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PlantR recently hosted two church planting practitioners who have worked all over the world in contributing to church planting movements–George Patterson and Tony Dale. Both contributors enriched our understanding of church planting and movements. This post will focus on Patterson.
Dr. George Patterson is Adjunct Professor of Intercultural Studies at Western Seminary and possesses 35 years of missions experience. At age 76, he is lively, insightful, and pastoral. It was a remarkable privilege to spend time with him. Making light of academics, his stated goal was to “easify church planting.” Patterson’s interactive discussion revolved around a 6 pointed star diagram that depicts seven non-negotiables in church planting movements.
This diagram helpfully brought together the elements of evangelism, worship. organizational structure, financial support, reproducible growth, leadership training all under the rule of Christ. As we worked our way around these points, Patterson provided refreshing, field-based stories and missiological insights. Instead of commenting on each one, I will offer a few of his insights here. We hope to get a U-tube video up soon.
Rabbit and the Elephant
Patterson pointed out there are three main types of churches—rabbits, elephants, and rabi-phants. Rabbit churches are small churches that reproduce quickly. If rabbits were killed as quickly they would quickly outweigh all the elephants in the world. Elephant churches are big churches that have longer gestation periods and reproduce much more slowly, but they are powerful. All too often the rabits and elephants compete instead of partner. A rabiphant church combines elements of a traditional, larger church with smaller missional units of non-tradtional missional churches. He averred that we need all three. This is often not the message we hear from micro/organic/house church voices, so that was refreshing.
Reproducibility
When asked what impedes reproducibility, Patterson offered a variety of insights:
When the sun rises and sets on the pulpit. Quoting from Jonathan Edwards, he remarked: “A churches greatest weakness is invariably its greatest weakness taken to excess.” Pulpit can strangle mission and evangelistic reproducibility.
Pastoral training by apprenticeship not seminary. Noting that this practice has been effective throughout church history. He was quick to point out that seminary is not the problem, but the way students respond to formal education conditions them for churches that are not highly reproducible, low in cost, and missional.
A group small enough to do the one-anothering and fast reproduction is typically too small to be the church. Small groups cannot have all the gifts of Ephesians 4, nor can they sustain reproducibility. Therefore, the small groups need to rely on one another. There need to be strong relationships between small groups and lots of interaction in order to promote healthy, missional churches.
Check out our new church website. 99% of the photos are taken by our own people. Feel free to give us some feedback.
In the coming weeks we will be adding new sermon archiving features, fresh content, and new pictures. The plan is to keep the site fresh with content, resources, and images. Notice the blog feed at the bottom of the homepage.
Shout out to Dave Cummings, Hollie Meador, and Jesse Lovelace for their work on this.
Here is the second part of Simple Church at Resurgence.
Resurgence is running part one of an article on simple church. What I try to do with this piece is to explore what kind of simplicity is called for in the missional church. There is simplicity that is naive and simplicity that is profound. The church should be about the latter not the former.
Read the article here.
We have some exciting speakers coming through Austin this month. Check out PlantR for information on talks by Tony & Felicity Dale (house church experts) and George Patterson (movement leader). We will record Patterson’s talk and, perhaps, the Dales.
What do your missional communities do when they aren’t on mission together? What do they discuss? How do you reinforce your values? How do you promote their discipleship alongside mission?
Story of Scripture with Soft Apologetic
When we started our MCs, I wanted our people to become familiar with the big story of Scripture, engage non-Christians, and promote practical discussion, not theological debates or Bible studies. Inspired by The World We All Want, I wrote an 8 week discussion-driven material that begins with New Creation and ends with Mission. I chose to focus on different texts, simplify the approach, and provide a leaders supplement.
The first session starts with a question posed by Chester & Timmis: “If you ruled the world how would it look?” Starting each session with a soft apologetic engaged people across the spectrum of faith, while promoting an understanding of the whole story of Scripture. It keeps the unbeliever in mind while challenging the believer.
See Overview and Sample session.
Sermon Discussion
Once this foundation was laid, we began discussing sermons. Again, our approach was to keep it simple, discussion driven, gospel-centered, and missionally focused. We sensed a need to gather our church on the same theological and visionary page, to promote true gospel-centered living. So, each City Group leader gets five questions each week that move from a soft opener to the problem of application, to the solution of the gospel. All this after a meal together and lots of talking, laughing and so on.
This has been very successful. Our City Groups are starting to pastor one another by speaking the truth in love. We are experiencing some substantial gospel change, but it takes a while for people to a) Trust one Another b) Confess and Repent c) Counsel one Another d) Understand How the Gospel Applies not just saves.
What have you found helpful in promoting gospel-centeredness, community, discipleship within your missional communities?
New Pilot City Group
We are considering starting a pilot City Group that runs 6-8 weeks for non-Christians to get exposed to Gospel, Community, and Mission. Kind of like a short-term Alpha Course that is missional and apologetic. Anyone else done anything like this?
We must have something to focus on, to glorify, to worship. We pursue either the real God or a created surrogate. We see these scenarios being played out over and over in the worldly world. Consuming and absorbing concerns, to while all else is subordinated, vary from person to person. If people are not pursing the real God, their passions will be for power of pleasure, money or fame, domination or drugs, ease and comfort, or a mingling of them all. their desires fill their thoughts, aspirations, and plans. They fret and fume and sometimes fight when deprived of their idols. Never do these created experiences fill their empty hearts, nor can they completely dull their inner ache and void that lurk under the surface of their lives.
~ The Evidential Power of Beauty, Dubay
Read about the story and my response here.
See the post here on developing a local theology and the excerpt below on our attempt to do local theology as a church:
The Four Self Church
We are cultivating a Four-Self Church, a concept that was tweaked by Paul Hiebert in his Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (probably the most influential missiology text I have read). Most church planters are aware of the Three-Self Church—self-governing, self-sustaining, self-propagating. Hiebert adds a fourth—self-theologizing.
We are trying to strike the delicate balance between teaching theology and cultivating theologians, between downloading Systematic Theology and discipling Christians who do theology to address issues in our Keep Austin Weird culture. One way we are doing this is through our Interpreting Scripture and Culture class.
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