Church Planting - What are We Doing Wrong?

Church Planting Movements (CPMs) are happening all over the world. They promise great things. A church plant amongst every unreached people group by the end of 2025. The world evangelised in my lifetime (I was born in 1966.) Jesus coming again in my lifetime. That's a little bit more controversial. That's the way they understand Matthew 24:14 'This gospel of the kingdom will be preached to the whole world and then the end will come.' Except that Jesus was possibly talking about the signs of the destruction of the temple, in the first half of Matthew 24, and not the end of the world. The gospel was preached to the ends of the known world in the apostles' lifetime, then the temple was destroyed. Mention CPMs to many Christians and they will have a sudden abdominal pain, a feeling of sinking dread. Many churches in England have been part of these movements before and found that they didn't work. They might even be blamed for the decline or closure of some churches. Is this because we are doing this in the wrong way?

 

Many movements don't have a correct understanding of the world around them. In Luke 10, Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust off their feet and go to the next town if they are not welcomed. If your intention is to plant a church in every major British city, be prepared to accept some cases of total failure. You must find a person of peace. The presence of that person of peace means that God is working among that particular group of people. The absence of that person means that he isn't. There are cities in England that are especially hostile to God. One of my friends laughed and told me, 'You come to this town centre to preach the gospel? I think that you are wasting your time.' Evangelism is never a complete waste of time but we have to accept that some areas are hard, almost impenetrable, and resistant to the gospel. Reading books from the 1990s, I am concerned by the prophecies of revival that were given that never happened. The Kansas City Prophets saw balls of fire falling from the sky on major English cities and the fire beginning to spread. A man who was an ex-drug addict appears in the Jesus Fellowship book 'Fire In Our Hearts' saying, 'The people out there are desperate for Jesus. They've tried everything else. They think it's all rubbish.' This is not true of the vast majority of westerners, by any means. Don't expect fires of revival to fall across whole countries. The apostles never saw this. You can read the missionary journeys of Paul in Acts 16 - 19. There are places, like Corinth, where Paul stayed because God had many people in the city. There are places, like Athens, where Paul stayed only briefly. There are places, like Asia, where Paul was specifically forbidden to go. Understand the world the way it actually is. Christians are often very spiritual people who have had some sort of faith in God and some sort of dissatisfaction in their lives for as long as they can remember. They think that everybody is like them. They couldn't be more wrong. One of the main problems with the western world is that people are so satisfied by science, technology and money. They can't imagine needing anything else. Neither, necessarily, do people feel empty inside if they have enough material goods and good family relationships. Many of our hymns and many of our Christian books say that people have an aching void that only God can fill. They don't. Christians do great damage to the church when they blame cell group leaders for poor performance and poor growth. This may even cause people to leave their church. 'Everything was fine until that pastor started having 'Vision.' His vision caused the church to close down.'

 

In order for cell groups or small church groups to reproduce more churches, they have to find a person who is the essential link in the chain that will create another group. Mission Frontiers call this the person of peace.  In traditional cell groups, the person of peace is a gifted leader. I was once asked to pray that we could find a leader for our church plant in Newcastle. Specifically, this leader should have a driving licence. We are looking for a Christian who is a great Pastor, a great Bible teacher, an experienced driver so they can drive a minibus 50,000 miles a year and can draw new people into the church. If a church group is led by somebody like this, the problem is that it's very difficult to reproduce the same level of ability in other people. To be good at drawing new people into a church requires a very outgoing, slightly forceful personality. The person who can draw these new people into a church is also expected to be a brilliant Bible scholar and teacher. They must disciple this new group and train these people to be pastors and evangelists in their own right. Few people can do all of these things. My friend was excellent at bringing people into the church but couldn't teach the Bible. I felt as if I was being forced to be someone I could never be, that my leader's attempts to make me an outgoing, friendly person who would draw new people into the church were cruel and went against my natural personality. The cell group movement relies on the ability to divide the cell every six months, according to some books, and within a few years each member of it would be functioning as a cell group leader in their own right. This expectation usually leads to despair. You could be in a part of the world that is extremely hostile to Jesus, where no one is interested in joining your group anyway, and you may also feel that you lack the ability to be an evangelist, pastor and Bible teacher. I used to think I was an extremely gifted evangelist, Bible teacher, everything, just waiting to be discovered. The best way to humble such a person is to make him into a cell group leader.

