Church Planting Hell

Wow, Ben describes the story so well.

I have lived this story myself, as well as seeing it take place in the lives of others. It is sad. But it many cases it is also inevitable when we start the church planting "process" with the ecclesiology that we have seen "work" in other places and then try to plug it in to our own context.

I have grown to learn that we must spend much more time cultivating the place we plan to plant through prayer and relationship building. We also to have ask serious questions about why we are planting and what is our true starting point.

The very first time I read Hirsch's "Shaping of Things to Come" in '03 I recognized that I and many others had been working backwards in our church planting efforts.

Instead of functioning in this manner: Christology > Missiology > Ecclesiology

We were operating in this manner: Ecclesiology > Missiology > Christology

Jonathan, thanks for posting this.

wow! this is the description of myself:

By this time, the church planter is a mess. He’s defeated and discouraged, possibly depressed. And he’s formed all sorts of new conclusions about God that hinder his future walk with God. What’s worse is that the planter, for the life of him, cannot pinpoint what went wrong.

He blames himself - maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a pastor. He blames his circumstances – there simply wasn’t a good meeting location. He blames a bad decision – he shouldn’t have launched so soon. Or he blames the people – there was a deceiving family out to turn everyone against him.

But what he almost never sees is the need for cultivated soil. He showed up with a bag full of seeds to plant, but all he found were dirt clods. It never dawned him that he needed a hoe.

I am truly wonder if I have the called to be a pastor, of course most of the people that knows me say that I do, but in a world where results, numbers, improvement are measures of success it is hard to live up all the expectations. Besides my feelings of frustrations I have learned to depend totally from Abba, but sometimes I feel alone in this quest and at my 38 years of life sometimes I feel like I havent acomplish many things...

Brad/Miguel, so what role did having a kingsize vision play into this?

I think the "kingsize vision" thing plays a huge role. The reality is that many times the vision is influenced by what we see happening elsewhere. We send planters to cp conference around the country where they see crazy success stories and they read books by all the "mega" planters and they begin to think "hey thats the vision God has given me."

But (to use the first person pronoun) the reality is: I am not that guy, I do not live where that guy lives (culutural context), I do not live within the same situational context (in regards to resources/support) and I am not reaching the same people that guy is reaching!!!

So I think the "vision" is a sort of man-made ecclesiocentric vision, rather than one that is birthed by God from the field on context.

It exhausted me just reading this merry-go-round "church planting" stuff, man! I cannot even relate to most of the terminology anymore, let alone trying to live like that. It's really sad to me. Seems like the scenario is largely wrong from A-Z.

Just one more comment: In the NT it doesn't seem like people with pastoral gifting ever "planted" churches. Apostles seemed to get things started, not "pastors." But don't get me started on the pastor thing again!

How do you really feel Tracy? ;-P

Jonathan,

One of the things I am most grateful for is that early on in my journey to live out "the outrageous vision", is that I went to a church planters conference where Craig Groeshel came to speak to us. He went way beyond the call to help us get that we have to be what/who we are -- we cannot pretend to be someone else. We must have a clear and compelling vision for who/what God made us to be before that can effectively work its way into mission. As a result of spending the day with us, when he got home he boxed up 100 copies of his very helpful book, cHaZOWN, and FedEx'd them to us so we'd each have one before the conference ended.

Processing that book, in the context of what he shared with us, was VERY helpful to the waiting process I continue to live as God works in me to help me be the me I was created to be so that I can help bring into life the vision that God put into MY heart.

Peggy, good word! And thanks for sharing that story about Groeshel, very encouraging.

"By this time, the church planter is a mess. He’s defeated and discouraged, possibly depressed. And he’s formed all sorts of new conclusions about God that hinder his future walk with God."

yeah, i resemble that remark. haha!! although i was not the leader, just on the team. now i don't much like church. its kinda funny.

anyway, i think part of the problem is that we can have the totally wrong motives to church plant. that taints things quite a bit. also, throw in another culture and it gets even stickier. then there is the pressure to have a big dog and pony show...lots of impressive numbers. we completely miss the point.

thanks for posting this and for letting me add my 2 cents.

Quit riling me up, Brink!

http://tinyurl.com/4ylc9d

:)

Tracy

Jonathan,

I haven't read all of the comments yet, so I may repeat what someone else says. What makes this story (and many like it) so sad? What makes the stories of many pastors and other leaders so sad? Because they are taught to - and thus they do - spend so much time, energy, and resources on "facility... funding... book... launch date... sound equipment..." etc. The church is about people, not all of these things. Start with people, not with the structure and programs. Maintain your focus on people, not with the structure and programs. Spend your time, energy, and resource on people, not with the structure and program.

I read a report recently of a group who was planning to move to a new city to "plant a church". They were only three families, but they already had a huge org chart showing how everything would turn out - but they had no people. They were raising over $700,000 to fund everything that they wanted to do - but they had not people. There is no church without people. This group was building a huge organization, but not a church.

