Message Magazine Online - Vol. 56, No. 03, Summer 2008

In This Issue

• Editorial
  Angela Shuff
• Canadian Editorial
  David W. Smith
• The Ecology of Church Planting
  ABWE's Core Ministries Institute Training Team
• Living Out Wisdom Literature in Middle Eastern Culture
  Susan Schmidt, Middle East
• Consider the Joy
  Bill Commons, Strategic Initiative and Research
• Culture Shock Revisited
  A. W., South Asia
• A Willing Sacrifice
  Pauline Stevens, with her sisters Dr. Beulah Hall and Mrs. Laura Anne Cebulak
• Dig Your Roots Deep–But Where?
  Kimberly Rae
• Deep in Liberia, People Have Never Heard
  Keith Lippy, Liberia
• Training a Special People Group
  Bill Amstutz, President, Shepherds Ministries
• CLIPS
• Adapting to Retirement
  Spence W. Jackson
• Kids Can Help Start Churches, Too!
  Jim Cook, ABWE Next Generation Ministries
• Invest in Training Missionaries for Cross-Cultural Ministry
• Focal Point
  Michael G. Loftis, President, ABWE International

The Ecology of Church Planting

ABWE’s Core Ministries Institute Training Team

Will it ever survive? you wonder, as you look at the apple tree sapling you brought halfway across the world, hoping that under your green thumb the radical change in conditions would not affect its growth. You quickly observe all your new neighbors plant only banana trees. Uh oh, bad sign. What are the chances that your plant would take root, grow, bear fruit, and reproduce in this new environment? What approach should be taken to nourish the life of your tree in this new soil and climate?

Cross-cultural church planting is not altogether different from bringing an apple tree to a land of banana forests. You cannot simply assume that the way you planted and the means you used to nourish in the past will bring the same delicious apples in the new place. Many missionaries (and Christians in general) think of a “church” as simply what they’ve experienced or what they’ve grown up with. But in all too many situations, this mindset can lead to failure when it comes to planting churches elsewhere. If missionaries simply transplant their North American church into a foreign setting, their failure could almost be ensured because of a lack of appropriate adaptation to the new environment.

Successful cross-cultural church planting requires missionaries to understand contextualization—the process by which they appropriately adapt the expression of the church in a particular cultural context without diminishing the biblical core definition of what a church is. While those who study missions have written volumes on this topic, one simple formula for practicing contextualization involves the following three steps: 1) Deconstructing stereotypes by differentiating between biblical functions of the church and cultural forms  2) Analyzing the unique, natural, and cultural ecosystem in the area for the new church plant  3) Developing expressions for the biblical functions of the local church that are appropriate in the particular cultural context.

STEP ONE:

Deconstructing stereotypes

You cannot plant a tree if you do not know the difference between the universal essentials for organic growth and the geographically based wisdom on how to best take advantage of the local soil. Likewise, missionaries seeking to contextualize must first learn to deconstruct any of their own presuppositions about churches and cross-cultural ministry that do not readily apply in this new culture. They must become fully convinced that the church style under which they grew up may not be the kind of expression of the body of Christ that will take root, grow, bear fruit, and reproduce itself in the cross-cultural setting where they will be ministering.

To accomplish this, missionaries need to differentiate between the biblical functions of a local church and the forms that are developed in a specific culture to carry out these functions (see chart). The New Testament has much to say about the functions of a local church—what a church should be about (teaching, discipleship, worship, care of the poor, etc.). But we don’t read nearly as much in Scripture about local church forms—how these functions should be carried out (time of meetings, style of music, etc.) With perhaps a few exceptions, the functions are transcultural directives to be carried out by all local churches in any era and/or setting. While the forms, on the other hand, are the adapted cultural expressions of how ministry functions work out in a given church-planting environment.

STEP TWO:

Analyzing ecosystems

After realizing that all the ways you used to plant your tree at home may not work best in your new home, you would most likely set about studying what would be the best means to plant a fruitful tree. What is the soil like? When are the seasons? Again, the parallel to contextualization is obvious: a missionary needs to analyze the church-planting ecosystem as a foundation for developing culturally appropriate church-planting strategies.

The term church-planting ecosystem is preferred to church-planting culture, because the setting where ministry takes place is affected by factors other than just culture. Culture is a combination of all the ways humans integrate with their environment. Therefore, cultural ecofactors in an environment are the religious worldviews, customs, values, and the economic, educational, and political systems. However, each church-planting ecosystem also has a set of natural ecofactors that impacts the church-planting process. Factors such as global location (proximity to the equator or major bodies of water), geographical features (mountains and rivers), climatic conditions (arid or tropical, hot or cold), vegetation (dense or sparse), and wildlife (hostile or docile wildlife) are some examples of natural ecofactors that impacted cultural development in the past and that affect church-planting strategy now.

STEP THREE:

Planting a fruitful, living church

Having laid aside some of your past assumptions about gardening and sought to understand how best to get a tree to grow in a new place, you are ready to go about the business of putting that knowledge to work and shaping a beautiful orchard. Once missionaries have distilled in their minds the essence of biblical church functions and fully understand the church-planting ecosystem where they are called to minister, they are ready to integrate the two.

Using these principles, effective missionaries develop their church-planting strategies. They pray for guidance in the process and list important aspects of the ecosystem in which they are working. They formulate possible forms and discuss proposed forms with new believers in the culture. Mostly importantly, they must make it a priority to teach the functions—biblical Truth—to their new church and let the forms almost develop naturally through a sensitivity to culture and constant partnership and collaboration with national believers.

To plant fruit trees, gardeners need flexibility to the changing environment, knowledge of the locale, and willingness to work hard. Church planters are no different. If they desire to plant a fruit-bearing church, they will endeavor to plant and grow a manifestation of the Body of Christ that brings the presence of the gospel into that community through  biblical faithfulness and cultural relevance. What is then grown is a fruitful, living church—a body of believers that reflects the diversity of God’s Church that He has redeemed “out of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation” (Revelation 5:9–10).