I’ve been writing a little bit recently in response to comments about church planting and whether it has played its part in the decline of existing local churches. One question that has come back my way has been “what about situations where the plant has mainly drawn members from existing churches? What if after a few years its membership remains 100% based on that transfer growth.”
I thought it might be worth fleshing out a few thoughts on this. First of all, a church plant will initially be made up 100% of people from other churches, whether that’s one or two couples or twenty or thirty people. Sometimes the plant will be made up entirely of people from one other, larger sending church. However, there may not always be a church large and stable enough to send many to a plant. So, sometimes, a plant will draw people from several other churches. For example, I’ve worked with one re-plant which included one person from the original church, the new leaders from two different churches and then three other couples who came from different churches.
Generally speaking, if a church is being planted and drawing its core team from several churches, you would want those people to be willingly and intentionally sent from the other churches so that there is a sense of willing mission partnership. However, sadly, this isn’t always the case. This doesn’t mean the plant are wrong, underhand or sheep stealing. However, we do need to recognise that the reasons for people joining are less positive. Sometimes it can reflect a genuine concern that historic denominations have compromised on core issues. Sometimes, it is simply that when the church plant starts, there are people in the area who recognise this as an opportunity to serve as part of a local witness.
I would expect that in quite a few places where there isn’t a meaningful Gospel witness, that there are Christians and as soon as there is a Bible teaching church that loves God, the Gospel and the community you will start to find that people who were travelling a distance or were attending more liberal churches will want to come to the church. Others will come because of difficult experiences within their previous church and some will come because there simply weren’t opportunities for them to serve and use their gifts for God’s glory where they were.
I don’t see anything wrong with this in and of itself. After all, whilst we don’t want to encourage a consumer mentality, we recognise that from time to time people will move between existing historic churches. What I would advice planters to look out for is a bit more of the back story to someone coming. There is a huge difference between the person joining you who has spent 10, 20 or more years serving faithfully in one church and who leaves well as opposed to the person who is known to move church every 2-3 years leaving a trail of pain, woe and wreckage behind them.
The other thing we need to watch out for is what is happening over time. Now, it will often take time to build relationships and we cannot control the response to the Gospel. However if 5-10 years down the line, the church is happy to rely on transfer growth, then you have a serious problem. I would hope to see non-Christians attending, becoming Christians and getting baptised or at least for evidence of meaningful Gospel engagement with them. If those things are not happening then it doesn’t mean that church planting is itself wrong or even that the plant wasn’t necessary. Rather, it means that there are some challenges for that particular plant.
Faithroots 