The Potential For Vanity In Church Plants
Proverbs 10:17 The one who follows instruction is on the path to life, but the one who rejects correction goes astray.
Soooooo, we need to talk...
I hate being this guy, I hate being the one that has to take something that is so celebrated and that inspires so much hope for fellow believers in JESUS and point out a major flaw I have recognized, but I see it, and now that I have seen it, much like the time when I witnessed a boom mic clearly in sight of a scene during a popular Christian movie, I cant un-see it. So my hope in pointing out what I am about to is that I may rebuild whatever it is I might tear down by the end of this post (so no one feels Left Behind but instead are made Courageous...please forgive me) and hopefully inspire fixing it.
So lets rip the Band-Aid off, here is what I'm seeing, church plants can be merely just an exercise in vanity, this vanity can be a temptation for several different groups, those being Mission/Church Planting Orgs, Churches themselves, & Church Planters.
You see all of these are usually led by men of faith & vision, and it is often hard for these men to distinguish where the promises of their faith ends and the particulars of their vision begins, because the two are often conflated in the mind of confident and gifted men.
A simpler example to demonstrate the greater point: Imagine if a major coffee shop company offered a bonus & promotion to any regional manager who could grow their market share by tripling his number of locations within a 5 year period, now imagine that one industrious man decides he is going to take on this challenge. He uses his gift of leadership by recruiting & training store managers, he uses his fund raising skills to secure construction capitol and he also used his gift of marketing to advertise each new location to already existing customers within older locations in hopes to create lines at his newer ones so that he may justify more new locations. Now imagine that upon the completion of his task he contacts corporate to receive his praise & prize and is promptly denied. Why? Because he misunderstood the assignment, he violated one of the most basic rules of economics, he has expanded his means of supply without creating a growing demand. He has fallen for the vain error of mistaking expansion for success, activity for progress & he has weakened all who are connected to him in the process.
This same vanity can affect great men of faith in the ministry of church planting, lets break it down...
Mission/ Church Planting Orgs
Church Planting organizations usually have a phrase such as this within their mission statement "we exist to plant churches" so you can imagine questioning your very existence as an organization if you have not planted a church in a while, you can also understand the temptation of the leadership of that org to force one or two through in order to justify their efforts... and funding. This is not true of every CPO but it is a possible temptation for every one of them and needs to be recognized in order to be avoided.
Churches
In speaking of churches I mean both churches as entities and as collections of individual believers.
First, churches as entities are driven by the Gospel and the love of JESUS. They want to see unbelievers become believers so that JESUS' glory may be experienced by many and proclaimed in a ever expanding arenas. This is a noble motivation but it can be corrupted. You see most churches are led by a man or a group of men and one thing I know about men they don't like to feel or be perceived as being incompetent. So now picture taking your church through Acts as a leader and seeing all the churches Paul helped to plant and take into account that you feel some sort of comradery with him and you can see the temptation to mimic his activity without duplicating the success that his ministry experienced. You can avoid the stain of incompetency by applying the bleach of appearances. You can create a new church without ever creating a disciple. You can announce your new church plant in Sunday service, social media and paste it all over your website, selling the message that your church is being used to expand the kingdom while all the while you are merely just stretching it thin by relocating already existing believers to a new campus.
Second, church members can also fall victim to vanity in participating in church planting, this can manifest in a couple of ways. They can be those who never share or demonstrate the life changing message of the Gospel in their everyday lives but give money to missions or church plants as a means of supplementing their guilt for not doing so, and thus appear concerned with the Gospel (all the while misunderstanding it). They also can be dormant members who rarely show dedication or interest in the local ministry of their home church who then decide that their path to becoming Gospel servants is to join up with a church plant which will require even more of them. This will merely be a different activity with the same result, eventually, without the LORD's intervention, they will regress to their natural state of mission apathy or in some cases quit attending a church all together, because the venture clearly demonstrates to them the difference between who they think they & who they actually are, & they have missed or have not been shown that this is meant to point them back to the grace offered in JESUS not motivate them to self preservation through evasive coping methods.
