Planting Churches that Plant Churches

Steve Timmis is on a mission. For all that church planting has become part of the vocabulary and practice of contemporary evangelicalism, for all that it has become ‘on trend’, he’s not yet convinced we see it as an absolute necessity. Hence, the arrival of Multiplying Churches: Exploring God’s Mission Strategy, a collection of ten short chapters from different authors, including Matt Chandler, Tim Chester, Henri Blocher, edited together by Timmis.

For evidence of this arguable reluctance, Timmis suggests “you only have to look at the number of churches that don’t plant,” or the fact that often it’s not the experienced church leaders who go with the plant. Now, given Timmis is Executive Director of the Acts 29 Network, which exists to “encourage, resource, facilitate, support and equip churches to plant churches that will plant church-planting churches,” it should be no surprise that this book is an unashamed advocate for that vision. And yet for all that you’re unlikely to be caught unawares by this insistence, you can’t help but be gripped by the authors’ passion for the task and challenge of church planting.

More Than Plaid Shirts and Fresh Fonts

As a couple of the writers express, there is a concern that the recent resurgence of planting has sometimes been theologically-light, and I think being aware of that helps one understand the vision behind Multiplying Churches. Because the book is much more about trying to address that perceived lack of substance, than it is about being the ‘How to’ guide to church planting that perhaps some readers might expect. For example, Tim Chester charts a rich biblical theology of light and darkness, before coming into land by showing how this Scriptural narrative provides a vision for planting as creating communities of light at “street level,” in itself a brilliantly inspiring phrase. Similarly, I was surprised to find theological heavyweight Henri Blocher had authored one of the chapters, but actually his reflection on how the opening chapters of Genesis give us a fruitful backdrop for considering planting that will stretch and stimulate.

Acts 29 President Matt Chandler contributes a couple of chapters, including a realistic and honest consideration of ‘Motive’, which I found personally really helpful. One Mokgatle, who is the lead planter of Rooted Fellowship in Pretoria, SA, presents a stirring and rooted argument for culture-transcending church planting. Ruth Woodrow shares her experience of women’s ministry within her church plant, including their efforts to love and reach Muslim women with the gospel. Reuben Hunter gives a wise exposition of 1 Thessalonians chapter 2. Steve Timmis also throws in a chapter explaining why Acts 29 has a complementarianism theology of gender as a “foundational” conviction. Some may feel this is a bit of a gear shift in a book on church planting, but Timmis sketches out why he believes that actually it “displays something vital, true and pertinent about God.”

We Can’t Do Mission Without Planting Churches

In 2000 Timmis edited a similar collection of essays, also called Multiplying Churches, which was really a call for the UK church to take planting seriously at a time when it had a lot less presence in the Christian ether than it does now. Now in 2017, this is a whole new book, but that aim still remains: to encourage church planting as a mission strategy. The difference is perhaps the emphasis, born out of the experience of the last seventeen years: planting needs to be the on-going life-cycle for churches (‘planting churches that plant churches’) and it needs to be shaped by theological rigour rather than pragmatism. That said, although I can understand the reasoning behind this accent to the book, I still felt that a few more stories or examples wouldn’t go amiss to ground things and inspire. For me, it has often been hearing a church’s story that helps me imagine what might be possible in my own situation.

Ultimately this book flows out of a high view of the local church. As Timmis says, we shouldn’t talk about gospel growth, or mission, or evangelism, without talking about planting churches, for “churches are the result and the means of mission”. To use another image from the book, the way to defeat the darkness is to light more candles. To quote Tim Chester, to plant churches is to “litter the world with little communities of light so that neighbourhoods, regions, and countries burst into light.”

The short essay format of Multiplying Churches means it will offer those involved or considering planting a rich platter of inspiration that manages to be substantial without being overly dense, whilst its range of authors mean it is broad in its focus, brimming with wisdom, without lacking coherence.

You can pick up Multiplying Churches: Exploring God’s Mission Strategy from the publisher here, and why not watch Steve explaining the vision behind the book:

Disclaimer: The publisher sent me a free copy of this book, but I hope it is still a fair review.

One of the assumptions we can bring to church-planting is to think starting a new church primarily means starting a new church service or public meeting. In other words, it’s all about the event.

For me, digesting Tim Chester & Steve Timmis’ book Everyday Church was a wake-up call to the reality that in our current cultural landscape, new events/services/meetings in and of themselves just won’t make significant gospel inroads into lives and communities.

