David Fitch is an author and frequent speaker at church seminars. He recently posted on his blog a request that we stop planting churches!
Instead of funding one entrepreneurial pastor, preacher and organizer to go in and organize a center for Christian goods and services, let us fund three or four leader/ or leader couples to go in as a team to an under-churched context (Most often these places are the not rich all white suburbs where evangelicals have done well planting churches).
Fund these leader/leader couples for two years instead of three. Fund them only with health insurance (in the States) and a reasonable stipend for housing. This gives them space to get a job on the ground floor of a company, at the bottom of the pay scale, learning a skill, proving themselves. They can do this because they have certain benefits and a place to live for two years.
The goal here is NOT (I REPEAT NOT) to have self-sustaining church organization in three years. It is to have three to four leader/leader couples working together with jobs each that can offer 15 hours of labor to work together to organize and form a gospel expression way in their context. They will be self sustaining in that they all have jobs. They will be committed to this context/neighborhood for ten years.
These leaders will have time and space to then a.) get to know and listen to the neighborhood and the neighbors b.) establish rhythms of life together which include worship, prayer, community, discipleship and presence among the neighbors, c.) discern God working in and among the neighbors and neighborhood, d.) bring the gospel to these places wherever God is working. This includes reconciliation, peace, forgiveness, healing, righteousness, and new creation. D.) develop a way of bringing those coming into faith in Christ into a way of growth and discipleship.
I believe that you put three or more quality leaders together in one place for ten years you will have a new expression of the gospel i.e. a church in each context. Gospel as a way of life will take root. Many will brought into the Kingdom. Imagine what could happen if we funded 100’s of such teams.
Fitch is supported by Brent Thomas at Holiday By the Sea,
Most church planters would not be so crass as to say that they are setting out to “plant” a once/week event that draws lots of butts to the seats to pad the budget so they can have a cool building, but pragmatically, that’s exactly how many church plants operate. We “plant” an event rather than the Gospel, so we grow consumers rather than disciples.
Fitch’s idea intrigues me because it focuses on the concept of believers truly living as missionaries rather than ministry providers. I have come to believe that this is a mindset that the American church desperately needs to adopt. I often wonder what it might look like if American churches viewed “success” or “failure” by how well they were making disciples who make disciples rather than by the “Three B’s” (butts in the seats, budgets and buildings).
Fitch forces us to consider that, the primary mode of contemporary church planting may be “off.” We don’t need more Sunday morning “services.” We certainly don’t need any more “mega-churches.” We need missionaries saturated by the Gospel, living in community on mission.
Here’s what bothers me about these kinds of conversations: who says that having a Sunday morning worship service in a building somehow prevents a church from being filled with disciples? Do you really have to meet in a house, coffee shop, or high school gym to be a disciple? Isn’t it possible for a house church to be just as filled with lukewarm, useless Christians as a church with a big building?
Indeed, Alex McManus responds,
So, why didn’t the author go further? He could have written, “Stop Funding Church Plants AND Stop Funding Missionaries. Everyone is Already Funded through their jobs!” …
The key component and common element here is that we don’t fund everyone. We don’t fund missionaries. We fund leaders. We fund catalysts, igniters, the obsessed, the ones who keep the rest of us in community, on task, and purposeful, the ones who show us the way forward. We may need new models for funding and new strategies for mission, but we still want to get behind those who sense a calling and who have a capacity adequate to the task.
You see, the building is neither the problem nor the solution. I agree that a lack of discipleship is a serious problem in the American church, but the cure isn’t to make it harder to serve by defunding leadership. The solution is to redefine conversion.
McManus continues,
A part of the problem here is the church. We accept members into our church, but maybe this is wrong. Perhaps, rather than accepting members, we should commission every new convert to Christ as a missionary.
One church that does this is Mosaic in Los Angeles. The lead cultural architect of that congregation, Erwin McManus, likes to say something like this: the issue is not location but vocation. If you are called by Christ, you are on mission. The rest is just geography.
I’m tired of the contempt so many shower on the institutional church, as though having a building and lots of members is somehow anti-Christian. It’s not. What is anti-Christian is attending your house church or mega-church or oh-so-trendy coffee-house church or any other kind of church while not being on mission.
Be about the mission and the rest will take care of itself. And for those rarely gifted leaders who have the talents and the heart to establish and build a congregation, God bless them! And they should be supported by the church.
(1Co 9:7-11 ESV) 7 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk? 8 Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? 9 For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? 10 Does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. 11 If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you?
