An acquaintance of mine among the Independent Christian Churches used to say, “Eric, there are three ways to plant a church: the hard way, the harder way, and the hardest way.” At times I have wondered whether I was doing it the hardest way. Today, I believe God is seeing us through and that maybe we are only doing it the hard or harder way.

Eight years ago, my family and I sold or gave away most of what we had to make a big move from the Deep South to New England. I transitioned from “big church” and “senior minister” to “no church, no salary, and no supporting organization.” In the church planting world, you would call us “parachute church planters.”

Today, we live in a small New England town, five miles from Plymouth Rock and thirty miles from Fenway Park. We have a community with a small group of people, hold no debt, and the four-year-old church has six million dollars of property including the historic church building and a parsonage. To God’s credit alone, I believe the greatest witness to what is taking place with this small church is that our town would notice if we were not here and that we would be missed.

So, how did that happen? How did God use us to engage this town? What works? What doesn’t work? Perhaps an analogy will help.

A great family therapist, Salvador Minuchin, once penned a book called, “Family Therapy Techniques.” It was a primary text in a course I took at Harding University in 1994. Minuchin explained that, “training in family therapy should… be a way of teaching techniques whose essence is to be mastered, then forgotten” (Minuchin, 1981, 1). As I trained to become a family therapist in the early 90’s I had little idea how much that would affect my call to church planting these many years later.

Perhaps one of my favorite family therapists in the early years of my field was a man named Carl Whitaker whose preferred technique seemed to be no technique. According to him a good family therapist is not a person who applies technique, it is the one who can survey and size-up the landscape in which a family lives. As the therapist “does” this a joining occurs so that as the therapist moves the system (family) to which they are now connected responds.

This explanation was lost on me when I first began to learn the techniques of family therapy. There was a time when I sought diligently to “do” what my teachers did. It seemed elementary that if I did what they did, I would be a good therapist like them. It didn’t happen that way for me and it was a process of trial and error, months and years, before “being” a family therapist felt natural.

Today, I am an adjunct at a small college in Boston teaching family therapy. Based upon my own previous anxieties as a student, I regularly remind my class that they have what it takes and the techniques they employ mean nothing next to how they regard their client. A good therapist doesn’t “do” therapy. It’s not a shirt you take on and off. Joining with an individual or other system is more about who you are than what you do.

Even though I instinctively knew these things about the practice of therapy, I did not associate the value of these experiences with church planting when we moved to New England. I thought I might just learn the techniques of church planting by spending time with a newly planted church. We spent a year with a church plant that began by meeting in a movie theater. I could “do” what they had done in New England and be successful. Perhaps the organization that planted the church would consider sponsoring us to do the same. After working alongside this church for a year, the organization said I did not have the gifts or “techniques” to successfully plant a church with them. I felt like a failure.

In truth, I was guilty of the same thing I struggled to learn so many years ago as a budding therapist. Underneath what we “do” is the more important question of who we are. But, in this experiment we call a secular culture that truth can go missing. How? In our secular culture religion is just another menu item that one might choose. You have your private life, your work life, your religious life, and so forth. For so many following Jesus is something you “do.” It’s formulaic.

But, following Jesus isn’t about wearing a Jesus shirt. Jesus owns my whole suit of clothes and my person, right down to the bone. Discipleship, spirituality, religion, we use a number of words to say the same thing. What I hear Jesus saying is that following him is not a technique. There isn’t a formula. How do I know? Well Jesus said so. The cost of discipleship is everything. There is no need for a list of things Jesus requires from you or me when it includes everything. Jesus didn’t come to give us a full spiritual life. Jesus came that we might have a full life – all of it.

Perhaps the greatest experience I have had in these years since moving to New England is the shedding of a formulaic faith and the embrace of a sacramental faith. It was not a failure to learn that I am not gifted for raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and planting a hip new church in a movie theater. It was freedom to discover there is not one formula. The hardest way to plant a church or follow Jesus would be to follow the formula of someone else.

Sacrament simply means sacred mystery. A sacrament is a sort of portal – a connection between heaven and earth. Yes, the church has struggled over that term and what sort of things are sacramental and what sort of things are not. I’m going to weigh in on this and I could be wrong, but if you are reading this you are a sacrament. There is something about you that is uniquely you. You have what it takes. And when Jesus is not merely a shirt that you try on and off but the One who is about making your life full and meaningful, then you become an extension of who Jesus is. That is sacramental.

