Church Plants: David Fitch argues that we stop planting churches

David Fitch is an author and frequent speaker at church seminars. He recently posted on his blog a request that we stop planting churches!

Instead of funding one entrepreneurial pastor, preacher and organizer to go in and organize a center for Christian goods and services, let us fund three or four leader/ or leader couples to go in as a team to an under-churched context (Most often these places are the not rich all white suburbs where evangelicals have done well planting churches).

Fund these leader/leader couples for two years instead of three. Fund them only with health insurance (in the States) and a reasonable stipend for housing. This gives them space to get a job on the ground floor of a company, at the bottom of the pay scale, learning a skill, proving themselves. They can do this because they have certain benefits and a place to live for two years.

The goal here is NOT (I REPEAT NOT) to have self-sustaining church organization in three years. It is to have three to four leader/leader couples working together with jobs each that can offer 15 hours of labor to work together to organize and form a gospel expression way in their context.  They will be self sustaining in that they all have jobs. They will be committed to this context/neighborhood for ten years.

These leaders will have time and space to then a.) get to know and listen to the neighborhood and the neighbors b.) establish rhythms of life together which include worship, prayer, community, discipleship and presence among the neighbors, c.) discern God working in and among the neighbors and neighborhood, d.) bring the gospel to these places wherever God is working. This includes reconciliation, peace, forgiveness, healing, righteousness, and new creation. D.) develop a way of bringing those coming into faith in Christ into a way of growth and discipleship.

I believe that you put three or more quality leaders together in one place for ten years you will have a new expression of the gospel i.e. a church in each context. Gospel as a way of life will take root. Many will brought into the Kingdom. Imagine what could happen if we funded 100’s of such teams.

Fitch is supported by Brent Thomas at Holiday By the Sea,

Most church planters would not be so crass as to say that they are setting out to “plant” a once/week event that draws lots of butts to the seats to pad the budget so they can have a cool building, but pragmatically, that’s exactly how many church plants operate. We “plant” an event rather than the Gospel, so we grow consumers rather than disciples.

Fitch’s idea intrigues me because it focuses on the concept of believers truly living as missionaries rather than ministry providers. I have come to believe that this is a mindset that the American church desperately needs to adopt. I often wonder what it might look like if American churches viewed “success” or “failure” by how well they were making disciples who make disciples rather than by the “Three B’s” (butts in the seats, budgets and buildings).

Fitch forces us to consider that, the primary mode of contemporary church planting may be “off.” We don’t need more Sunday morning “services.” We certainly don’t need any more “mega-churches.” We need missionaries saturated by the Gospel, living in community on mission.

Here’s what bothers me about these kinds of conversations: who says that having a Sunday morning worship service in a building somehow prevents a church from being filled with disciples? Do you really have to meet in a house, coffee shop, or high school gym to be a disciple? Isn’t it possible for a house church to be just as filled with lukewarm, useless Christians as a church with a big building?

Indeed, Alex McManus responds,

So, why didn’t the author go further? He could have written, “Stop Funding Church Plants AND Stop Funding Missionaries. Everyone is Already Funded through their jobs!” …

The key component and common element here is that we don’t fund everyone. We don’t fund missionaries.  We fund leaders. We fund catalysts, igniters, the obsessed, the ones who keep the rest of us in community, on task, and purposeful, the ones who show us the way forward. We may need new models for funding and new strategies for mission, but we still want to get behind those who sense a calling and who have a capacity adequate to the task.

You see, the building is neither the problem nor the solution. I agree that a lack of discipleship is a serious problem in the American church, but the cure isn’t to make it harder to serve by defunding leadership. The solution is to redefine conversion.

McManus continues,

A part of the problem here is the church. We accept members into our church, but maybe this is wrong. Perhaps, rather than accepting members, we should commission every new convert to Christ as a missionary.

One church that does this is Mosaic in Los Angeles. The lead cultural architect of that congregation, Erwin McManus, likes to say something like this: the issue is not location but vocation. If you are called by Christ, you are on mission. The rest is just geography.

I’m tired of the contempt so many shower on the institutional church, as though having a building and lots of members is somehow anti-Christian. It’s not. What is anti-Christian is attending your house church or mega-church or oh-so-trendy coffee-house church or any other kind of church while not being on mission.

Be about the mission and the rest will take care of itself. And for those rarely gifted leaders who have the talents and the heart to establish and build a congregation, God bless them! And they should be supported by the church.

(1Co 9:7-11 ESV)  7 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk?  8 Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same?  9 For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned?  10 Does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop.  11 If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you?