Church Planting Has Failed the Gospel, Part 3

Homogeneous church planting is the easiest type, but leaves us with churches who are mostly unconcerned with those unlike them. There is more to it than, that, however. As those churches meet with challenges, they tend to turn inward and seek self-preservation. In the process they lose the focus of the mission of the church.

When we teach a church that they should gather together with people who are like themselves, we give them license to preserve the integrity of that gathering. We give them license to associate with people who are like minded, but also like-colored, like-socioeconomically, like-cultured, like-educated, and so forth. We have churches for cowboys, churches for bikers, churches for middle class whites, churches for Latinos, churches for educated Latinos, churches for lower class whites, uneducated Latinos, churches, and churches for lower class whites, etc.

By planting churches for so many distinct groups of people we ensure that there is a gospel witness among them. We also ensure that this gospel witness is limited in various areas. We ensure that each of these defined groups of people concern themselves mainly with other people who are just like them.

We don't expect a Latino church to do outreach among its Anglo or black neighbors. We don't expect Anglo and Latino congregations sharing space to interact in any meaningful way. We don't attempt to build community between a biker church and an upper crust white congregation or a cowboy church with a black congregation, or a Korean church with a lower class white congregation.

As a result, when a congregation is stressed in some way, they generally will not seek comfort, aid, counsel, or support from a church just down the road. When the demographic around them shifts, they are at a loss, for we have taught them by their very design only to engage around the gospel with people very much like themselves.

In an age in which denominations all around are in crisis, we don't look to one another for support. We don't engage the shifting demographics around us. We move to the suburbs, we close our doors, we sell our real estate, and we focus on maintaining the purity of our demographic identity. In part, we do that because it is in the DNA of our creation. We were established to reach a specific demographic, we have always worshipped and built community within that demographic, and we never learned how the gospel would compel us to be more inclusive of others.

Instead of focusing outward toward the millions of people surrounding us we were tasked by Jesus to disciple, we look for those who are already like us. We entrench ourselves in our self-description of the church we were planted to be, not the church Christ commissioned us to become.

I've seen churches in small communities face change as a population of 2,000 people swelled to over 50,000. Rather than grow from a congregation of 200 to 5,000, too many remain at 200 or begin to decrease. The reason is in large part they still consider themselves according to their original demographic. A rural church still tries to live as a rural church even as the town around it becomes part of a larger metropolis. When leaders attempt to shift its focus to reaching the new community growing up around it, its original DNA hardens and begins to erect barriers to change.

Rather than seeing the mission field around us and responding to the challenge of the gospel to make disciples of all classes of people, we dig in all the deeper, refusing to change our identity, refusing to be what the church is called to be. More importantly, we refuse to allow ourselves to become part of something greater than we have been.

We were planted as a church to reach a certain demographic, so we will continue to work to reach that same demographic, even when it is a death sentence for us.

I drove by one church in a changing community. They put chains up in their parking lot with no trespassing signs to keep the community off its premises. They then placed a sign declaring their service to God and following the Bible. They never saw the discrepancy between their words and actions. This is in great part due to the fact that the target audience for their outreach was no longer represented in the community. A couple of years later, I drove by to see the building having been sold, the church disbanded.

The gospel, however, declares that our target audience is the entire world. It is not just those who look, sound, and smell like us. It is not those who share our cultural norms. It is not simply those who share our educational attainment, our language, our socioeconomic status, and belong to our clubs whom we are called to serve as ministers of the gospel. Our commission is so much broader than such a meager definition.

The gospel calls us to extend our fellowship and friendship far beyond the limitations of our church culture. It calls us to move far beyond our homogeneous grouping of people. It calls for much more than excuse ourselves saying the next church down the street will reach the folks we are ignoring. If we are honest, the Biblical descriptions of God's people look far less like our 11am worship gatherings and a whole lot more like the crowds at the sports stadium, the Renaissance Festival, the farmer's market, or the amusement park.

It may be easier to plant churches among homogeneous groups, but doing so distorts the gospel. We do the very churches we plant a disservice in the long run. We transform the gospel message into something it was never intended to be. We once more discount those who are not like us and teach those we are reaching to fall into the same trap all over again. Long term, we kill the very churches we plant by not allowing them the flexibility in their DNA to reach beyond their social definitions.
So, what is a church to look like? We will address some of that in the next article.


—©Copyright 2017 Christopher B. Harbin

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