~6 min read
Ecclesiology, Church Planting and the Gospel
Gold I Culled from Verge 2010 Conference
© Seth Kniep, 2010. All rights reserved.
Stop planting churches. Plant Jesus and churches will be the by product ~ Neil Cole
It is possible to plant churches and never make disciples. Church is to be the outgrowth of the message ~ Neil Cole
The world isn’t that interested in church. But they are interested in Jesus. Consider the latest top sellers, The Purpose Driven Life, The Shack, and Da Vinci Code ~ Neil Cole
When is the man in Mark 4 most busy? Sowing and harvesting. When are we most busy in our churches? At the in-between stage, trying to get the plants to grow. But Paul wrote, “So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth” (1 Cor 3:7). If you don’t plant the seed you won’t have the growth ~ Neil Cole
Neil Cole story: I lived in southern California and led a man to Jesus. I baptized him in the ocean. The only problem was that he celebrated his baptism by getting high. And he kept getting high every week. I finally told him, “I can’t keep spending time with if you aren’t going to change.”
He said, “Yeah, I understand. What do we do?”
“I have an idea,” said Cole. “Take me to your drug dealer and let’s share Jesus with him.” They did, and from that day, this new follower of Jesus never did drugs again. Today he writes songs for Cole’s church.
Story from Jeff Vanderstelt: Someone considers joining our church and asks, “How much of our time will it require?” Jeff replies, “One hundred percent of it. You are paid for full time ministry. At your job you are getting paid full time to minister to people. Every believer is a full time paid minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Your paycheck—no matter who wrote it—is from God so that you’ll do ministry.”
Many people in churches today get the idea that they pay the pastor to do ministry for them. It’s the mercenary mentality, I’ll pay you to do what I’d rather not do. But the Bible says a pastor’s job is to equip you to do the work of the ministry (Eph 4:11-12) ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
The best quote, worth the price of the entire conference was when Jeff Vanderstelt said, “The down side of this event is that none of you will be equipped by this. You’ll get informed. But that’s all. Equipping begins when you go out and obey Jesus.”
We do not gather for the sake of gathering. We gather and train for the purpose of sending you right back out again ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
Let’s not extract people from normal life to do events. Lets equip them to live life in and around people with gospel intentionality (2 Tim 2:2) ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
The only launch I see in the Scriptures is Jesus sending people into the world and the Holy Spirit comes down. Let’s not launch a service...we launch people. We launch you. You don’t plant a church, a church emerges out of the planting of the gospel. ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
You’d be surprised what the church can do if you start believing that Jesus is in them ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
If you dropped every religious activity—everything—and simply said: I’m going to disciple three people into the kingdom, in 11 alterations, the entire American population would be Jesus followers ~ Alan Hirsch
If we want to reproduce something it must be reproduce-able. If it cannot be easily passed on to others than it’s something you must call into question ~ Alan Hirsch
John Burke: “If people know you are for them, not against them, they’ll start to believe that your God is for them and not against them.”
Worship leading means to do anything to lead people to make Jesus exalted and praised ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
We are to be the ones engaging the culture and we bring the better wine ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
We should be known for the most partying people in the city and on the planet. What do we have to celebrate? He has risen! ~ Jeff Vanderstelt
“I don’t experience his joy!” “Maybe that’s because you are not suffering. He’s called the Comforter. Why do you need a comforter if you are comfortable?” ~ Francis Chan
George Patterson: “You will never get a church planting movement out of starting Bible studies. Just like a school, a Bible study is information based. Schools do not reproduce themselves. Rabbits reproduce rabbits. Churches reproduce churches.”
George Patterson: “The term personal Savior started out meaning “Jesus is my savior; each person must come to Jesus." But Satan put a spin on this and personal has come to mean private instead. This is tragic."
One thousand eight hundred years ago, Tertullian taunted the Roman empire with these words, “We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you—cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum—we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods” (193).
Ray Bakke adds, “Early Christians penetrated the whole city, but not by claiming space for church buildings or programs of their own. They penetrated everybody else’s space instead” (193). God help us to do the same! Ray Bakke, A Theology as Big as the City (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997).
“Church in principle is in its ideal expression the coming together of two realities: the cross of Christ and Christian freedom. These two ideas jointly create families of love over and over and over again through time. To overestimate church as a value in itself is to objectify the non-objectifiable and thus to possess that which can never be possessed. ‘Far from depicting the original healer of pure nature free of all contradiction, the church is caught in the fragile and sinful; it is not an external idea, but a temporal means.’
Church in its ideality touches down in history, like a Texas tornado, with the appearance of caprice, making contact with time and space, yet then withdrawing almost as quickly as it came. Thus we confront the painful facts of totally empty Christian churches turned into mosques and museums in North Africa. . .The tornado of God’s fervent rush comes and goes through world history. Any geography of Christian church growth will immediately demythologize any traditions we still posses of a standing army of Christian believers and institutions. History’s criticism is free and unthreatened. This is due to the cessation of judgment by virtue of Christ’s cross” (Paul Zahl, A Short Systematic Theology, Eerdmans, 2000, p. 88-89).
The basic paradigm of superstar pastors doesn’t tend to produce leaders from within their congregation. If you go to a church where the pastor's the star, you’re often there as a member to uphold his arms and help him make a bigger impact on the world. A more interesting model is when a pastor may not be a superstar, but is raising from his congregation people who are doing good things in government, the media, the law, or garbage collection. The model where the pastor writes a book and it becomes a bestseller and he becomes a star can deprive that church of its proper function. I would prefer that the pastor be holding up the arms of members of his congregation who are then empowered to go and do good things for the world. Who’s doing it well? My guess is if a pastor is doing it well, we won’t know his name and that there are thousands of pastors doing it well, but they’ve never written a book and we don’t know who they are.
-Mark Joseph
- Your core team has to own this thing. They have to take it on themselves to raise the money, reach those far from God, make this happen. The day needs to come when you say, "We don't want finances from HCBC because it will hurt us." So pray that we will do this.
- Remember that your end goal is not starting a structured community (like a Sunday morning worship service). Your end goal is to see people come to know Jesus and then naturally through that a structured community emerges.
- When you add a core member that's addition. And that's good. But you need to move to multiplication. When a core member leads someone to Jesus, that's multiplication.
Pastor Tim Hawks said that if we really do plant this church through the conversion of people to Jesus instead of gathering a bunch of consumer Christians who aren't living missionally, we may need to get to full time support through our core team and through you who are reading this before we ever get to a structured community (Sunday service of tithing believers). I'm down with that if God is. So pray for His direction.
Last thing: Tim shared that we should start viewing our finances as not coming from HCBC, our supporters, or from core but from God. As soon as we do this something amazing happens inside--it totally shifts how we do everything.