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