The numbers game

I've been doing some more work on my congregation plant paper, trying to make it accessible to the church leaders without much of a background in the theory and practice of 'emerging' churches.

Doing a sales job on something that prides itself on rejecting traditional church values is a difficult task. It would be ideal to be able to point to outrageous successes by the movement – massive numerical growth, countless baptisms, flashy buildings – but these new churches are more likely to fill blogs with discussions of how to do a labyrinth or run a missional order than count bums on seats.

So is this a case of new wine in old wineskins? Can the two ever go together?

Dan Kimball of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz seems to manage the issue quite well. His early experiences were with running a Gen-X service in a typical evangelical church and his book Emerging Church came with the approval stamp of Seeker Sensitive™ guru Rick Warren. Kimball's vision of church looks a lot like traditional church re-tooled for the new generation. He still has a lot of standard evangelical concerns – gospel preaching, evangelism, discipleship – albeit with a different flavour.

I was considering these issues in depth a few weeks ago and began to ask myself the hard questions. Why bother trying something new at my church? Why not simply start a new one, without the hassle of convincing the sceptics and pleasing the leaders?

My final answer - there's a bit of compromise inherent in remaining within the established church, but there's an even bigger opportunity. New plants are always going to be a fringe movement the way things are headed. They'll preserve their ideological purity and may be exactly where God wants them in their communities. Nevertheless, if we are convinced that introducing a healthy dose of reality, passion and uniqueness into our worship and community is essential, then why wouldn't we want to share that with other Christians? Are we to dismiss the entirety of institutional Christianity as unworthy or unable to experience God's radical plan for them?

There will be heartache. There will be failure. Wineskins will burst under the pressure and wine will go bad in the wrong conditions. Isn't that inevitable?

If our plant fails miserably on its own terms, but convinces the rest of the church that there are different ways of living out the Gospel and that these risks are worth taking, then I will count myself blessed.

I might even write a book about it.

Categories: Gospel
Tags: emerging; planting; convincing