Brothers, We Are Not Entrepreneurs: A Call for Lutheran Church Planters to Be Pastors

While there are differing ideas about church planting in Lutheran circles, there is one concept that seems to bring divergent schools of thought together:  the centrality of the church planter to the success of a church plant. Hand-in-glove with this concept is the idea that a church planter needs to be an entrepreneur (or at least possess an entrepreneurial spirit). Alex Early of the Acts 29 network summarizes this view well when he writes, “Church planting in the 21st Century is a bold task. Being a gospel-centered, innovative church planter implies that you are going to have to have some entrepreneurial aptitude. … As church planters, entrepreneurial aptitude is a must. We cannot afford to keep doing things the way that we’ve always done them.” This view of the marks of a potentially successful church planter has certainly influenced Lutheran church planting.  Recognizing the need to be more active in planting new churches and desiring to be successful in our endeavors, Lutheran church planting leaders and practitioners have sought out and embraced the church planting principles and practices of authors, consultants, and organizations that have a very different understanding of the church than we confess (and therefore a different understanding of the church’s purpose, the marks of the church, what is healthful for the church, etc.). Though highly popular among church planting experts, the entrepreneurial church planter embodies a number of the elements of contemporary church planting thought that are counterproductive to planting authentically Lutheran churches. 

What is an entrepreneurial church planter and why is one so dangerous to planting Lutheran churches? Although the idea that church planters need to be entrepreneurs is widely held, there is hardly a consensus as to what constitutes an entrepreneurial church planter. Drawing on several sources from the church planting movement, academia, and business, an entrepreneur is characterized as being visionary, market savvy, innovative, self-driven, and success-oriented. These five characteristics are centered in the entrepreneur. What this means in practical terms for church planting is that the church plant is defined, driven, and developed as an expression of the entrepreneurial church planter. The vision for a church plant originates with the church planter and is his vision for the church for which he works to recruit and align supporters. The prospects of the church plant rest in the abilities of the church planter to market his vision to a target audience through human techniques such as demographic analysis and surveying target groups to ascertain consumer interests (i.e., felt needs). As an innovator the church planter has license to establish the modes of operating the church plant as he determines as necessary to support his vision and execute his marketing plan. The self-driven nature of the entrepreneurial church planter focuses him inwardly for the strength, insight, and ingenuity to move his agenda for the church plant forward. Lastly, the success-orientation of the entrepreneurial church planter focuses his attention on measurable results, especially the number of people that are attracted to his vision and supportive of his efforts. In short, the grave danger of planting churches with an emphasis on (let alone the necessity of!) a church planter being an entrepreneur is that, by its very nature, it tends toward being a man-centered effort.

We must divest ourselves of the influence of the church planting movement and its emphasis on man-centered church planting if we are going to plant authentically Lutheran churches. To begin with, the vision for the new church must originate in the missio dei and not in the imagination of a church planter (or any other human being). When it is, the vision will invariably be centered and focused in Word and Sacrament. The Lutheran church planter will embrace this by gathering people around Word and Sacrament as the defining vision of the church plant. Rather than relying on human techniques for analyzing a target market, the faithful church planter will rely on God’s Word and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to exegete the culture of the community in which Word and Sacrament ministry will be established. As such, the church planter should be well versed in theology, not marketing. How the Word and Sacrament ministry will be brought to the community is a matter of creativity rather than innovation. Unlike an entrepreneur who, in the words of the economist Joseph Schempeter, shatter the status quo and set up new things in place of it, a Lutheran church planter looks to bring what is ancient and well established to contemporary people (whether modern or post-modern) knowing that it is new and different for them. In contrast to the self-drive of entrepreneurs, a church planter recognizes that the starting point of the church planting endeavor is denying oneself. A church planter is willing to forsake his goals, preferences, and priorities in order to serve others, especially those who make up the community he is seeking to reach with the Gospel. Above all, a faithful church planter recognizes that the call to plant churches is a call to bear the cross rather than to achieve success in human terms. In other words, what we need to be faithful in planting Lutheran churches are for church planters to be pastors rather than entrepreneurs.

