Where Everybody's Crazy

I was asked recently by the editor of our in-house magazine to come up with something controversial for him to print. Well, he didn't use those exact words, but the implication was very much there. And he pointed out a phrase I used a while back about church planting, and wondered if I could expand upon it. Here we go.

Our mission, WEC, defines itself as a church planting mission. Our strapline is "reaching people - planting churches". I was present at the UK field meeting when we decided on our UK strapline, because "church planting" has a different connotation where I come from. I met someone on a bus in Oxford who had come from a certain denomination to "plant a church" in Oxford. I told him that we already had more than fifty, most of which were growing and serving the community well, but that wasn't what he was interested in. We didn't have a church from his denomination, so he came to plant one. "Church planting" in UK parlance can look very similar to ecclesiastical colonialism. I will come back to this idea later.

So anyway, at the UK meeting, we ended up after a fairly laboured process with the strapline "planting where there is no church", which avoids the unfortunate juxtaposition of those two words. I noticed, though, at the meeting, that many people did not understand the point of a strapline.

A strapline is not meant to be true. The idea that WEC is "planting where there is no church" is, well... Here's a chart which shows the correlation between the number of WEC workers in a country (from our communication directory) and the percentage of Christians there (using the methodology and figures found in Operation World).

Do you see how, as the number of workers increases, the pink bar gently falls? No, neither do I.

Anyway, that's OK, because straplines aren't meant to be true. They're just for advertising. We say that we're reaching people and planting churches, but in reality, WEC has more people primarily involved in medicine and teaching - activities which are explicitly considered secondary by our constitution - than the 16% of WEC missionaries who are primarily involved in pioneer church planting. (These numbers come from our communications directory.)

The point of straplines is that they represent the vision and hope of the organisation. They reflect what we're aiming at. We're not a church planting mission by any means, but we do want to be.

But sometimes I wonder why. I am sure that some people will consider "church planting" to be the "Biblical mandate". Now the Bible is a fairly big book and if you look hard enough you can find a mandate for anything, but I think that in this case, they are mistaken. We have a mandate to make disciples, a mandate to baptise in the name of the triune God, to be witnesses to the ends of the earth, to preach the good news to all creation, to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the leper and drive out demons. Plenty, I feel, to be going on with for the moment, without any need to make up other work for ourselves. But if you want a mandate to plant churches, you will have to find it from someone other than Jesus Christ - and I'm not convinced that that is a very good idea for anyone who considers themselves to be his follower.

It is true, of course, that Jesus does talk about the "church". He mentions the word all of twice - once when he talks about how Peter will be the rock on which it will be built, and that gets pretty Catholic pretty fast so we try to ignore that one, and once when the NIV spectacularly badly translates "ekklesia" as "church" rather than the obvious contextual meaning of "town assembly". (cf. Kittel & Bromiley, TNDT, p.400.) Jesus concern, and his mandate, was that of disciple-making. The church was what happened as a result.

Why is this distinction important? I leave the explanation to Bosch: (Transforming Mission, p.332.)

The medieval missionary policy of plantatio ecclesiae had still operated on the assumption that one day, all the world would be put under the sway of the church. By the middle of the nineteenth century such an ideal was no longer deemed possible, at least not in Protestant circles... So the Protestant variant of plantatio ecclesiae was the carving out of small, exclusive "territories" of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and the like. The "advance of the gospel" was measured by counting tangible things such as the number of baptisms, confessions, and communions, and the opening of new mission stations or outputs. The church had, in a sense, ceased to point to God or to the future; instead, it was pointing to itself. Mission was the road from the institutional church to the church that had still to be instituted... The relationship of these churches to society and to the wider ecumenical and eschatological horizons was largely ignored.

Anyone can plant an empty church. Anyone can plant a social club which meets on a Sunday and sings some songs - and then write back in their newsletter having justified their continued existence. The success of a "church planting mission" like WEC directly depends on the number of churches it plants - a recipe, if ever I saw one, for the kind of base ecclesiastical colonialism we saw in my young friend from Oxford.

But how all this church planting relates to the Kingdom of God is unclear. Indeed

questions were seldom asked at this time about the relationship of this churches to the kingdom of God. Their very existence appeared to be its own justification and no further discussion of mission goals was required. (Scherer, Gospel, Church and Kingdom, p.77.)

The church is not the goal. The Kingdom of God, in all its various and unfathomable richness of manifestations, is the goal. The church is purely the community of those who live in the Kingdom of God.

If you think you can "plant" a church, then your understanding of church is way too small.