It is a mystery to me. I have no formula to share. Over the last eight years, I have shared sacred moments on barstools, in parking lots, by deathbeds, in doctor’s offices, furniture stores, ambulance rides, and the list goes on. So, this is not a how-to-do-it blog. It’s more a how-I-think-I-learned it blog. How does life happen to me? How can I get more to happen? May more and more happen to you.

~ Eric Greer

____________________

Eric Greer sounds like he’s from Tennessee but he is a New Englander. He pastors a new church in Kingston, MA and loves beekeeping, the Red Sox, and fire engines.

Church planting wasn’t supposed to be this difficult!

Don’t tell Mission Alive I said that. I was warned that church planting would be difficult but I wasn’t really listening. I knew it was just a matter of gathering some folks who had already been softened to the gospel during the summer mission trips my supporting church had engaged in for a decade. Imagine my surprise when my Christendom tactics (which I was well-versed in) did not work!

Stefan Paas, in his excellent book, Pilgrims and Priests, helped me understand why I found church planting such a challenge. In Canada, as in Europe, where Paas teaches missiology and has planted churches himself, we find a post-Christian, secular culture that has no place for Christianity as a (the) dominant narrative. Thus, Paas addresses the question of what missionaries are to do in such a context.

He writes about the “always elusive majority” (chapter two). A “conquest” motif has softly underlay Christendom. The church has always been seeking to have a majority but has never fully actualized it. Even when the culture was largely considered to be “Christian” it was always the minority acting on behalf of the majority. 

This is seen in the images of “hospital” and “restaurant.” A hospital is a place you support so that, in time of need, you have access to its services. A restaurant is a place you choose to go to when you want access to its services, though you do not support it otherwise. The Christendom church has functioned in both of these ways in Christian-majority culture. In some cases, the “hospital” has been a state-sponsored church. In other cases, the church has certainly been the restaurant serving the buffets of Easter and Christmas. 

In light of this, most dominant models of church are dependent upon Christendom underpinnings. This is because we find at the heart of Christendom the “conquest” motif: Christianity seeks to transform (to overcome) the world. This mindset is no longer helpful, or appropriate, in secular culture. It is important, Paas believes, to maintain a clear separation between the church and the world. Both are God’s, but both are distinct.

Constructively, Paas draws from 1 Peter (chapter 5) to elucidate the themes of pilgrimage and priesthood. Christians are pilgrims. We are travelers, foreigners in the land, who have no interest in conquest and transformation because that time has passed. Likewise, Christians are priests, and our mission is not to transform, or take over the world, but to bless the world on behalf of God. 

His work on 1 Peter is strengthened by his work on Israel’s exilic situation and spirituality (chapter four). He develops the theme of “loss,” that exile was not merely a deportation and a grappling with a new culture. Rather, it represented the actual loss–even the failure–of the promises of God: the loss of land, the loss of a king, the loss of the temple. Amidst this loss, Israel had to find new resources to draw upon, and they did. In the exilic literature of the Old Testament, we find the rise of Sabbath as both an identity marker and as a participation in God’s created order, identity practices such as circumcision and purity laws, and devotion to God through cultivated practices of prayer at regular hours and almsgiving. Israel in exile had to carve out a way of being God’s people in a culture that didn’t care about God. 

This book has shaped my missional imagination in many ways. First, the deconstruction of church models opened my eyes to the prevalence of the Christendom model. This enabled me to see that one challenge I faced was that I was trying to import a model of church among people who knew what that model was and had already rejected it. This is not to say that they have rejected God, only that they have rejected a model of organizing belief. 

Second, the discussion of Israel’s exilic situation and their spirituality within that context, combined with the priestly reflection on 1 Peter, helped me to understand the distinction between the people of God and the world. Here, formation is key and is privileged above public proclamation and evangelizing. The church must focus on its identity and formational practices are important to that end. Rather than evangelizing for new members, churches can focus on the ways in which they are being formed into the people of God and can discern the ways in which God is calling them to bless their neighborhoods. Conversion happens implicitly, not explicitly, as the church blesses the world.

Third, the practical implications of small churches, distinct from the world, functioning as priests who bless that world on behalf of God is generative. Small churches are nimble and can operate as mission outposts without the apparatus that larger, Christendom-style churches have in terms of buildings, staff, and other commitments. These small churches can gather in living rooms, backyards, community centers, and public parks to pray together, dwell in the word, and discern where and whom God desires them to bless. They can bless freely without the need for results hanging over their work. 

