I think that’s helpful. Being fruitful as individuals and churches seems good Biblical language. Keller is right to caution against a shallow understanding of faithfulness. In fact, the church claiming to be faithful may in fact be unfaithful if it has just dug a hole and buried its talent.
So, what will it mean for your church plant or church planting project (where the aim is to plant more than one church), to be fruitful? Well, first of all, I think the crucial measure is health. Is the church or are the churches you planted showing signs of health and life? Do you see plural leadership in place, is God’s word being taught faithfully, are people growing in holiness and in their gifts, is the Gospel being shared with the community around?
Secondly, I do think that it is a good and helpful thing to set goals, to aim for particular things under God. For example, the wider movement we are part of in Birmingham started with an aim of 20 new churches by 2020 and is now looking to see a further 30 planted by 2030. Our little family of churches in the city are seeking to play our part in that and that means that our own local church have particular dreams and goals in mind.
This means that we have said that we would like to see 2 new churches planted from ours in the next 10 years and so this is shaping our approach to church life. For example, it means that our aim is not to grow large but we would like to reach about 150 to be in a position to plant a strong core team out from us. It also means that I’m seeking out 2 or 3 potential pioneer planters for the next 3 or 4 years to help us plant into the harder to reach areas of the West Midlands.
Having a clear vision for where we want to be and specific objectives helps us to all work out where we fit in to a plan and what we need to be doing. There tend to be two extremes in Christian thinking. On the one hand, there are those who can be so dogmatic about their goals that they won’t budge from them. They hold to them too tightly. We might particularly associate this with American mindsets and also with those of us from a charismatic context, especially when we believe God has specifically called us to something and spoken to us about it. At the other end of the spectrum though is the particularly English mindset and often associated with more conservative evangelicalism. It’s the mindset of the amateur. We get places without particularly aiming to or knowing how. We enjoy the adventure but don’t like to get too serious. The thing is that the easiest way to make sure you don’t miss is not to set a target. The best way to avoid getting lost is to not plan to get anywhere particularly. You can also never be late if you don’t agree a time!
I want to suggest, keeping with a Kellerian approach that we need a centre point between those extremes and I would suggest that it is this. We need to dream dreams, have plans, set goals as we have faith for but we also need to hold onto those dreams, plans and goals lightly. Back at our previous church, we planned to plant a new congregation into one of the local estates. We had timeframes for this. However, we didn’t achieve this. Why? Well God has a habit of surprising us and whilst we were thinking about how to make this plant happen, God sent us a large group of Spanish speaking South Americans. Our hands were full with seeking to disciple them and the outcome was a congregation and church plant serving a wide multicultural community using Spanish as its main language. Later on, we were given the opportunity to help with a church replant in a different location. So, one plant didn’t happen but others did.
Now, come to think of it, I think we can talk in terms of success or failure here. You see, there were things where we succeeded and others that we failed to accomplish. That’s true of many of the things you seek to do within your context. It’s helpful at this stage to talk in terms of success or failure because it helps us to evaluate honestly what happened. Sometimes we don’t succeed because it wasn’t the right thing to do or the right time. Sometimes we don’t succeed because other things took priority. It’s helpful them to consider whether or not we got our priorities right. Sometimes we don’t succeed because we made mistakes or because we didn’t have the right gifting and experience for what we set out to do.
It is helpful in those contexts to review and think about what did and didn’t work. Sometimes the result will be that you try again, sometimes you’ll recognise that God has helpfully steered you away from one thing to another.
It’s important though to distinguish those objective success and failures from determing whether or not the church itself is successful. That’s where we do need to stick with the language of fruitfulness. It is possible for a church to be fruitful, healthy, alive whilst experience failure when it comes to particular objectives.
Faithroots 