Sw - Session 13 - Homework

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How Holistic Church Planting Transforms Society The Strategy of Paul and its Implications for Today Session 13 Homework

Introduction Jesus' essential call was to plant new communities of disciples (i.e. churches). Virtually all the great evangelistic challenges of the New Testament are basically calls to plant churches, not simply to share the faith. e 'Great Commission' (Matt. 28: 18-20) is not just a call to 'make disciples' but to 'baptize' and to ‘teach’ people to obey everything that Christ commanded us to do. In Acts and elsewhere, it is clear that baptism means incorporation into a worshipping community with accountability and boundaries (cf. Acts 2:41-47). e only way to be truly sure you are increasing the number of Christians in a town is to increase the number of churches. While evangelistic crusades and outreach programs are not to be discarded, their effectiveness is far inferior to church planting. Why? Much traditional evangelism aims to get a ‘decision’ for Christ. Experience, however, shows us that many of these 'decisions' disappear and never result in changed lives. Why? Many decisions are not really conversions, but often only the beginning of a journey of seeking God. Only a person who is being 'evangelized' in the context of an on-going worshipping and shepherding community can be sure of finally coming home into vital, and life-transforming faith. is is why a leading missiologist like C. Peter Wagner can say, "Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven."1 Paul’s Strategy to Transform the Roman Empire Paul understood this reality crystal-clear. Paul's whole strategy was to plant urban churches that cared for their communities. e greatest missionary in history, St.Paul, had a rather simple, two-fold strategy. First, he went into the largest city of the region (cf. Acts 16:9,12), and second, he planted churches in each city (cf. Titus 1:5- "appoint elders in every town"). Once Paul had done that, he could say that he had 'fully preached' the gospel in a region and that he had 'no more work' to do there (cf. Romans 15:19,23). Of course, more work needed to be done… but Paul had laid the foundations that the new believers could build upon. is means Paul had three controlling assumptions: a) that the way to most permanently influence a country was through its chief cities; b) the way to most permanently influence a city was to plant churches that holistically cared for their city, and c) the way to most permanently ensure the influence of churches in a city was to raise lay leaders and inspire members to proclaim the Gospel of the kingdom and plant new churches. Once he had accomplished this in a city, he moved on. He knew that the rest that needed to happen would follow.2 How effective was Paul’s strategy? Did it really work? At the end of his life Paul saw many of his churches consumed by in-fighting. Some had grown cold in their passion and fervor for God and his Kingdom of justice and peace. Others were facing severe persecution, to the point of

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extinction. Yet, the seeds he had sown bore much fruit in decades and centuries to come e Effects of Paul’s Strategy To the early Christians, acceptance of Christianity meant a conversion, and not only a “spiritual conversion” but a conversion of one’s whole lifestyle.3 To be a Christian did not mean primarily embracing a new doctrine. Primarily it meant living a new lifestyle.4 Everyone was a missionary – by the simple fact that the Christian way of life, the new community life of sisterly and brotherly love, and the proclamation of God’s kingdom of Shalom had a challenging and contagious effect on the environment.5 While many reasons are put forward for the growth of the early church, two factors stand out: the first was the early church’s fervor to plant new and reproducing communities of the kingdom; the second was its strong and attractive social ethic. As a result, the Christian community slowly transformed ancient Rome over the course of 300 years. It presented an alternative community in which a new social ethic was realized. e North African Christian leader, Tertullian, for example, exhorted the Christian minority of his day to be the “soul” of secular Roman culture. Pagan Rome was beset with corruption and moral decay, but Tertullian urged the Christian community not to retreat from that culture but to contend for it.6 e secondcentury letter to Diognetus said, “As the soul is to the body, so are Christians to their city.”7 Consequently, even while not directly addressing political questions, Christian churches challenged the structures upon which inequalities were based.8 Aristides, an envoy to Roman Emperor Hadrian, wrote about the Christians of the second century: “ey love one another and they never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger they take him home and are happy as though he were a real brother; they don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit in God. When one of their poor dies, they provide for his burial according to their abilities; and if they hear that any of them is imprisoned or oppressed for confessing the Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it is possible to free him, they deliver him. And if someone among them is poor and in need, but they don’t have enough to give, they fast two or three days in order to supply the needy with necessary food.”9 While it would have been unwise for the Christians to try and engage directly in the state political system of the first three centuries AD, it is clear that they had a significant impact simply by living as exemplary citizens wherever they were.10 In Alexandria, women rounded up destitute babies and orphans and cared for them. Christians in the Egyptian cities knocked on poor people’s doors

