Reflections on the Church Planting Week at Summer School

Steve Timmis and David Fairchild enthusiastically taking questions

“Every church is planted into a particular culture and generation and is only designed for that particular culture and generation. In other words, every church has a shelf life.” So began the church planting week of the summer school at WEST. Steve Timmis (of the Crowded House, Porterbrook Network and recently Acts 29) kicked us off with that statement that he called the live grenade in the room with its pin still in. Joining him was David Fairchild (of Kaleo Church and Acts 29).

What follows are some fairly disjointed and unorganised reflections from the week.

We began by talking about contextualisation, about being incarnated into particular and contemporary cultures. Church must be relevant and the gospel must not be made to be relevant, because it always is, but must be shown how it is relevant. With regards to culture, we must not be too negative nor too positive about it. We’ll never reach a golden Christian age but not all culture is bad. In fact, Steve put forward that if we’re not being culturally relevant then we’re not being faithful to the gospel.

David gave a session that was a lot of statistics. He was using them to argue that small churches are actually more effective for discipling both Christians and Non-Christians. Interesting! I could have done with that for my dissertation!

Some further interesting points made about contextualisation by David are that we find doing it hard because we have a tendency to see our own culture as absolute and so as unchangeable. Also if we are contextualising then we will be both hated and also attractive. He used the epistle to Diognetus to aid his point here. One of them also made the point that trying to analyse our own culture is like trying to push a bus from inside the bus!

As we got more practical through the week and talked about models of planting, after Steve had a rant about how we need to release more younger people and take more risks in pioneer planting, we pinned it down to essentially two models, those with relationship to the existing church and those without.

Steve aimed to nail down a missional ecclesiology. Piper says that “mission exists because worship doesn’t”. Steve said, “worship exists because mission does.” He made that point to show how key mission is, that it’s not just an afterthought. Mission is intrinsic to God. The Father sent the Son, who both sent the Spirit and all three sent the Church. He then gave 10 characteristics of a missional church. I may cover these another time! Essentially though it’s the three core values of gospel, church and culture held in balance.

Today then we covered some more practical things including the stages that any group, including a church plant, goes through. These are forming :the honeymoon period where barriers are up, storming: where the barriers drop and tensions arise), norming: where normal patterns are set and core values realised, and performing: where you focus and perform what the group was formed for and where dynamic group virtues occur. Steve then gave us a very rushed A-Z of church planting, which was great and I will do another time.

David Fairchild being animated!

Besides all those, we also had plenty of questions and Q&A sessions (which got a little bit annoying for me because everyone wanted to know about how the Crowded House functioned, which I already know, which left less room for church planting specific questions… but I learnt to be patient!) The we also had a group project where we were given the made-up city of Goldingham and given the job of planning a plant there. This was helpful as it gave us an opportunity to chat through very practical issues as a group, which is likely how you would do it anyway.

All in all a great week that I’m sure will prove of much value in years to come. It was especially enjoyable and inspiring. There was a good banter with the speakers that made it all the more engaging. And all that for only £90. Be there next year!

Oh and before Steve starts taking the credit for it when he starts using the term, it was me that came up with the term Community Of Grace (COG) for a missional community!