The other day, I suggested that it may be that you have already planted, more than once at he same church. I thought it might be helpful to say more about this which might in fact turn this challenge into an obstacle.
The other day, I noticed that IX Marks had published an article about how to pastor and care for large churches. The pastor of a large church explained that his approach was to subdivide the church into parishes and these parishes were allocated elders to care for them. Now, this is surprising because it rather turns the concept of a parish system on its head. Here is a pastor suggesting that one single assembly of God’s people might serve multiple parishes. The Parish system was developed on the basis that a church served a geographical parish. What is interesting is that IX Marks have consistently promoted the idea over the years that a church should be an assembly of God’s people able to meet together under the same eldership oversight, in the same place to hear teaching, worship together and share communion. On that basis, the idea of multiple congregations/services or multiple sites is pretty much an anathema. Yet, here are IX Marks acknowledging in effect one of the main arguments against their approach, namely that even if you can get one or two thousand people in the same room, this does not mean they are all connected to each other in a meaningful way. Yet at the ame time, like those who disagree with them, they were arguing that it was still possible to break down the structure of a church and so enable diversity within a single church.
Now, personally, I don’t subscribe to the IX Marks approach. I don’t find their take in Scripture. In fact, I’m not sure that the type of local church presumed by such polity is envisioned in Scripture. Rather, I suspect that the way things were broken down at a local level were more fluid. That’s why I favour what is sometimes referred to as principled pragmatism. This means that for ten years I was part of a church where the approach was to make maximum use of one building by multiplying congregations within it. I’m currently an elder in a church that grew out of a multi-site model where the sites have become autonomous churches but linked together as a collective, sharing resources together for the good of the Gospel.
Anyway, the article reminded me of another way in which you might have already been planting without realising it. That is, that as the church grows, you may find that different groups of people form within the church. There will be some things that they share together with the whole of the church but you may find that there are groups that know each other better, have more to do with each other in the week and have a greater level of discipleship accountability to one another. What on one level looks like a homogenous mass actually reflects diversity. You may all meet at the same time on a Sunday but the day to day, week to week stuff means that you have multiple congregations forming already.
So, how does this help with approaching church planting? Well, I think, that if possible, church planting best happens organically. This doesn’t mean that you are laissez-faire and don’t worry about if it happens or not. There needs to be some intentionality and you need to be set up in a way that encourages a posture of planting. However, it can often arise best where there are natural groupings and missional focus.
So, for example, you might simply encourage small groups to think missionally about local communities and this may evolve into a situation where reaching the local community means having a gathering there on a Sunday. This gathering might then evolve into a local church.
Alternatively, if you are constrained by space in a building as we were at Bearwood, the temptation may be to put your energy into getting a larger venue, either by hiring offsite or undertaking a building project. However, what you might do is begin to use the building more, gathering people at different times over the weekend. Each congregation would then also have a level of autonomy and the church should be open to the possibility that in time, one or more might move off-site and establish a new church.
Faithroots 