Smart planting, right planting

Tony and I spent Thursday and Friday last week at the Church Planting conference held at Moore College. (Tony did Thursday and I did Friday.) It was a brilliant couple of days, and I couldn’t help but be thankful to God for so many people who are working hard at making Jesus known in so many places. What an amazing gift to sit in the room with so many godly and gifted people whose great goal in life is to make Jesus known. Awesome.

I thought I’d post a couple of reflections on the day I attended. Here are three key things I have been thinking about since:

1. We need to embrace risk and failure

   I was struck over the course of Friday by the need to keep trying new things. Richard Hibbert’s stories of gospelling in Bulgaria and Turkey, and, more recently, among ethnic minorities in Australia, was a challenge to our normal paradigms. Breaking into other cultures and sharing Jesus with them means sharing your life. And sharing your life isn’t measurable. It means enjoying each other’s hospitality—spending hours and days in each other’s lives. It means being willing to see the gospel grow relationally among family networks as people live differently for Jesus. And it especially means that our expectations of success (as in having a regular Sunday morning church meeting that is well attended and has 13 bazillion programmes running) won’t necessarily be the outcome. But as Richard testified, the lack of these things doesn’t mean that people haven’t been profoundly converted. We need to be willing to find the right people and invest money in them, while giving them the freedom to do what works under God.

   Shane Rogerson’s plea to remember the difficulties of working in complex, urban, multicultural environments was another push in this direction. We need to keep finding people with a heart for Jesus and the skills to try new things, and free them up from structural obligations so they can pursue relational evangelism and new ways of gathering the people of God. Unless we are willing to embrace the possibility of failure, we will be too afraid to try the things that are needed.

2. We must learn to acknowledge our own cultural baggage

   Archie Poulos and Brian Tung spoke at some length about cross-cultural church planting, and reminded us that all evangelism and church planting is cross-cultural. Our greatest problem is that we think that we are the ones without a culture, and so we expect others to leap all the cultural boundaries that we have erected in order to hear the gospel from us. It would benefit every Christian to spend some time with people from another culture, and to think about what they believe is absolutely gospel essential and what is totally irrelevant. To put it another way, we can have the nicest, most welcoming middle-class, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant welcomers in the world, but that won’t necessarily make poor Sudanese migrants feel welcome (for example).

   For this reason, the homogeneous unit principle (HUP) is important—not because we should segregate the people of God, but because it acknowledges a human reality. We understand this in its extremes: it’s very hard for Mandarin speakers and English speakers to church together because nobody can understand what the other person is saying. But these very problems happen in more subtle ways every time we meet. So much is spoken without being said that we are fooling ourselves if we think our meetings are universally welcoming!

   And so Archie, in particular, noted the importance of creating things with a particular cultural flavour for the sake of evangelism, and seeing new disciples growing. But he stressed the importance of training people to grow over time so that having Jesus as their Lord overshadows all else. When he was running a Greek church, he would ask himself regularly, “Could someone who has been with us for three years join a non-Greek congregation if the Greek church folded tomorrow?” It was an important litmus test of whether the church’s identity was found in being Greek or in belonging to Jesus. The bottom line: the HUP is an excellent servant and a lousy master.

3. We need to keep praying

   It wasn’t so much that anyone called us to prayer, but that the day reminded us all of the way that God is sovereignly growing his church—in all sorts of unexpected places and among the least likely of people. God’s word is powerful, and his mighty Spirit is transforming lives. Will we submit ourselves to his mighty hand, be faithful in speaking truly about Jesus, live with the inevitable suffering and cry out for God to work?

May the fruit of these two days be the prayers of God’s people and the raising up of many workers to take the gospel to Australia and beyond.