Gathering in South Jersey

Next week I'll be attending a monthly gathering in Philadelphia of area pastors and lay leaders who are involved or interested in supporting church planting. Its called Church Planter Community and is open to anyone.

I like the CPC. (Click here to join their Facebook group.) It is an increasingly diverse group and a part of the Metro Philly Church Planting Network. The focus is advancing the kingdom of God in the metropolitan Philadelphia area.

That includes Gloucester County, New Jersey. Philly is close to home: we can see Philly on a sunny day from a hill around the corner.

The speaker at the Church Planter Community this month is Dave Wiedis. He heads a ministry called Serving Leaders. Dave is preparing a talk about what he calls "the idols of church planting."

Asked for my thoughts on the issue, I shared the following three idols that came to mind:

1. Self-promoting Spirituality: an approach to ministry that sees others as primarily the object of ministry, and jiggering all personal spiritual experiences to promote the goals of the "church plant" rather than the goals of God.
2. Jack Pot God: doing certain things, pulling the handle, and out pops a church.
3. Walking by Sight: descending into an Idolatry of What Can Be Seen (measuring success or failure primarily by what results I can see of the work that I do, when church planting is primarily a work of faith, and God will not be mocked.)

Now, these idols are not peculiar to church planters alone, but they are certainly temptations and threats that seem to confront me more regularly than they did before.

Hmm. I wish my idols would stay still for a minute; then maybe I could finally beat some of them?

Seriously, church planting idolatry also came to mind when reading this interesting critique of British evangelical church planting methodologies.

I don't agree fully with the essay, but I do concede that there is a tension between going with cultural and resource trends, and walking by faith as you go against such things. See Romans 12:2, for example.

A friend recommended Roland Allen's book some time ago, The Missionary Methods of St. Paul.

Allen brings similar criticisms of missionary methods that are overly pragmatic and wind up taming the biblical imperatives of world-conquering faith and God's irresistible grace as the main weapons in the missionary enterprise.

Prayer doesn't seem powerful, but are we men or mice? Are we building a business or a church?

I'm the last person to pit "business" and "church" against one another; my answer is usually, "Why do we have to choose?"

Edmund Clowney's book on the church repeats earlier scholarship when he says the church is both Organism and Organization. Same idea.

Still, as Americans, and Western Civilized Folk, we will do well to mind our idols and the native spirituality of the air we breathe; it is not necessarily neutral.