Here is my wife’s idea – and I think it’s brilliant!!
The Church of the Laundromat.
Laundromats exist in low-income, neglected areas. Laundromats are already a meeting and gathering place. People who visit laundromats will be there for an extended period of time with not a whole lot to do. It sure seems to me like an ideal environment in which community and relation can be built.
With some clever design and forethought, the laundromat can become a church in the truest sense, and one that seeks out those who are most in need of the church.
And while the laundromat would take some significant funds on the front side for construction, it would, hopefully, become self-sustaining, not through contributions from those it is serving, but through the normal operation of its business. In addition, it provides much needed jobs within those communities where jobs within walking distance (transportation is unreliable for many in these areas) are hard to come by.
For those interested, I have had an architect draw up preliminary plans for one, as I think this is the best idea I’ve heard for what “church planting” could/should look like in modern America, and maybe elsewhere as well.
“Church of the Laundromat” is a fantastic idea. My local congregation has been discussing ideas to reach out to the local lower-income, predominantly Hispanic and Vietnamese (hence Catholic) population that’s grown in the area over the last few decades. Maybe it would work to reach out to people since Sunday’s one of the few days off of work that allows them to monitor clothes washers and dryers for hours. Maybe a church could buy a local laundromat, and have it open up into a “sanctuary” in the store space next door. Only problem I can think of is that it might get really noisy!
Jay,
Obviously, in any pure sense, I agree, “the building is not the problem.”
But part of the issue is also driven by the question of what is the path most likely to lead to a solution. The institutional churches are often so bound up in their patterns and traditions, that it’s very hard “steer the boat” in any direction at all, much less a new direction.
I’m not particularly enthralled by Fitch’s solution, partly because, he proscribes what others should do. Is he himself executing the solution he proposes?
I have little interest in what other’s suggest I should do rather than being the example of doing it themselves.
Ultimately, as I’ve expressed here and elsewhere often, I’m convicted about the need for me to love others the way Jesus loved me. That could change the world.
Adam,
I’d love to see the plans. And, like Jenny, I wonder how an architect would deal with the noise issue.
It reminds me in a crazy, ironic sort of way of the many combination laundromats/bars that began several years ago — and evidently failed. But at least the idea led to the Bill’s Laundromat Bill and Grill country song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrfVw2loEc
I agree with the thought that every Christian should be a missionary. There are mission fields from laundromats to libraries and coffee houses to construction sites.
I see the work of missionary leaders as helping Christians find their mission fields.
Questions for the Christian:
Where do you spend your time?
How can you be a missionary there? or more in line with David’s thought, How can you love the people there the way Jesus loves me?
Question for the missionary leaders (a.k.a. Elders Pastors etc.):
How can I equip the missionary for her specific mission field?
You want to see this in action, go to a prison ministry.
My family would sign up to do this one. How soon can we start? We’ll be coming from a restricted access country in 2012. Got any job openings?
KP,
Are you in touch with any of the missionary organizations, such as Missions Resource Network, the Continent of Great City, Eastern European Missions? Or domestically Kairos and Mission Alive? They are doing great jobs of assembling missions teams and helping them find support.
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Fitch has a good point and if we would absorb his language we might see it more easily. I am in favor of evangelism, but not in favor of scratch-start religion franchises designed to attract a share of the existing religion market and with the ultimate end of providing a living to seminary graduates.
How about this variation on David’s theme? The “sending church” provides a short term stipend, as Fitch suggests, but a long term commitment to funds for community service. No salary, but we’ll buy all the soup you can serve. No cash for sound systems or auditorium rent, but funding for projects that meet the needs of the neighbors, or which take the gospel outside.
Now this model does not create a new Sunday meeting, which has always been the sine qua non of church planting. And that is intentional. As far as “meeting” goes, why can our “church planters” not find a single fellowship anywhere in their new city to whom they can connect? To me, it is both myopic and insulting to the body of Christ to do a church plant in an American city of 100,000 and suggest by our actions that none of the Christians there are worthy of our fellowship. Unless they want to submit to our oversight, that is.
If things develop where our missionaries have so many people needing their care and training that those folks have to pay shepherds to get enough of their time, then I can’t fault that. But at the moment, the domestic American church plant model has us importing professional shepherds who have no sheep, setting up brand-new sheep ranching operations with venture capital, then rounding up strays from other ranches and rebranding them as our own.
In Texas, that’s not called evangelism, that’s called rustling.