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and offered to move in to nurse the sick, deliberately exposing themselves to illness. Unlike their pagan neighbors, they readily ransomed their friends from barbarian captors, and when plague hit, they tended their sufferers whereas all others abandoned the sick at the first symptoms.11 Indeed, Christianity’s concern with the interests and concerns of the marginalized classes within and without the Roman Empire was the principal characteristic of Christianity in those centuries.12 Not astonishingly, as this movement to change society swept across the Roman Empire, Rome became deeply threatened by these Christian alternative communities; communities who gave allegiance to an Emperor other than Caesar while claiming to have found a way of life superior to that of Rome. is is the only explanation that truly makes sense out of Rome’s episodic persecution of the church for over two centuries. Yet, even in trying to extinguish the Christian movement, many Romans remained impressed at its power. Roman governor Plinius Secundus, for instance, wrote in his Epistles X96 that Christians were people who loved the truth at any cost. Although he was ordered to torture and execute them for refusing to curse Jesus, he was continually amazed and impressed with their firm commitments "not to do any wicked deeds, never to commit any fraud, theft, adultery, never to falsify their word, not to deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up." e result eventually was the transformation of Roman society into a Christianized society within the course of 300 years. e pressures of a minority religion whose social practice challenged its foundations, made the Roman civilization crumble under the weight of its own decadence. God used the message carried by the tiny, persecuted, oppressed, rejected, reviled group of disciples to change the Roman Empire.13 By the time Constantine was crowned Emperor in 312, between 10-25 percent of the Roman Empire was Christian. And Christianity had brought about significant social justice and social reform. It is an exciting study to see the impact of the second and third century churches on changing the social culture of Rome, particularly in terms of justice and social welfare. Even when the emperor Julian of Rome, in the fourth century, tried to reverse the empire’s embrace of Christianity and to restore the pagan (Hellenistic and Roman) charities and cults, Julian labelled the disciples of Jesus as “impious” in the same breath that he grudgingly gave respect to the ways they cared for the poor. In a letter to his own high priest in Galatia in 362, Julian admonished his priests to match the virtues of Christians, even if their “moral character” is “pretended”. “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence… e impious Galileans support not only their poor but ours as well; everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”14

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In short, Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won. is historical evidence, then, suggests that Paul’s strategy (and that of the other disciples and apostles) was indeed successful. Implications for Today If we want to see our cities and communities transformed, it seems thus, that a key strategy is to plant churches that care for their communities and are themselves driven to plant new churches with similar characteristics. Apart from the historical evidence we have seen above, why would this be the case? 1. New churches best reach the unchurched--period. Dozens of church growth studies have confirmed that the average new church gains most of its new members (60-80%) from the ranks of people who are not attending any worshipping body, while churches over 10-15 years of age gain 80-90% of new members by transfer from other congregations. is means that the average new congregation will bring 6-8 times more new people into the life of the Body of Christ than an older congregation of the same size. So though established congregations provide many things that newer churches often cannot, older churches in general will never be able to match the effectiveness of new bodies in reaching people for the kingdom.15 2. New congregations, in general, are forced to focus on the needs of its non-members, simply in order to get off the ground. So many of its leaders have come very recently from the ranks of the un-churched, that the congregation is far more sensitive to the concerns of the nonbeliever. Also, in the first two years of our Christian walk, we have far more close, face-to-face relationships with non-Christians than we do later. us a congregation filled with people fresh from the ranks of the un-churched will have the power and real concern to invite and attract many more non-believers into the events and life of the church than will the members of the typical established church, which have become more disassociated from the real issues of their non-Christians neighbors.16 is doesn’t mean that older churches should be closed down, and that we all should roll up our sleeves and start new churches. Older churches have their rightful place, particularly since they have a stability and steadiness that many people thrive on and need. In fact, a good number of nonChristians will only be reached by churches with long roots in the community and the trappings of stability and respectability.17 Nonetheless, if we desire to transform society, we need to think in terms of church planting. e good news is that older churches who catch a vision for church planting and birth new congregations, benefit themselves in the

