The “Greedy” Church Plant Complaints

I am often surprised when I hear resentment expressed at church planting. The statements usually come in rather sheepish form as complaints:

• church plants steal bright, energetic young people from established churches that did all the hard work of educating them, raising them, etc.
• church plants disperse covenant children to too many places. We’d be better to gather all of them into one, big church rather than have them scattered in little, weak churches.
• church plants take the some of the brightest and the best seminary graduates taking them off the market for established churches looking to hire top tier staff

In my experience these complaints get aired when people feel “safe” enough to express their feelings. It’s kind of like when someone looks around, sees only people like themselves and lets loose something very non-PC.

Door #3

The third complaint was asked of me recently quite innocently by a young woman. I got the sense that it wasn’t her complaint, but that she’d heard the complaint and wanted my take on it given my experience and promotion of church planting.

For a general apologetic for church planting I recommend Tim Keller’s “Why Plant Churches.”  He addresses the common complaints quite well I think.

Watching Our Biases

Part of me doesn’t like complaint #3 much either partly because it categorizes seminarians. If “the brightest and the best” are going somewhere “special”, I guess that leaves “the dullest and the worst” to go to “regular” churches.

We are constantly conditioned to rate and compare people. It is a dirty habit. I completely understand that especially in a school context there are those who shine and those who don’t. I get that there are those who see some things quickly and those who take a bit longer.

Yes indeed I understand, but these tools of evaluation are themselves biased. In my experience there are hosts of qualities that go into church leadership and it is not always the ones that get appreciated in a scholastic context that provide good fruit in every setting. We need lots of different leaders for lots of different contexts. I’ve seen sharp, bright, good students struggle in local churches, and others who struggled in seminary thrive in local settings.

The seminarian/church market place IS a market place, or perhaps better yet a “beauty pageant”. Imagine the a seminarian preaching his best sermon as analogous to the swimsuit competition. As in any beauty contest there will be things that attract and qualities that will be overlooked. Wise church leaders may appreciate the fact that a beauty pageant isn’t always the best place to go looking for a wife. There are many qualities to consider, “fit” being perhaps the toughest and most important.

Trying Church Planting as a First Charge

When I was in seminary I heard again and again, usually not from faculty that you really don’t learn much ministry at seminary. You get a good education that can serve you well in ministry, but you will learn ministry in your field education and once you get a job. This really isn’t unusual. I hear the same thing for lots of other professions.

When I get a chance to talk to a seminarian I’ll often recommend that they NOT look for a nice established church for their first charge.

It’s very common for a seminarian to take a second staff or youth pastor position to get their feet wet. That’s a very good place to start in many cases. They will learn fast about real life church politics, staffing, shepherding the herd, etc.

I do think, however, that doing a church plant, or doing something more “out of the box” is a terrific way to spend your first 10 or 15 years. Why? Because your first 10 to 15 years are important for developing the skills and knowledge base for the next 30.

I also think that strategically, for the denomination, encouraging seminarians to consider church planting is important for the long term thriving of the CRC.

In the Deep End of the Pond

When I think about long term systemic church decline in the CRCNA I usually imagine a series of lakes and ponds linked by streams. Western Michigan is the deepest and largest lake with some good sized ponds in Chicagoland, Ontario and Iowa. There are more ponds on New Jersey, a few in California, some in Canada. There are some puddles scattered about, communities with one or two small churches.

Imagine widespread North American secularism and new spirituality to impact these ponds as a drought might. Not all ponds will be impacted in the same way but they will very much impact the system. Shallow ponds and puddles will be under the most stress the soonest and the effects of the drought will be most clearly seen in them. Deeper ponds and lakes will seem to tolerate the drought better but a sharp eyed ecologist would recognize the drought impacting their water level and ecosystem as well.

The CRCNA has been in this drought system for a long time now. Ponds in major metropolitan areas like the New York and San Francisco areas have been particularly hard hit. Changes in deeper CRC ponds are significant but more subtle.

Learning In the Shallow End

What skills do CRC leaders need to develop to address this drought? Where can these leaders find these skills? I think church planting is one of the best places for the CRCNA to develop its next generation of leaders.

Church planters are under incredible stress to very quickly learn a number of key skills:

• How to gather unchurched people and get them into church
• How to train newly churched people to trust God with their money
• How to evangelize unchurched people in the patchwork of their cultural context
• How to disciple new believers into faithful members of the community of Christ
• How to find space for worship and gathering if you can’t afford to build a building
• How to build a building when you can’t afford not to anymore
• How to raise up new members into new leaders
• How to hire staff, supervise them and let them go when you need to
• and lots more

Church planters have to learn to succeed, or even learn as they fail to succeed in all of these areas within a cultural context different from the deeper parts of the CRCNA pond system. If the CRCNA is going to profitably engage the climate change it faces it must develop the leaders it needs to work in new waters. I can think of few better ways to train young leaders to do this than in the context of a church plant.

