Constructive principle: Be missional.
4. Planting a restorationist church.
This church plant is an attempt, accurately, to recreate what the church was like in the first century, to restore apostolic Christianity. Churches like this tend to spend a lot of time trying to identify precisely the patterns of New Testament practice. Of course, it’s vital to be biblical.
But replicating apostolic norms can be a futile exercise, not least because there seems to have been quite of bit of diversity within the New Testament. And that diversity existed because the apostolic churches were adapting to their contexts, both to the people within the church and the people they were trying to reach. The real danger with the restorationist mindset is that you become inward-looking.
You end up having long debates over how exactly the New Testament churches celebrated the Lord’s Supper rather than throwing yourself into evangelism. You become like the people described in 1 Timothy 1, who are more interested in winning converts from within the church than winning converts to Christ.
What’s good about this: We do need to be biblical. One of the joys of church planting is the opportunity to rethink the way we do church to ensure it is faithful to Scripture and relevant to the culture.
Constructive principle: Be contextual.
5. Planting a reductionist church.
In some ways, this is the opposite of a restorationist church. Here the desire is to plant a church that is ‘incarnational’ or ‘missional’ or ‘contextualized’ (or whatever is your favored buzz word). But you understand these terms to mean creating a church which closely resembles the surrounding culture. This concern can too easily lead to attempts to minimize the differences and therefore to minimize the confrontation the gospel brings.
True contextualization includes identifying what repentance means in a culture. So it’s not about reducing the challenge of the gospel but understanding the culture well enough so that we heighten or focus the challenge of the gospel. The danger facing such churches is that they reduce the gospel and assimilate to the wider culture. In the end, they have nothing to offer. If we’re so like the culture that the differences are marginal, why should the culture bother with us?
We will have nothing to add to what they already believe. Beside which, it’s a fool’s errand: We will never be as a ‘cool’ at MTV! What will be attractive to a lost world is the gospel we proclaim and the distinctive community life it creates (remembering that ‘distinctive’ is another word for ‘holy’).
What’s good about this: The desire to be contextual is good. We should try to minimize anything off-putting that is part of our church culture but not part of the gospel.
Constructive principle: Be biblical.