As I near the 21st anniversary of my baptism in the Los Angeles Church of Christ, I ponder the meaning of my decision to take up with a “controversial” church that employs “unconventional” methods to achieve its goals. We respect time-honored traditions, but we’re not enslaved to them. We respect our leaders, but at the same time we’re not afraid to question them or even replace them when necessary. The struggles of recent years have borne witness to that reality. Time and again I’ve been called upon to defend our teachings, our institutions, our innovative means of evangelizing the world. I would like to think I’m getting both smarter and humbler as I go.
And then, every so often, I’m gratified to find that others are discovering the wisdom of these approaches – even if they don’t give us credit for it.
In today’s edition of CT Direct (an online newsletter from Christianity Today magazine), there appeared an article titled “The End of Church Planting?” by Jason B. Hood, a Methodist scholar from Tennessee, calls for a new vision and new attitude toward church planting.
Hood argues not just that the customary old American and European models for evangelism don’t follow the inspired model of the early church, but also – despite their popularity and longevity – they cost too much and they just don’t work.
Where have I heard that before?
The article cites a blog post from seminary professor David Fitch, who “encourages church expansion via a missionary team model, rather than relying on professional entrepreneurial pastors to plant churches… churches, denominations, and missions organizations [should] send out teams consisting of three or four leaders or lead couples who could operate as a team in under-churched contexts.”
Isn’t that what we have been doing all along?
Rather than to rely on a steady stream of outside money to support a full-time staff, Fitch argues, this small team of missionaries can feed themselves by holding down regular full-time jobs.
This sounds vaguely familiar.
This team should remain in place for no longer than ten years, at which time they surrender leadership to carefully chosen local converts.
Yes, yes, I’ve heard this before somewhere.
Hood continues, “Mission methods that do not depend on massive finances certainly deserve consideration, and not just for the reasons Fitch cites. In the first instance, expensive church planting models are not well-suited for many contexts. In poorer locations, teams prepared to minister bi-vocationally could serve for the long-term in communities where churches have little or no chance of producing a minister's salary.”
It’s no secret that, in recent decades, fresh seminary graduates find it harder and harder to find full-time employment in an existing church or ministry. Often this forces them to become entrepreneurs, continually burdened with fundraising. The “bi-vocational” approach largely solves this problem as well.
Hood points out, “One decades-old study indicated that both churches and pastors benefited when a minister moved from being under-employed as the full-time pastor of a small church, to a forty-hour secular job with a twenty-hour-a-week assignment to serve that church as pastor.”
The team approach offers further benefits: “no one person or couple needs to excel in every area [of ministry or administration]. Everyone involved could provide some of the necessary skills and labor.” In this model, the success of the church doesn’t rely on the personality of a charismatic superstar preacher; the work of the ministry continues, with or without him.
Of course, as we seek to expand God’s Kingdom, the worst thing we can do is to reject one sacred bureaucracy for another. If our current methods should stop working, I say let’s kneel, pray, and find something better.
But for the moment, if it ain’t broke, let’s not try too hard to fix it.