JD Payne has started an interesting
series of articles on the missiology used in North American church planting. His question: are we primarily coming from a
pastoral missiology, or an
apostolic one?
I’m one of three church planting missionaries in my family. My brother Steve works with new churches among the Oromo people in Ethiopia with
CMF International, and my wife’s twin sister and her husband are planting church in rural Paraguay with
SIM. Our strategy when we planted our
church in Bakersfield in 2003 was definitely pastoral, and theirs was definitely apostolic.
Since then, we’ve shared some interesting conversations, and I’ve come to agree with JD Payne that we need to rethink not just our strategy, but the missiology from which that strategy flows. That’s led me to an ongoing dialogue with colleagues who are planting churches internationally.
As part of that dialogue, I’m helping coordinate a workshop track on church planting at the
National Missionary Convention, and am working with Doug Lucas of
Team Expansion on casting a
vision for 1000 new church plants in the US and 1000 church planting movements worldwide between now and 2020.
Meanwhile, our church in Bakersfield has participated with
Stadia in the launching of two other congregations — one
Anglo and one
Latino — as well as starting a small missional community in a low-income apartment complex a few miles from our Sunday morning campus. I’m still wrestling with the issues, but that hasn’t stopped us from planting churches while we wrestle!
If you’re a church planter, how would you describe your own missiology — pastoral or apostolic? What thoughts do you have on how this has worked in your context?
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