Very interesting editorial in the Houses of Worship column in the Journal by conservative commentators Fred Barnes, “When the Pastor Says It's 'A Time to Sow'”. It explores the idea of church replication and planting, and it is especially interesting because it concerns schismatic former Episcopalian church that have become independent of the Episcopal Church and are now part of the greater Anglican communion. They are now on something of a campaign to plant new churches, and when you think of Anglicans, really is aggressively planting conservative churches the first thing that comes to mind?
I especially like this part concerning the new church, Christ the King, that they were part of planting in Alexandria, Virginia:
But we don't just meet one day a week. One of the problems for a new church is that most of the parishioners don't know one another. They're not yet a community. Barbara and I knew fewer than a dozen of the original members of Christ the King. So David Glade, the 35-year-old pastor, organized everyone into dinner groups that gather monthly. Indeed, they had better gather: When our group skipped a month, Mr. Glade wanted to know why.
I would say that the problem of people not knowing each other is hardly limited to new churches. My concern would be maintaining that sense of community and fellowship as the church grows. I hope that even as they grow, they continue to seek out ways to be in fellowship and community with one another. That is not just something for “church plants” and once you get to a certain size you can stop. As new people come and stuff happens in people’s lives, the need for fellowship and community building doesn’t diminish, it grows. I do like the model that says as the church gets too big, rather than build a multi-million dollar new building, add services and hire more staff, you send people out to start a new fellowship.
As I mentioned earlier, leaving the Episcopal Church has freed these newly independent Anglican churches to do stuff like church planting that they were unable to do in the past. Doctrinal drift and outright heresy are killing the Episcopal church, but the attitude about the local church probably has a lot to do with it as well:
As an Episcopal Church rector, Mr. Yates began thinking about planting churches 20 years ago. But the bishop of Virginia "wouldn't allow us to discuss it," he says, fearing that new Episcopal churches would lure people from older ones. In 2001, he was allowed to plant a church, but only a county away in a distant exurb.
Think about that statement. They were afraid to plant churches because it might draw people away from the old church. What next, non-compete agreements for pastors? We have those in financial services, I can just see a written agreement to not accept a call or plant a church within 50 miles of the current one. Scratch that, I would be willing to bet a donut that such agreements already exist.
This movement is encouraging, with Timothy Keller as one of the leaders (mentioned in the article), seeking to not build bigger and bigger churches but with a purposeful desire to plant more churches. There are a number of other groups that are big church planting advocates, planting new and theologically orthodox churches all over the place. Rather than killing off the little churches in favor of bigger ones, why shouldn’t the body of Christ seek to gather in more places? Which can have more impact, one big church with a dozen paid staff in one corner of a county or dozens of small groups throughout the county in small buildings, schools, homes, whatever?
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