In part of the conversation that followed on from Jonathan Carswell’s provocative tweet about church planting, he followed up with this statement:
“I wonder what great good could come by sacrificing style prefs and prize unity/partnership?”
It’s a good question to ask and fortunately, we are in a place to answer that question. I can’t speak for every part of the UK but I can talk about what’s been happening here in the West Midlands in country’s second city and one of its largest conurbations.
During our time in the West Midlands, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with something that started life as 2020 Birmingham and is now known as the Birmingham Collective. The story started with a meeting between two pastors, Jon Bell from Church Central, a New Frontiers church and Neil Powell, at the time co-pastor of City Church, a significant sized FIEC church in the city (one of the founding pastors was John Stevens, current national director of the FIEC). The realised that they both had a desire to see lots of churches that loved Jesus, proclaimed the Gospel and blessed the city of Birmingham. Out of this grew a vision to see 20 churches planted by 2020 and following that a renewed vision for a further 30 by 2030.
The Collective brings together pastors and potential planters from a variety of churches. There is probably a core theological vision in that we are evangelical and generally speaking lean towards reformed theology. However, there is a breadth both in that the movement encompasses charismatic and non-charismatic, Anglican and independent, baptistic and paedo-baptist. One crucial element of this partnership is a recognition that there are distinctives. This probably means, to use one of Neil Powell’s catch phrases that “we wouldn’t attempt to plant churches together but together we plant churches.”
In other words, no, we wouldn’t attempt to plant one super-dupa Angli-Presby-Baptist-Cessationist-Charismatic church for Perry Barr (to choose a place at random) but there are lots of ways in which we partner together and encourage each other. This includes:
- A monthly get together for prayer, fellowship and teaching
- Running training courses
- Sharing resources and helping each other to source resources such as funding.
It has also resulted in some interesting connections. For example, a couple of years ago, whilst I was pastoring a church with Brethren roots I got a call from a man who was looking after the Evangelical Fellowship of Congregational Churches in the Midlands. He asked if we could help him with one of their churches that was struggling.
At the moment, I’m spending a lot of time with a young man looking to plant with the Redeemed Churches of God, a Nigerian denomination with Pentecostal leanings. We’ve prayed together, we’ve walked the streets in an area where he’s looking at and explored possible venues.
It’s meant that an old Brethren Gospel Hall has been made available for a New Frontiers church plant into Walsall. Rather than church planting leading to a local church dying, planting has meant that a witness remains in a place where the light would otherwise have gone out.
Other fascinating examples of how this unity for the good of the city has been at work include in church revitalisation. This has included a few churches seeing an injection of new people. In omne example, this started with a church plant renting a building in the afternoon which enabled them to build a relationship with the older congregation who met in the morning.
We often feel as though we are scratching the surface here in Brum and there’s much work still to do both in terms of the mission of reaching our city and in getting better at working together but we are encouraged to see what God is doing.
Faithroots 