Church planting can sometimes seem like a relatively new phenomenon, but whether it is or not depends on what you mean by church planting.
A good friend and mentor of mine – who has planted two churches in France – believes that when Paul instructed Timothy to ‘do the work of an evangelist’ (2 Tim. 4:5), he was instructing him to plant churches. To evangelise – to make disciples of all nations (Mat 28:19) – is to see churches started. Church planting, in this sense of the term, is as old as the early church.
In fact, throughout the centuries, something akin to what we understand as church planting has been the primary vehicle of Christian mission. For over a millennium prior to the Reformation, in order to extend the Christian faith into new places, the church had sent out and established monastic communities. These monastic communities were centres of discipleship that served as evangelistic bases (which, to me, sounds like a very good tagline for a contemporary church plant!), and they played a big part in Christianity extending throughout the UK and Ireland in the fifth century. Later, when the Reformation began to gather pace, the Reformers no longer had access to the central resources that enabled this monastic church-planting programme. Missiologists lament the effect this had on early Protestant mission.
When the Irish missionary Columba was submitting his proposal to plant churches throughout Scotland around 560AD, he would not have needed many words to complete a section on ‘Details and assessment of existing churches’ – there likely were none! Today, however, determining whether a UK town or city needs a new church can be a more complex task. This is because we do have to carry out some form of assessment of existing churches so that we can make an informed decision as to whether another church is needed. Carrying out such an evaluation is not straightforward. What are we to make of the existing churches, and on what grounds?
Let’s assume that the church planter conducting the research believes that a church ought to be an evangelical church, a safe assumption given the name of this magazine! Several questions then arise: How do we define ‘evangelical’? If there are existing ‘evangelical’ churches, do they share the same definition?
The researcher may also believe that a church ought not to be doctrinally faithful (evangelical) alone, but also fruitful. (Tim Keller makes a good case for this in his book Center Church.) Well, how do we measure a church’s fruitfulness? Is it simply about the size of the congregation, sign-ups to Christianity Explored, baptisms? Are numbers entirely irrelevant, should we instead (somehow) look to Christian maturity as a measure of fruitfulness?
These questions have vexed me as I have considered a church plant in a small UK city. Without detracting from their importance, it was refreshing to sit down with the minister of an established church in the city and to hear him simply say: ‘You should do it!’ We had told him that we were weighing up planting a church in the area and asked him what he thought. Why should we do it? Because, he explained, the percentage of the population attending a church in the city – any church – is so small. Can the Church in that city be expected to reach all 130,000 residents when it would be extremely optimistic to estimate that the Church consists of 5% of those 130,000? Depending on your answers to the above questions, you might even suggest the figure is more likely below 1%.
I do not know what the monastic missionaries would have made of this. But the result of our assessment, along with prayerful interpretation of the Lord’s providence, is that in 2021 you might just hear about Trinity Church: A Centre for Discipleship Serving as an Evangelistic Base!
