Natural Church Planting by Tim Keller

According to Tim Keller, the Book of Acts had a mindset, a set of guiding assumptions. Paul and all the leaders of the early church embodied this mindset. They always did three things: evangelism, discipleship and church planting (movement building?). Church planting was as natural as any other work of the church; it went hand in hand with teaching, evangelism, discipling, worship and music, or education. To make church planting (movement building for our purposes), Keller argues you need these three things.

First, church planters and movement builders must have the ability to give away and to lose control of money, members, and leaders. As Paul planted churches, he really “empowered” the new leaders. He gave them ownership—losing in the process a lot of control. Current churches or movements cannot bear thought of money-giving families, or key leaders, or just friends being lost to new works. Similarly, their pastors and church leaders are also afraid of giving away glory.

It’s hard to resist the logic of: If your ministry adds people, you: 1) assimilate them into your church, 2) turn them into Bible studies under your church, and 3) spin them into new ‘ministries’ in your church. Your numbers swell and you get both control and glory. If you organize them into churches, you are losing money, members, numbers, leaders, and control.

But that is just what Paul did freely releasing control even when it meant keeping responsibility for problems in that new church plant. He realized that church planting required the difficult reality of no control, but continuing responsibility.

Second, church planters and movement builders must have the ability to give up some control of the shape of the ministry or movement itself. This is scary especially to people who care about Biblical truth and cherished methods. But it’s a simple fact that the new church or movement will not look just like you. It will develop its own voice and emphases. On the one hand, pains must be taken to be sure that the difference is not too great, or fellowship and cooperation is strained. Remember the book of Acts speaks of “the faith”. There is one body of true doctrine at the heart of Christianity. But on the other hand, if you insist that the church or movement be a clone of your own, if you are not willing to admit the reality of contextualization in the Biblical sense of adapting and incarnating-so different generations and cultures will produce a different kind of church or movement-then you won’t be able to do church planting or movement building!

For example: Paul’s adaptations from culture to culture are famous. No-one size fits all for him. And why in Acts 16:13 did Paul ‘expect’ to find a prayer meeting at the river? Would you? He knew something about God-fearers. Frankly, it takes creativity and wisdom about people to do church planting-and many leaders cannot think ‘outside the box’.

Third, church planters and movement builders must have the ability to care for the kingdom even more than for your tribe. We see this in the way Paul talks of Apollos, who, though not a disciple of his (Acts 18:24ff.) Paul speaks of him in the warmest terms (1 Cor.3:6; 4:9; 16:12) even though his disciples evidently considered themselves a particular party (1 Cor1:12; 3:4) We see it in the way Paul (as said before) constantly takes his hands off new churches. 16:40-then he left. What we have here is a concern not for his own power or his party’s power (and even then, different apostles had their followers and emphases), but for the kingdom as a whole.

Keller offers this test to church planters: When we “lose” 2 families to a church that brings in 100 new people who weren’t going to any other church, we have a choice! We must ask ourselves: “Are we going to rejoice in the new people that the kingdom has gained through this new church, or are we going to bemoan and resent the two families we lost to it?” In other words, our attitude to new church development is a test of whether our mindset is geared to our own institutional turf, or to the overall health and prosperity of the kingdom of God in the city. Will we resent the 10 people we have lost or rejoice in the 80 people the kingdom has gained?

Conclusion: The church-planting or movement building mindset is not so much a matter of trusting new leaders etc. but trusting God. Paul does not give the new churches up to themselves or others. Rather he “committed them to the Lord”. Since we live in the Acts world again, it is doubly important to make church and movement multiplication a central ministry strategy.

Source: Natural Church Planting.