Foreword
By Thom S. Rainer
I recently returned from a speaking engagement in Montana where I met a few minutes with a young pastor. He shared with me that the attendance of his church was 400 a couple of years ago, 200 last year, and almost back to 400 this year. “What is happening?” I inquired of the roller coaster growth and decline and growth. “We grew to 400, planted a church of 200, and have almost replaced all of our ‘losses,’ all in just three years.”
His story amazed me. This pastor and church planter grew a church, planted a church, and grew a church again in one of the most sparsely-populated states in America. “What are your future plans?” I asked. He smiled and responded, “We plan to do it again and again and again. God blesses when you ‘give away’ people and resources. We are just going to keep giving it all away.”
This young man has not had the opportunity to lead research teams as I have the past decade. But his on-the-field experience is just as credible as the national research we have conducted. God blesses church planting.
One of my first research projects was on effective evangelistic churches in America. We discovered that churches that have a DNA of reproduction are among the most effective churches at reaching the lost and unchurched across America.
Starting new churches is always important. The biblical narratives of the early Church certainly attest to that reality. But starting churches today is critical. There are some 400,000 churches in the United States. We estimate that some 60,000 of those churches will close in the next 10 to 15 years. We will need at least 60,000 churches just to stay even!
But even if churches were not closing, we would need new congregations. These new churches tend to be more effective at reaching people for Christ, and for penetrating areas not reached by existing churches. One cannot have a true passion for reaching our world for Christ without also having a passion for planting churches.
In your hands is a book that surprised me for at least two reasons. First, I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about church planting. But, as I devoured the pages of this tome, I was surprised to find out how much I did not know!
But I was also surprised by the incredible quality of each chapter I read. In most multi-author books, the material ranges from bad to good to very good. In this book, each contribution was good, or very good, or very, very good. There is no weak link in this work.
My original plans were to write the foreword to Church Planting from the Ground Up and to thank Tom Jones for the opportunity to provide my input. I now have different plans. I now have different plans. As soon as I finish these words, I am giving the manuscript to the church planting department of the seminary where I serve as dean. I am strongly encouraging our staff to require this book of every church planting student. It will also become required reading for a course I teach on growing evangelistic churches.
This book is an encyclopedia of church planting. Every chapter is written by someone who knows his or her stuff. These are no pie-in-the-sky theories that just might work. Every contributor writes from an incredible background of real-world experience. They have been there and done that. And now you have the opportunity to hear their insights on a wealth of church planting topics.
Be prepared to enjoy some great stories. Be prepared to hear from some great men and women. But, above all, be prepared to hear the work of a great God who honors the work of His servants who take church multiplication to heart.
Thom Rainer, Dean
The Billy Graham School of Evangelism and Church Growth
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky
Foreword
By Dr. Ed Stetzer
I remember the first time Donna, my wife, asked, “So what do we do now?” It is easy to remember because I had no answer. It was 1988 and we were planting our first church in Buffalo, NY. We were 21 years of age and right out of college. We had arrived full of enthusiasm and passion, but little knowledge and no experience. So, we started knocking on doors. Fifteen years, several new churches, and a lot more training later, I still knock on those doors—but I do a lot more when I plant a church.
Over the years, Donna and I learned that church planting is hard work, but incredibly rewarding. I remember the day we baptized 50 people, the Sunday we had a great outreach service with hundreds of new people, and the day our new church pulled off a great story in the local paper. But, I also remember the many things we tried that did not work. I recall vividly the failure of an incredibly expensive mailer that generated no guests, building a building that sat unfinished for months, and core members leaving because they “needed” something more established.
I remember the times when I did not want to go on. I remember quitting many times but never telling anyone but God. I wish I had someone tell me what they did right and wrong, so that I could learn from their experience. I wish I could have learned from someone else’s hindsight.
Outside of the text of scripture, the greatest tool I could find along the way was experienced church planters. I found a coach to help me, I read everything out there, and I asked questions of every church planter I could find. It made a difference. Our second church plant was four times larger at its first service than our first church plant five years earlier.
What would have been different if I had had some experienced church planters to guide me—like the church planters in this book? Could I have avoided some of the obvious and painful mistakes? Probably. We are always more effective when we discern lessons from those who have gone before us.
The Tools for the Task
Ultimately, we combine several things when we plant a church. First, we bring the Word of God and the gospel message. Ultimately, we are planting the gospel and the kingdom, and the content of our message must be “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 4). If we plant something else, it is not a church, but a religious club. There is always the stumbling block of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:23); that, no matter how contextual we want to be, we must never discard. We learn from history that those who go too far end up with a shipwrecked faith.
But, we must bring the tools of missions to the task. North America needs to be treated as a mission field. Biblically faithful churches are churches on mission in their communities. They are missional by the commands of Jesus (though some do not live that mission). As such, we need to think like missionaries think and discover how the unchurched think, how we are most likely to reach them, how we can lead them to an encounter with God, and how we can create a biblically faithful church that is indigenous in its context.
Mission principles teach us that the church needs to be indigenous (to some degree it looks like the community it is called to reach), contextualized (its worship and outreach are meaningful to those in the context), and faithful (it cannot become so much like its community that the gospel is compromised). Needless to say, that is a difficult task—and over the years, many more have failed than have succeeded.
Lastly, we bring the tools of experience to the task. When we plant a new church, we are not the first ones to discover the adventure. People have been planting churches for two thousand years, and we have learned some things along the way.
Entrepreneurs Learning by Experience
Church planters are, by their nature, entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs tend to start things from “scratch.” Effective entrepreneurs learn from those who went before them. Today that might mean reading everything we can find on the topic of church planting. It might involve delving into the deeper principles of missions that undergird the church planting task.
We can learn power encounters from Boniface who cut down the sacred Oak of Thor leading to the conversion of Germany (700s), contextualization from Raymond Lull who taught us to learn the culture of Muslims to reach them (1300s), the need for each church planter to have a deep devotional life from Philip Jacob Spener (1600s), the importance of culturally relevant worship from Rufus Anderson (1800s), and even strategies from the Church Growth Movement (late 1900s). Finally, we can learn from experienced pastors and leaders who are just a few years further along the journey than we are.
Learning Practice from Practitioners
I have always found learning practical skills from theorists to be an odd thing. Hearing experts on church planting and growth who have never planted and grown a church always seemed strange. I prefer to learn about carpentry from carpenters. Church Planting from the Ground Up is just that—a wealth of wisdom from a diversity of practitioners.
Tom Jones has provided a great service to the church—practical insights from people who have been there and speak from experience. They help the church planter to start a biblically faithful and contextually relevant church. This book is a gift to the church that will help its planters to think biblically, missiologically, and experientially about church planting.
Ed Stetzer, Ph.D.
Author, Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age