Church planting and fresh expressions resourced by Incarnate Network

I don’t believe in an ordained/ laity divide.  The ‘laity’ is a term that should be abolished, as followers of Jesus we are all ordained to be part of his mission.  However I do believe that God called me to be released from having to earn a living in the normal way so that I could focus more of my time and energy on the ministry to which I am called.

Others recognised this call and saw that my primary gift was as an evangelist.   Evangelist is a loaded term, but I am gifted in an ease of relationships in networks outside the church and skill in sharing the gospel through dialogue in those networks.

The problem is I find myself in ministry with a huge workload in one way or another; this prevents me from spending as much time in those networks outside the church as I would like.  In fact I look at friends doing normal jobs and they seem to have more time to spend on evangelism than I do!

I know that I must take some responsibility for prioritising my time.  However I find the pressure to deliver a project or quantify how my time is spent comes at me from several places.  I joined a sailing club a few years back, with the intention of doing something I enjoy whilst getting into a new network of people. A fellow minister’s wife said quite scathingly I don’t know how you have time for that?  I later gave up the sailing because I didn’t find time.  However the point is I need to make time and it isn’t just those of us who are religious professionals that need to lead by example, we also need to release our church communities from busy church programmes to go and make some friends.

I used this as the basis for our discussion at the Solent Regional Group today and thought it might spark some thinking/discussion for others.

Incarnational Mission: Understanding the Context.

The way church has been organised in the West has tended to baptise a white, middle class, Christendom culture and understood it as Christian.  When looking to engage in mission, there is a need to understand and engage with the culture to which we are called.  The complexity in contemporary society means not only facing cultural issues of geography, various people groups or socio-economic differences.  There are also the challenges for the church in how it organises in a post-Christendom, post-modern and post-commitment context.

Not all are called to cross cultural mission, but even if we remain in a culture we are familiar with, we need to recognise the cultural chasm between church and those outside.  We do therefore need some form of incarnational expression of faith.  This is not to uncritically baptise a new culture.  It is recognising we are not taking Christ to them, but that he is already there among the people.  We minister by creating opportunity for the liberating and redeeming of each culture believing within it is the possibility of salvation, holiness and grace.

My own experience of moving from a very affluent Hampshire village to a large estate, recognised as an area of high deprivation, was that I learnt to listen and not assume I knew.  I respected the knowledge and experience of those who had lived on the estate for a lifetime. I spent two years living in the community, getting involved, building friendships before ever having a meeting as a church.  Therefore when we did begin to gather people the meeting reflected a local response to God rather than my understanding of what church should look like.  I came to teach and to help the people of the estate, but I have been humbled and learned so much.  As an unnamed American student put it, “In working with young people in America, do not try to call them back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are as beautiful as that place might seem to you.  You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have ever been before.”  (Donovan 1978: preface p.xiii).

1. What are the main challenges for you of an incarnational lifestyle?

1. Is incarnational mission in danger of selling the gospel short in order to fit in, do we make it too easy?

1. Can we ever totally incarnate into another culture and is it right to try?

1. In cross cultural mission is there a danger we just impose our culture on others and we should leave mission to people that are from that cultural background?

1. Why should we bother with incarnational mission, didn’t Jesus call people to come to him?

Some of the denominations are suggesting that church planters need to consider  bi-vocational ministry.  This is to address the challenges of funding church planters.  On one hand I have no problem with this challenge.  Let's face it those of us who are paid to church plant are an expensive resource.  If it means more people could be sent out to plant more churches then it's got to be worth considering.  One of my aims is to work myself out of a job, so that the church I am planting wont always be reliant on a full timer.

On the other hand it seems a little unjust unless the same challenge is put to those ministering in established churches, so that resources could be released for mission and the poor.  My experience of church planting  is that it takes a lot of time and energy at the beginning.  I would have struggled to get things going had I not been released full-time.  As things are more established, people discipled, the team expands there is less need for a full time minister.  That is if we do our job properly and  release the whole congregation into realising their ministry, instead of understanding ministry as the task of the "professional."

Perhaps there is a bigger issue that churches need to view their income as belonging to God's Kingdom and not just to resource their club!

Recently we faced some challenges that for a moment threatened the feasability of our church meeting.  We got through it okay but it made me question if it had all collapsed would that mean we had failed and the last seven years had been a waste of time? 
The church is or at least should be seen as essentially missional.  God is a missionary God.  The church are a pilgrim people, we are called out and sent back but we are only temporary residents.  We often see church as an institution to which we call people to and see success of a church in terms of how many members it has and its longevity. 

I believe the church is essentially organic, temporal and fluid.  It may be right for a body of believers to come together for a time but they are not necessarily covenanted together until Jesus returns.  That is not to say I don’t want to see existing churches flourish and grow. It is to say that we can’t afford to stay put and expect the world to come and join our club.  The church needs to continually incarnate itself into the world and its different communities and cultures. We need to be prepared to adapt and re:invent ourselves in order to stay fresh.  This may mean allowing a local church to die in order that new life can grow.

The question as we look to creating new churches will often come down to how will we afford it.  Some like Urban Expression certainly attempt not to make this prohibitive to church planting by recruiting self-supporting ministers and finding creative ways of financing their ventures.

In the two church planting experiences I have had our support and resourcing has been very different.  In the first we had loose connections with a network of churches via an informal relationship with another church.  There was no financial help and very little of any other sort of support.  This meant we all had full time jobs that kept us occupied mainly outside of the local area.  My wife who was a full time mum was the only member of the team who really made any strong relationships outside of the immediate team.  The rest of us failed to get involved in the local community.  This was a major contributing factor for us not succeeding to get anything going there.

My second experience has been very different, I am employed by a mother church and I am accredited as a Baptist Minister.  This has meant we have been supported financially, prayerfully and practically.  It has meant that my children have had somewhere to relate to where they have formed relationships with other children with similar values and beliefs.

If I am honest I struggle with the tension of being part of an institution, in my case the Baptist Union.  Any denomination can at best be slow to respond to a move of the Spirit and at worst totally stifle it.  To varying degrees the organic nature and charismatic disposition of the local church will be affected by its relationship to a denomination.

In having a mother church there have been for us more tensions than our relationship with the wider Baptist Union.  I have to say we have been given a lot of freedom without which I’m not sure we could have made progress in the estate.  However when a group is investing a significant sum of money into a project there is almost inevitably going to be a reminder that they hold the power when decisions you make as a dependent group are overruled.  This has not happened very often but even a few times creates some friction.

On balance I would say there are more pro’s than cons to being part of a bigger organisation.  There are the resources that you can call on, financial and otherwise.  There are necessary checks and balances, for example it is easy for an enthusiastic pioneer to forget important administrative tasks such as an adequate child protection policy, but we have been reminded and helped in forming such policies.  Whilst I recognise it doesn’t always happen, at its best when things don’t work out it is good to have support that helps you reflect on what went wrong in order that everyone can learn and move on positively.

I also think those working on the edge in forming new missional churches have opportunity to share what they have learnt with a wider audience.  I think the tension that often exists between pioneers and the established institution can be creative on both sides, but particularly for the denomination who are pushed to think missionally and not just settle into maintenance mode.  In order to do this we need to resist the pressure to be moulded by the inherited church.  We need to recognise that not only do we have an important message for those outside the church, but also a message for the church itself!