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long run. Often the excitement and new leaders and new ministries and additional members and income 'washes back' into the mother church in various ways and strengthens and renews it. ough there is some pain in seeing good friends and some leaders go away to form a new church, the mother church usually experiences a surge of high self-esteem and an influx of new enthusiastic leaders and members. Yet, the existing church, since it will inevitably loose good leaders to new church plants, will have to ask itself a crucial question: "Are we going to rejoice in the 80% - the new people that the kingdom has gained through this new church, or are we going to bemoan and resent the three families we lost to it?" In other words, our attitude to new church development is a test of whether our mindset is geared to our own institutional turf, or to the overall health and prosperity of the kingdom of God in the city. Any church that is more upset by their own small losses rather than the kingdoms large gains is betraying its narrow interests. Yet, as we have seen, the benefits of new church planting to older congregations is very great, even if that may not be obvious initially. Simply planting new churches by itself won’t transform society, however. It all depends on what kind of churches we plant and to what ends. If we want to see our society and communities transformed, the types of churches we have to plant need to have two key characteristics: 1. ey need to be churches who have embraced the holistic mission God has charged the church to fulfill. Like the early church, they need to actively care for their communities and its members in an integral way that tangibly shows the love of God. What’s more, they need to understand that church planting is not an end in itself, but a means to advance God’s Kingdom of justice and peace. e growth of the Kingdom and God’s glory is the end of our purpose and mission; not the growth of the church! 2. ey need to be horse churches, not mule churches. What do we mean by that? Mules, being hybrids, are sterile, infertile, incapable of reproduction. Horses can reproduce. Mule churches result from church planting patterns which are not reproducible. is can be in terms of who plants the church, how they do the work of church planting, what resources are utilized, what type of church they plant, etc. If we plant mule churches, the job will not ever be finished. at’s why we need to plant horse churches. Let's look at an example in church planting to make the difference between mule and horse churches clear. Let's say that you wanted to see 15% of Chimalhuacan’s (a large slum community outside Mexico City) onemillion strong population actively involved in a church that cared for its community. at would require approximately 7,000 additional churches with an average membership size of 15-20 people. If you could recruit and fund fifty church planting teams which would plant

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one mule church every year it would still take 140 years if the population never grew. If those same teams would plant horse churches which would reproduce annually then the job could be finished in a mere eleven years with nearly 1,000 churches to spare. In summary, then, planting holistic churches that plant more holistic churches is the only way that we can be sure we are going to increase the number of believers in a city, one of the best ways to renew the whole Body of Christ, and a crucial way to transform our society by caring for our communities in an integral way. e evidence for this statement is strong – Biblically, sociologically, and historically.

reflection questions Write your answers and thoughts to these questions into your Application Journal and be prepared to share your findings in the next class session. What questions or challenges do you have in response to the ideas presented in this article? What is your take regarding the article’s stance, that church planting is a much more effective strategy to advance God’s Kingdom and transform society than are evangelistic campaigns or purely social service-oriented initiatives? What about holistic church planting makes it a more complete community transformation strategy? How would you respond to the following argument? --- “While Paul’s strategy of holistic church planting may, to some extent, have been successful in his time, that success was soon transformed into failure as the emergent church of the 4th century and onward no longer identified itself as an alternative community over against the empire, but soon positioned itself as the church of the empire, blessing the empire’s every advance and exploits. So why bother and seek to change our cities via holistic church planting, if in the end, the Church becomes as corrupted as the structures it once sought to change?” How would you formulate a strategy to advance holistic church planting in your community/city?

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application journal:

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endnotes 1

Tim Keller, W hy Plant Churches, article online available at http:// www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/why%20plant%202%2011%20TLeaders.pdf 2 Tim Keller, W hy Plant Churches, article online available at http:// www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/why%20plant%202%2011%20TLeaders.pdf 3 Eduardo Hoornaert, e Memory of the Christian People, 81 4 Eduardo Hoornaert, e Memory of the Christian People, 165 5 Eduardo Hoornaert, e Memory of the Christian People, 76 6 online available at http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/1999/04/08/end-times-andchristian-responsibility/ 7 Ray Bakke, e Urban Christian, 83 8 Melba Padilla Maggay, Transforming Society, 153 9 quoted in Pedrito U. Maynard-Reid, Complete Evangelism, 17 10 Graham Gordon, What If You God Involved?, 84 11 Philip Yancey, e Jesus I Never Knew, 156 12 Eduardo Hoornaert, e Memory of the Christian People, 121 13 Bob Moffit, If Jesus Were Mayor, 36 14 quoted in Mark Lewis Taylor, e Executed God, 132-133 15 Tim Keller, Why Plant Churches, article online available at http:// www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/why%20plant%202%2011%20TLeaders.pdf 16 Tim Keller, Why Plant Churches, article online available at http:// www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/why%20plant%202%2011%20TLeaders.pdf 17 Tim Keller, Why Plant Churches, article online available at http:// www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/why%20plant%202%2011%20TLeaders.pdf

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