Matt Sweetman was challenged by Ed Stetzer’s words cautioning about the creation of a new way of doing church rather than actually reaching new people with the Gospel. I’ve wrestled with this from the first, when we came onboard with Community of Hope to help launch this new church plant. How much should we be prioritizing and seeking Christians to join us in this enterprise? How much should we be focusing on straight out evangelism, and where is the balance with discipleship? When have we turned too inwards to reach out? These tensions are the bane of all churches – part of the problem with North America’s churches in general has come from answering these questions incorrectly, or refusing to even ask these questions.
On the ground, there is a recognition that to start something you need something. Life does not come from nothing – it comes from a seed. A church plant needs a core – a seed to synthesize and reproduce. When Philip and Beth came to Surrey to begin Community of Hope, they had no seed – they needed a seed. They recognized that it is hard for people to visualize the community that was to come unless there already was a microcosm visible that they could use and model. Our first core group was that model. But it needed to be bigger. But let me step back for a second.
You can, as a pioneering church planter, seek to start that core using new converts. You could bring people to Jesus, lead them to salvation, then disciple them to the point where they are good models of the type of Christian you want your church to be filled with. It takes much time and energy for this to happen. But looking around inside and outside of churches, I think the pragmatic has to recognize that even though the Reformation sought to do away with the Augustinian idea of the invisible church – a church of true believers within the larger church which may or may not include the saved – it is nonetheless still true right up until today. Even Jesus said that not everyone who cries, “Lord, Lord” will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
The longer I serve in church the more I realize that there is more to this walk than the simple saved/unsaved dichotomy. There is also the whole scale of sanctification that people work through as they work out their salvation with fear and trembling. To characterize, there are mountains of people, in solid, evangelical churches, who feel no need to pursue instruction – to continue their discipleship and deepen their walk with God, outside the occasional shopping trip to the Christian Bookstore and the purchase of “Your Best Life Now” or “The Purpose Driven Live” which will then collect dust on their bookshelf whilst they read one of Barack Obama’s biographies or the latest sequel to “Twilight“. There are still more who are content to simply come on Sunday, listen to the sermon, sing a couple of songs, and go home and watch the football game sunday afternoon without any conception of the importance of service, in the sense of the one they claim to follow, who “came not be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many“. These people, too, need a church plant to revitalize, activate, and engage in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Who are these people? They are legion. And they are wasting space in our churches – swelling the numbers and making leaders feel like successes, when in fact they are presiding over the dead. The church is to be a light in this world, not a weekend social club, or at best a religious Elks community service club. When people aren’t discipled properly, they think a stunted, dwarfed faith is complete and healthy and that is just sad. I fully agree that the church is there to proclaim the Gospel to the lost, but the Great Commission says to make disciples, and if there are people who have a knowledge of Christ, and may even claim to be saved, but are not exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit, are living as the world does, and do not follow Jesus with more than lip service, then they need our church plant too.
So a church plant must seek to share the gospel with the lost AND teach his disciples to die to themselves and follow Jesus. A withered, weak vine will produce few fruit, but a strong, healthy, vibrant vine will produce abundantly. Keeping a vineyard is not just about planting seeds, it is about pruning, watering, harvesting, and protecting the living vines that grow as well as the new sprouts you seek to start.
That is what I think has been happening largely at our church plant. Initially we found ourselves meeting many people who you might call nominal Christians. We ourselves, the core team, was in many ways nominal. We were stunted and immature. We have spent a lot of time and resources in maturing and
growing in health. When we were unhealthy and stunted, we produced little fruit. But as we mature, we will produce more and more. That is why I expect great things at our church this year.
I am excited, because when we go to plant our own church, we hope to take a cutting from a healthy vineyard. We pray that we ourselves are part of that cutting. Starting a new church with a healthy, vibrant core should allow us to start quicker and reach more people for Jesus sooner than even Community of Hope has – not because we are better, but because we will benefit from all the nurturing and all the nourishment that Community of Hope is providing us now. That too is very exciting.
Tags: church planting, community of hope, core team, discipleship, evangelism
