Church Plant Theology

Every church planter knows about “the question.” Whether planting in the Bible Belt, on the coasts, or anywhere else in the U.S., The Question can haunt us. It’s usually asked innocently, but if we are unprepared for it, it can send waves of panic, insecurity and dread through us. The following thoughts are intended to help church planters, church plant senders, and even seasoned pastors think through how to answer The Question: “Why do we need another church in this town?”

Why Plant New Churches?

According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, there are approximately 300,000 congregations in the United States, about 1 per 1,000 people. Even in the least churched areas of the country, it isn’t generally hard to find dozens of existing congregations within driving distance of a church plant. So why plant new churches?

There are actually a lot of excellent answers to these questions, but each leader will need to work them out for him or herself. We’ll group the answers into three broad categories. It’s important not to try to have only one kind of answer. It is a worthy discipline to think through the rationale for a church plant from multiple angles and thus be able to give a complex, textured apologetic for its existence.

“Missional” Answers

Probably the quickest answer off the tongue to The Question is the missional answer. Even in the most churched locales in the U.S., there are thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of folks not connected to an existing faith community. About 76% of Americans call themselves “Christians,” but only around half (at best) of those attend church on a given week. If we believe in the importance of the local church in people’s lives, it’s worth initiating new communities in order to help unchurched folks connect to some local community.

Additionally, new churches are often more aggressive and creative at gathering the unchurched. New churches are often nimble on their feet, able to change more quickly, and able to launch fresh initiatives without the burden of institutional history. [bctt tweet=”Church plants are often the lab in which new outreach strategies are developed &adopted by more established churches.” quote=”In fact, church plants are often the lab in which new outreach strategies are developed and then adopted by more established churches.”]

The biggest objection to missional answers is to say that there are lots of existing churches with empty seats on Sundays. This objection can come from skeptical outsiders, discouraged team members, or simply from within our own heads. But it is misguided and overly idealistic. The simple truth is that if those churches were able to reach the thousands of unreached people in any given community, they would be doing it already. This is not to level any critique at existing churches; rather, it is simply to say that there is space in almost any community in America for new, innovative congregations.

“Distinctive” Answers

The second set of answers to The Question centers around distinctives in the vision of a new church. These answers require vision and faith from the leaders of the plant. The act of formalizing distinctives carries the danger of coming off as arrogant or superior, but distinctives are actually some of the most important answers that can be given. In some ways, they actually are the underpinnings of the missional answer, because they describe the rationale for why this new church will reach folks that other churches are not currently reaching.

It’s helpful to recognize that a church’s distinctives are rarely unique. Most churches have some version of the same general practices. There will nearly always be some form of worship, some exploration of scripture, some program for discipleship and community, and some form of outreach, along with the sacraments and a bevy of other programming options. Distinctives have to do with how a church will do these things and which areas they will most emphasize.

Perhaps a church will have an emphasis on intimate, musically excellent worship. Or perhaps the leading edge a church takes will be in the form of small groups with deeply developed relationships, or aggressive outreach, or long prayer meetings seeking the presence of the Spirit. Certainly other churches are doing some form of worship, prayer, or community, but it’s important to communicate the elements that will be distinctly emphasized in a new church.

One obvious but sometimes missed aspect of the distinctive answers to the question of planting a new church is that the church’s practices should actually match the language. That is, if we are going to say that our church strongly emphasizes prayer, it would be important to make sure that there is a vibrant prayer life developing in the church! If we say we are going to be enthusiastic evangelists, there should be practices and programs developed to demonstrate this emphasis.

Over time, the practices themselves become the answer to the question. Rather than explain why we are planting a new church, we can simply point to what we are already doing that is contributing to our local community and the broader body of Christ.

“Narrative” Answers

Depending on the different personalities of planters, narratives could be either the first or the least likely answer to be on their lips. In either case, this answer might be the most important, because in some ways, narrative explanations undergird the distinctive answers, which undergird the missional answers. The narrative answer is essentially the story of how the planter and her team ended up feeling called to plant a church in this area. This story can take any number of forms, because there are as many stories of calling as there are congregations.

This answer is important, because as much as the first two sets of answers matter (the missional and distinctive answers), in the early days, they are “best-guess” answers. That is, we think we know what the distinctives of our church will be, and we think we know who we will reach. But over time, the answer to those questions can change. Yet what doesn’t change are the people who launched the church and the God who called them to it.

For example, early on in our plant, we really believed we were going to have a big impact on the immigrant community in our city and that having an immigrant-based church would be a huge part of our distinctives as a congregation. Over time, we realized that while we could love and serve new immigrants in our town, the unique cultures of the immigrant groups we served made it unlikely that they would form a huge part of our congregation in the early years. We found that we were able to reach a number of idealistic young people in our town, many of whom were quite passionate about caring for people of other cultures.

However, the story of how we felt called to our city, felt called to love the different groups in it and to serve with all our hearts stayed the same. That story formed who our congregation was, even if over time it played out in some different ways than we initially envisioned.

Finding Ways To Hear From God

In the life of a church plant, many people will ask The Question, but the most important people asking it are the leaders of the plant itself. Within the daily grind of starting a new congregation, self-doubt and insecurity are the great enemies of faith and a sense of vision. And at the end of the day, leaders need to learn to go to God himself to find the ultimate rationale for the hard work of starting a new congregation. We start churches because we are called by God to do so.

Leaders hear from God in different ways. Sometimes we can let other leaders project onto us the ways they hear from God. Some people hear prophetically, some during times of Bible study, others in prayer. Some hear God in solitude, others in community. None of these ways of hearing is superior to another. The key is that the leaders of church plants are able, in some way, to take these questions to the Lord and hear why they were called to plant their churches.