My dad left Bible College with a vision to do church planting. He joined a tiny mission whose goal it was to plant churches in a certain part of the USA, and he was the first full time missionary with that mission. Church planting (church extension as they called it then) was not the popular ministry option then that it is now. He spent 30 years with that mission, and planted 2 churches that are now self supporting, and assisted with a couple of others. His method was simple. Move into a town, rent a facility, start Sunday services and invite everyone you can by every means available. The goal was to make disciples by planting a church.
Over the years, the system my father followed (in a day when it was unpopular) has become an extremely popular ministry option for Bible College and Seminary graduates. Every mission, both home and foreign, is emphasizing Church Planting. The annual Exponential Conference for young and aspiring church planters draws over 7,000 attendees to it’s week long lineup of major speakers and workshops on every facet of church planting. My father couldn’t have imagined such a conference in his day.
I have watched many other friends and extended family members follow the same plan, and in my humble opinion it hasn’t been a very effective strategy. Many of the churches have generally remained small and struggled for many years. A few people came to Christ through door to door calling and personal evangelism, but even those churches that grew to self supporting status were made up mostly of existing Christians who migrated from other churches in either the same town or who moved into town from other cities. If you computed the total amount of money given toward the missionary’s support plus the amount of money given by supporters to build church buildings or fund other capital projects, and then divided that sum of cash by the number of people who were born again and baptized through that ministry in the same time period, you would find that the cost of making disciples was highly inefficient and far too expensive to reach entire communities for Christ.
On the other hand, I have known some uniquely gifted individuals who were able to develop megachurches from scratch, but those individuals with such an amazing combination of preaching / leadership / management / people skills are few and far between. And when the dust settles, those amazing success stories are still stories of churches that have attracted Christians disenchanted with other ministries. Some people have been saved, but once again when you divide the millions (in some cases billions) of dollars invested in facilities and the huge budget for multiple staff members leading multiple church programs, you end up with a cost per salvation / baptism that is entirely too expensive to reach entire communities for Christ. They may look successful on the surface, but if making disciples of Jesus and equipping the saints to do the same is the goal, they seem to have failed miserably.
So what is wrong with this picture? To start with, I find it surprising that so many missions and Bible College / Seminary courses are emphasizing Church planting when there isn’t a single command in scripture to plant churches. Not one. How can that be? Church planting is the generally accepted goal of ministry among missions, missiologists and many pastors. But if church planting is the goal, then why is there not a single command to do so in scripture?
I was taught in Bible College that the Apostle Paul was our example of a church planting missionary. Certainly Paul’s ministry resulted in many churches, and his epistles to those churches are the evidence of his successful strategy. But was Paul really a church planter? I’ll continue this discussion tomorrow, but I’ve come to the conclusion that church planting was a byproduct of what Paul did. Paul had another goal.