Discipleship, Leadership and Church Planting

If we think that a model of church is our solution to reaching the world we are already in a bad place, whether that model is a mega church or a micro church.

There is a vast difference, however, between an attractional posture and an incarnational/missional understanding of church. The difference is not in the organization, but in the release and flow of God's kingdom. The church is not meant to be sedentary but sent-"one holy, apostolic (sent) church."

Today we expect the lost to come to us. In the Bible, God is always the Seeker going after those who are lost. He pursued Adam in a garden and Moses in a desert. He found Jonah at the bottom of the sea and Peter on top. Jesus found Matthew in an office and Paul out on the road.

God became a man and entered the world through a birth canal just like the rest of us. He chose to come to us on our turf, rather then expecting us to rise to His. Jesus preached everywhere that the kingdom of God has come near. He came to seek and to save the lost, and He now invites us to join Him.

Church planting is easy!” we thought. Within a few months of landing in a North African city, we already had a group of men and women meeting in our home. Joining that fellowship were some Muslim-background believers who had previously come to faith in the Lord through the testimony of others. We lined our living room with couches, in the local style, served sweet mint tea, and wore djellabas. We hoped a contextualized fellowship could grow into a solid church.

Tim, a seminary graduate, functioned as the pastor, but rotated leadership. We sang and studied the Bible in English, Arabic, and French. The participants came from Berber, Arab, French, Spanish, Scottish, and American backgrounds. We even collected an offering for the poor. We thought we had planted a truly multi-cultural New Testament house church.

Right doctrine without relational integrity is dead orthodoxy.  You do not learn to be friends by sitting in a classroom listening to someone lecture.  You learn to be friends by following Jesus together in daily life.   The New Testament is full of relational commandments.  Forty “one another scriptures”  are given here but the list could be extended to about seventy if you included similar verses which use words such as “brothers”, “neighbors” or “members”.

These commands, sown through out the New Testament, enforce the reality of communities of friends in flat relational structures who are to act from the heart to serve each other and in so doing serve the King who lives in each one of them.

As I coach church planters all over the world, I get to evaluate a variety of approaches to this difficult task. God has relentlessly brought two facts to my attention—the two main obstacles to church planting movements across our world.

ONE: What we are doing is too complex. Even though we stress to those we train that they must reduce the “heavy package” of ‘Church As We Know It’ to bare New Testament essentials before carrying it to an unreached people group, most church planters are still struggling to strip away the cultural elements that slow or stop reproduction in the new cultural setting.

For example, dispensing with the need for a special “holy” building to meet in on Sundays may be easier than modeling active ministry by every believer. The church planter often does so much of the work himself that the fledgling church sees ministry as something only full time religious professionals can accomplish. The movement is stillborn since “qualified leadership” can never reproduce itself rapidly enough. One thing we really need is a simpler and more Biblical view of what “church” actually means. When I speak of “church” ...I mean the living organism that corporately forms Jesus’ Body and Bride on this planet, not a religious organization. In practical terms: a gathering of any size, committed to one another and to obeying the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have been lugging around a model and definition of “church” that is far too complex and encrusted with layers of nonessential, non-Biblical “barnacles.” We need to get radical in simplification.

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If we are going to transition from church-as-we-know-it (a box) to a dynamic Spirit-filled movement, we will also have to transition from leadership-as-we-know-it to something else.

Alan Creech says the WHOLE thing has to be reinvented:

I mean full-time, paid staff pastors who preach every Sunday and do pretty much all the ministry and stress themselves silly over every little thing in the community. I think this will kill us if we keep this up. It's beginning to happen, but we've really got to re-envision what it means to be a pastor, leader, elder, whatever in our new churches. I don't think we can afford to keep the old pastoral paradigm alive any more. We can't do that and expect to happen what we want to happen in these communities.

A fresh look at the question of leadership in the church

//vimeo.com/19847639

Dear Nicolai,

Allow me to share with you two recent experiences which have led me to one conclusion.

The first was a recent visit to Madrid to spend time with Betel. Betel has begun 180 drug rehab homes and 40-50 churches around the world in the last twenty five years. One of their distinctives is that they work (businesses) to raise over 90% of their own support. The self-sufficiency allows them to have an apostolic spirit of reproduction - always looking outward and moving forward.

If the primary metaphor for church in the New Testament is family, then the primary model for leadership of an individual house church is spiritual mothers and fathers. Healthy families need healthy parents. Parents care what happens to their kids. They are always looking out for their good. They love it when their kids succeed. Their greatest longing is that their kids do better than they have done. With good parents, there's no envy, no one-upmanship.

A good parent will not do something for their kids that they could do for themselves. They assist their kids towards maturity in every area of life. Their goal is that their kids don't remain dependent on them any longer than necessary, but that a healthy interdependence results. In a healthy family, the kids will leave home and start their own families.

What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” -Apostle Paul

Many Christians and churches will never reproduce themselves. The result is that they take their faith and legacy with them to the grave. Nearly four thousand churches close every year in North America. Ed Stetzer estimates that 70% to 80% of all evangelical churches in the US have either stopped growing or are in decline! What does this mean? Simple: the church in North America is not reproducing. We need to become a reproducing disciple making movement once again.

The ultimate goal of discipleship is to reproduce disciples with the gospel through developing disciple making leaders and church planting. Reproduction ensures that a movement will live past its founding stages. The church was never intended to be an end in itself; rather it is called to reproduce and fulfill the Great Commission to make disciples. Reproduction is the goal of every living thing. We see this throughout the pages of the Bible. The Bible is full of reproductive language. God created humankind, animals, and plants to reproduce. Reproduction is also seen in the agricultural language that Jesus uses through the gospels.

To view this video in English you may go to the following website.

//www.cpmtr.org/