Church Planting Has Failed the Gospel, Part 2

We looked at the failure of church planting as meeting the diversity requirements of the gospel in a previous article. There is more to the story than simply not measuring up to Jesus' call to unity across non-homogeneous groups of people, however. In failing to reach beyond the limitations of gathering people like us, we inadvertently offered up the concept that the gospel is for our personal benefit and comfort.
Without taking the step of tying the gospel to some level of discomfort, we send the opposite message. We told those we were bringing into our new churches that the gospel meant they should gather among people like them. The gospel might focus on some theological issues that challenged previous ways of thinking, but not in ways that affected our day to day encounters with other people.
We did not challenge those we were bringing to the gospel to learn to live the gospel in community with people who neither looked, talked, or acted like they did. We did not stress that the gospel community was broader than the limitations of a homogeneous group. A white church in this way remains a white church. If the community around the church changes, so be it. A church speaking English continues to speak English. If the community around it begins to use other languages, so be it. The church continues to speak only English.
If we planted a church among bikers, we only expected community to exist among bikers. We did not bother attaching that community to a traditional church community for the growth of either. We did not consider that a Black congregation, a Latino congregation, and an Anglo congregation needed each other in order to live out the fulness of the gospel any more than we expected to hear Korean, Spanish, and Tagolog spoken alongside us in 11am worship.
And yet, the gospel demands just that. The gospel demands that instead of building a community that makes us comfortable that we build community beyond the boundaries of our comfort zones.
Much like Peter pressed by God to step beyond his comfort zone to enter Cornelius' home, so the gospel would compel us to learn to eat foreign foods, commune with people who speak a different language, and worship among people of different walks of life. Our failure to do so does not simply weaken our faith. It eviscerates the very gospel we proclaim from the pulpits of our churches.
God is not the God of the homogeneous unit. God is not the God of worship segregation. God is not the God of safety among our own kind. God is the one calling us beyond the boundaries we erect to make us feel safe, coddled, and comfortable.
What receive in the process is not churches on mission for the gospel. What we have erected have been churches focused on being comfortable. By extension, these same churches are able to overlook the demands of the gospel because that is how we engineered their DNA. We taught them from our strategies of church planting to develop community and faith among people just like them. We taught them this was the easy way to plant and multiply churches. We taught them that the limits of their comfort were accepted by God as part of the gospel strategy we employed.
Is it any wonder pastors struggle with churches who think the pastor exists to make them feel comfortable? Is it any wonder that churches believe that any aspects of the gospel that would challenge the status quo are unacceptable and can be brushed aside as irrelevant?
That has been the hidden message of our church planting efforts. Join with people like you to worship God who loves people like you. You need not concern yourself with others who are not of your kind. Leave that to someone else. They are not your calling.
Jesus would tell us otherwise. Our missiology, however, has been less about following Jesus and more about following our values of growth at whatever the quality of commitment to the gospel Jesus actually preached.

While we preach comfort and self-preservation, the gospel calls us to much more. We will pick that up in the next article.

—©Copyright 2017 Christopher B. Harbin

http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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