OK. Kudos to Christianity Today on the title. It’s catchy and, as a writer and marketer, I appreciate that.

But the article, The End of Church Planting, is really about the end of an era — the “one-size-fits-all” era. The author, Jason Hood, is responding to another article by David Fitch on how our changing culture requires changing strategies for funding and planting churches. (I will respond to this second article tomorrow and touch on the economics of church planting).

In reality, The End of Church Planting is about how to advance the gospel and best start new churches. But it has provoked some conversation (Ex, Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight) (I think) because it suggests the question: Is the era of launching large, high-impact churches led by entrepreneurial leaders over?

The article summary under the title, “The End of Church Plants?”, reads:

“A look at whether churches should expand through a missionary model rather than relying on professional entrepreneurial pastors to plant churches.”

In the end, I will disagree with the either/or structure of this thesis. But first, I want to agree with some essential points. We must never rely on models. That goes for both the “professional entrepreneurial” model or the “missionary model”. These both are mental frameworks that may mean different things to different people and both can be limiting or empowering depending on what you see and mean when you think them.

Secondly, ever since Carol Davis of the Church on Brady in East Los Angeles gave me a copy of The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church in 1990, I am a huge Roland Allen fan. I have given Roland Allen to numerous young pastors over the decades. I resonate with an image of the Spirit of God calling indigenous believers and inciting a movement of faith in Christ through the efforts of amateurs –latin for “lovers”. The Christ following movement is not led by professionals, but by the spirit who woos lovers, amateurs.

In making this point the author of this article writes that “Paul’s own method for ministry was a message: his gospel (1 Cor. 15:1–4; Rom. 1:1–4) and his gospel-shaped way of life (1 Cor. 4:8–17). This message impacted Paul’s method of ministry. He did not choose a tent-making approach to ministry for pragmatic or financial reasons, but for pastoral reasons. He used his lifestyle to model the sacrifice and service required of every Christian (Acts 20:33–35; 1 Thess. 2:9–12, compared with 1 Thess. 4:9–11; 2 Thess. 3:6–12; and a point also made in the middle of 1 Cor. 8:1–11:1).”

A reader may wrongly conclude here that Paul chose against being a professional clergy man and instead chose a “tent-making”approach to ministry. But that choice did not exist. There were no professional Christian clergy in Paul’s time. Tent making was not Paul’s approach to ministry. It was his profession. But I agree that Paul’s life was shaped by the gospel in such a way that everything he did was ultimately in its service. I also agree that the gospel advanced without a professional caste of clergy. It wasn’t just Paul that was an amateur. Every believer was an amateur. Even today, the gospel advances not because we have a professional clergy, but because there are still followers of Christ who love where he is taking the world. Some of these followers have an entrepreneurial spirit.

Lastly, I agree that a conversation around this either/or proposition is probably a good thing for denominations and other late adapting churches and organizations. Perhaps leaders who never made it out of more traditional structures who, at the same time, had temperamental reservations about the rise of speedy and growing entrepreneurial type ministries might be able to make the leap into a slower, more relational, and organic model. If this is done under the recognition that the west is once again a mission field, then that would be a good thing.

That would perhaps be my greatest point of agreement: the sense that the mission field has changed is still true. A one-size-fits-all approach no longer works in our fragmented and diversified mission field.

Steve Andrews, founder of Kensington Community Church and pioneering guide to the community of leaders that navigate that congregation, states it like this:

“I always think of Rick Warren’s ‘all kinds of churches for all kinds of people’. Likewise, all kinds of church planting strategies……”

Exactly. We definitely have moved beyond a one-model-fits-all culture, especially in the world of church planting. We need all kinds of strategies and approaches for all kinds of mission fields and missional leaders.

So I think the conversation might do some good if it encourages more people to get involved in church planting in what ever form they desire. Having said that, I think I have some points of difference that may also be worth talking about.

Let’s start with the either/or formulation: Should churches employ the professional entrepreneurial pastor model OR execute the missionary model to expand?

I certainly don’t think the author meant this but this either/ or formula could be read like this:

Should churches send those nasty, agenda driven professionals or the meek and relationally intelligent missionaries?

Or maybe this:

Should churches employ that wicked capitalistic entrepreneurial framework or an authentic and genuine servant model?

Or: Should churches create those big old, impersonal institutions or loving, vital organic groups where everybody knows your name?

There’s not a lot of wiggle room in this formula for those of us who appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit and love the thought of some church plant going magnificently super nova..

I would have liked something like this: Should churches expand through a missionary model AND professional entrepreneurial pastors to plant churches.

Or we could have created a synthesis like: Should churches expand through entrepreneurially oriented, missional professionals who also serve as amateur pastors of high impact organic communities?

Yes and yes.

I resonate with attempts to experiment with new ways of structuring mission and community for witness in the world. Love it. But I have this nagging feeling that some depreciate those leaders whose charism it is to have things grow big around them. This is not always a choice. Years ago I had a young pastor tell me that he had chosen against planting a mega church on principle. I was glad to tell him that that choice had probably already been made for him. Few people grow the kinds of great, fast growing congregations that some have come to dislike. Few.

But I get the feeling that some would have the few with this great gift to restrain themselves. Imagine it. What if Rick Warren had sold insurance, instead of being a professional entrepreneurial pastor, somehow limited the natural way he commands huge portions of social space, and just led an authentic community of 10 people in Orange county. You know, just doing life together. What if Rick had never succumbed to the wicked impulse of gathering together other groups or even imagining together with others what they might be able to accomplish together as one huge publicly identifiable movement in the Saddleback Valley?

What a wonderful world it would be.

I think new kinds of church planting teams, like suggested in the article, are necessary. Like the authors (Hood and Fitch), I also think new strategies of funding are needed. Many fields will take years to ripen for harvest. In fact, we are too often, as San Franciscan Church Planting Strategy Guru Linda Bergquist says, a harvesting people in an unseeded field.

We must employ all kinds of strategies for all kinds of fields and all kinds of seasons. We should also team with high capacity leaders and teams and seek to make high impact entries wherever and whenever we can. Not everyone is a Rick, but a rare few are. Yes, they’ll often fail and so what? They’ll succeed some too.

When I was with Mosaic in Los Angeles the ground around us trembled when Erwin and I heard about the amazing high impact church plant called K2. Dave Nelson was sent with a significant team from Kensington Community Church (a distributed congregation that is localized in 6 campuses across Southeast Michigan and Central Florida) to plant a church in –of all the unexpected places — Salt Lake City, Utah.* K2 hit the ground with a huge and positive footprint and established a significant mission point in a city and state that is not a haven for evangelicals. We were excited and encouraged.

Is K2 –and the model Kensington used– all that Salt Lake City needs? Of course not, but because Kensington took a risk and launched large K2 is a base of operations, mission, and service for the whole of the region. I say “play it again” when the place, person, people, momentum, and presence seems right.

Launching large, high-impact churches led by entrepreneurial leaders will end immediately following the death of the last born,  high-impact entrepreneurial leader. In the meantime, we also must experiment because most of us aren’t “high impact” anyway. We need all kinds of faithful approaches for all the different types of missionary contexts and faithful missional leaders that surround us.

What do you think?

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*I am now the Director of Church Planting at Kensington.

*Join Erwin McManus, Steve Andrews, Dave Nelson and more at

M
Sept 28-29
Motown

Day 1: Launching Large: Methods, Madness, Motivations
Day 2: Going Native: Barbaric, Instinctual, Apostolic Movement