5 reasons to plant a church

So here is part 2. The first part looked at some of the reasons not to be a church planter, that is unless you have been called by God to do so. Here I will look at 5 reasons to plant churches.

Jesus told us to plant churches

No he didn’t I hear you say, he told us to go and make disciples.  True, but what was the disciples response to that command? To go and make disciples and then gather them together in communities.  The disciples had captured something of the intent in Gods purpose and plan for spreading this radical new message of a resurrected messiah through the vehicle of community.
John Stott says this; 

‘The church lies at the very centre of the eternal purpose of God.  It is not a divine afterthought.  It is not and accident of history….....the church is Gods new community.  for his purpose, conceived in a past eternity, being worked out in history, and to be perfected in a future eternity, is not just to save isolated individuals and so perpetuate our loneliness, but rather to build his church, that is, to call out of the word a people for his own glory’

I am convinced that the most effective way to carry out our mandate as disciple makers is by planting churches.

Church is the vehicle for mission

We are in danger when we read Jesus’s command to ‘make disciples’ outside of the context of the local church.  The facilitator for making disciples and turning them into disciple makers is the local church.  We are called to be a community of disciples who together make up Christ’s glorious bride.  The bridegroom is, after all, coming back for His Bride, and not to marry Himself to a collection of isolated individuals.  It is the churches purpose to facilitate mission and ministry and not the purpose of stand alone ministries to grow the church.  And for that reason I am convinced that the only way we will fulfil our calling as followers of Jesus is through the planting of many Jesus centred, gracious, mission propelling churches.

We need more churches

Ah you say, don’t we have enough churches already?  Do we need yet more churches? In short; Yes.  Put quite simply, church planting should never, ever be something that is done in competition with other local churches.  I have seen it done that way and it is messy, leaving a trail of hurt and anger.  I have been on the receiving end of some of that anger.  I remember a local Pastor who leads a large church here in Belfast responding to my invitation for coffee by basically telling me to ‘go back to where I came from’.  The point is this, we are not planting churches because we think other churches are not doing the job! We plant churches because we feel compelled by the mission that we are caught up in.  We also plant churches because we realise that there are people out there who, for different reasons, will never connect with existing churches.  It is highly unlikely that we will ever see someone from an older generation, who enjoys traditional worship and a high liturgical style of service come to Redeemer.  Likewise there are people at Redeemer who would not even consider going to a church like that.  Its just the way it is.  We need many different streams, all hopefully running in the same direction towards the same source.  The more streams, the more opportunity for people to start dipping theirs toes in the water.

We need new models of church

What does the church, full of grace and the spirit really look like in your town or city in 2010?  What does the church look like to those in your city who have never crossed the threshold of a church door?  Church planting is in one way a bit of a blank canvas.  We have a biblical basis which forms our view of how church should be structured and what kind of things might happen when we gather.  But other than that church planting gives you the opportunity to think critically, biblically, missionally, culturally and contextually about how it might look.  It provides you with an opportunity to rethink how Gods great missional vehicle might actually look for your city, or a particular sub culture.  This for me is really exciting, because at a basic level it means that through church planting, we are providing many more open doors for people to discover the message of Jesus and the community of church.

The call

I talked about the call in my last post.  At Redeemer Central we have a vision to see 5 expressions of Redeemer Central planted across the city in the North, South, East and West.  We also want to see churches planted in each major city across Ireland and in every major town and into the nations.  This is what we believe God has called us to, not to one work, but to many.  To fulfil this we need people who are called by God to church planting.  If that is you, then why not come and spend a year or two with us at Redeemer Central, get trained and be part of something exciting, in this nation, and beyond.

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