Church Planting Isn't Just Preaching the Word

Last week was supposed to be a lighter week. It was half-term, someone else was kindly preaching on Sunday and so I got to spend lots of time reviewing the church finances...That wasn't quite the intention, but it's that time of year when I need to get them to the accountant and although I keep them in pretty good order throughout the year, there's always work to be done to get things together. It's not something I enjoy particularly. I don't like doing my tax return much, so managing a church's finances isn't high on my list of things about my job I love. Even worse we've received notice to file a Company Tax Return from HMRC now, so the financial joys multiply. But we don't have anyone who is able or willing in the church to do it and I can, so it falls to me.

It's an example of an uncomfortable truth that I have repeatedly learned in ministry, but which has become particularly evident since planting a church. A lot of what I do isn't what people think of as ministry. It's not studying the Bible, or doing evangelism, or even pastoral care. It's tracking the finances, raising money, writing job adverts, completing risk assessments, ensuring GDPR compliance, updating the website and social media presence of the church and reviewing safeguarding procedures or situations. I have to admit I find it fairly dispiriting. There's not much of that list that lifts my spirits!

When I was dipping my toe into ministry and receiving my early training there had been a big pushback against church ministers doing everything but preaching the word. In UK conservative evangelical circles this seemed to have its roots in some talks by Phillip Jensen at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly in 1986 (I think you can find them here). The concern was to recognise that the Pastoral Letters seemed to focus on the elder's role of teaching the Word and yet most evangelical ministers seemed to find themselves pulled into focusing on anything but. More recently, this approach is captured in the Trellis and Vine books by Tony Payne and Colin Marshall. I think this is a fair point and, while I would accept that church ministers should expect some administration work (trellis work), the basic principle would be that the role is to preach the word and lead the church (vine work).

The problem, of course, is to reconcile that principle with reality. There's not a lot of administration work that I do which is optional and we outsource what we can (we pay for an accountant and safeguarding support for example). Of course, the larger the church (and honestly the more professional or business level the employment of the membership), the more likely it is that there are people within the church who can take on some of this work, although as this gets more complex (and possibly unpleasant) I think it's understandable that people aren't enthusiastic (people tend not to serve in safeguarding for fun!). In fact, my observation is that when people do offer to help, they usually want to serve in the bits I quite enjoy, so I have more time to spend on the things I don't. The alternative, if the church is large enough (financially speaking), is to employ people to do the work for you - a church administrator perhaps or in terms from the US an executive pastor.

But back to our situation. The reality in a deprived area with a small church plant is that the administration work will largely fall to the one paid employee - me in our case. If we're honest though, what that probably means is that there won't be many small church plants in hard places, because it's not a job anyone is trained for and it probably isn't a job that many people really want to do.

I think this maybe means that we will do larger church plants that one way or another include more people with the necessary skills (volunteers or employees). In deprived areas, does this mean that we will at least initially have to bring people in from outside the area to fill gaps that it may be unrealistic to expect to fill locally? This will make planting in deprived areas more costly, precisely in the context where finances are limited. This speaks to a more general problem that the church tends to invest least where the need for greater investment is most of which more another time.