Planting Missional Churches

Your Guide to Starting Churches that Multiply

Ed Stetzer, Daniel Im

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781433692154
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Kirche

Planting a church is one of the most exciting adventures you'll ever embark on. It's also one of the hardest. It requires initiative, leadership, strategy, systems, and a lot of prayer. In this second edition of Planting Missional Churches, not only will you find a completely redesigned book with new content in every single chapter, but you will also find several new chapters on topics such as church multiplication, residencies, multi-ethnic ministry, multisite, denominations and networks, and spiritual leadership. So if you're planting a church, be prepared. Use this book as a guide to build the needed ministry areas so that you can multiply over and over again. For additional resources visit www.newchurches.com/PMC.

Section 1

The Foundations of Church Planting

The first major message of this book is to understand what missional means. Establishing a missional church means you plant a church that’s engaging in God’s mission, is focused on the kingdom, and is part of the culture you’re seeking to reach. We used the words mission and missional in the previous sentences, and we’ll also use the word missions in this book. Because all three words are so important, we need to define them before we go further:

Mission. The word mission refers to all that God is doing to bring the nations to himself.

Missions. The word missions relates to mission and refers to the pursuit of sharing and showing the gospel to all corners of the earth.

Missional. Missional means adopting the posture of a missionary, joining Jesus on mission, learning and adapting to the culture around you while remaining biblically sound.

In church planting the goal isn’t to plant the coolest church or do things that have never been done before, but it’s always to reach people, be on mission, and be about the kingdom of God. Your church may be composed of Koreans, African-Americans, young families, established professionals, baby boomers, millennials, or a combination of the above, but the important thing is that it is a church that is on a mission.

In most cases your church will be a combination of people. In many areas of the world today, we have such a rapidly growing and changing population that church planters can’t afford to target such a specific niche that we miss one part of a mission field in favor of another. And that’s the tricky part: understanding the complicated fabric our society is weaving without becoming overwhelmed. For no church planter can do it all. You may gain a better understanding of families than singles. You may connect more with young professionals than retirees. But it’s critical that you learn about the components of the mission field around you, adapt your approaches while remaining faithful to the gospel, and reach at least some of them as effectively as you can—all while leading people to be on mission.

So congratulations, reader, you’re not only a church planter, but you are also on mission! And can you see how we’ve come to this? At the same time we’re experiencing rapid population shifts, we’re seeing enormous changes in attitudes, in worldviews. It’s possible to be a missionary without ever leaving your city. And that’s good because it helps you understand better than ever the second major message of this book, which is how the word incarnational relates to church planting.

Missional is the posture—we join Jesus on his mission to people in culture—but incarnational describes what’s actually happening. Just as Christ came to live among us, we dwell with the people around us. In many ways we’re like them. But we’re changed, transformed; and because of that, we seek to change and transform.

The concept of being incarnational as it relates to church planting emphasizes the importance of relationships in effective church planting. It’s not about establishing a location for worship; it’s about establishing a basis for coming together in the first place. Good church planting depends on good relationships.

It also depends on solid theology, which is the third major message of this book. Relevance to the culture should never clash with the power of the gospel. There is much theological revisioning right now; some people are, in the name of missional thinking, abandoning basic theological messages. However, this book is not that book. Bible-based theology is the foundation for a successful church plant. No apologies for that!

The fourth major message is expressed in the word ecclesiological; the church matters. We know this because the New Testament is full of descriptions of how to transform the culture. The examples are all based on churches. Believers come together in churches, becoming stronger as individuals and as a body, with the goal of becoming the body, which in turn can transform the culture. That does not mean the goal of a church is a brick building, large group, or incorporation. Yet the biblical idea and model of church does matter and is the goal of church planting. Church matters.

Fifth, today’s successful church planter is spiritual—focused on spiritual formation. This may sound like a no-brainer (and perhaps it should be). But to be realistic about the state of church planting in North America and in many areas of the world today, let’s admit something: many church planters are by nature entrepreneurs, mavericks, free spirits, sometimes even misfits. (Thank God he can use cracked pots.) That energy can be harnessed and focused to be used for God’s glory but only if the church planter is Christ centered and transformed by the power of the gospel. In other words, a newcomer to a church needs to leave a church service being amazed by the awesome God the church planter serves, not by what a cool preacher the church has.

So let’s begin this journey together with the foundations of church planting.

Chapter 1

The Basics of Church Planting

My (Ed) own experience in church planting began in June 1988. I’d just graduated from college with an undergraduate degree in natural sciences. I arrived in Buffalo, New York, ready to start my first church. I was twenty-one years old and had a vision to reach the entire city but little experience and no training. I didn’t know it then, but desire wasn’t enough. The church was not the great success I thought it would be. Although the church grew and we saw people changed by the power of the gospel, I could have avoided countless mistakes with proper training.

When I was planting this church, our district association was strategizing to plant seven new churches within three years. The church I started in inner-city Buffalo, Calvary Christian, continues to this day but in a different way. Since then the community has changed significantly, now being predominantly Vietnamese and Burmese. As a result, as of a few years ago, Calvary Christian is now Calvary Christian Vietnamese Church and has a new service to reach out and minister to the Burmese in the community. Now that’s being missional.

Only one other district church plant from that time is still alive. It is a small church that took over the property of another church to survive. (One other church started, died, then restarted with a different name and location.) So an ambitious church planting effort that began with great enthusiasm dwindled to a whimper. Discouraged and demoralized, our church planting supervisor left the area and then the ministry. Untrained and discouraged pastors left the field for better salaries and better possibilities in established churches elsewhere.

My first church plant did not struggle because of lack of effort. I wore out my knuckles knocking on doors. With the help of partnership churches, we contacted tens of thousands of residents to start Calvary, canvassing neighborhoods, ringing doorbells, talking to people on their front stoops and porches. When Calvary decided to sponsor a new congregation, Lancaster Bible Church, we did so with what we assumed was an innovative strategy, using billboards. The team generated many ideas and worked long hours, but little success followed. That church later died and was restarted.

In the ’80s and ’90s in western New York and across North America, some strategies had succeeded. Successful church plants had shared their methods of success with others. Practices such as direct mail, telemarketing campaigns, and large grand openings had appeared infrequently but had become hot topics of discussion.

At the first church I started, we began a direct-mail ca...