Planting by Pastoring (eBook)

Introduction

Size, speed, sufficiency, and spread.

These four s’s determine success and significance in church planting. Grow, grow, grow as fast as you can! Be financially self-sufficient sooner rather than later! Spread your impact by multiplying services or campuses or churches! If church planting were a sports car, then the four s’s would be its whirring engine; you can’t see it, but it’s there under the hood, powering everything. It sounds powerful and impressive. It purrs and hums. Who wouldn’t want to drive that thing?

But what if we popped the hood and discovered that this engine needed work? What if the engine sounded nice, but we knew this engine wasn’t built to last? What if the engine merely looked good, but actually endangered passengers?

This is a pop-the-hood book. Its goal is to ask the questions of the previous paragraph, applying them to church planting. What if the four s’s aren’t what your church plant needs to run on? What if we should look elsewhere for success and significance?

Oh, but size and speed and sufficiency and spread are so enticing! We all want them. I know I did when I first started out. I wanted more people to hear the gospel, and I wanted those people to come quickly so that we would “make it” without external financial support. And yeah, I wanted—and still want!—to spread the gospel into other communities through more church planting.

Every church planter should pursue the four s’s. But is pursuing them the point of church planting? Is achieving them the goal of church planting? Can a church planter be successful without size and speed and sufficiency and spread?

Yes, I think so. I hope to persuade you of that in this book. But first, let’s talk a bit more about the four s’s. Are they really that prominent?

Size and Speed

Church planters love books. We love instructional manuals and manifestos and how-tos and everything in between. Popular church-planting literature places a great emphasis on the four s’s. Let’s talk about the first two for a moment—size and speed.

Nelson Searcy comes right out and says it: “As you think about the launch date for your church, remember that your primary goal is to launch as publicly as possible, with as many people as possible.”1 Ron Sylvia agrees, and in doing so lumps Jesus in with him: “Launching large is congruent with the best of missionary theology and with the Methods of Jesus.”2

And then there’s Ed Stetzer—perhaps the most popular purveyor of church-planting wisdom.3 In Planting Missional Churches, Stetzer and Daniel Im say “reproduction is the goal—reproducing believers, ministries, groups, and churches.”4

“Rapid mobilization” is often thought to be central to church-planting success since it spreads the gospel to more people more quickly. Stetzer and Warren Bird advocate this approach in their book Viral Churches: “Our hope is to inspire and help you develop a church multiplication movement—an exponential birth of new churches that engage lost people and that replicate themselves through even more new churches. A church multiplication movement is a rapid reproduction of churches planting churches.”5

Steve Addison follows suit in Movements That Change the World. He lists “rapid mobilization” as one of the requirements for global change.6 Dave Ferguson, president of America’s largest church-planting conference, writes in his book Exponential that “Jesus has given his church the problem of rapid reproduction.”7

Without question, common church-planting wisdom says size and speed are vital to success. However, when we consider Scripture, we find a narrative not of speed but of slowness, so that God might be glorified as his people put their trust in him.

Consider Abraham and Sarah, who were childless for nearly twenty-five years after God’s promise. Or Israel, who endured slavery in Egypt for 420 years before their deliverance. Or the coming of Christ, which happened thousands of years after God’s initial promise in Genesis 3:15. Or consider Christians right now, who have been longing for Christ’s return for more than two thousand years. As my old mentor used to say to me, “God is rarely early, but he’s never late.”

Self-Sufficiency

Now let’s talk about the third s: self-sufficiency.

Think for a moment about how we refer to church plants that don’t make it. “Failed,” we often say. If, after a long enough time, there simply aren’t enough people or money to go around, then the church planters have “failed” at their mission.

This sentiment dominates the landscape. Just consider these comments from a so-called “failed” church planter: “In the end, the church plant did not last. After thousands of dollars raised and about fifteen months of effort, it failed. I simply could not get enough traction when gathering. I was underfunded. I lacked experience. I was alone. I had heart, and I had zeal.”8

Not enough money. Not enough people. Failure. When I read this, I wanted to reach through my screen and grab the author and tell him, “Oh, brother, you didn’t fail!”

It is true that 1 Timothy 5:8 commands us to provide for our families; however, financial profitability has zero bearing upon the essence of what makes for successful church planting. I suspect a hard-working church planter who, over the course of many years, can’t gain any traction with people apart from his family generally might need to move on to something else. I’m not arguing that church planters should never give up. It’s the relationship of size and survivability as “essential” that is dangerous.

Too many planters can subconsciously begin to believe that the essence of a church is its financial success (or lack of). Few might think this consciously, but I fear many think it subconsciously. Consequently, when a financial goal isn’t met within five years, they can believe they’ve failed to plant a church. Or, perhaps they think they’ve failed as individuals. Maybe the planters do need to move on, but it’s not because they lack the essence of what makes a church plant.

Think about impoverished areas in your community or in Bangkok, Thailand. Churches need to be planted there, and yet, we might assume they will never be financially viable. Yet, insofar as they are doing the basic elements of what makes a church a church, they can thrive more than the prosperity gospel “church” down the street that has throngs of people coming in and out of it each week along with huge financial windfalls. That church has failed; the biblically faithful church plant hasn’t.

Kenneth Jones, a fellow pastor in Washington, DC, planted Redeemer City church eight years ago. To date, the church has not been able to fully support him financially. Not only does he continue on, but more importantly, the work of the church continues on. He said to me recently, “Our church is small, but we gather and preach the gospel every week, we participate in the ordinances together, members are cared for, and our neighbors are hearing about Christ. The size of our gathering or the size of our bank account hasn’t stopped the work of our church.”

Spread

So far we’ve seen that speed, size, and self-sufficiency often become the litmus test for a church plant’s success. But there’s one other factor—one that usually happens after self-sufficiency is reached—that also looms large. I’m talking about spread. Generally speaking, church plants aren’t successful until they’ve spread their influence through multiplication.

Continuing in their book Viral Churches, Stetzer and Bird say that for a church-planting movement of multiplication to occur, there need to be new markers of success: “The better option is to develop new benchmarks, such as a more organic mind-set that focuses on abundance verses size. . . . Perhaps we need to think more like farmers, hungering for the orchard that we’re helping to plant to become wildly out of control.”9

What are these “new benchmarks” for achieving a church-planting movement? In short, Stetzer and Bird encourage the planter to focus on an abundant amount of church plants, not simply larger gatherings. The more churches there are, the more we can keep up with population growth. If we can achieve this, then we will successfully achieve a church-planting movement. But the goal is exponential multiplication.

We see this in church-planting literature, but we also see it in church-planting events. Perhaps the largest conference on church planting, Exponential, produced a field guide that teaches planters how to become a “level five” multiplying church.10 On their website, you can take the “multiplication challenge” and, in the process, unlock your church’s potential by “launching more churches with greater success.” You can even find a list of reproducing...