the course by rooting us in the ongoing mission of God—the missio Dei. It is only by discerning God’s ongoing redemptive work in our context and then humbly joining him in it that our efforts as church planters, pastors, and Christ-followers can begin well. Chapter two builds on this understanding of the church as a sent people participating in the mission of a sending God by framing the general contours of this mission. What framework orients our understanding of our efforts on a micro and macro scale? The general framework in which all our church planting and ministry efforts are rooted is the biblical concept of the kingdom of God as seen throughout Jesus’ teaching, in the Lord’s Prayer, and finally in the consummation of God’s kingdom in the book of Revelation. No one (if they are wise!) starts a journey without knowing the means of transportation and the destination. As followers of Jesus our means of travel is joining in on the ongoing work of a missional God and our destination is the kingdom of God, something that we along with the church universal pray will “come, on earth as it is in heaven.”
From these roots chapter three will begin to shift our focus to the next stages of the life cycle—growth and reproduction—by asking how God’s story spreads. As we start new faith communities, how do we make sure that the good news isn’t just good news for us but good news for our neighbors on our street, across town, and around the world? How do we move from roots to fruit, from birth to multiplication? Is there a biblical framework for this kind of church life cycle? As we will see, the answer is yes.
Now let’s get started! May the Holy Spirit guide you as you read and as you lead the small part of God’s big church that God has called you to. It’s his mission and his kingdom, not ours. May we begin rooted in these realities, and may his good news spread.
HOW DO WE DISCERN GOD’S ACTIVITY IN SCRIPTURE AND OUR COMMUNITY?
THE MISSIO DEI AND THE MISSIONAL HERMENEUTIC
CHARLES E. COTHERMAN
Mission has its origin in the heart of God. God is a fountain of sending love. This is the deepest source of mission. It is impossible to penetrate deeper still; there is mission because God loves people.
DAVID J. BOSCH
ABOUT SEVEN MONTHS INTO PLANTING A CHURCH in western Pennsylvania, I found myself seated across from Dan in the dimly lit back room of Karma Coffee. For the better part of an hour Dan had invited me into his story, a story filled with betrayal, loss, and a numbing sense of hopelessness. Now he looked at me, his new pastor, for a response.
Dan’s pain followed a trajectory I had grown somewhat accustomed to in my small, poverty-stricken town, so one might think that I would have learned enough even in a few months to respond with an answer that was both compassionate and theologically rich. I wish I could say I did. Instead, I shot from the hip, and blurted out, “You need to run to Jesus.”
Fortunately, Dan was honest (or desperate) enough to call my pastoral bluff. “What does that even mean?” he shot back just as fast. For someone who had prayed for years, seemingly to no avail, for God to save his marriage and free him from addiction and chronic underemployment, another clichéd action step was precisely not what he needed.
Thankfully, God was gracious to both of us. In the midst of my blundering pastoral care, God helped me see that Dan needed to develop a sense of God’s active and redemptive presence, a presence that was there in the midst of his past pain and continued into his current struggles. I asked Dan where he saw the presence of Jesus in the events of his life. As Dan took a moment to reflect, I noticed his expression change. Unlike my first question, which focused on his action, Dan found my second question, which focused on God’s action, liberating. For Dan, considering anew the reality of a God who draws near in compassionate and redemptive presence helped shift his perspective from his own problems and failures to the goodness of a God who has always been actively working for the good of creation.
“Bad Theology Kills”
Why begin a book on church planting with a story like this? Obviously not to wow you with my pastoral skills! My initial, emotionally charged response was hardly what Dan needed. Yet as simple as it was, my conversation with Dan illustrates one of the most fundamental aspects of church planting and every other activity of the church: God’s action always precedes ours. Ministry begins with God, not us. It is his mission, not ours. Put another way, “it is not individual Christians or even the Church who has a mission in the world; rather, it is the God of mission who has a Church in the world.”1 For church planters this means that our calling is one of recognition and response. Instead of beginning with our own “failproof” strategies, custom logos, exquisite websites, and five-step action plans and then inviting God to bless them, we begin with eyes, ears, and hearts open to sensing how the living God has moved in the past through Scripture and the history of the church and is currently moving in our midst. As church planters and congregations our question becomes not What can I do? or What can we do? but How is the missional God inviting us into a mission much larger than anything we could dream up on our own?
This may seem like a small distinction, but as the rest of this book will argue, the theological lens through which we see Scripture and our calling as church planters and church communities matters. This is not always a popular stance to take in a church planting culture where the tendency to value action over reflection is pronounced and sometimes explicitly celebrated. We give our churches names like Action Church and stress activity—sometimes any activity. I have even seen a church plant boast on its website that its modus operandi was “ready, fire, aim.” For the most part, the heart behind these sentiments is probably good. These churches want to actively spread the good news of Jesus to their community in innovative ways. What a great impulse! (Plus, truth be told, I would rather attend a church called Action Church than one called Theology Church. At least action implies some excitement and passion.) Yet what would happen if soldiers and hunters followed these ready-fire-aim guidelines? Not only would they usually miss the real target, there would likely be plenty of casualties to go around. Unfortunately, this same dynamic can be true in the church. Whether we recognize it or not, all church planters have a theology—a way of thinking about God. The question is, does our theology help us hit our intended target by helping us better live as outposts of and signs pointing toward the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, or does it lead to unintended consequences?
