Why Do We Plant Churches?
I get asked questions about church planting all the time! (And I love it!) Questions like: How do you decide where to plant? Why don’t we just focus on making our current churches healthier? Why do we spend so much money on planting? Why is planting so hard? Do you have to be a pastor to plant?
However, the question I get asked the most is, “Why do we plant churches?”
The answer is simple: Because we are called to. It’s right there in the Great Commission, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples…” Jesus not only tells us to go make disciples, but he tells us that he is commanding us to do so with all of his authority. We see the early Church take this very seriously. They become dispersed because of persecution, but as they go out, they share the gospel. They see people come to faith. Then the early church leaders organize churches, bringing biblical structure and guidelines to the gatherings.
The command to go and make disciples hasn’t come to an end. Today we are called to “Go” and reach people with the gospel.
One of the most influential pastors of my time, Timothy Keller, states, “The vigorous, continual planting of new congregations is the single most crucial strategy for numerical growth of the body of Christ.”1
I believe there are two reasons for this. First, church plants are designed around the disciple-making movement. A church plant starts with a few people or a few families, and the intention is to reach lost people. Church plants are designed around the concept of getting involved with the lives of those around you, just as Jesus did in the New Testament.
This leads to the second reason. Church plants usually have a time clock working against them. They are more likely to run out of funds before an established church would. New church plants are in “grow or die” mode. This is actually a good thing because it keeps the church focused on the mission of reaching lost people for Jesus!
Timothy Keller agrees with this, and he states, “The average new church gains most of its new members (60-80%) from the ranks of people who are not attending any worshipping body, while churches over 10-15 years of age gain 80-90% of new members by transfer from other congregations.”2 (We should talk about this more, but that will need to be another article!) The statistics show that church planting is effective at reaching those not already connected with local congregations.
There is another positive side effect of church planting for the CLB. It brings us back to our roots. In 1900, five churches came together to do something they couldn’t do on their own: Send out a missionary. The CLB was birthed out of a desire to partner in mission. Today, over 120 churches from across Canada and the United States partner in mission. We join in mission to send out missionaries to unreached people groups, to raise up young people in faith, to train pastors, and, of course, to plant churches. Planting churches today is reaching the unreached.
North American Mission is asking you to join us in praying for our church planting mission. “Then he [Jesus] said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field’” (Matt 9:37-38).
Speaking about sending out workers into the harvest field, here are a couple of ways that the Lord is working in the CLB. Our Redeemer’s in Minot, North Dakota, just launched a church plant 20 minutes away in Velva, ND. Pastor Ed Nugent said that there was a group of people from Velva who had been driving to Minot to worship and that they had been talking with leadership about planting a church. This very motivated group of 20 or so found a place to host worship in Velva, sent word out around town, and launched a church. They have held several Sunday evening services with 70-80 people in attendance. Pastor Ed said that they were thinking of calling a pastor in the future, but things are moving in such a way that they are praying about doing this soon.
We are also excited that, from October 20-22, Jordan Spina (Associate Director of North American Mission) and I will be traveling with two potential church planters to Washington D.C. for church planting assessment. One of these pastors has completed the nine-month Passion for Planting intensive cohort, and the other is in the class currently. This is a very important next step for each of these men as the assessment will teach us how to build teams around them.
The CLB now has seven church plants in North America and we have two more on the horizon. NAM has also held discussions with a number of other churches looking to plant new churches and additional campuses!
Would you please pray with me?
Lord, we pray that you would lead our CLB churches and NAM in planting more churches. Lord, lead us to where you want us to go and help us to engage this world so that people might come to accept you as Lord and Savior. Lord, as you call workers into your fields, we pray for you to equip and gift them to gather people, disciple those around them, and speak your truth into the lives of those who don’t yet know you.
Brandon Pangman is the Director of North American Mission for the Church of the Lutheran Brethren in Fergus Falls, MN.
1 https://redeemercitytocity.com/articles-stories/why-plant-churches
2 Ibid.