Calvin Seminary and Church Planting

Having said what I just said we might imagine that ministerial training and church planting would be deeply wed in the CRC. I’d have to say that this is a work on progress.

Calvin Seminary has been moving towards the church planting world on a number of fronts. These are the examples that I know about.

• CTS hired Jul Medenblik, a church planter as its President
• CTS has an Institute for Global Church Planting and Renewal
• CTS has been developing its distance learning programs to help people train for ministry while they are in ministry.
• CTS has been partnering with Michael Goheen and the Newbigin House of Studies, both very active in the church planting world.
• CTS has offered the “Gospel Preaching” class with Kevin Adams in Sacramento a couple of times where we can give CTS students experience with preaching in a context very different from their part of the pond system.

Much of this has been developed in the last few years. I’m excited about the trend. I’d like to see it expand.

Large CRC Church Plants and Their Relationship to the Denomination

Before Synod I had an online conversation with Larry Doornbos (this post and this) about size and the CRC. We explored a bit some of the felt distance between the CRCNA and church plants that have grown large:

• There is mistrust of large, non-traditional CRC congregations on the part of some
• There is mistrust of church plants and church planting in the CRC among some.
• Large CRC church plant sometimes don’t feel valued
• Large CRC church plants sometimes don’t feel the cost/benefit denominational relationship works for them
• Large CRC church plants sometime feel out of place in the CRC and more at home with larger, non-denominational churches with whom they have more in common
• Large CRC church plants don’t feel their influence is welcome in the CRC at classis or the denomination

I’m sure others could add points to this list, feel free to do so in the comments. In any case if we think about the pond metaphor for the CRC we might see that this is a dangerous disconnect for the CRC. The leadership of these large CRC church plants have obviously learned some things about ministry in North America and should be a place we want to learn from. It seems to me that closing this gap will be of strategic importance for denominational and classical leaders.

Barriers of Entry Into Church Planting

Established churches that have stable budgets, offer competitive salaries, benefits and who already own buildings naturally have an advantage in recruiting seminarians who have run up student debt, strained their families to get their education, and are looking for a place to settle down for “regular” life to begin again. With these kinds of assets established congregations already have a number of strong features for attracting and retraining clergy employees. When it comes to competition for seminary graduate talent I think established churches hold a good many cards.

A generation ago when I was leaving seminary potential church planters in the CRC had a variety of supports available to them. Home Missions had a funding track that looks outrageously generous by today’s standards. An ordained church planter leaving the seminary could be assured of at least 250k of start-up denominational funding over the next 5 years, more if you considered staff support, classical support, parent church support, building support, etc. Today a planter MAY get 75k if the monies are available.

Not all of this is bad. A lot of study on church planting has indicated that too much funding doesn’t help the church in the long run. A good church planter who will have to talk pagans into the Christian faith should be able to talk Christians into supporting him or her.

At the same time this high barrier for entry skews the pool of those who may get the opportunity to plant churches. Not only will only the most committed go for it, but in some cases only those who are backed by churches of origin who have the financial resources to do significant above-ministry-share giving. Church planters who come from the shallow places in our pond network might need to go bi-vocational, a track that the CRC will need to develop but really hasn’t fully pursued.

Priorities

What might we want to prioritize as we go forward?

• Continue to see church planting as a strategic element of CRCNA leadership development. Established churches of tomorrow will benefit from the leadership development fruit of church planters today.
• Continue to develop the link between seminary training and the church planting community.
• Find a way to get more seminary field education on church planting sites and church planting cluster areas.
• Continue to get church planters on campus for guest lecture opportunities at CTS.
• Bridge the gap between CRC church plants and other CRC institutions. There will need to be healing, forgiveness and sacrifice on both sides if church plants will benefit from their CRC ties and the CRC will benefit from its church planting investments. We’re going to have to have honest conversations going both ways about what both sides are grumbling about in private.
• If you are looking for your first call in the CRCNA consider spending the first decade or so in shallower CRC waters. Why? You will develop the skills and knowledge that the entire system needs for the future. If you are still in your twenties take this time to travel, explore, do something that will be tougher to do in your 40s and 50s. Build your capacity for cultural exegesis, evangelism and discipleship in the North American context that has never heard of the CRC. There will be time to re-invest what you learn with the denomination later on and by that point you will probably be of more use to it than if you stayed in the deeper CRC ponds your entire career.