Is there a correct way to pioneer a church?

"There seems to be no set way which God uses to gather people to form a church"

You’re probably getting the idea by now! The truth is, that while there are techniques and keys to learn there is no one correct way to gather people to start a new church.

The New Testament bears witness to this – we see a variety of methods in operation.

In Jerusalem, we see Peter speaking to a vast crowd, like one of the open-air meetings Wesley and Whitefield spoke at.  In Samaria, mighty miracles were used to get a crowd such as the Jeffries brothers saw in the 1920’s and 30’s. In Athens and Corinth, Paul reasoned in the synagogue, persuading the people who were listening about the truth of the gospel.

In Philippi, Paul went down to the river where a few God-fearers gathered to pray.  In Malta, Paul was shipwrecked and while giving a helping hand was bitten by a snake - and lived! And in Antioch, people were just sharing the gospel with whomever they met.

There seems to be no set way which God uses to gather a group of people to form a church. Down the years, God has used ordinary circumstances as the catalyst for pioneering a church.

James and Betty Taylor, the great-grandparents of missionary Hudson Taylor, took a route that was virtually unheard of in their day, the mid 1700s. Moving to the industrial town of Barnsley, and finding no Christian church there except ones marked by ‘deadness and indifference’, they took matters into their own hands and opened up their own home.

‘And so it came to pass that Betty’s kitchen was swept and garnished, and a few neighbours gathered in for informal meetings. The singing no doubt was an attraction and both James and his wife were among “the people that do know their God” and so can be a help to others. Some evidently received blessing, for in time a class was formed which met regularly in the little cottage. Eventually a Methodist Society was fully organised, and James Taylor appointed as the first Class Leader and Local Preacher in Barnsley.’

(Taken from Hudson Taylor: The Growth of A Soul’ by Dr and Mrs Howard Taylor.)

Why do people plant churches?

"God will use many reasons to get us on the move"

Just as God uses all kinds of people to plant new churches, he also gives people a variety of reasons for doing so.

Sometimes churches are planted as a result of God calling someone specifically for that task. For example in Acts 13:1-3 we see the church leaders in Antioch praying and fasting, and strategically sending out Paul and Barnabas to plant churches.

Chapter 16:6-10 shows Paul going to Macedonia as a result of a vision:

‘…a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.’

The New Testament even gives examples of how people plant churches for reasons that don’t look particularly spiritual – in chapter 11, the church in Antioch was started because Christians from Jerusalem were fleeing for their lives!

God will use many reasons, such as job moves, redundancy, the opportunity for education, retirement and illness as well as more overtly ‘spiritual’ reasons such as prophetic words and dreams to get us on the move.

Who can pioneer a church?

"God really can use all sorts of people to do it"

For lots of people today, the idea of pioneering a church seems way beyond them. They think of it as either the calling of a few reckless enthusiasts or the result of a few guys strategising from behind locked doors.

This is definitely not the case – if we take the briefest look at the book of Acts we can see how in the early church, new churches were planted by many different people, for many different reasons, employing many different gifts and many different methods. And despite what you may think, there is no spiritual gift of church planting!

Churches get planted by a variety of people with a variety of different gifts.

On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out on the believers in the upper room. Their actions, and Peter’s wonderful sermon attracted a large crowd, and 3,000 people were saved and added to the first church plant recorded in the book of Acts.

But in chapter 8, we read how Philip, a healing evangelist, was himself used to bring about a church in Samaria.

Reading on into chapter 11 shows how a team of people who were prepared to share the message with the Greeks, and as a result, planted a church in Antioch.

In chapter 16, a hospitable woman called Lydia helped to pioneer a church in Philippi by opening up her home.

And in chapters 17, 18 and 19, Paul and his apostolic team were used to pioneer churches in Thessalonica, Corinth and Ephesus, with examples such as Apollos who used his teaching gift to encourage the new church plant.

While some people might be temperamentally more inclined to be the kind of people who plant churches, God really can use all sorts of people to do it.

A church pioneer

"Planting churches used to be seen as exclusively for the 'radical' people"

How times have changed.

Over the past six months I have been asked to get involved in two inter-denominational church planting groups in Greater Manchester. This church planting thing is really catching on!

When we came the city 14 years ago, church planting was often seen as a threat to existing churches… I must say with some justification, as it did tend to involve whole groups of people ‘moving in’ to an area from elsewhere. It was also seen as an activity exclusively for the ‘radical’ people.

A few years ago I wrote a manual outlining lessons we had learnt in our first phase of planting churches in Greater Manchester. I now want to bring it up to date as we have now embarked on our second phase of church planting bringing some new ideas into the text.

I am going to use the blog as a vehicle to go through the text and so over the next months I will unpack the manual.

Watch this space!