SDG
@RevMAWood

Planting the Church Militant vs. Planting the Church Relevant

There’s been a focus in church planting over the past few decades that promotes the importance of planting churches that are relevant to the culture of the target people for the church plant.  In its fullest expression, this is often stated as working “to make God’s Word relevant” – an impossible task given that God’s Word is forever relevant to and for a dying world.  But even when this view is moderated and holds up the valuable goal of bringing God’s Word to people in a way in which they can relate to it (i.e., showing people the relevance of God’s Word rather than attempting to “make it relevant”), there is a fundamental problem with planting the Church Relevant: doing so runs contrary to what we are called to do as Christ’s Church.

    There are a number of irresolvable conflicts with God’s Word when planting the Church Relevant.  Because the Church Relevant is culturally driven, it invariably devolves into a man-centered endeavor.  No matter how good the intentions of those who seek to find relevance in a culture may be, appealing to the culture’s preferences, priorities, and practices in order to attract people transforms the church into an expression of the culture rather than establishing it as the presence of the body of Christ in the midst of the culture.  While it is always the task of the Church to engage the culture, it is self-defeating for church planters to strip the Church of her intrinsically counter-cultural message and character in an attempt to become relevant to the culture.  Advocates of planting the Church Relevant will quickly object to this assertion by appealing to St. Paul’s statement, “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22), but in doing so they have already shown that they have placed cultural accommodation over God’s Word.

     1 Corinthians 9:22 is quite possibly the most distorted texts in all of church planting theology.  Often cited as supportive of finding common ground with the culture and shaping the Church to be more compatible with the preferences, priorities, and practices of the culture, this text is actually a summary of the evangelistic methodology of a church planter who boldly confronted the cultures in which he labored.  The results of Paul’s becoming all things to all men were not welcoming embraces and high praise from the cultures’ adherents, but imprisonment, severe flogging, lashes from the Jews, stoning from the pagans, and danger from all corners along with hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation and lack of shelter.  If not before all these experiences, Paul certainly knew from them that planting churches is not a matter of finding peace with the culture but in being at war with it.  In other words, Paul understood that he was planting the Church Militant not the Church Relevant.

     Like Paul, we too are called to plant the Church Militant.  This call is undergirded by our Lord Himself who prepared the first church planters for their difficult task by telling them plainly that the world hated them.  “If you belonged to the world,” He told them, “it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” ( John 15:19)  The fact that this passage is rarely if ever cited as a text for church planting belies our tendencies to avoid the militancy of making disciples of all nations and the costs of doing so to embrace the more palatable, safer, and less costly approach of cultural accommodation.  But choosing to plant the Church Relevant rather than the Church Militant has proven to be both ineffective for newly planted churches and crippling to established churches as our unilateral disarmament has left us vulnerable to the attacks of the cultures of the world that continue to hate us because they have first hated the One who has sent us into the world.  In church planting, as well as in all other aspects of being the Church in the world, we must never forget that we are and always will be at war.

    The Church is at war, but in what kind of war are we engaged?  Failure to understand the kind of warfare called for in this struggle is disastrous.  This war is, of course, first and foremost spiritual warfare (cf. Ephesians 6).  However, in order to be effective in this warfare, we must recognize the kind of war fighting the battle calls for.  Of the various kinds of human warfare experienced in history, today’s counterinsurgency operations provide the best picture of the battle in which the Church Militant is engaged.  Church planters need to recognize that this is our reality and be equipped for entering into the target culture as unwanted and despised liberators ever mindful that the world, not its inhabitants, is our enemy.  Failure to engage the culture in counterinsurgency warfare by either employing ineffective tactics as the Church Militant (e.g., building defensive fortresses, striving toward victory through attrition, employing “scorched earth” techniques) or by seeking peace with a hostile culture by becoming the Church Relevant will result in defeat.

     Church planters and leaders, in order to be faithful to the One who said that He “did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” (Matthew 10:34) we cannot lay down our weapons, capitulate to the culture, and become the Church Relevant.  In light of Christ’s call to liberate those who are captive to the darkness of our fallen cultures, we owe it to the world to be and to remain the Church Militant.

SDG,

@RevMAWood

Third Article Church Planting

PDF file of "Third Article Church Planting"

Even a casual survey of the discussions and writings relating to contemporary church planting will quickly reveal that most church planting experts are convinced that the success of any given church plant is directly dependent upon either the abilities of the church planter or the effectiveness of the church planting method.  Most of the church planting tools, resources, models, books, conferences, etc. available to church planters today has been structured around one of these emphases or the other – with a few innovative approaches that seek to combine them in some fashion.  For the most part, anyone entering into the church planting arena today is going to be pulled in one direction or the other.  Practically speaking, they will find themselves having to decide to focus on either the church planter or the church planting method as the primary emphasis in their church planting endeavor.