-Alan

Alan, again big vision...no people. Very astute

Hi Jonathan, I just read all the comments – a LOT of great reactions and insights here! I’ve got some thoughts on those, and then I’d like to share what I wrote after reading just your initial post.

* Could I suggest that, ironically, our visions are actually not big enough! What God would like ME to do locally is something that can’t be revealed elsewhere. So any Big Vision I can import from elsewhere has to arrive here in a box, and it in fact just boxes me in here. And the only boxes that get planted in this soil are those we know of as coffins! (I also find it ironic that we import the products of other church planters, and then wonder why WE got consumed.)

* I live in what may be some of the hardest soil in the U.S., with a non-nominal Christian population estimated to be somewhere between that of Japan and Taiwan. Hard soil may be quite fertile, though, and it just needs aerating and working over time. So I’ve tried to interest some local pastors in even the idea of a 100-year plan, implanting families who hopefully will commit to at least three or four generations of incarnational presence here, to plow, sow, and water – and not worry so much about the reaping.

* I wonder if a lot of church planters would really do better in entrepreneurship of new businesses or social agencies instead of churches. But maybe that’s a KingdomSized Vision that few are ready for yet.

Okay, so here’s my response to the initial post:

Jonathan – I rarely post blog clogs in other people’s comment sections anymore – except maybe over at Peggy’s Virtual Abbess site. But I hope you don’t mind if I give an extended response here. Your post really touched something deep, I think because you said it made you sad. Me too. I’ve worked with church planting teams since 1995, and have seen both constructive and utterly destructive results. So, here’s what I think is the core of what makes me sad … and perhaps you’ll relate as well.

For me, the primary/lynchpin problem is not so much in what’s there that Ben wrote. That’s a really REALLY accurate composite! It is in the reality of what’s missing from his description of the process. I noticed that there is no mention of the Holy Spirit. And when the Spirit was not necessarily invoked or involved, why should we expect anything else but to be disheartened in the long run?

If we distilled his boldfaced items into a list, we’d have a typical launch schedule for implementing The Formula. And that’s the secondary/symptomatic problem: Church planting in this marketing-model format reduces everything to managing a formula for a product launch, with success presumably “guaranteed” to those who are The Bold! The Visionary! The Risk-Takers! It’s the symptomatic problem, because we usually love to try fixing things by attacking the surface stuff with The Amorous Principle … namely a more-of-us approach: “This would’ve worked if only we had gotten more workers, spent more time, found more funds, gathered more crowd, tried more diligently, …” However, solving according to The Lesson Us Principle would require more reliance on the Holy Spirit and less on us workers as (legitimately) necessary elements but who, unfortunately, got squeezed into The Formula and became consumables when we tried to produce “success.”

And that’s why it also makes sense at the end that Ben talks about the soil, tools, cultivation. So, what also makes me sad is that the seminaries I know of do not really train church planters for Spirit-led preparation, contextualization, or sustainability. And so …

* Planters spend six months prepping their all-important first sermon, and then – oh yikes! – have just six days to prepare the second! (Okay, so you got trained in how to prepare sermons, but what about how to do so creatively so your wife could stand to listen to you for the next 30 years?) (Ummm … is there a cpsermons.com out there yet?) (Ummm … does “c.p.” stand for Christian Plagiarist? Just askin’ …)

* Planters learn the basics of catalyzing a core team, but receive no instruction, training, or advance practice in how to mentor co-laborers, supervise volunteers, resolve relational conflicts, or in other critical skills that sustain people for the long haul and prevent burnout.

* Planters often undergo a rigorous assessment clinic, where the elements for evaluating a “promising” candidate are all based on conventional church-culture definitions of “success.” [I’m trained as a Level 2 Assessor in the Ridley system, and also specialize in analyzing communication skills.] But what happens when a bold and visionary planter selects a “tough field” that is unconventional and, as it turns out, is therefore not a good match for him culturally? And what preparation did such promising candidates receive in how to deal with the sources and results of inevitable culture shock?

Yeah, I get it. Actually, I totally, totally DID it, SAW it, GOT it. Been there, done that, over a 10-year period with five church plant teams, a few focus groups for potential plants, and consulting on a church-within-a-church as part of helping a church in transition. All sincere and intentional, yet only one anywhere near successful and sustainable.

It makes me sad. But also righteously mad enough so these experiences could fuel passion for some constructive work that could potentially change the course of other planters’ future. And so, I’ve been working to create resources that focus on Spirit-led ground-preparing, team-building, soil-tending, disciple-mentoring. I see much in the extended missional dialogue that works in this same direction. These resources may arrive too late for many of those who’ve been deluded by and then disillusioned by The Formula, but I have to trust that such resources will bring a better and more realistic hope to a next generation of planters.

Meanwhile, for my planter friends who’ve become disheartened, I’d say that they still have the potential to discover a redemptive purpose. No crappy experiences remain a waste when we let God “cure” them to neutralize their corrosivity and thereby convert them into fertilizer that we can then mix into a new plot of soil to see a new plotline develop …

Brad

Thanks Brad. No worries about the length when you have something great to add.