Participating in His Mission
These are exciting times! Every day we experience God’s hand in Mission Alive. Church leaders are committing themselves to church planting, local churches are partnering with us to plant churches, and our initial church plantings are beginning. A new era is beginning – an era in which we are once again thinking of ourselves as a missionary people North America!
But I am concerned about many assumptions about "church" that significantly limit our ability to become a people planting authentic missional churches.
Many church leaders assume that the first step in church planting is purchasing a piece of property and constructing a church building. A church defined as “a place where things happen” (Guder 1998, 79) necessitates property and place. A second assumption is that church is a public “service” organized by a staff for the giving of information or for celebration. Church becomes, to some degree, a spectator engagement. These ideas are so culturally embedded in the term “church” that we commonly say, “Let’s go to church,” inferring place, or ask “When does church begin?” inferring service. When American pragmatism is added to this mix, church planting becomes “getting the largest number of people to a service in the shortest period of time.”
Within this cultural atmosphere where “success” is defined by numerical growth, church planting is frequently the reapportioning of the Christian population. Christians sometimes flock to new churches launched with significant capital because they offer better preaching, enhanced children’s ministry, superior classes, and/or inspirational services than other churches and thus draws their members. Megachurches, consequently, consume smaller churches in what might be called the Wal-Martization of Christianity. The goal becomes providing more and better services rather than providing a community of disciples on a pilgrimage through life helping each other be Christ’s disciples and encouraging others to join them as they journey through life to heaven. The first type of church is a social fraternity with some trappings of Christianity. The second is a unique community which is formed by the calling and sending of God and which reflects the redemptive reign of God in Christ.
Within this environment of cultural accommodation the word “church” must be redefined in relationship to the mission of God.
posted by Gailyn Van Rheenen @ 11:32 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Kevin,
Church planting should focus on developing a community of faith which serves as a distinctive light in darkness. Numerical growth might result but is not the goal. Paul writes of "being transformed into [God's] likeness with everincreasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:18). I put the word "success" in quotation marks inferring a worldly connotation. While I surely beleive that God wants many people to come to Him in Jesus Christ, we should focus on disciple making and spiritual formation.
This was a great post, especially the parrallel with the "Wal-martization of Christianity." I have no idea about what is going to happen in the business realm, but I think that in Christianity this phenomenon is already starting to implode. Last year a leading member at a larger church told me that she and her husband were beginning to doubt whether the megachurch is
"the way to go" -- it's just too hard to keep everybody happy, and when that becomes your goal or primary concern, you quickly lose your focus on God's mission. It seems much better to work in smaller, more focused groups that see themselves as part of the larger body of Christ, rather than in terms of denominational affiliation.
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