It was Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll that first attracted me to church planting, and it was Steve Timmis and the evolution of Acts 29 that kept me interested. Over the last 15 years I’ve served at churches being planted and built as a congregant, a community pastor, an executive pastor, a lead pastor and a coach for church planters.
Over the last five years, I’ve watched founding pastors leave their church plants at an alarming rate, watched church plants close, merge, re-plant, and a number more simply struggle to survive. It’s hard to make an impact on others when you’re in survival mode.
I don’t fault these pastors as much as I fault the trends and the system that promotes a type of church planting that is no longer necessary and funding mechanisms that are outdated, unfocused and ineffective. Millions of dollars have been given toward church planting, but few churches, denominations and networks can even tell you the impact of those investments.
No doubt, God used these plants, pastors and founders to change hundreds of lives, but it’s time to re-evaluate our methods and models for the future of church planting. I suggest three needed changes that will help church planting, church planters and their families move beyond survival into an ability to plant churches themselves.
1. Indigenous Over Transplant Planters
An indigenous planter calls their neighborhood home, while a transplant church planter needs to spend years—usually three to five years, sometimes longer—adapting their lives to make their planting neighborhood home.
For a number of years, there was no choice. Cities around the country and the world still needed transplant church planters to get the movement of the gospel started. They often parachuted in knowing no one, or if they came with a team, watched as their team all left leaving them behind. But any current church planter and pastor is indebted to the efforts of transplant church planters who broke up the fallow, hardened ground of their cities so the seeds of the gospel would bear fruit.
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While it was necessary, we’ve entered into a time where it is no longer necessary to move out of the place you call home to plant a church. For those of you who feel called to do so anyways, I’ll address that in the third section.
Now, we need to disciple, develop and empower indigenous planters. We need Christians who grew up in neighborhoods needing churches, who have been discipled by local churches and church plants.
An indigenous planter brings the benefit of knowing the language of the people, so they can bring the language of God’s kingdom into their context with ease and with power reaching their neighbors. An indigenous planter knows his neighborhood’s blessings and curses, so he doesn’t have to take the sometimes years-long process of getting to know the neighborhood. An indigenous planter also knows what it takes for the neighborhood to be home, to live there successfully, and knows what actually needs to be changed, not what a transplant would like gentrified for their own comfort.
Existing pastors and planters may face challenges discipling an indigenous leader who will know more than they do, but the expansion of the kingdom is worth overcoming that insecurity and taking the risk on a local leader.
2. Funding Infants Over Funding Babies
The funding mechanisms of church planting are focused on new churches. This is natural, as new churches, like new start-ups, have no money to fund their goals. While it is natural, church planting funding should either consider the longevity of their commitment or allocate a portion of their funding for infant churches, not just for baby churches.
