Participation and Church Planting: Perspectives from Scripture, Doctrine and Practice

Participation and Church Planting is a collection of writings and essays that seek to draw together scholars from biblical studies, systematic and historical theology, and practical theology to reflect on how the concept of participation can help us to think theologically about church planting.

Participation promises to offer a unique theological lens through which to see church planting; for the concept of participation is crucial for understanding the relationship between the church and mission of God. As the New Testament writers remind the early church over 130 times, their participation ‘in Christ’ is central to life of the Church. Participation refers not just to the task that Christian disciples are given to do, but something of their identity: it tells us who they are. It is therefore crucial for any one trying to do ecclesiology; the church is not just a community of likeminded believers, but rather, they are those who participate in the mystical body of Christ.

Take a look at an extract from the introduction of Joshua Cockayne, Academic Dean at at Cranmer Hall in Durham and the Director of the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology. You can buy Participation and Church Planting online now.

You can read an interview with Joshua over on SCM Press, where he unpacks more on this new work.

Seeking a theology of participation for church planting

So, what are the fundamental theological conversations we should begin with? One central question, which the chapters in this book explore through their various lenses, concerns the ways in which church planting allows for a kind of participation in the mission of God. This emphasis on planting as participation provides a helpful corrective to many of the pragmatic approaches to church planting that I have already noted above. This emphasis on participation has been a notable feature of many of the critiques of church planting and innovation in the Church. Andrew Root, in his book The Church After Innovation, describes the Church’s recent obsession with innovation and entrepreneurship as the hallmarks of a declining institutional Church desperately trying to make a case for itself in the religious marketplace. While the Church has always had to adapt and change to its circumstances, Root worries that innovation has become a kind of idol in the Church (Root, 2022, p. 63 ). What we fail to see, Root thinks, when we prioritize innovation for its own sake is that:

God is God. There is nothing greater, no way to ever capture and control God. Not in our churches, not in our dogmas, not in our liturgies, not even in our shiny, full buildings glowing with prosperity … There are no human tactics or technologies, no religious mechanisms that can conjure up this God who is God. And yet God can be known … This knowing is possible only because this God who is God chooses to make Godself known to us. (Root and Bertrand, p.2023, 92)

For Root and Bertrand, the desire to innovate is often bound up with a desire to control to prevent decline, to increase the Church’s relevance, or to convince more people to come to church. Innovation can be seen as an attempt to rescue the Church from its many problems today. But the radical changes in culture and the rapidly shifting engagement with religion and spirituality cannot be met with just more innovation; they must force us to wrestle more deeply with the question of what the Church is called to be. As Edwin van Oriel puts it:

In times of deep cultural change, it is not enough to focus on what to do, because a few technical changes here or there are not going to transform the situation. It is equally, if not more, important to reflect on who we are. (van Driel, p. 2020, 48)

It is this question of who we are that forces us to look for a richer ecclesiology for church planting. This call to rediscover the Church’s identity is expressed succinctly in the work of Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank in their critique of many of the innovations within the Church of England in the past two decades. Davison and Milbank highlight the ways in which socio logical principles have dominated the conversation around the health of the Church, noting that ‘sociology is allowed to triumph over theology’ (Davison and Milbank, p. 2013, 80). They draw attention in particular to two aspects of the Fresh Expressions movement, namely: (i) the emphasis on numerical growth, and (ii) the appeal to social homogeneity being as effective in mission contexts (such as the notion that mission is more effective when it focuses on engaging with people similar to our selves). These two emphases are problematic for a number of reasons, Davison and Milbank think, not least because:

The Church is not one more voluntary association alongside others, to be analysed on secular sociological principles. She is not even one more group of people of good will … The Church is the Body of Christ and the bearer of his mission in the world. (Davison and Milbank, p. 2013, 80)

As Milbank puts it elsewhere, to stress the divine priority of the Church is to note the fact that the Church must be understood primarily through the lens of ‘participation in God’, and not just focusing on what works sociologically (Milbank, p. 2023, 4; emphasis added). As Milbank goes on to argue, an emphasis on innovation and reimagination can sometimes give the impression that the local church is responsible for ‘inventing the religious expression’, and what this ignores, Milbank thinks, is that ‘worship is not simply something that we do but is also a gift from God’ (2023, p. 82). In other words, engaging with the theology of participation forces us to wrestle with the question of how ministry is rooted in the life of God.

In its most basic sense, then, a theology of participation encourages us to shift our perspective on church planting to recognize that the Church is primarily a mystical body that is given by God, and which we are given to participate in, rather than a human organization that we can control or dictate the direction of. As we have seen in Root’s writing, as well as Davison and Milbank’s, a theology of new churches that fails to take seriously the place of divine participation risks treating the Church as a humanly controlled organization, which can be grown at will and through more effective strategies. This has significant implications for how we understand the work of starting new churches. And this book seeks to take this instinct about participation and explore several important questions related to church planting.

Participation and Church Planting is available to buy now.