Doug Paul
Before arriving to the central point of this post, allow me to recap some of the things I’ve been talking about in the past few months. As I see it, here are some of the enormous hurdles facing church planters as they are planting in the current landscape of things:
- Many church planters are attempting to plant types of churches that are vastly different than any church they’ve seen or been a part of before. We use words like movemental, decentralized, discipleship-oriented, empowering, lightweight/low maintenance, gathering is a time to bring together the scattered pieces of the community so we can scatter again. The hurdle: Doing this requires a skillset that next to none of us have because there are next to no people who have done this and almost all of us have grown up in a different paradigm of church. Furthermore, even if we can find coaches who have done it, it’s still crazy hard because we’re trying to do something beyond our reigning paradigm that we’ve never experienced for any lasting period of time. It’s easy and fun to talk about the theory of all of this stuff. But at the end of the day, don’t we actually need to know how to do it? For instance, it’s one thing to read about a Missional Community or be coached by someone who’s led them…but I’d contend the learning curve is a Mount Everest of steep if you’re launching Missional Communities and you’ve never been in one yourself for at least a year where you’ve seen it start, grow, disciple people, see people come to faith and multiply. Church planting can be a volatile environment for learning something this hard when you’re starting from square one. Now I’m not suggesting it can’t be done without experiencing it first. Clearly every movement in history, at some point, did not exist. But I’m suggesting for a movement to grow and flourish it needs to be easily reproducible. This barrier of paradigm, training and experience is a monumental barrier to that flourishing on the wider scale of things.
- I would contend that most church planters have never been discipled before. I have this running theory that the vast majority (I’d guesstimate it at 95%) of people age 40 and younger who grew up in the church have never been discipled in the way that the New Testament and every missional/discipling movement would qualify discipleship…and that includes pastors. There are two big problems here: First, Jesus cares first and foremost about our own discipleship. He cares more about us than he does about what we can do for his Kingdom. He doesn’t really need us to accomplish his purposes, though obviously he prefers it. Second, how are we going to be able to disciple someone if we’ve never been discipled yourself? We can’t take people to the places we haven’t been ourselves.
- The financial stress cannot be overstated when you combine the two things above with the reality that church planters have to feed their families. Raising support, at least for most, isn’t a viable long term option. You can start the church that way, but eventually, most people’s support will dry up. Obviously bi-vocational is a great possibility, but to be honest, most church planters are trained to do one thing and one thing only: pastoring. That’s their skillset. So bi-vocational can be incredibly difficult (this is another post for another time, but we’ve started to work on some really exciting things for this). It’s difficult because it puts most bi-vocational planters in a position where the job has very little flexibility or pays peanuts (or both). This leaves church planters in a precarious position because they need the church to grow and prosper financially, which means they need more people…but in order to get more people they need to know how to disciple people (and they’ve never been discipled) and grow a new kind of church (which they’ve never really seen or been adequately trained to grow). That’s quite the Catch-22, isn’t?! Can you start to see how all of this puts church planters and their families on the precipice of a nervous breakdown? (not to mention a possible financial one)
It seems to me, from where I sit, that more and more church planters want to plant these kinds of churches; churches that can flourish in post-Christendom and embrace all of the ancient practices of discipleship and mission. We’re seeing that the future is found in a kind of return to the past. I would say many of them feel as if the Lord has spoken something deep inside of them to plant this kind of church. But for the reasons listed above, many will default back to the hierarchical, centralized, Sunday-centric attractional church model they know rather than sticking with it. And who can blame them? Their primary responsibility is to care for their own family! We cannot ask people to sacrifice their family on the altar of ministry. Clearly this isn’t what Jesus is after.In short, we need to address some of these massive gaps or we simply won’t be providing a way forward for scores and scores of church planters who long to be faithful, but need the means by which to do so. They need it financially, spiritually, relationally and from a training/experience perspective.
In other words, we must radically re-imagine the way we are training and resourcing our church planters. In my next post I’ll throw out some of the practical ideas I’ve been kicking around with some people and where I believe all of this is going. Stay tuned.
pueblodedioslutheranchurch 