Church Planting Is for Wimps (Redesign) (eBook)

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Church Planting—Slightly Preferable to Unemployment

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Cyril Connolly

By the spring of 2003 I was tired. Really tired. I was working forty hours a week as a manager for an insurance company. This involved talking to unhappy customers who cared a little too much about replacing their cell phones as well as supervising entry-level employees who were either impregnating or hitting one another. I was also taking a full load of classes at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, driving back and forth from work to school a couple of times each day.

Every morning I was in the office by 6:30. Every evening, at the close of the workday, my wife Karen would meet me in the parking lot of my office building to hand over the baby. She then went to work as a nurse at the local hospital’s emergency room, while I headed home to study. Add in renovations and repairs on a hundred-year-old house, and not much time was left for sleep.

Want to Be a Guinea Pig?

So when my former pastor from Capitol Hill Baptist, Mark Dever, called one morning and asked me to meet him that day on the seminary campus, I felt reluctant. I was happy to meet with Mark, but doing so meant staying late at work. It also meant skipping my fifteen-minute afternoon nap, which was often the only thing lying between me and the abyss. But Mark has boundary issues and a way of getting what he wants, so later that day I chugged a jumbo-sized cup of gas station coffee and slumped down on a bench outside the seminary library, waiting for him to arrive.

When he did, we started with a few moments of chitchat, but he turned to business pretty quickly. Capitol Hill Baptist was growing out of its meeting space, he said, and the cost of making significant renovations to their old building was exorbitant. The elders of the church had decided to implement a strategy to plant churches in the surrounding suburbs. Mark was here to float a trial balloon: would I be interested in returning to DC after seminary to be CHBC’s guinea pig church planter?

I would eventually say yes, of course. Mark is a made man in the Reformed Mafia. He has a giant Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals logo tattooed on his back. He has J. I. Packer’s home phone number in his contact list under “Jim P.” You don’t say no to a guy like this.

But even if it wasn’t Mark who was asking, the last seven years in the cell phone insurance biz left me willing to take a job as an assistant manager at Wendy’s, the fast-food hamburger chain. In fact, I had tried, and they turned me down, but that’s a tale for a different book. Since many of my seminary friends had spent three years and thousands of dollars on classes but were struggling to find a full-time ministry opportunity, I wasn’t about to forfeit an opportunity like this. So I told him that I would talk to Karen, who I didn’t think would be excited about moving, and get back to him.

Planting for Hipsters

I had already received a few other offers to plant churches, but I had turned them down. I had never thought of myself as a church planter. Seminarians often talk about church planting as if it requires an indelible mark on the soul. “Are you a church planter?” they ask in hushed tones. The truly gifted men can recall thoughts of planting from their time in their mother’s womb. I, on the other hand, had checked my soul twice but never found any indelible marks, at least not of that kind.

Still, several organizations had approached me about planting churches in the trendy part of the city where all of the wealthy young professionals live and drink. The idea, I think, was that I would be the tattooed pastor in the punk rock band T-shirt with a church full of twenty-somethings, all of whom wore plastic black eyeglasses. We would meet in a warehouse on Tuesday nights, followed by a trip to the local brew-house. Good theology. Loud music. Maybe a trendy church name taken from a Greek or Latin word that will sound cool for five or six years.

Can you see the picture? Let’s face it—it would have been a lot of fun. I could have met cool people and done some good ministry.

But it seemed like a really bad way to build a church.

Don’t get me wrong—I can see how such a scenario presents an effective way to draw a crowd. People favor people who favor them. They favor goods and services tailored to their tastes and how they want to perceive themselves. Niche marketing works. So plant a church that gives off an intelligent, slightly rebellious, funny, hipster vibe, and you will attract pre-wealthy twenty-somethings, since that’s how they want to feel about themselves. If you do it artfully, you may attract lots of them. Hopefully you’ll be able to help those twenty-somethings you’ve attracted: lead them to Christ, teach them a lot about Jesus, equip people to care for the city. I’m not knocking it. That would be great! But . . .

I don’t think you would have a very healthy church. The Bible seems to assume that a church will express diversity in age. As just one example, think of Paul’s instructions to his protégé Titus:

But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. (Titus 2:1–6)

Here Paul has instructions for the old men (be temperate and worthy of respect) and the young men (be self-controlled). He even has things for the old women to teach the young women about how to be godly wives and mothers! It’s hard to see how that happens if everyone in the church is the same age, right? Are the twenty-seven-year-olds supposed to teach the twenty-two-year olds how to be godly at that stage of their life? I don’t know about you, but I was pretty pathetic when I was twenty-seven (full disclosure: I’m still pretty pathetic).

In fact, if you look at what the Bible says on this subject, you’ll see that one of the glories of the gospel is that it reconciles people that could never be reconciled without it. In Ephesians 2, Paul describes the glorious display of God’s wisdom in the church as different kinds of people come together (specifically, Jews and Gentiles). In John 13:35, Jesus tells us that the world will know we are his disciples because of our love for each other. But if we only hang out with people who are the same age, who like the same kind of music, and who share our taste and politics and preferences, how are we any different from the world? Doesn’t every non-Christian you’ve ever known hang out with people who are just like him or her (Matt. 5:47)?

Love in the church should be at least partly inexplicable to the world. The elderly ladies at Capitol Hill Baptist who, in 1995, invited the guy with the stupid hair and safety pins in his face to their homes for lunch after church—they were displaying the riches of God’s wisdom to the watching world. When a church looks diverse on the outside, it’s often because the gospel is central. That’s why you want to see churches filled with political liberals and conservatives, people wearing jeans and three-piece suits, men and women with white and brown and black skin, Christians old and young, friends tattooed and tattoo-deficient, and so on. Churches that aim at just one demographic ultimately work against that show of God’s wisdom.

Don’t Say “Homogeneous Unit Principle”; Say “Contextualize”

Not many books or church leaders these days speak anymore about the homogeneous unit principle—appealing to one homogeneous group of people. Somewhere in the 1980s or 1990s church growth writers stopped using the phrase because they had heard enough complaining about it being biblically problematic. Still, they needed some way to target particular groups, so they began to speak in terms of “contextualization”—adapting yourself to a context. I don’t want to totally knock the good people-sensitivities involved with contextualizing, but the evangelical fascination with the topic makes me wonder if it’s just an updated version of the homogeneous unit principle: Pick your social demographic and appeal . . . I mean, contextualize to them.

When we start churches intentionally designed to appeal to a certain kind of person, we fail to heed the biblical mandate to become all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:22). It seems like many churches want to embrace the first phrase without the second. We want to become all things to some people. The problem is, becoming all things to some people—say, by rocking the tattoos and turning up the music—often keeps us from reaching all kinds of people. After all, wooing one demographic (for example, urban young people) often means alienating others (such as older people or foreigners).

It seems to me that Paul in 1 Corinthians 9 wasn’t saying that he would mimic the people he was trying to reach, you know, with a ripped tunic and Doc Martens sandals. He was trying instead to remove unnecessary offense whenever possible. He wasn’t telling them to sport goatees—he was telling them not to flaunt their Christian...