John Valentine - theologian, trainer and host of the Doctorate of Ministry in church planting from Asbury Theological Seminary - shares a brief introduction to the theology of church planting, exploring how this activity so effectively draws together the call to 'church' and 'mission'.
By John ValentineMarch 2022
The crux of church planting is that it is about the planting of churches, and as such involves theologies of both church and mission; it sits at the intersection of the two, and insists that we refuse to separate them. A proper theology of church must involve understanding church in terms of the mission of God, and, by the same token, mission must be viewed in terms of what we understand the purposes of God are for and through the church.
The Old Testament
This has been so throughout Scripture. Think of the calling of Abram in Genesis 12: 1-3. He is called to be a blessing to ‘all the families of the earth’, and this will happen as God makes of him ‘a great nation’. The blessing of God comes to the world through the people of God. Similarly, at the giving of the Law in Exodus, God declares his covenant with his people, saying, ‘’You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’’ (Exodus 19: 6), words which are picked up in the New Testament to describe the vocation of the church (1 Peter 2: 9).
The Gospels
In the New Testament, the Gospels show us how God is fulfilling and recalibrating the calling of Israel in Jesus. He is the new Israel, in whom that ancient vocation to bring God’s blessing to the world is to be fulfilled and made new. It is through his blood on the cross that the new covenant is established and the fulness of God’s kingdom is announced (e.g. Matthew 26: 27-29). Although he rarely speaks of the church, Jesus is plainly laying out a vision for God’s people, gathered around himself, to bring God’s mission to the world. The Great Commission, in Matthew, states an agenda to “make disciples of all nations”, through baptizing and teaching, both activities that require a gathering together of individuals into a recognisably church-like grouping, marked out by the presence of Jesus (28: 19-21).
The rest of the New Testament
This is indeed what we see happening in the rest of the New Testament. The Acts of the Apostles is the story of the establishing of churches throughout the Mediterranean world. When Paul summarizes his apostolic ministry in Romans, he does so by speaking of having ‘fully proclaimed the good news of Christ’ ‘from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum’ (Romans 15: 19), a huge swathe of geography, which includes places of which we have no record of Paul having been. This is explicable only in terms of a missionary methodology of establishing churches through which the message of Jesus could be declared to the surrounding territories. This is the process Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians: ‘For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you [the Thessalonian church, 1: 1] not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place where your faith in God has become known’ (1 Thessalonians 1: 8).
The New Testament letters give us the same vision, of God acting through churches to declare the gospel. Ephesians proclaims Jesus to be ‘the head over all things for the church’ (Ephesians 1: 22), and describes the purpose of God as being to make known his wisdom to the ‘rulers and authorities in the heavenly places’ ‘through the church’ in all its ‘rich variety’ (3: 10). The predominant New Testament metaphor for the church is ‘the body of Christ’ (e.g. 1 Corinthians 12; Romans 12); it is through the church that God acts in Christ by the Spirit.
The individual is always in view, of course, but the major New Testament focus for the action of God is in and through the church. Mission is a church affair, and it is in the churches that we encounter God’s presence, active in mission in the world.
Some theological reflections
Church planting is not the only means of mission for the church, of course, but why is it that church planting is so effective as a means of mission in the world? One answer is that church planting occupies the theological sweet spot of both church and mission. It is precisely in the intersection of ‘church’ and ‘mission’ that we see most clearly how God is active in the world. This means that church planting is not a new thing, but has always been at the heart of how God has planned to be active in the world.
This means that we must be careful to think of ‘church’ in terms of mission. Theologian and missionary statesman Lesslie Newbigin wrote, ‘A church which is not a mission is not a church’ (The Reunion of the Church, SCM 1960, 10). The Second Vatican Council declared that ‘the church is missionary by its very nature’. The church is not wholly explicable in terms of mission, just as mission is not wholly definable by reference to the church, but this interconnection occupies a high place in biblical, theological and missional thinking.
Why should this be? One answer is that Jesus is central to both these avenues of thought. It is Jesus who is the great subject of mission, and it is Jesus who is closely identifiable with the church, to the extent that it may be described as his body. If Jesus is the centre and heart of the Christian gospel, then the church is actually a part of that very message. To encounter Jesus is to encounter both mission and church, for they cannot be separated because they are both aspects of the same one Jesus Christ and his activity in the world by the Spirit.
Theologically, church planting is one of the key ways in which Jesus Christ can be known in the world today. There are other fruitful methods of mission, and there are numerous practical questions to consider, not least for denominations like the Anglican church which have a parish system. In overall terms, though, the establishing of new churches, by, in and through mission, is an activity, which, theologically speaking, is near the centre of what both ‘church’ and ‘mission’ are all about. Small wonder that church planting is so effective.