 

In Mission Frontiers, the person of peace must be a non-Christian. They are a person who is seeking Jesus but doesn't really know him yet and is asking lots of spiritual questions. This kind of person is very rare. You can read in Acts 16 how hard God tried to stop Paul going to several other places and eventually directed him, through a dream, to Macedonia, where he met Lydia.
I normally do evangelism by asking people questions. 'That shopkeeper's a devout moslem who closes his shop on Fridays to go to the mosque. I'll think of a really good question to ask him. What did Jesus say about the religious people of his day? If he thinks Jesus is a prophet, isn't that part of what Jesus came to do? That woman used to be a Buddhist nun. I'll ask her how that came about.' Evangelism can be done in the right spirit. This isn't necessarily wrong. I did ask my friend how she became a Buddhist nun and we had a really good conversation about it with her friends in the pub. Telling a muslim about something Jesus said to religious people is a good way to start a conversation. They would understand what you meant. That is something they would agree on and you can try to take the conversation further, to talk about the way of salvation. The person of peace will come to the evangelist and ask their own questions. They are seeking Jesus. Another problem is recognising who is and who is not a person of peace. A lot of time can be wasted on the person who has been on the verge of becoming a Christian for ten years and actually hasn't. I know people like this. For some people it really did go on for ten years. I remember a man in Leeds who loved reading the Bible with me. He was an African man, and I felt that he was grateful for his high school education and loved the Bible because he loved books. I could have brought my copy of the works of Shakespear to his house and he would have been just as happy. If a kid on a rough city council estate wanted me to read the Bible, that would be different. The African man would answer any challenge I gave him with the question, 'Are you asking me if I've been baptised?' He had been baptised in the Mormon church. The number of times he asked this question became a nuisance. This was his way of saying that he was happy enough with the religion that he had and didn't want to be any closer to God. A person can invite you into their house for a meal because they are friendly. A person can listen to you read from the Bible because they are an intellectual. Be discerning in your spirit. You can often sense what is happening in someone's mind. You have the Spirit of God. What is God saying about this person? Some people think it is their job to find a person who is on the verge of becoming a Christian and push them over the edge of the cliff. If you need to use any pressure or coercion on an individual, one of two things has happened. You either have someone who is not really interested in following Jesus and you are wasting your time or worse, you have found your person of peace and you are trying to force them to become a Christian before they are ready. This could actually turn them against you. One Christian said, 'I would have reacted against that particular evangelistic leaflet when I was a new ager. Here's a cult using fear to control me.' The truth seeker will ask lots of questions. The truth seeker may have bizarre ideas about God because they are not a Christian and have probably never understood the gospel. You must listen to their bizarre ideas and try to correct them with your Christian teachings. The truth seeker will be very interested in what you have to say. They want to know more. They want to come closer to God and want to move beyond the knowledge of God that they have already.

 

One Mission Frontiers article said that when you find your person of peace don't try to convert them. The problem is that western Christianity sees the person of peace as an individual. The person of peace must be converted. The person of peace must be discipled. The person of peace must be trained as an evangelist and Bible teacher and God will do something really powerful in their life so they will be able to lead and pastor their own cell group in one year's time (this exact story in an old book about revival.) One man in an African country led many people to Christ. He created no new churches because he saw his converts as individuals. In fact, as western evangelists we would simply have told the new Christians to find a church. There are few countries now that don't have churches at all, they could even travel to another town to attend church. In Acts 16 we see the power of teaching the Bible to a whole group. Lydia had family and friends who could be brought into this group to listen to the apostles together. The same thing happened with the jailer when Paul and Silas were put in prison. By finding a person of peace and bringing their friends and family together to study God's word, you are creating a church. It is also not difficult for that church to reproduce itself and to create another small group. To do this, we no longer have to train one of our new Christians to be an incredibly gifted evangelist/Bible teacher/church pastor. We are using a different model. All the group have to do is find another person of peace. The church at Philippi became large and well known and even has a letter written to it in the New Testament.

 

Christians don't really understand intercession. The way that we pray is very strange. In the Jesus Fellowship, people have often prayed for the forces of darkness not to destroy their church. You hear them, in prayer meetings, commanding the forces of darkness to leave their church alone. The forces of darkness are not really interested in destroying churches. When I read Revelation 2 and 3, I get the impression that it is rather God who destroys churches for disobedience, not the forces of darkness. I think the forces of darkness have got better things to do. Their real responsibility is to keep some of the towns and cities where we live so hardened to the gospel that nothing that is planted can actually grow there. They do not care about the survival of our small church. How do we push back the powers of darkness over a city? I doubt very much that the powers of darkness will bow down to our command, as people expect them to do in some prayer meetings. In the book That None Should Perish by Ed Silvoso, there is an awful lot of intercession. People are knocking on their neighbours' doors asking them if they have any prayer requests. Is this a form of evangelism, relating God to a felt need, as Ed Silvoso seemed to think at the time, or is it something greater? As Christians begin to pray for their neighbours, even if it's just about some mundane problem that someone is having at work, and when this is done by hundreds of little cells operating across a whole city, the result will be that the the power of God comes down in the city and the forces of darkness retreat. The other thing that Ed Silvoso majored on was church unity. There were 62 churches in the city that were the result of 61 splits. When the Christians forgave eachother and were reconciled again, this caused the power of God to come down. The story is told in an old book about the Primitive Methodist revival of an evangelist who was trying to evangelise a place that was hardened to the gospel. He fasted and prayed for several days. He broke down and cried. Eventually, God broke through. Revival came. If we are going to see cities and hard areas of the country open up to God, if we are ever actually going to meet that person of peace, Christians must learn to intercede for the people of their cities with great power and Christians must love one another.

 

Original article that inspired me to write this:
http://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/beyond-the-person-of-peace