Reflections from Discovering
Church Planting
J. D. Payne
Nehemiah Professor, Southern
Seminary
jpayne@sbts.edu
www.jdpayne.org
•re-Discover a Biblical Definition
of Church Planting
•re-Discover a Biblical
Understanding of the Apostolic
Nature of Church Planters
•re-Focus Your Strategy on the
Multiplication of Disciples,
Leaders, and Churches
re-Discover a Biblical Definition of
Church Planting
re-Discover a Biblical Definition
of Church Planting
• Acts 13-14
– Evangelism that results in new
churches
• It is not about church planting
– Making Kingdom Citizens who
live according to a Kingdom
Ethic in covenant relationship
to God and one another as the
local expression of the Body of
Christ
re-Discover a Biblical Understanding
of the Apostolic Nature of Church
Planters
Where is the pendulum in the U. S. and
Canada when it comes to church
planting?
Church planter as. . .
Missionary
Why?
Pastor
re-Discover a Biblical
Understanding of the Apostolic
Nature of Church Planters
Missionary
Methods
Missiology
Theology
-- If our
foundation is
wrong then our
missiology and
methods are on
tenuous ground.
The Missiological Shift in
Western Contexts
• As a society moves from an historical point
in time when they were without the gospel,
to a time when they became Kingdom
citizens and developed a well-established
Church, four shifts seem to occur:
The Missiological Shift in
Western Contexts
• From Simplicity to Complexity
Complexity
Time
The Missiological Shift in
Western Contexts
• From Apostolic to Pastoral
Apostolic
Pastoral
The Missiological Shift in
Western Contexts
• From Apostolic Missiology to Pastoral
Missiology
As the Church becomes more pastoral in her
functions, and less apostolic, missions in that
society becomes filtered through a pastoral lens
instead of a missional lens, resulting in a pastoral
missiology out of which the Church then develops
her missionary methods—which generally are not
very missional.
The Missiological Shift in
Western Contexts
• From Approaching the Mission Field
with Missionary Methods to
Approaching the Mission Field with
Pastoral Methods
Since our methods are derived from our
missiology, if a community of believers shift
from a missiology being apostolic in nature
to a missiology being pastoral in nature, then
the evangelism, church planting, and
leadership development methods will reflect
such shifts.
A result of a pastoral missiology applied to a post-Christianized
context is a failure to think and function missionally (i.e., apostolically),
but rather with more of a pastoral approach to missionary labors. A
pastoral missiology leans toward maintenance and the conservation of
structures and organizations. Such is the nature of pastoral ministry—
even for the most evangelistic pastoral ministries. The heart of the pastor
is aligned in this direction, and this direction can be a very good thing—
for a pastor and an established local church.
Unfortunately, a pastoral missiology misapplies this good desire
to the mission field, and finds satisfaction in the planting of churches with
believers who have been Kingdom Citizens for a long-time, rather than
with recent converts from the harvest fields. A pastoral missiology
typically wants to maintain and control rather than empower and release
others to be and function as the local church in their context. By way of
an historical analogy, a pastoral missiology understands missionaries to
be like a scaffold, but desires that scaffold to remain attached to the
building (i.e., the local body of believers), once the construction is
complete.
What is an Apostolic
Missiology?
• a missiology that treats societies and
peoples as a mission field should be
treated—lost without Jesus and in need for
the rapid dissemination of the gospel
resulting in the multiplication of disciples,
leaders, and churches.
• a missiology that recognizes while the
West has many local churches in
existence some ten, twenty, fifty, or one
hundred or more years in age, the
structures and organizations of those
churches (and denominations) took a long
time to develop.
What is an Apostolic
Missiology?
• a missiology that seeks to sow the gospel
seed into the hearts of the people, with the
expectation that the Holy Spirit will birth
His church in His time.
• a missiology that allows for the
development and application of simple, yet
highly reproducible, methods that the new
believers can be taught to use to preach
the gospel and plant other churches.
What is an Apostolic
Missiology?
• a missiology that informs missionaries that
once the “building” has been constructed
(i.e., local body of believers), the
scaffolding needs to come down, and
erected elsewhere to repeat the process.
• a missiology that desires to see selfsupporting, self-expressing, selfgoverning, self-identifying, self-teaching,
self-theologizing, and self-propagating
churches planted from the moment the
Holy Spirit births those churches.
What is an Apostolic
Missiology?
• a missiology that works hard to avoid
falling into the trap of paternalism (i.e.,
new believers and new churches must
depend on the church planters for
everything because they can’t “do” church
“right”), or the trap of pragmatism (i.e.,
that the goal is to get a church planted by
any means that works to create the
organization, rather than see the Kingdom
expand).
What is an Apostolic
Missiology?
• a missiology that drives missionaries to
reach, teach, empower, and release new
churches to the power of the Lord and His
Word (Acts 20:32), knowing that He is able
to keep them from stumbling and to
present them “blameless before the
presence of his glory with great joy” (Jude
24, ESV).
• a missiology that drives missionaries to
follow after the example of the Apostle
Paul who made certain that the new
churches had their own elders (Acts 14:23;
Titus 1:5).
Three Primary Purposes of
Apostolic Missionaries
• Evangelism (Rom 15:20; 1 Cor 9:16)
• Discipleship (Acts 20:27; Eph 3:14-19)
• Leadership Development (Acts 14:23;
Titus 1:5)
Where do you spend the majority of your time? Do
you need to change your priorities? How does
knowing these three primary purposes influence
how you coach and mentor future church planters?
re-Focus Your Strategy on the
Multiplication of Disciples, Leaders,
and Churches
re-Focus Your Strategy on the
Multiplication of Disciples, Leaders, and
Churches
• Three Guidelines to Keep in
Mind
• Receptivity-Need Analysis for
Where to Begin
• Reproducibility Potential
Guide for your Methods
Guideline #1: Assume the Great Commission.
The general call for all believers is to
“make disciples of all nations” (Matthew
28:19). Intentionally making disciples is to
be the normative pattern of the Church at
any time, any place, among any people.
Therefore, where is the place to begin?
The answer is simply, wherever there are
people who are not disciples.
Guideline #2: Has God Extended to You a
Specific Call to Hard Soil?
Unless there is a specific call for a team to
work among an apathetic or resistant
people, clear Holy Spirit leading, and
confirmation by other believers (Acts 13: 13), then the team should move to
Guideline #3.
The call to be a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel
and labor for years in a resistant field is a
legitimate and valid calling, but not
normative. The church is commanded to
“make disciples,” which carries the
expectation of seeing disciples made.
Guideline #3: Determine the Most Receptive and
Most Needy Field.
In order to be faithful with available
resources, church planters should
prayerfully locate the peoples and areas
where receptivity is high and need is great.
Receptivity-Need Analysis Guideline
RECEPTIVITY
High
High
Low
A
Priority 1
B
Priority 2
C
Priority 3
D
Priority 4
NEED
Low
Where are you serving? Why? How will you guide
future church planters to know where to begin in your
area?
Reproducibility-Potential Guide
Reproducibility
Technicality
How technical are your methods? Can the people you
have reached reproduce what you have taught them?
Why or why not? How will this guide assist you in
coaching future church planters?