Paas’ project to define a post-Christian mission is ambitious but helpful and practical. He has helped me see the disconnect between my earlier Christendom approach to church planting and the reality of the post-Christian, secular culture. I have much to think about as I contemplate a new, smaller, more nimble, and priestly approach in our post-Christian, post-covid era. 

____________________

Jeremy Hoover and his family live in Sarnia, Ontario, where Jeremy is a church planting missionary with Love First. He also co-hosts Mission Alive’s Discipleship Conversations Podcast and provides Pastoral Care for Pastors who are struggling with burnout, time management, and relationship and leadership challenges. 

I’m excited to be helping Mission Alive relaunch their blog. This blog is part of a larger social-media effort that also includes a monthly webinar called Innovative Church Conversations and a podcast called Discipleship Conversations.

My excitement stems from my belief in the cause for which Mission Alive exists, the mission of God. I’ve had an association with Mission Alive for more than a decade now. I fondly recall my wife and I having breakfast with Dr. Gailyn VanRheenen and his wife Becky, hearing about the beginnings of Mission Alive. Several years later I helped with a church planting team that Mission Alive was helping and then eight years ago I participated in the Mission Alive Renew cohort for leading church renewal.

Although I serve as a pastor with a church that is nearly seventy years old, I believe there is a need for planting new churches. Likewise, I also believe there is a need for equipping leaders who will help local churches live on mission with God. That’s why I’m helping Mission Alive.

Of course, I will boldly say that neither the church nor her leaders should ever forget that when we speak of mission, we are talking about the mission of God — not our mission. As Christopher J. H. Wright has said, “it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world” (The Mission of God, p 62). 

Recognizing that it is the mission of God rather than our mission raises some questions. What does it mean to participate in the mission of God? How do local churches participate in the mission of God? How does participating in the mission of God shape the task of church planting? How does participating in the mission of God shape the task of leading? You probably have a few other questions too. One thing for sure is that there are not any easy answers to the questions before us.

As most people know, the landscape of North American culture has and continues to shift in major ways. We can’t even speak of one culture because there are a multiplicity of sub-cultures that differ from city to city, region to region. Even within any given metropolitan area there are many sub-cultures. So we can forget any one-size-fits-all approach to our participation in the mission of God. Rather than embracing a homogeneous approach, I want to suggest that the answer to our questions begins with the Bible and particularly the hermeneutics of how we read the Bible.

When we read the Bible, we’re reading a story. In short, the story gives us an account of how God is redeeming and restoring the life he has created, with a past, present, and future. We learn of what God has accomplished in the past to understand how that bears upon the present and will come to complete fulfillment in the future.

Although every aspect of the story is important, the plot draws our attention to Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God. The Bible, then, offers us a narrative that is Christ-Centered and Kingdom-Oriented (or Christologically-Centered and Eschatologically-Oriented). Reading the story as people who are part of the story serves forms us as followers of Jesus living under the reign of God. Herein is the key to our participation in the mission of God: We are are learning to live as a coherent reflection of the life Jesus lived and the incoming kingdom of God he proclaimed as good news (cf. Mk 1:14-15). 

So as I like to remind people, we are the Bible that people will first read. What story will they read? Our calling is to live the story of the gospel in such a manner that when words become necessary, they are merely offering an explanation of what is already seen. In other words, the churches we plant and lead as well as our very own lives as church leaders must be embodiment of the gospel. Underscore that too because one of the unfortunate obstacles between the gospel and culture is the reality of too many scandals with churches and church leaders, where there has been a failure to embody the gospel.

However, as important as faithfully embodying the gospel is, the plethora of different cultures among the North American landscape will require innovation as well. If we don’t pay attention to the culture we live among, we may faithfully embody the gospel but do so in a manner that talks past the local community.

To some Christian, the word innovation raise concerns. Are we now just deciding to make it up as we go along, doing whatever is trendy and even edgy? The answer to that is a big “No!” 

What I mean by innovation involves what actors and musicians call improvisation. With the Bible as our story, we become actors within the story (Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, p. 140). Except the script for our particular scene — how we are to embody the gospel within our local context — is missing and now will require some improvisation. It would be redundant, meaningless, and eventually boring if we just repeated everything in the previous scene because that is what was done before. In lieu of that, we want to improvise in a manner that makes sense for our scene but also remains coherent with the plot of the story told within scripture.