Whether we think of ourselves as theologians or not, what we think about God and how those thoughts translate into our actions and teaching matters. I know a professional theologian who sums up this reality in an oft-repeated three-word sentence: “Bad theology kills.” At first I thought her mantra was an overstatement. Over time, however, I have come to believe that she is right. Faulty understandings of God and God’s mission in this world really do stifle life and growth in both individuals and the church. Church planting is no different. So much of what we do as church planters is encouraging the life cycle that comes naturally to all living things (birth, growth, flourishing, reproduction). As living bodies, churches are naturally prone to follow this life cycle. The various stages of this progression—including reproduction—should not be exceptions to the norm but the natural outflow of the life of Christ’s body.
However, as we see in the natural world, not all living things follow this process. Sometimes a plant can put all its energy into growing larger and larger and neglect the production of fruit that will ensure reproduction and long-term sustainability through future generations. In other cases, an outside force like disease, environmental factors, or genetic engineering curtails the regular life cycle. The same can be true for churches. A host of internal and external forces can stunt a local church’s growth. Sometimes the problem is unconfessed sin or unhealthy leadership. Other times a lack of growth stems from a failure to accurately discern the local climate or wisely cultivate a healthy environment for growth and reproduction. The following chapters in this book will address these and other concerns, but more basic than them all is the theological soil into which a new church is planted. Just as plants cannot thrive in poor soil, our efforts as church planters will be stunted or wither altogether if we fail to begin with a theology that places the task of planting in right relationship to the ultimate Source of life.
Missional God
Over the past half century or so, theologians, missiologists, pastors, and church planters have increasingly recognized that the theological basis for church planting and all other Christian endeavors is the missio Dei, the “mission of God.” Drawing on the meaning of the Latin word missio (sending), the missio Dei points to the sending nature of the triune God: The Father sends the Son, and the Father and Son (or for Eastern Christians, the Father) send the Spirit to complete God’s redemptive mission in creation. Only recently has the church rediscovered an appreciation for the divine origin of mission. Its earliest Protestant manifestations trace back to the work of European theologians like Karl Barth (1886–1968) in the 1930s and only began to crystallize following the 1952 Willingen Conference of the International Missionary Council. From that point on, the concept of the missio Dei found a ready reception. By the mid-1970s the idea that all Christian mission found its origin in the missionary (i.e., sending) God was making its way from theological classrooms and ecumenical conferences to the books of popular authors like John Stott. Writing in 1975, Stott conveyed the idea of the missio Dei in clear terms that readers then and today could hardly miss. “The primal mission is God’s,” Stott asserted, “for it is God who sent his prophets, his Son, and his Spirit.”2 Stott even anticipated later developments by taking God’s sending task one step further—to the church. Stott pointed to passages like John 17:18 and John 20:21 as evidence that “Jesus did more than draw a vague parallel between his mission and the model of ours, saying ‘as the Father sent me, so I send you.’ Therefore, our understanding of the church’s mission must be deduced from our understanding of the Son’s.”3 Through his international ministry and regular speaking engagements at places like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s triannual Urbana Conference, Stott no doubt helped many begin to think through the implications of God’s missionary nature.
It was not Stott, however, who played the leading role in helping the church better understand the practical implications of the missio Dei. Though not the originator of the term missio Dei, no twentieth-century figure was more influential in shaping the church’s understanding of God’s sending nature than one of Stott’s contemporaries, the British missionary, pastor, author, and theologian Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998). Newbigin was among the early advocates of God’s sending character and had been one of the most influential drafters of the 1952 Willingen statement.4 For Newbigin, as for Barth, mission was not simply something God did; it was part of the triune God’s very nature.
As the 1960s wore on, however, Newbigin became concerned that many in the ecumenical movement were misusing the concept of the missio Dei in such a way as to actually marginalize the church. In their effort “to get out into the world, find out ‘what God is doing in the world’ and join forces with him,” many were overlooking the role of the church. The problem, in Newbigin’s assessment, was that “‘what God is doing in the world’ was generally thought to be in the secular rather than in the religious sectors of human life.” In practice this led both to the marginalization of the church in the world and to the church’s acceptance of cultural movements that Newbigin found “bizarre” and sometimes even anti-Christian.5 As a case in point, he noted that for some “even Chairman Mao’s ‘little red book’ became almost a new bible.”6 For Newbigin this was a misuse of the idea of missio Dei that needed to be challenged if the church hoped to keep its bearings in the world.
