Monday is for Discussion
Great day yesterday as New Song Church in Bolingbrook, IL celebrated its 20th anniversary as a church planting church. It was great to go back, three years after I resigned to invest my remaining years in training and mentoring church planters. We saw old friends, heard some great testimonies, witnessed some new baptisms, heard a great message and ate a lot of food.
The pastor of our sixth church plant, Ronn Smith, gave a wonderful testimony of changed lives and exhorted the New Song that the church he leads (The Sanctuary) and all the churches that New Song was privileged to plant, are part of New Song’s inheritance. He was right.
I think of all those churches,
- Crossroads Community Church of Naples
- Three Rivers Evangelical Free Church
- Jakarta International Fellowship Church
- Mountain View Community Church
- The Sanctuary
- even, New Song Church itself.
I think of the joy of knowing six different communities have a church planting church in their midst and are hearing the gospel from godly men who are committed to training their flocks to take the gospel to their neighbors. I think of the hundreds of church planters we have trained or mentored or coached. And then there are the hundreds of communities that have been impacted by the investment New Song, its pastors and elders and its congregation have made toward planting churches around the world and I wonder why any church would settle for not reproducing themselves in the planting of other churches. How about you?
QUESTION:
Why do churches not build church planting into the DNA of their mission/vision?
ChosenRebel's Blog 
Marty my brother,
What a wonderful day that must have been and thank God for New Song and your part in listening to God and bringing a church planting vision from the inception of the New Song Church. Truly a heritage from the Lord. Picture the scene in heaven and the celebration for each person that has come to Christ. The heavenly celebration will be ongoing because of this wonderful heritage.
Why churches plant without having a church planting DNA can be mystifying but having spent over 30 years in pastoral ministry I can think of several reasons:
1. Fear – fear of failure, fear of losing good families, fear of losing giving.
2. Lack of vision – it is easy to get focused on the vision of caring for your present church family and losing focus on reaching new communities and planting daughter churches.
3. It is hard work and many times it can be painful – birthing a daughter church, just like a mother birthing a child, is hard work and painful.
4. Forgetting our Lord’s instruction that we are to be “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” As we both know statistics demonstrate that the greatest way to reach a neighborhood or community with the gospel is to plant a new church.
As Howie Hendricks would say: “May your tribe increase.”
Linked together in the vision of planting 5 million churches – your co-laborer,
steve howell
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Great start to the discussion Steve. i hope many others chime in. Even though we have been teaching for years about some of the barriers to building church planting DNA into the established church, I am hoping that the discussion will reveal some new barriers that we haven’t seen before.
Still working toward 5 Million churches worldwide by 2050 and
1000 churches by 2030 as my part in the grand mission of God. May God show the way.
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