It’s like playing in a jazz band. The story of the Bible provides us with the key, tempo, time signature, and even the chord structure. If some of the musicians were to play in a different key, tempo, time, and chord changes, the music would sound terrible and turn away the listeners. So instead, all the musicians play within the structure given. One the other hand, imagine if the musicians just began playing the same seven or eight notes over and over again in the same pattern and same emotion. The song would lose meaning and lose the interest of the listeners. But if the musicians were to improvise, they would still play coherently with the music piece they are given but do so in a manner that makes sense at every bar in the music. So it is with participating in the mission of God. We follow Jesus Christ as people living under the kingdom of God but it requires both faithfulness to and contextualization of the gospel we read about in the biblical story. That is how we participate with God to, as the purpose of Mission Alive states, “bring about the holistic transformation of marginalized communities through starting and renewing innovative churches that address the most challenging issues faced by their neighbors.” To that end is what the relaunch of the Mission Alive blog will serve.

~ K. Rex Butts, D.Min

_____________________

K. Rex Butts serves as the lead minister/pastor with the Newark Church of Christ in Newark, DE. He holds a Doctor of Ministry in Contextual Theology from Northern Seminary in Lisle, IL and a Master of Divinity from Harding School of Theology in Memphis, TN. He is married to Laura and together they have three children.

I am excited to reintroduce Mission Alive’s Missional Church Planting blog. It has been nearly 5 years since our last post. At the time we were in the midst of a leadership transition from Dr. Gailyn Van Rheenen, Mission Alive’s founder, to me as the second-generation executive director. We have made the transition well, planted several new churches, developed a focus on marginalized communities, and are now ready to recommit ourselves to providing helpful articles on missional church and church planting.

As we relaunch this blog, we are doing so as part of Mission Alive Media. Mission Alive Media will consist of 3 media platforms

• This Missional Church Planting blog,
• Our monthly webinar called Innovative Church Conversations, and 
• A podcast called Discipleship Conversations.  

Each platform will have a unique audience but together they will explore the breadth of topics involved in missional church, church planting, leadership, discipleship, and the future of the church in North America.

I am even more excited to announce the leadership team that will oversee Mission Alive Media. It is my pleasure to announce that Steven Carrizal, Associate Minister for the Alta Mesa Church of Christ in Ft. Worth, Texas will chair the Mission Alive Media team. In addition to his ministry at the Alta Mesa church, Steven is a coach and an associate with Hope Network Ministries. Steven and Jeremy Hoover, Mission Alive church planter in Sarnia, Ontario, originally launched the Discipleship Conversations podcast. While Steven will lead our media team, Jeremy will oversee the Discipleship Conversations podcast. I will continue to oversee the Innovative Church Conversations webinars.

This Missional Church Planting blog will be under the direction of K. Rex Butts. Rex is a gifted preacher, pastor, theologian, and congregational leader as well as a husband and father. He is a ministry coach, guitar player, and enjoys a good brew — coffee and more. Rex holds a Doctor of Ministry degree in Contextual Theology from Northern Seminary in Lisle, IL (Chicago). What makes Rex the perfect leader of this Missional Church Planting blog is how well he brings together missional theology and missional practice. I am excited to entrust the leadership of this blog to Rex.

This blog will address missional ecclesiology in general and missional church planting specifically. It will focus on the connections between Christology, missiology, and ecclesiology all with an eye toward ministry practice.  

Our hope is that this Missional Church Planting blog will become a valuable resource to you and your church, as you seek to join God in what he is doing to bring about the holistic restoration of every soul and every community. Our goal is to provide you, the well-trained ministry practitioner, with high-quality, theologically robust articles that are at the same time enormously practical and inspiring. We will seek out the leading theologians, missiologists, and practical ministry experts in the field of missional church and church planting to write for this blog. Many who are already part of the Mission Alive Network will share with us their thoughts and experiences and we may even convince Dr. Gailyn Van Rheenen to write an article from time to time to share with us his ongoing insights!

We in Mission Alive believe that the cultural tables have been turned over. While tried and true ministry methods may continue to gather the already-Christian – introducing our unbelieving neighbors to Christ and helping them grow in Christ will take more creative and innovative methods. That means no one is truly an expert. We are all experimenting. Our goal is to bring you the result of many experiments from many missional trailblazers.  Please join us.

~ Tod K. Vogt