Sending evangelists convinced of the power of their testimony to the grace they've received in JESUS out in teams is biblical, sending unconvinced spectators to a new location to see if it moves them to live as if their life has a mission of eternal purpose is fool hearted.
Church Planters
This one hits close to home, but Church Planters are the most susceptible to this temptation to vanity. I have seen men who plant churches deceived by their vanity, who believe their preaching, teaching, and leadership is uniquely anointed and the only reason it's not converting the masses is because it has been given only a limited space within their current church setting to be exercised, thus they seek to plant another church so they may no longer be "held back" from "fulfilling their call". Rarely when this is the case have I seen someone ask the question "Have I been mistakenly limited or does my gifting have a providential call that is just not as big as I think it should be"(elders and fellow ministers are a wonderful resource to discern this question). If you ever want a megalomaniac as a Pastor, give him a something to prove attitude, a disdain for sound council from seasoned ministers, and a new church where there is no restraint.
Likewise I have seen others who believe they have discovered (it's rarely new) a system or method of church that has been previously ignored for the 2000 years of church history which will fix all that ails her and perfect all her blemishes. The unfortunate error of this approach is that it mistakes the means for the cause and thus unwittingly misdirects faith to systems instead of the HOLY SPIRIT. It often gets caught preaching a Gospel of structure which glorifies it's engineer rather than the Gospel of salvation which glorifies CHRIST JESUS.
The Solution
Lets rebuild a bit, shall we?
As with anything else I think our approach to church planting can be found clearly in scripture, since so may of us seem to be enamored with imitating the Apostle Paul, lets look at his method, specifically in Acts 14
Acts 14:21-23 21 After they had preached the gospel in that town and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, to Iconium, and to Antioch, 22 strengthening the disciples by encouraging them to continue in the faith and by telling them, "It is necessary to go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God." 23 When they had appointed elders for them in every church and prayed with fasting, they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
Paul's method was to
1) Preach the Gospel
2) Disciple those who responded
3) Prepare them for the hardship
4) Identify & appoint Elders
5) After seeking the blessing of the LORD released them as a church to the LORD's care.
This approach shows a faith in both the power of the message of the Gospel, an actualized desire for making disciples, and a submission to the moving of the SPIRIT, it stops us from jumping the gun and creating a church name (or gimmick) before we actually have been blessed by the SPIRIT with a church family. It also keeps our focus on fulfilling the Great Commission in our everyday lives, not just when we can gain attention for it. Churches are established and released by the faithfulness of JESUS's ministers to obey him by faith, a faith that is confident that GOD will reveal, gather, and sustain his elect by the power of his grace within the wisdom of his timing, & through the telling of his story.
Clearly, you can see in order to do it this way our planting timelines may have to be lengthened, our egos may have to be minimized, our faith put into practice and the focus of our mission may have to be transitioned from the promotion of our grand vision to seeing clearly what can actually be produced in minor scale before we go major.
My genuine hope is not that this post has dissuaded anyone from the ministry of church planting but rather it has persuaded them to do so by biblical means, that being the proclamation of the Gospel, the making of disciples and the prayerful seeking of the LORD's will by the moving of his SPIRIT in establishing churches. I also hope that if this article has convicted you at all, that you will not try harder, but rather that we all may trust JESUS more, trusting that he desires the revealing of every soul that belongs to him even more than we do and trusting that by his power they will be.
In closing, I want to recognize the irony of the fact that I, a man currently engaged in initiating a house church network, have written by the medium of the overinflated blogosphere to tell you that you that alternative methods of planting and overinflating supply will not necessarily create demand. Let's just say that recognizing my own vain motivations has caused me to stare in to the mirror, not for admiration but rather for correction, and it has driven my faith in JESUS even deeper in the process. Pray for me, and for every other who hopes to be a disciple maker, that we are continually refined and reproved as we grow as disciples ourselves.
Speaking of correction, for a more in depth exploration of this subject may I suggest Spent Matches by Ray Moran
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