What We Can Learn from International Church Planting

(Comments by Ed Stetzer from his blog, www.edstetzer.com. Used by permission) Edited by Ron Hamilton

Ed Stetzer

I’ve been working through a series of reflections on what we can learn from international church planting, based on a recent meeting with the North American Church Planting Leadership Fellowship. For what we have covered thus far, click the links here:

• Be a Learner, not a Leader

• Be Simple and Reproducible

• We Need Greater Commitment to Discipleship

When you have empowered simple structures and empowered disciples, it is natural that you would have empowered leaders — which leads to the next point.

Fourth, empowered non-staff leadership regularly marks the Church Planting Movements seen around the world. We have heard this repeated on multiple occasions, and from multiple speakers working in a variety of areas around the world. The growing global church provides more empowerment for people to go out and do.

When we look in the New Testament, we see the ordinary practice of ordinary Christians planting ordinary churches. In the West, we have “professionalized” basic components of the Christian life in church. While we might never admit it, we have sometimes eliminated disciple-making from the vocabulary of the regular Christian, and relegated that responsibility to the “super Christians” or the “professional Christians,” i.e. the clergy. I wrote a whole series on this issue last year on the blog. The clergy-laity caste system we have created has significantly bottled up the exponential potential of the church in the West.

The healthy and growing parts of the global church are looking at Scripture, acknowledging the responsibility of every Christ-follower to be and make disciples, and opening up the floodgate of disciple-makers by equipping every person to be about that business. We must learn from them and do the same.

But I truly believe this last part is the high point, leading us to the final principle.

We must recover respect for and reliance on the Holy Spirit in church planting.

We consistently hear a theme of reliance upon the work of the Holy Spirit regardless of the theological family of the speaker. As we examine the landscape of global movements, we cannot help but see there is a great emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit and a great reliance upon the necessity of the Holy Spirit.

In the Western church, we love to systematize and analyze what we do. To be honest, I think systems and analyses are helpful — which seems obvious considering my job. I lead a research firm, so I clearly am committed to research, administration, and analysis. But I fear we are placing too much hope in our systems. We need our systems — and if we love planters we will have systems to support them — but we cannot hope in our systems alone.

We have to remember our systems and analyses serve a greater purpose, and that is to facilitate the purposes of God.

He is first, and His movement trumps everything else. That does not mean we avoid systems, processes and analyses. In fact, I think it means the opposite. We value those things, and use them widely, while remembering our ultimate success or failure is dependent on God through the person of the Holy Spirit. Our hope is in Him. Our success is in Him. Our Church Planting Movements will come from Him.