Wellspring for KC

The question of “is this it” that I talked about in post # 2 led me on a 2 year study of ecclesiology and church planting. The more I studied the more I realized that I did not fit the mold of the traditional SBC church planter. I became fixated on the type of planting that happens on the overseas mission field and the dynamics of congregational life and leadership. Every book I got my hands on seemed to be emphasizing “how I made it work” instead of using biblical principles of starting a church. Not to say that the men who wrote the books began wrong or were saying their way was the only way, but I just got sick of reading everyone’s story which seemed to be so similar. When I read Charles Brock’s book on Indigenous Church Planting I knew I had found what what I’d been looking for. Church planting is to be a natural outgrowth of reaching people with the gospel, not a forced result of a man whose job it is to increase the number of churches in a particular denomination. I learned from this book that whatever a church planter does with a new group of believers must be easily replicated so the people don’t have the expectation that church has to be done a certain way.

This led me to thinking about different ways to express church. The convention of which I am part of seems to think otherwise though as seen in this article. I just don’t know how a church can both be theologically conservative and methodologically liberal as this article states some churches are such as those in the Acts 29 network. I began to look at churches like Mosaic in California, multihousing churches, and finally got in touch with those doing organic/house/simple churches.  This last type really seemed to match what we’d been looking for. Reaching neighborhoods, families, and friends naturally. Establishing bible studies and churches as the Lord leads in homes and other gathering places, freeing up more money for missions and truly being indigenous to the communities in which we live.

After talking and praying with some people, we thought we’d give it a try. We got together with several couples and shared our vision and they were so excited to give something new a try. What we didn’t know was that it is almost impossible to begin a group with people already steeped in “church” life. As soon as we started talking about being accountable to one another and each parent leading their families in a walk with Christ we began to lose people. We lost all the churched except for one couple who were young in their faith and not what you’d call “churched”.  This was an extremely hard lesson to learn, but I’ve heard and read it tons since. Unless they have the same burden you do deep at the core of their heart, the churched will leave.  Today all who come to our group except for 1 are what you’d call “unchurched”. We are finding that the way we did evangelism at our home church and the one where I served as associate pastor in TN simply does not work for us. The goal is no longer sharing Christ and trying to gain more members, but simply sharing Christ, being there for people, and loving them as Jesus did. This year we had 4 baptisms and we have 1 more waiting to be baptized.  Sometimes everyone makes it to the bible study, other times we only have a few. Christy and I are unlearning so much that sometimes it’s overwhelming. (But in a good way!)