AEC2001
Plenary Session 2:
Church Planting in a
Postmodern Context - Part 2
Stuart Murray
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The challenge
One of the fundamental challenges as we consider church
planting in a postmodern culture is how to present the gospel in this context.
What is good news in a post-Christian, postmodern society? If we are interested
in planting churches that will not just redistribute existing church members but
engage with those who are not already Christians, we must ask questions also
about our evangelistic strategy. I have time in this session only to indicate a
few of the issues we need to consider.
First, an increasing number of people in our society do
not know the gospel story at all. In the Christendom era, evangelists could
assume their hearers knew the story and could concentrate on calling them to
commit themselves to this story. Many familiar contemporary local church-based
evangelistic strategies assume this. But we cannot make such an assumption
today. I don’t know about here in North America, but in Britain the cut-off
point for knowing the Christian story is about 35 or 40 years of age. Evangelism
as explanation must precede evangelism as exhortation. Evangelism will mean
starting much further back, telling the story in fresh ways, and giving people
much longer to respond to its challenge.
It will also mean that living the gospel must be
accompanied by telling the gospel: incarnation and proclamation will need to go
hand in hand. Many Mennonites in Europe and North America have told me that
church members do not naturally talk about their faith with others. The emphasis
is on living faithfully and distinctively in the hope that others will be
challenged by this and drawn towards faith. Perhaps this approach is due to deep
communal memories of persecution and the decision in the late sixteenth century
to become a quiet community in order to avoid further trouble. Perhaps it is a
consequence of the humility that pervades Mennonite spirituality or of the
principled aversion to putting pressure on others in matters of faith. While
there is much in this that I affirm, our changing context will require a
different approach. In a culture where the gospel story is not known, faithful
living needs explanation. Traditional "living the life" as a means of
communicating the faith only works in Christendom where the Christian story is
already known. If we are to engage in effective church planting in a postmodern,
post-Christian society, we will need to recover the early Anabaptist heritage of
proclamation.
Second, a related issue is discerning the points at which
the gospel connects with people in contemporary culture. For centuries in the
West evangelists have assumed that guilt and death are the two
crucial points and have offered forgiveness and the hope of eternal life as the
good news. But many today do not feel guilty and many are not particularly
interested in life after death. The guilt-culture that existed when the first
Anabaptist churches were planted has largely disappeared. A recent survey of
people in Britain who had become Christians revealed that nearly half had no
sense of guilt at the point of becoming a Christian. They did later feel guilty,
however, when they became part of a church! So guilt may no longer provide
either a starting or a connecting point.
What are the felt needs, the longings, and the aspirations
of our contemporaries? Suggestions have included alienation, loneliness, a
search for meaning and purpose, interest in spirituality, and resources for this
life rather than hope for the next.
But postmodernity is a plural society, quite unlike the
unitary society of Christendom and early modernity, and there will be many
different answers to this question. A vital task for mission today is to listen.
The gospel is rich and has the resources to meet all human needs. But we need to
listen carefully to our postmodern and post-Christian culture: what are the
questions to which the gospel is the answer? And, in order to listen, we need to
build relationships outside of church. Do our members have such relationships?
Effective church planting strategies depend on this.
Frankly, I am distressed by the number of church planters
who don’t listen to their local cultures. Listening to that culture does not
mean diluting the gospel, but it does require a recognition that the New
Testament is full of resources to help us connect with that culture.
Third, we do need to incarnate the gospel as well as
proclaiming it – communally as well as individually. So we need to ask not
only about the gospel we proclaim but also what kinds of churches we need to
develop in order to live out this gospel. Church planting gives us an
opportunity to reflect on this. Many of our churches are in decline because they
are not engaging with contemporary issues, and people ignore them and do not
find what they offer to be relevant or inspiring. A disturbing number of church
members are leaving our churches each year. Participation in church life is
becoming counter-cultural in a society that has also been described as
"post-commitment." The renewed interest in spirituality in our society
usually draws people in other directions rather than to the churches.
This situation invites us to respond in two ways –
through church renewal and church planting. Church planting is not about
establishing more churches of the kind we already have, especially when many of
these are declining and are struggling to impact a changing culture. Nor is it
about developing new churches that leave the existing churches untouched. The
appropriate response to the challenges we face is both to plant new
churches that engage creatively with this culture and to transform our
existing churches into missionary congregations that contextualise the gospel in
a postmodern culture.
Planting new churches offers a number of benefits. It
provides us with opportunities to experiment, to be creative, to do things
differently – without threatening existing congregations. Within most
denominations and established congregations, there is an aversion to risk. If we
try to introduce changes too quickly into many of our churches, we risk damaging
them. But if we have church members who are eager to explore new forms of
mission and church life, they will become frustrated if the pace is slow and the
resistance is great. So church planting provides a place of ministry for the
entrepreneurs among us.
Planting a new church allows us to develop new forms of
mission and explore new ways of being church without encountering the same
amount of opposition or needing to carry older congregations with us. Not all of
these experiments will be successful. Those that fail are opportunities for
learning important lessons. Those that succeed and grow are models that can be
replicated elsewhere. But in both cases – failure or success – the lessons
learned from church planting can be shared with older churches. These may then
be willing to embrace some changes themselves (once they have seen how the new
churches have operated) and take steps towards becoming missionary
congregations. And in the meantime our more radical and creative leaders will be
able to pioneer on behalf of the whole denomination. We need to find ways of
releasing them so they may engage in these pioneering efforts.
Church planting has the capacity not only to increase the
number of churches in a denomination but also to be a catalyst for renewal. In a
changing culture, reflection on the task and shape of the church is a constant
necessity. Planting a new church is a wonderful opportunity to engage in this
process of reflection. Simply to plant another church of the same kind
represents a missed opportunity for ecclesiological renewal and missiological
creativity. In fact, I am more interested in the renewal of the church through
church planting than I am in the number of new churches planted.
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