Focus on the Church Planter

Those who support and promote the church planter as the essential ingredient in successful church planting have developed resources for evaluating and assessing potential church planters to hone in on those with the most promising attributes (and weeding out those who lack the requisite qualities) as well as programs to coach, guide, and otherwise develop nascent church planters into successful church multipliers.  This perspective of what it takes to successfully plant churches was expressed some years ago in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s leadership’s declaration that effective church planting was primarily dependent upon having the right person as the church planter.

Focus on the Church Planting Method

Meanwhile, those who support and promote the church planting method as the chief determinant of successfully establishing sustainable congregations have invested themselves in defining and refining methodologies of church planting that promise success to all but the most incompetent of church planters.  Of course, there is a great deal of disagreement as to which methods are most preferable and most effective.  Still, those who trust in methodologies find common cause in documenting, disseminating, and promoting their models for effective church planting – a perspective of church planting captured well in the title of Aubrey Malphur’s latest book on the subject, “The Nuts and Bolts of Church Planting: A Guide for Starting Any Kind of Church.”

First Article Church Planting

One could imagine that if these two camps within the church planting community were to combine forces and find a way to marry the right church planter with the right church planting process that success in church planting would be a foregone conclusion.  Yet the inherent deficiency in each of these approaches to church planting is only exasperated when they are combined.  That deficiency is the focus that these church planting approaches place on that which belongs to the First Article: the abilities and resources that God has given and made available to us that, as part of His creation, are also given and available to nonbelievers.  In other words, much of what is driving church planting in America today is based in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and other sciences rather than in theology.  Put another way, we are practicing First Article church planting not Third Article church planting.

Third Article Church Planting

In the Small Catechism, Martin Luther explains what we confess in the Third Article as “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”  As Lutherans, we understand that this Article excludes any human role, effort, decision, etc. in our salvation.  We rightly give glory to God the Holy Spirit for bringing us the gift of faith as just that: a gift.  We reject the use of the First Article resources of psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc. as effective means of creating faith in individuals.  Why then do we resort to these resources as the effective means for establishing, growing, and revitalizing churches?  Reading on in Luther’s explanation of the Third Article we find the same four actions of the Holy Spirit used to describe His sanctifying work in individuals used to describe His work in building the church, with one added action: gathers.  Clearly, we confess that it is the Holy Spirit who plants, grows, and revitalizes churches through His work of gathering.  But how does the Holy Spirit go about gathering His Church?

As Lutheran church planters we should confess in word and action that the Holy Spirit gathers His Church in the same manner in which He does all His sanctifying work.  Negatively, we say that this work is done “not by our reason or strength.”  This means that while we may make use of First Article resources for guidance, we cannot rely on them for church planting no matter how enticing, promising, or “successful” they may appear to be.  The guidance that they may provide must work in concert with and depend upon that which is above and apart from our reason and strength.  The First Article resources of which we do make use in church planting should facilitate that which the Holy Spirit has promised to use for creating and sustaining faith, namely His Means of Grace.

Third Article church planting is wholly dependent upon Word and Sacrament ministry.  According, it makes use of First Article resources only insofar as they enable and promote Word and Sacrament ministry.  Those who practice Third Article church planting expect the Holy Spirit to work when and where He wills.  They reject the idea that either the right person or the right method can produce desired church planting results.  They embrace the Holy Spirit’s work within the expectations that we develop through our First Article gifts and, especially, His work that defies those expectations as He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the churches that we plant as He desires using the people and methods that He determines – all to His glory according to His plan and purpose.

SDG

@RevMAWood

Post-Church or Post-Churched?

There's no question that there has been a fundamental shift in the worldview of Western culture.  We are no longer a modern society, but what we have become is difficult to define.  The best handle that we've been able to attach to it is "postmodern",  a title that will undoubtedly change once we arrive at a destination and can stop describing what we are not.  As part of this cultural shift, the church has experienced a change in its role in our society.  In modernity, the church maintained an influential role in our culture.  But now, like society, the church is in the midst of an identity crisis. 

