Interesting post on church planting

I thought this was an excellent post from J.D. Payne on church planting with the ironic title: It’s not about Church Planting.

This was great….

Biblical church planting is evangelism that results in new churches. But, churches can be planted with little to no evangelism being done.

For example, if our annual goal is to plant 12 churches, then all we need to do is gather some long-term Kingdom citizens together into twelve groups, lead them to covenant together as 12 local churches, and we have accomplished our goal. And if we do this, people will sing our praises and invite us to speak about church planting, telling them how they can plant 12 churches in a year. And no one will ask us about making disciples.

But it’s not about church planting. We are called to make disciples—and the first step in making disciples is doing evangelism. For it is out of a disciple making movement that churches are birthed (e.g., Acts 13-14).

Unfortunately, most church planters in North America are more involved in gathering together long-term Kingdom citizens than doing evangelism that results in new churches.

That really captures it. Biblical church planting is not starting a new church to attract Christians who don’t like their current church. It is making disciples that form churches that in turn go forth and make disciples that form churches….and on and on. Simply reshuffling believers is not what we are called to do.

One of the things that worries me about starting up a “house church” is that I am concerned it will simply be a refuge for current Christians who are disgruntled with the institutional church. Heck, I am a current Christian disgruntled with the institutional church! I think we need to get our focus away from church planting and on to disciple making. If we do that the church planting will take care of itself!

Read J.D.’s article and let me know what you think…