Are you wasting time church planting?

Are you wasting time church planting? January 11, 2017

Even Paul knew his labor in planting churches could be a waste of time. If Paul felt this way, shouldn’t we take notice and figure out how to avoid wasting our efforts?

Public Domain
Public Domain

To the Galatians, Paul wrote,

“I went up [to Jerusalem] because of a revelation and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain.” (Gal 2:2)

Upon seeing the false teaching present in the church, he concludes,

“I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain.” (Gal 4:11)

Paul urges the Philippians to …

“[hold] fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.” (Phil 2:16)

Knowing the affliction of the Thessalonians, Paul explains

“For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to learn about your faith, for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you and our labor would be in vain.” (1 Thess 3:5)

Few people like talking about this reality. If we don’t, however, we too could fall into the very trap Paul wanted to avoid.

Brothers, Don’t Waste Your Church Planting

In this month’s EMQ, Will Brooks’ succinct article offers excellent advice for anyone who wants to see lasting fruit in their ministry. He easily could have followed John Piper’s example by titling his essay, “Brothers, Don’t Waste Your Church Planting.”

Brooks first diagnoses the problem:

Rightly loving and laboring to see the advance of the church into new areas, they define church health solely in terms of the church’s ability to start new churches. Self-propagation, then, becomes the defining metric of church health. In reality, many other components should be included in a discussion of church health, and to be fair, most of those components are not easily quantifiable.

He then lists and explains five reasons why training in biblical interpretation should be an integral part of every missions strategy. Training in biblical interpretation…

  • benefits all believers, not just future leaders.
  • equips future pastors to faithfully lead their churches.
  • equips leaders for appropriate contextualization.
  • prepares missionaries for future service.
  • enables the planting of healthy churches.

How often I hear missionaries advocate self-sustaining, self-reproducing churches yet how rarely I see hermeneutics training specifically. We need to distinguish theological training and hermeneutics training.

From many conversations, I’ve found out many people do not know the difference. They suppose that teaching people what the Bible says (i.e. theology) means training people how to interpret the Bible (i.e. hermeneutics). This is not always their fault since seminaries increasingly minimize the need for exegesis, especially when training missionaries. Mission organizations often have low-expectations for missionaries as far as their own training and ongoing education. This is all the more unfortunate since contextualization begins with hermeneutics.

Essential for church-planting

Therefore, in order to take Brooks’ advice seriously, we also need to rethink how to equip missionaries who are training national pastors. How can local shepherds do for their churches what they themselves have not been taught?

By teaching hermeneutics, local believers are not bound by the theological conclusions taught them by their teachers. At a practical level, the Bible remains their authority, not the missionary. Local believers will have insights that missionaries have long overlooked. As a result, the global church is strengthened, not simply the handful of churches with whom we work closest.

That is fruit worth working for. By grace, we’ve been called to be Christ’s ambassadors. Let’s not labor in vain by allowing false teaching, superficial spirituality, and dogmatic divisions to plague the church.

Teaching hermeneutics is one important step in the right direction.

 

 


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