Church Planting Has Failed the Gospel, Part 1

During seminary days, I was considering that God was calling me into church planting. Karen and I took the plunge in working on a church plant in Michigan, then accepted a call to serve as church planter apprentices in Mexico for two years. We then returned to the US and started a Spanish-language church in Aiken, SC. That church is still going strong after two decades of ministry. I studied church planting in a compact seminary course and read a lot of the church growth literature on the subject. I went to training sessions on church planting offered by South Carolina Baptists. We then spent several years on the mission field in Brazil watching the implementation of those methods and hearing others talk about church planting and church growth methodology. Along the way, I taught several aspects of church planting in my seminary courses. I've also learned a few things from my own experience, as well as reflecting on the successes and failures of efforts to begin new churches.

Here are a few things I have learned along the way.

First and foremost, our successes in church planting have often failed the very gospel we have tried to preach. Let me explain.

We have devised strategies to plant churches among “homogeneous groups” of people. Essentially, that means that we targeted groups of people who already held a lot in common and focused our efforts on bringing them into community around the gospel.

That strategy was designed around corporate models of efficiency. It was designed to make use of market strategies for maximum outcome with the least investment of effort. For the most part, it has been successful in the short term measures of converts, Bible studies, worship attendance and the like. This success fueled more of the same kind of research looking at the numbers reflecting the growth of conversions and participations. What it failed to do was measure gospel issues, and we are still paying the cost of its results.

Several years back, I accepted the call to a church on the understanding that my position would be focused on principles of integration. I was to minister to the Latino congregation of the church while building bridges for unity between the Latino and Anglo congregations of the church. I was to implement strategies to draw both congregations together into one. That is where I discovered in living color one of the major ways in which our church planting methods failed the gospel. Many forces within the two congregations did not want to be united. They wanted to remain distinct entities. They wanted to remain in the relative comfort of staying within their enclaves.

That highlights the problem with so much of our church planting strategies. We focus on people who share some common identity and limit our work to reaching a group of people within those same boundaries. The gospel, on the other hand, calls us to cross boundaries and reach people who are indeed not like us. A brief look and Jesus' life and ministry tells that tale loud and clear.

We find Jesus taking the gospel to a woman of Samaria while his disciples were simply concerned with getting past Samaria and reaching their destination with people like them on the other side. We find Jesus ministering to the possessed man of Gedara and sending him to extend Jesus' own ministry among a region of ten cities. We find the disciples like Peter sent to the home of Cornelius against their wishes and faith traditions to eat, minister, and fellowship with Gentiles who were unlike themselves. We find Philip heading into the wilderness to encounter a Eunuch who would take the gospel back to Ethiopia. We find the Palestinian and Hellenistic Jewish Christians in disagreements over the distribution of food, but called to live together in community in a way that transcended that divide.

We find among the very disciples called by Jesus a range of professions whose most common trait was that of belonging to an underclass in regard to religious pedigree. They were no homogeneous unit, nor were they called to be a group of people who naturally held a lot in common. Jesus called them, however, to bridge their own differences and reach out past their commonalities to minister to people who were even more unlike them.

Jesus included in his circle of twelve both Hellenistic and Palestinian Jews. He included fishermen and a tax collector. He himself was the son of a day laborer. Among his followers we find both a zealot and a Pharisee. Then we hear Jesus pray that they might all be one even as Jesus and the Father were one. That is where the problem with our church planting focus on homogeneous groups comes into play.

We simply can't learn unity beyond our differences when we build groups that simply learn to fellowship within a non-diverse group. White Christians do not learn what it means to be the body of Christ along with Christians of color when we remain segregated during Sunday morning worship. We do not learn to become one with people who do not look like us when we gather with people who can't be told apart from us.

Our history as Christians, especially in the South of the US is one of segregation. In the majority of our church planting, outreach, and missions efforts, we have extended those principles of segregation far above Jesus' principles of good news for all people.

We focused on what is easy. We focused on quick solutions. We focused on a numbers game that showed success by the metrics of Corporate America, rather than the metrics of the gospel. We played a game that looked good in the short term. Its longer term results, however, have included a death spiral for our churches across the board.

In following the tactic of what seemed effective and produced quick success in numbers, we lay aside the principles of the gospel that we are to reach the entire community around us in all its diversity. What has happened is that as our communities have become more diverse, our models of church have become ever less diverse in proportion. We have become more isolated. We have cut ourselves off from changing communities and demographics around us.

If we are honest about planting churches as an effective means to make disciples of all nations, we have to get more serious about actually sharing the fullness of the gospel. That means reaching out to people who are not like us. It means including them in our circles of community, even when it makes us a little uncomfortable.

It is past time we look more seriously at the gospel and give less attention to issues of self-protection. We'll look at that more in a following article.

—©Copyright 2017 Christopher B. Harbin

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