In the last post, I considered the elements that we need to think about before planting a church. You can read the previous posts in the series here.
Two in particular stand out as vital before someone decides to take a step into planting a church. Firstly, that we are grounded in a community that will help guide and support us. Secondly, that we do some research and personal preparation to think through where we might plant. A few years ago I worked as a chef, and I remember a head chef telling me that the difference between and cook and a chef is that a cook can take hours to prepare a meal, but a chef has to make a meal in five minutes. Partly because he frightened me, I didn’t speak up to mention the irony that we worked 16-18 hours a day in the kitchen! Chefs are scary, but we can also tend to hyperbolise at times! Part of the work of cooking a meal lies in preparation. I studied French in school and have forgotten most of it, but I learned a French phrase in the kitchen that has stuck with me forever - mise en place - putting in place. Part of the speed of food service is in the fact that our preparation ends with everything right in front of us. Vegetables chopped, sauces made, everything ready. So when the service begins we shouldn’t be rushing all over the place, but focused, prepared. Now, in the church planting journey this is virtually impossible. Nothing ever stays in its place. I think of it more as doing maintenance on a plane while it’s flying! However, there are a couple of really important things that we can do to prepare for a church planting work, and I want to unpack them briefly.
A New Work Requires A Community Effort To Discuss Need
When we were considering the work to which we are now involved in, my first decision was to chat to others about it. In our context of Ireland, there are very few places that someone hasn’t ‘thought about’ before. With quite a few roving evangelists, and door-to-door ministries, there is an increased likelihood that someone has looked at the area that you’re planning for, and already knows something about it. For us, we were blessed by the fact that although nothing concrete and established had been attempted, there had been a few evangelistic efforts that faithful brothers and sisters had been involved in over the years. In chatting to some of these folks, they both shared the difficulty of a work in that area, but also the lamenting that they would have loved to ‘get stuck in’ but lacked the resources and ability to do something about it for a variety of different reasons. What was obvious though, was that there was a very obvious ‘need.’ However - in this area we need to be both careful and bold.
In the years we have been here, I’ve been both aware of, and a part of compiling needs in Ireland for places that are without a Gospel preaching church. Of course, this starts off a million different questions, but often devolves into a matter of statistics. Statistics are simple, they are effective, they tell a story - but not always the entire story. One of the things that I lament is that as much as many people know the statistics and use them in our presentations, not many of these same people are stirred by these statistics to do anything about them! A friend of mine who is an experienced pastor once stated that people love talking about planting churches - very few actually do it. What we need to be careful of is realising that a need that is decided upon statistics is not a fully rounded need. It’s not entirely that statistics can be misleading, but they can tell a story that is very different in reality. For example, a town may have very few people in it’s urban boundary, but if it has a few multi-national supermarkets, it may serve a wider constituency, and have a weekly turnover of quite a few more people. An area that borders a university campus might have 20,000 students, but these recycle every few years as people graduate and move away and new students move in. Numbers are helpful, but having discussions about this with people who have gone before, will help put these into context. This is even more necessary if you are an ‘outsider’ into the context that you are planning to reach. Sweeping generalisations can be interesting in some cases (leprechauns and Guinness anyone?), but sometimes stereotyping areas can be a way to get our heads around places, however, in the planting of the Gospel, and the seeking to establish a church in an area they can be very dangerous. People aren’t stereotypes, and with the rapid onset of expressed individualism, things can change in a community at an alarming rate. However, that doesn’t mean we can just get there and see what happens.
If we are interested in planting in a specific area, we should ask a lot of questions before we consider pioneering into this area. Are there other faithful churches, even if they are not of our tribe? Has there been a previous work in the area that has failed for some reason - why? Am I the best person for this area due to my background or experience? Do I want to plant here because I’m comfortable in this context? I’m sure there are many more questions - but please - do ask them! And ask them from someone who either knows the answer, or knows someone who does.
A New Work Requires Strategic Planning As Well As Context Research
Church planting has to be somewhat of a fluid thing. With all the best will in the world, there are some plans that will be intricately detailed that will end up going out the window because they do not work once people are added to them! Peter writing of the church speaks of it as a gathering of ‘living stones.’ Now, with my limited experience, building any structure is hard, never mind one with stones that have a habit of shifting themselves about the place. However, there are quite a few ways in which a church interested in planting, a church planter or a planting team can prepare themselves to understand a people or a context. This is even better if a context is known before a planter is identified, as there may be specific cultural nuances that a church can prepare for if they know someone who is from that context, or has experience of a similar context. If there is an incredibly rich Gaelic culture and language in a town in Ireland, it may be helpful if a person can converse in the language. Or (and I’ll write about this in a couple of weeks) we can go down the path of what I have affectionately labelled the “Reece Witherspoon Method.”
One of the things that has helped us in our journey of planting the Gospel is an experience we had of ministry in Mexico City from 2007-2009. This experience has sub-consciously shaped our thinking, and I think at least, prepared our hearts and minds for pioneering works of ministry. There is a mind-set of cross cultural ministry that not only makes you a student of God’s Word, but also a student of culture. Culture, as much as there are multiple definitions that can confused and contradict, is basically ‘the way things are done around here.’ Now, there are people who want to make this a lot more nuanced than this, but it’s not a bad starting point. Furthermore, it’s not just knowing the ‘what’ people do, but the ‘why’ they do it. Like with us ministering in Mexico, there is an ‘official’ language to learn, but a cultural and contextual ‘language’ to learn as well. In planting the Gospel in a local area, that you, by God’s grace, want to see develop into a local church, filled with redeemed local people, then you have to understand the local context. It’s as simple as that. Now, this is an incredibly difficult thing to address, because we all come with the baggage of our personal culture, and as well as this, our Christian/Evangelical culture that we bring to the table. Like the antagonists in many of Jesus’ battles with tradition, we need to be careful that we are not elevating ‘our way’ as ‘God’s way’ or even ‘the right way.’ At times these may align, however, we need to be sure that this will not be the case in every community. One of the things that we need to be aware of, and I will talk more about this later, is the places within local areas that ‘do’ community in a way that thrives, and genuinely cares and shows compassion for people. Then all of a sudden, a group of Christians turn up to ‘demonstrate’ loving community, and fail to understand the sense of togetherness that is already there. Failing to understand becomes failure to learn, and failure to learn becomes isolation from something wonderful in that local area. Following this is normally a comment of how ‘closed’ the people are to the Gospel, when it is a clash of cultures, and an unwillingness of the people of God to see the image of God in anyone else.
So if we think of ways to prepare ourselves for planting the Gospel in a new community, what are some of the ways in which we can plan and think strategically to begin this journey? Next week I want to think through a few practical things we can think about in this phase of preparation, both for churches to think about, individuals interested in church planting, and church planters that might be in this phase presently. As always if this describes you, I’d love to hear from you, and your experience of how you undertook or are undertaking this stage of preparation for church planting.
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