They've Got It "SDRAWKCAB"

Yes, that is correct. They have it "sdrawkcab"! For those that cannot read in reverse, that is, "They have it backwards." Who does? The Church.

I could spend hours, days or even weeks on many things wrong with the functioning of the Church. Specifically today, I want to discuss church planting. It appears to me that most church leaders (denominational officials, primarily) have not changed their theory of church planting since Lewis and Clark embarked on their transcontinental expedition.

The theory behind church planting was to send a young pastor into a frontier town and say, "Brother, go start a church. God be with you." Then the guy was dropped into this town to fend for himself. It may have worked at one time, perhaps even as late as half a century ago.

This is still in play in many leaders' thinking. Here is the current philosophy: send some poor sap to a faraway place, demand that he find a permanent building and grow a church.

The reality of life today is that it simply does not work. Where the permanent building used to be one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, it is now one of the last things a church planter should worry about. One hundred years ago, building a church building was relatively inexpensive. All one needed was a few walls and pews. Now, one has to contend with building permits, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements, fire codes, plumbing codes, electrical codes, building codes, environmental land use laws, etc.

Years ago, church staff was not important. In fact most churches did not have a staff. What staff that existed was voluntary. Unfortunately, that no longer works. Churches need to be staffed from the beginning. The way I see it, a church needs a minimum of four full-time (or nearly full-time) ministers: lead pastor, worship pastor, youth pastor and children's pastor. One would do well to hire a reliable nursery worker on a part-time basis.

The result of this "sdrawkcab" approach to church planting is that churches are doomed from the outset. To put it in business jargon, they are under capitalized. They have great buildings with no ministry. People may show up to see what a new building looks like, but they will not stay with effective ministry. We need to make sure every church has effective plans for ministry before we worry about anything else.

I call all church leaders to reevaluate priorities when seeking to plant churches.

The High Modernist Church

I just finished reading James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State. In the book, Scott, an anthropologist from Yale, dissects the high modernist view of the world. Essentially high modernism is roughly the time period of the early nineteenth century to mid twentieth century. Your run of the mill high modernist is someone who believes in endless progress of scientific reasoning. It is not so much a belief in science, as in biology, chemistry, physics, etc. It is a belief in the science of reasoning. There is no value of what has come before. In fact it is a hindrance. Scott uses the example of two cities that were highly influenced in their design by high modernist thinking. One is Paris, France. Paris is an old city, and it was difficult to retrofit it to a modernist grid system. The older part of the city was built up with no rhyme or reason, in the view of an outsider. The other city is Brasilia, Brazil. It was totally planned from the ground up by designers with a high modernist view.

Scott details how Brasilia did not turn out the way it was expected. He details many such things: Prussian forestry science, Soviet agricultural collectivization, and others.

He does not mention the church, but I think we can apply some of these lessons to the church. Somewhere in the nineteenth or twentieth century, this sort of thinking permeated through the church world. Everything became cookie-cutter. (I have numerous book in my library that prove this.) Everything was reasoned. Everyone had to have the same salvation/sanctification experience. Every church had to be run the same way. Every church plant had to done to exacting specifications. Every church building had to look the same way. (Not everyone does, of course, but you can almost date the decade in which a church was built by looking at the architecture.)

Centralized church bureaucrats (like centralized bureaucrats in the Soviet Union, or anywhere else) drew up plans for everyone to follow. The problem is that these cookie-cutter plans seldom worked. A church plant in midtown Manhattan, New York City is going look vastly different from a church plant in rural Iowa. The ministries that exist in a mountain community in Washington state are going to look much different from a multi-ethnic church Miami.

I think a good number of people in the church world have come to realize this. What works here will not work there. Just because Pastor Big Shot in Dallas baptizes people at the local water slide does not mean it is going to be effective in anywhere else.

As ministers, we have to know our community better than anyone else. This is one thing I struggled with as we were running our church into the ground. I went back and forth with the district big-wigs (250 miles away, in another universe). I kept trying to tell them what our community was like, but they would not listen. They insisted we do things by their methods. We tried to change, but the money they were supporting us with was taken away.

Every church must be local and meet the needs of its community. I am not a fan of this word, but it must be organic.

Taking a Leap of Faith

Have you ever taken a leap of faith, I mean a real leap of faith? When I was almost 15, my parents picked up and moved 350 miles so we could attend a church that had a good youth group. That is crazy, their relatives said. And, here's the kicker, they had no jobs. My dad had just retired, and my mom was still working. She called a business where a friend was working and said, "Hey, we're moving to town. Do you have a job for me?" God provided. She got a job. We had food, clothing and shelter.

My cousin is now in the process of taking a huge leap of faith. He is starting a new church plant. At the age of 46, he is striking out on a "shoestring budget." You can check out his church's website, which has his blog.