Newbigin found time to set himself to the task of salvaging the idea of the missio Dei after he retired from active missionary work in India and returned to the United Kingdom in 1974. Newly confronted with the reality of a rapidly secularizing West, Newbigin dedicated himself to confronting misuses of the missio Dei and to exploring and propagating the implications of a mission-based theology in a culture that had lost its spiritual moorings. His 1978 book, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, explicitly rejected the freewheeling handling of the missio Dei that had defined the church’s use of the concept in the 1960s. Instead, Newbigin again argued that the church needed to root any concept of the mission of God in the Trinity, specifically in the authority of Jesus, who was “sent by the Father, anointed by the Spirit to be the bearer of God’s kingdom to the nations.”7 For Newbigin, the church’s duty in any context was “to go back to the original biblical sources of this [trinitarian] faith in order to lay hold of it afresh and state it in contemporary terms.”8 Newbigin’s emphasis on this basic understanding of the sending God as the source of mission offered Western Christians a means for thinking in new, post-Christendom ways about engaging Western society. It also pointed to a renewed role for the church. In a secularizing culture, the church could not simply open its doors and wait for people to stream in. Rather, the church’s only viable option was to live into its primary calling as a sent community following the lead of the sending God. In future books like Foolishness to the Greeks (1986) and The Church in a Pluralistic Society (1989), Newbigin would further explore what it meant for the church to point to and engage in God’s great mission.
In raising the profile of the missio Dei as a concept for mission, Newbigin pointed the way for the following generation of scholars who sought to further explore the basis and implications of a theology rooted in the nature of the sending God. Of these scholars none was more influential in shaping the conversation around mission than the South African missiologist David J. Bosch. By virtually all accounts, Bosch’s Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (1991) lived up to its title by reshaping the way the church understood mission. Among the most notable aspects of Bosch’s work was his ability to demonstrate that the church’s call to participate in God’s mission did not hinge on a select few proof texts like the Great Commission, which appears at the end of Matthew and the beginning of Acts.9 Rather, Bosch convincingly demonstrated that the entire New Testament pointed to God’s mission in the world.
At the same time, Bosch’s emphasis on God’s missionary action throughout the New Testament also helped underscore the importance of thinking about mission in terms of the missio Dei. For Bosch the church’s discovery of the missio Dei was one of the greatest of all the paradigm shifts that had occurred in the modern understanding of mission. “The recognition that mission is God’s mission” represented what Bosch described as “a crucial breakthrough.” Indeed, to Bosch’s mind it was “inconceivable” that the church could ever again revert to a church-centered understanding of mission.10 The Rubicon had been crossed. Theology had arrived at a first cause permitting no deeper delving. “Mission has its origin in the heart of God,” Bosch declared. “It is impossible to penetrate deeper still; there is mission because God loves people.”11
Missional Church
But what did this mean for the church and for church planting? This was the question a group of scholars led by Princeton Theological Seminary missiologist Darrell Guder took up in the late 1990s. It was one thing to state that all mission pointed back to the work of a triune, sending God, but it was another to translate this into a practical way of being the people of God. Drawing on the legacy of Newbigin and Bosch, Guder’s team from the Gospel and Our Culture Network worked to chart a trajectory for the church to live into this calling. The result of their effort was the 1998 publication of Missional Church.12
The edited volume did more than simply offer a new language for talking about the church as missional; it also explored concrete ways in which the church was called into the sending nature of God. As Guder noted in the book’s first chapter, if the church followed a “missionary God” who carried forth his mission by sending himself and his followers into the world (Jn 20:21), it made sense that the church understand itself as “God’s sent people.”13 For the Western church, still struggling to find its bearings in a society where secularism was increasingly displacing Christendom’s cultural consensus, these efforts found a ready hearing. Whereas Newbigin’s earlier reflections on the theme of a church sent into the world had been influential in scholarly circles but had made fewer inroads in popular practice, Guder’s volume helped move the concept of the missio Dei from the ivory tower to local churches.14 In the next decade, the term missional took on a life of its own and became one of the most popular catchwords among North American church leaders. Within fifteen years of the book’s publication, missional had come to have what Timothy Keller later described as “a dizzying variety of different and sometimes contradictory definitions.”15 As Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile note, by 2011 the term missional had developed into four broad streams that understood missional to primarily denote either an (1) evangelistic, (2) incarnational, (3) contextual, or (4) reciprocal and communal church movement.16
While there is certainly overlap among proponents of these diverse understandings of missional theology, the fact that the term has come to mean different things to different people points to the potential for misunderstanding and confusion.17 Perhaps now, two decades out from Guder’s Missional Church and four decades out from Newbigin’s The Open Secret, it is time for church planters and missional leaders to reemphasize the basis of missional church as being found in the mission of the triune God who has sent his Son, his Spirit, and his church into the world as part of his cosmic plan of redemption. This basis in the ongoing mission of the triune God is the touchstone that a missional people must return to again and again, perhaps even daily, as a way of ongoing formation. We are sent ones who minister and plant churches in the power of the sending God