Attempts to describe the current situation of the church with a term or a title has proven to be as difficult as nailing down the new paradigms of our society.  Just as the culture's worldview is being described in terms of being "post" what it most recently was, the situation of the church is frequently discussed as being "post."  That might work well for the church, but only if we understand what it is that we are "post" of.

The most prevalent view of the current situation of the church in America is captured by referring to our culture as "post-church."  Unfortunately, that term is defined as widely as it is used.  For some it means that the church has lost its place of influence in our culture.  For others it means that the institutional church, especially the mainline denominations, are as good as gone even though they will continue to exist for some time.  Taken to its logical end, some use the term to describe the church as being in its death throes as it approaches an inevitable extinction.   Trends, statistics, surveys, etc. are frequently cited to support and promote one or another of these definitions of post-church.  Whichever of these definitions we end up settling on, we should be asking ourselves why we're planting churches if we truly are a post-church culture.

Thankfully, post-church does not accurately describe the current religious landscape of America.  With thousands of churches in communities throughout our nation, we obviously are not post-church as a culture.  Yes, there has been serious decline in membership, in attendance,  in financial support, and in the church's influence in American society, but these losses do not equate to being post-church.  Instead they reflect the reality that we as a culture are post-churched.

Understanding the difference between being a post-church culture or a post-churched culture is critically important to church planting.  If we truly are a post-church culture, planting churches would be a pointless waste of resources.  What purpose would more churches serve in a culture that has no use for churches?  It would make as much sense as producing 8-track tape players in our digital age.  No matter how many features you added to the player, how well you marketed the benefits of 8-track over MP3, or disparaged the social and economic consequences of digital media, the culture has moved on and will not ever return to the 8-track platform.  We are truly a post-8-track culture.  So, if we are genuinely a post-church culture, planting churches, even vastly "improved" and wonderfully marketed churches, is pointless.  And, logically, those arguing for planting of "culturally relevant" churches are to be pitied most of all in a post-church culture. 

Fortunately, we are not a post-church culture, but a post-churched culture.  This term captures the reality that a majority of Americans are not churched.  Some of the non-churched were once churched, but have left the church for one reason or another.  Others, an increasing majority, have never been churched.  Once we see that the loss of the church's influence in our society is not a direct result of our culture's worldview shifting from modernism but is a function of the decreased participation in the church by a steadily increasing majority of Americans -- that we are a post-churched, not a post-church, culture -- we can go about the task of planting churches that effectively engage the non-churched through Word and Sacrament ministry which transcends all cultures and cultural shifts.

Planting Distinctively Lutheran Congregations

Planting Distinctively Lutheran Churches: 

What Does This Mean?

Church planting is a hot topic in American Christianity.  Faced with decreasing membership and a growing indifference (if not outright hostility) toward the Faith in our culture, many church leaders see church planting as a do-or-die proposition and have launched church planting initiatives in their respective church bodies.  Lutherans are certainly no exception to this effort.

The increasing challenge to Lutherans engaged in church planting is that of planting churches that are, in actuality, Lutheran.  With so much of today's church planting literature and expertise found in non-Lutheran sources, this challenge is more substantial than it may first appear to be.  Compounding the situation is the naturally tendency in church planting to gravitate toward what works rather than what is faithful to the Lutheran confession of the Faith.  

There are many churches being planted by Lutherans.  However, we must consider whether or not we are planting Lutheran churches.  More fundamentally, we must honestly ask ourselves if planting distinctively Lutheran churches is desirable and if it is what we should be doing to be faithful to Christ's Great Commission.  Our answer to these foundational questions is a resounding "yes!".  We are committed to planting churches that are distinctively Lutheran and are convinced that doing so is proper, will be effective, and is pleasing to our Lord and Savior Jesus.  

Our conviction raises new questions.  What is a distinctively Lutheran church? What is involved in successfully planting such churches?  What, if anything, should we make use of from the evolving discipline of church planting that is not Lutheran in its theology and practice?  In short, we must ask ourselves the Lutheran question, "What does this mean?".  Exploring the answers to this question is the purpose of this blog.

Welcome to "Planting Lutheran Churches."  We hope that you'll find helpful information for and useful guidance in being a faithful planter of Lutheran churches in the current and future pages of this blog.  Moreover, we invite you to engage in a discussion that will result in the exchange of beneficial ideas, identification of best practices, and the encouragement of what Martin Luther called "the mutual conversation and consolation of the brethren."

SDG

@RevMAWood