There's Church Planting and then there's real Church Planting!

I’ve recently had a couple of conversations about real church planting, i.e. what is and isn't church planting. The problem is that there are a range of rather different things that people call church planting. 

At one end of the spectrum, a pastor-evangelist shows up somewhere pretty much on their own or with just their family and attempts to start a new church by making disciples from scratch, i.e. by sharing the gospel with people, seeing some become Christians and forming a church. At the other end of the spectrum, a large church takes a relatively large group of people, say 40, plus a couple of full-time staff members who then provide a small, ready-made church perhaps even meeting in the same building but at a different time.

As an example of the number of different models, Graham Beynon, in his little book Planting for the Gospel, describes 7 fairly different (although sometimes overlapping) models of church planting (in chapter 2). These include house church plants, re-start churches, multi-site churches and mother-daughter church plants. And yet, even then, I'm not quite sure which model we fall under!

For what it's worth, I am grateful for faithful new churches starting and more people hearing the gospel and biblical preaching. We will all have questions about ecclesiology and there are certainly questions about what a church plant and church planting is biblically. I think those questions are tricky. I'm not sure that many of the church planting models that I have seen accurately map onto the Pauline model that we see in Acts, for example.

I also think the imagery of planting is interesting. It's quite a rich biblical image. I guess lots of people would look to 1 Corinthians 3:5-9 for it's biblical roots. But we might also think of all the vine and vineyard imagery, or the parable of the sower. And even in 1 Corinthians 3 we can just move onto the next section and see that Paul moves from plants and planting to a building metaphor. I wonder why there aren't more books and conferences on church building!

If we're looking at plant imagery, I wonder if my two ends of the spectrum above fit the following metaphors best. With the lone pastor-evangelist he is a little like the sower in the parable of the sower, sowing the word of God and praying for fruitful plants. The large church sending a group with some full-time staff is more like a spider plant which send off little fully-formed plants (offsets I believe they are called) which can take root in a new place. There are of course lots of other models and metaphors in between.

I think understandably, those who are nearer the parable of the sower end of the spectrum tend to think those at the spider plant end aren't real church plants. I say understandably for two reasons.

The first is that I think the less people, staff and resources you go with, the harder it is to make real progress in forming a fully-fledged and lasting church.You can understand why someone struggling away with only a few people, no staff and few financial resources can be a little irked at what they see as the supposed plant, which was actually a fully-fledged church from day one.

The second follows from the tendency for the "successful" to be the ones speaking at conferences and writing books. When this happens in church planting, you tend to get a preponderance of people from the spider plant end of the spectrum telling you how it should be done. I well remember hearing someone at a conference telling us how to do church planting and trying not to laugh out loud at a model that was never going to work outside of the rather wealthy, professional and middle class environment in which the planter had done his work. This can, as my experience suggests, be both annoying and unfruitful.

I'm not overly keen on defining sharp boundaries for what is and isn't planting. As I say, I'm happy to see new and faithful churches coming about. But I do think that given the evident diversity within planting, it would be useful to recognise and hear from that diversity. This is even more the case when you start to think about some of the other spectra involved in the process (rural to urban, wealthy professional to deprived council estate etc.).

If we limit ourselves to hearing from some people and some models, the likelihood is we will limit what we do and where we do it. And in a country where many places crying out for gospel church plants and not within easy reach of (for example!) a large middle class church able to send 30-40 people with a couple of members of staff, we will simply perpetuate a church that doesn't go to there.