The Mother Church

Mike and Donna set out to start a new church. They had funding from the denomination. They had training. They had potential. They even had a few people and some equipment. But twelve months and two locations later, they left the work and closed the church, disillusioned and a little bitter. Their core had not grown as they had hoped, they failed to see the evangelistic numbers they imagined, and the new church never became financially viable. Eventually, most of their congregation drifted back to the parent church, or maybe they were not in church at all anymore. If you have been in ministry leadership for long, you likely know people like Mike and Donna. Perhaps they are part of your congregation even now.

Stories of results like these may be the reason you have never taken seriously enough your denomination’s church-multiplication efforts and sent people out to start a church. Though you may not be sufficiently cynical to speak the words out loud, inwardly you ask, “Who decided that the world needs another tiny, struggling, under- funded, ineffective church anyway?” In conversation after conversation with potential parent-church pastors, I have come to believe that this unspoken question is lying just below the surface, and not without reason! Starting new churches is exceptionally challenging work and it takes a toll on people—even in successful works.

Theologically, the propagation of new churches is a tertiary activity. First is the kingdom of heaven, second is evangelism, and third is the establishment of churches. The kingdom of heaven is the message, the ultimate reality into which God beckons. Evangelism is the proclamation of that message and reality. The church is the transformative context and divinely ordained community in which the encounter with the kingdom of heaven is embodied and lived out. In the New Testament, the establishment of new churches was a response to God’s activity in and through the evangelists rather than an initiative in its own right. When Peter stood up to preach at nine o’clock that morning in Jerusalem, he did not turn to the men and women with whom he had been praying in the upper room and say, “Watch this. I’m going to start a church.” There was no church multiplication strategy. There was no proposal or assessment. In an act of Spirit-inspired evangelism, he simply preached the kingdom of heaven in a way that was significant and appropriate to that place and that moment in history. The formation of Jerusalem’s first mega-church was simply the gathering of those who responded to evangelistic proclamation into a Christ-centered, communal embodiment of the gospel message.

The other prominent New Testament church multiplication model differs slightly from the proclaim and gather model. It might be called the involuntary relocation model, where persecution forced the church to scatter and, like dandelion seeds blown by the wind, communities of Christians landed in previously un-evangelized communities. This is evidenced in Phillip’s involuntary relocation to Samaria (Acts 8:4-8), is certainly the origin of the church in Antioch (Acts 11:19-21), seems to be the pattern in Ephesus (Acts 19:1, “There he found some disciples”), and is most likely how the church in Rome came to be. These two models have at least two important features in common: (1) the initiative was God’s and, (2) the establishment of churches was in response to effective evangelism. This pattern can be seen in Paul’s instructions to Titus: “I left you in Crete . . . that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town.” Titus’ role brought structure and leadership to the community in Crete that came into being as an ingathering of those who responded to the evangelistic proclamation of the gospel: Evangel, kerygma, ekklessia; Gospel, proclamation, church.