Ok, mildly clickbait title, the more accurate question is “why has church planting slowed among the new churches, in the UK.” The majority of the church-planting movement I’m in (Commission, part of Newfrontiers) is based in India. They plant churches, despite being openly persecuted in some states, with rapidity. I’m told that around the world Commission plants approximately one church a week. In the UK, however, it’s infrequent.
My church has just sent a family to plant a church in the north of Portugal, so we haven’t stopped, but generally speaking the pace is much slower. Why might that be?
Context
The UK is a different context to, for example, India. It is structurally more difficult and more expensive to move to another part of the country and so it requires resources and effort to plant a church.
True as far as it goes, though I think there’s some assumptions there that could be picked at. As an explanation it doesn’t hold much water, however. We used to plant lots of churches around the UK, so something changed.
The context has changed, of course. When the first waves of renewal churches were being planted around the UK there was nothing like them around. Now it’s not difficult to find word and spirit, grace teaching churches in many towns and cities, and not just our own, there are many movements doing similar things. Moreover, most of the easier places to plant are well-fished, having multiple good churches located there.
We should push back on that slightly, if there aren’t enough churches for 90% of the population of a place, there aren’t enough churches there. We tend not to plant churches in towns we already have churches in: I think this depends on the geography of the place, but plenty of places could take another church in a different area or estate or the town or city. The model is likely to be different: a church on an estate is going to be focused on the estate rather than on the whole of a place.
We should also push back on my assumption that ‘easier places to plant’ is the right way of talking about somewhere. For a given model of church-planting it might be true. It definitely is true if by ‘easier’ we mean has the potential to grow to a over a hundred and buy a building within 5-10 years. If we’re expecting church plants to look like that we’re right. But perhaps the model needs to look different for places that no-one wants to go?
It’s also true that the extreme costs of housing in (some parts of) the UK is a major barrier to gospel movement and not an easy one to fix, but we aren’t seeing mass planting in the dirt cheap places to live in the North East of England so that on its own isn’t a sufficient explanation.
Missional Thinking
It is plausible that our wedding ourselves to missional paradigms that encourage growing big churches and growing them through multisite models has, paradoxically, blunted our mission.
It’s certainly true that growing your church big is generally going to involve keeping leaders rather than sending them. It’s also true that having the goal of growing a very large church seems pretty pointless: not least because the style of charismatic worship that we love as a movement becomes very difficult with more than around 200 people in a room, though even without that ‘getting big’ is not itself a biblical goal for a church. I doubt many people really want bigness for bigness’ sake. It is true that a church of a certain size is able to do some things smaller churches can’t. It’s also true that successful evangelism will grow your church.
Multisite church was very trendy in churches like ours 15 years ago. Watching it develop over the last decade and a half has put most people off: pragmatically it doesn’t work in most situations, ignoring the ecclesiological questions it raises. The places I’ve personally seen it work well are doing something that only looks like multisite superficially, they’re actually separate churches with separate elderships being run out of the same charity to facilitate the richer parts of a city in bankrolling churches in the poorer parts of a city. They’ve invented the diocese, but it seems much more in keeping with our ecclesiology.
The rise of missional thinking could be part of it, not because growing your church and planting churches are in tension, but because missional philosophies of ministry tend not to emphasise church-planting. However, we should push back a little here too, for all I think there’s truth in it. Churches growing is not a bad thing. Practically, if your church grows then planting a church in another town will not stop you needing to deal with that growth. Planting a church within a mile or two might allow you to use church-planting as a solution to outgrowing your space, but otherwise you’re going to send around 10 people. You’re still going to need to decide what to do when your facility is full (a bigger facility is not only expensive, if its possible, but will may well kill your charismatic worship; multi-meeting has different challenges that may not sit well with your ecclesiology). Pointing the finger at large churches is easy if they aren’t church planting, but let’s not assume that if they were they wouldn’t be the same size.
Developing Leaders
I think this is the core of the challenge. Are we developing leaders who want to go and plant churches? Are we growing and sending and preparing elders?
The context is a problem (where are they going?) and our philosophies have probably slowed us down, but if you don’t have anyone to send you can’t do anything. The funny thing is, you need to be developing leaders in your church just to keep going. Develop and send is the right pattern for ministry, it’s the pattern we find in Acts. There may be some churches managing to develop lots of leaders and not send any of them, but I suspect they are the minority.
This isn’t because no one is trying. At the risk of making everything about a problem I’ve written on extensively, I think the biggest barrier to developing leaders in the UK right now is the discipleship crisis. Our churches are full of Christians who have got comfortable and wouldn’t dream of moving and getting a new job because God told them to go with a church plant to a new place. They’ve become static. It’s good to commit to a place long term and the church is a nomadic people at heart, putting down roots and then finding ourselves drawn out by God into a new place in order to be drawn in to communion with him. The Exodus is still our pattern.
That may sound like contradictory emphases. I want us to build strong churches that have generational impact long after I’m dead. I want those churches to plant churches, not frenetically but because we believe there aren’t enough churches in the UK—even if we include ones that don’t preach the gospel—for all the people of our towns and cities. I probably haven’t quite tied the bow on that piece of theory, but I do believe that part of a strong church’s long-term impact will include planting and planting and planting again.
Some of it may be going to the ends of the earth, some of it might be planting at the end of the street. We do both until the glory of the Lord covers the earth like the waters cover the sea.
Photo by Syahrin Seth on Unsplash
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