As they say,

A 2007 Tearfund report found that almost 70% of the UK population have no intention of attending a church service at any point in the future. That means new styles of worship will not reach them. Fresh expressions of church will not reach them. Alpha and Christianity Explored courses will not reach them… The vast majority of un-churched and de-churched people would not turn to the church, even if faced with difficult personal circumstances or in the event of national tragedies. It is not a question of ‘improving the product’ of church meetings and evangelistic events. It means reaching people apart from meetings and events. (p. 15).

Later on they cite the film Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner plays Ray Kinsella, a farmer in out-of-the-way Iowa. Kinsella has a dream in which he thinks he’s been told to build a baseball diamond on his struggling farm, in the hope that people will come to watch baseball and pay for the privilege. As the refrain in the film goes, ‘If you build it, people will come.’ But as Chester & Timmis compellingly argue, that’s not the case with church events in our cultural moment. We can’t just ‘build events’, expecting people to turn up.

As we’ve explored planting a new church community, one of the challenges for all of us has been trying to resist this temptation to think only about the new meeting. What will it be like? What time will we meet? Which venue will we use? What will the format be? And so the ‘event’ questions go on…

And this is where the Iceberg is our trusty friend. (For church-planters that is. Less of a friend if you’re the Captain of the Titanic.)

Because the classic stat about icebergs is that approximately 7/8ths of an iceberg is below the waterline. (And if you want to dig deep into the Archimedes Principle, immersing yourself in theories of mass, volume and buoyancy, you can do that elsewhere!)

The point is that what may seem like a fairly minor block of ice casually floating on the surface is in reality a pretty staggering and colossal mass that we underestimate at our peril.

And that’s why icebergs are a helpful illustration for church-planting. There’s far more to it than the public meeting, and if we forget that then – to stretch the metaphor – what we’ve created will most likely never stay afloat.

And I find that an encouragement in our current situation – because at present on our church-planting journey, there’s no weekly public gathering. So from a ‘surface-level’ things seem quite insignificant. But we’re trying to build something that is about what’s under the surface far more than what’s above the surface.

As we’ve journeyed through the last year twenty months or so, here are three aspects of this ‘under-the-surface’ vision that I’m realising are critical for an effective church-plant:

1. Growing a team, both spiritually & relationally: If we’re not a team of people who are committed to the gospel vision and committed to each other, then we’re never going to be able to implement the New Testament’s picture of a Christian community. So spending time together, digging into the Bible together, having fun together is all part of growing that team. You can’t fast-track that, because that’s just not how relationships work.
2. Being connected into the wider community: Again, if we’re merely focused on starting a public meeting – and perhaps doing so as soon as possible – then we run the risk of running an event that is disconnected with the community in which it happens. That might satisfy the wishes of some Christians, but it is likely to be a closed shop. Similarly, maybe this is the challenge for ‘mother-church/daughter-church’ models of church-planting. It’s brilliant to begin with an ‘operational outfit’, but to what extent is it actually embedded into the wider community? So how much time are we investing in understanding and being members of the community in which we find ourselves?
3. Informally sharing the gospel as we share our lives: In a sense this should flow out of number 2, but there’s always a danger that it doesn’t. Particularly so if we’ve basically decided in our minds that our only job is to get people to the church service. That essentially betrays an expectation that the church event is the sole way people will be exposed to Jesus and that we have no personal part to play. Ok, yes, I think our church meetings should be excellent evangelistic arenas for people to hear more about Jesus and see the difference he makes to a bunch of ordinary people (in other words, we need to consider the unchurched and dechurched person as we plan our public meetings). But the chances are that few people will ever consider attending them if they’ve not seen or heard something in our own everyday lives that gives them reason to think this is more than simply another religious club. And if we’re not enmeshed in relationships, then that’s going to be near on impossible.

So there we go. Considering church-planting? Make sure you aim for an Iceberg.

What do you think?

What have I missed off my list of critical ‘under-the-surface’ aspects of church planting?

Do you resonate with the iceberg illustration?

Ok, so maybe I’m showing my naiveté straight up here, but eighteen-months into our pioneer curacy adventure and I’m wondering if you can over-complicate church-planting.

I don’t mean to say that church-planting is easy or straight-forward. But the past few months have reminded me that there’s to be an irreducible core running through all that we’re trying to do: planting is about gospelling. And that’s a great encouragement in the midst of the messiness of ministry…

You can read the full piece over on the Church Society blog…

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Church Society exists to strengthen local churches in biblical faith and to help shape the Church of England now and for the future.