Once upon a time, “church planting” was all the rage in missions. As a prospective missionary and young seminary student in the early 90’s, I was caught up in all the excitement. We fervently embraced C. Peter Wagner’s provocation, “The single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven is planting new churches.”(Church Planting for a Greater Harvest). Rare was the mission agency that didn’t highlight its commitment to establishing the body of Christ among the unchurched.
My secret fear was that I could never become a church planter. I didn’t have the gifts one of my professors and other church planting experts said were the pre-requisites of an effective church planter. But two things gave me hope. First, a missions recruiter (today we would call him a missions coach) visited campus and told us that his organization was looking for people who loved to teach the Bible. Why? Because teachers make great church planters. Still, I was doubtful: I recognized this was a shrewd appeal tailored to students of a seminary known for turning out Bible teachers, and I guessed that teaching wasn’t the only gift needed to plant a church.
Second, a missionary couple in Japan invited my wife and I to join them for a year to help them plant churches. One year seemed like a good investment of our time. By the end of that year, I learned that my guess was correct: teaching was not the only gift needed to plant a church. But it is one of the gifts, and my experience taught me that God had given me other gifts that could contribute to this ministry. My commitment and calling to church planting became a settled reality.
Four years later, my wife and I re-embarked for Japan with a long-term vision: to plant churches in unchurched areas of Japan. Japan didn’t have many churches, so there was a plentiful supply of unchurched areas to choose from. There were compelling arguments made to go to the smaller towns of Japan that had not even one church. There were equally compelling arguments to go to the larger cities where you could find a handful of small churches, but in which unchurched communities abounded.
For Kathy & I, the compelling invitation came from a Japanese church with a vision for planting churches in partnership with missionaries in unreached communities. We moved to a city in southwestern Japan to start one of these churches, and planted ourselves in a neighborhood of 30,000 people with no known Christians and no church.
11 years later, in our little corner of the world, a church had been born and our work as “church planters” in that community was complete. But now it was the late 2000’s, and the words “church planting” had lost their magic. Wagner’s 1990 book was no longer the cutting edge of missiology. My organization began to emphasize making disciples, because it is possible to gather people together in something called a “church” without introducing people to a transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.
Our fundamental calling as disciples of Jesus is to make disciples (Matthew 28:18-20). We make disciples by proclaiming Jesus and showing people how to follow Him within a community of other disciples – the church. Where churches exist, churches need to practice the calling to disciple-making. When we make disciples in a place where there is no church, there is also need for church planting.
The term may not be all the rage anymore, but church planting is still a critical element of doing mission. There are still hundreds of communities in Japan, and in countless other regions around the world, where there is no church.
I’m thankful for the missions recruiter on my seminary campus who told me that teaching God’s Word was vital to planting a church, and for the missionary couple who invited us to get a taste of church planting with them in Japan. Both were members of members of the same organization, and it was an easy choice for us to follow in their footsteps.
