Church Planting

Jonathan Dodson, a church planter in the Acts 29 Network, offers an honest and insightful look inside the "missional" church-planting movement and points out that it is just as likely to become myopic as any other expression of Christianity. Much of what he has to say resonates with my own perspective on the movement. In particular, I want to highlight several quotes.

Daring to disagree with missional guru Ed Stetzer (warning to Dodson -- it seems to me because of all the hoopla that disagreeing with Stetzer might put you under a ban from using the word "missional"), Dodson says (remarkably):

"while I agree that being missional includes being culturally alert and active, church planters often appropriate this idea monoculturally. Our notion of being culturally aware is often radically ethnocentric, primarily restricted to American culture. As missional people, we can become so committed to reaching our own culture that the cultures and peoples of the rest of the world end up taking a backseat. As a result, "missional" becomes a codeword for Western, ethnocentric, monocultural church planting, which leads to churches that aren't fully missional. In turn, this missional short-sightedness produces churches and disciples of Jesus that are not shaped by the insights and challenges of the global church."


In the most substantive portion of the article, Dodson says:

"Numerous examples of missional short-sightedness could be adduced; however, I will provide just one critique that cuts to the heart of the missional movement-our growth methodology. Contemporary methods of church growth have often focused on growth as the purpose of mission, attraction as the power of mission, and strategic planning as the plan of mission. Missional churches, unless they are stitched into the missio Dei, are just as easily lulled into such skewed notions of the purpose, plan and power of the church.

"Although church planters are susceptible to measuring their affectivity based on the number of people who attend their church, they face another straying purpose for their existence-numbers of church plants or being a part of a church planting movement. If we are not deliberate, the purpose of mission can subtly degrade into planting more churches, instead of cultivating diverse, global worshippers of the triune God. To put a spin on a familiar phrase, church planting is not the ultimate purpose of the church. Worship is. Missional activity exists because worship doesn't.[3] Without worship as the ultimate purpose of missional activity, we will end up making quantifiable converts, not worshipping disciples.

"Whenever we depart from the missional purpose of God, our missional plans become man-centered and narrow-minded. ... Whenever our primary concern becomes how many missional community churches we can plant and what forms of church we need-building, music, service, website design-we demonstrate a warped missional ecclesiology. Moreover, when the concept of missional is reduced to connecting with our culture in order to reflect its forms, from urban professional to rural cowboy, we reveal our missional short-sightedness. By obsessing over North American contextualization, we are in danger of neglecting the global mission of the church.

"When narrowly conceived missional methodology takes priority over missional theology, the power of mission is reduced to pragmatics, abandoning the missio Dei and dishonoring the many-faceted, multi-cultural gospel of God."

Find his entire article here. Whether you are missional or not, or if you are like me and find yourself wondering just whose definition of "missional" you want to accept, Dodson's article is a much needed call for reasonable, biblical and theological thinking about the movement, both from within and without.

HT: Justin Taylor