I’ve been reading Peyton Jones ‘Churchplantology‘ over the last few days and it has been percolating my thinking around this area again.

One of my genuine frustrations and bewilderments with my own denomination has been the absence of purposeful church planting over the last 30 years.

I remember back when Bob Clark and Phil Bryant were in partnership, both promoting, calling for and intentionally focusing on church planting. We may not have planted a heap of churches, but we did plant some and we did get some stuff done. I recall attending a church planting conference in 1996 led by these guys and it was catalytic in my own formation. Intuitively I knew this was what I wanted to do – but I had accepted a job in the hills as a youth pastor – which funnily enough eventuated in a ‘church planting’ type of project among young people.

But it seems church planting has dropped off the radar, for the most part. I remember asking a question about this at a recent pastor’s gathering – ‘why is no one planting churches?’ and the honest, fast response was ‘because it’s hard work!’

Maybe true – but some people are built for it and if we don’t pursue it we can expect them to do something else or go somewhere else. Some cars are built for serious 4wding – the diff lockers, winch, 4 inch lift and suitable tyres all say ‘built for purpose’, yet so many of them spend their life on the blacktop. In a similar vein I think there are some folks who are just created to pioneer, risk, create and repeat. Yet they find themselves trapped in the confines of a steady as she goes meat and three veg church.

As I observe what is happening around the place I see a fair bit of ‘campus planting’, (or franchising – to be more blunt). I see ‘revitalisation’ of dying churches happening, but I see precious few fresh starts, focused on a people group, or a locality and I wonder why…

My theory is this. While churches may speak about planting churches, while they may dream about and even vote on it at church meetings, churches just don’t plant churches. Church planters plant churches.

Churches don’t plant churches – church planters plant churches.

I feel like it’s as simple as that. But because our systems and processes have become so unbelievably regulated and bureaucratic most church planters either leave or find themselves trapped between wanting to kick off a new initiative while seeing a truckload of paperwork every step of the way.

I appreciate that every era has its’ struggles and perhaps in the 2020’s the ‘barrier to entry’ we need to ‘suck up’ is not persecution but paperwork. Perhaps we just need to accept that this is how it is in this culture and move on.

But – if that is going to happen then someone has to find a way to free the church planters / apostolic types from creating risk assessments, filing incident reports and the like and let them get on with tilling the soil in the community, nurturing and training teams as well as creating frameworks for new church communities to thrive within.

It was 20 years ago that we first experimented with new expressions of missional community and church gatherings as we went to Brighton with our Upstream crew. Back then we were considered too different or too non-conformist by most people wanting a Sunday church to join with all the bells and whistles of kids programs and good music. Our team eventually shrunk as people moved on and we closed it down. But maybe post-covid we may be able to re-imagine again what churches can look like. We may be ready for a fresh tilt at re-thinking mission and church for a very new era.

At the end of the day conservative institutions that focus on maintaining the status quo (your average local church) will never be the catalysts for new initiatives. There is too much comfort to lose. But if we can identify and unearth the next generation of apostolic leaders and inspire them with what may be possible, then maybe we can capture their imagination before they kick of a business venture or some other entrepreneurial activity.