The 2000 Anabaptist Church Planting Survey:

Reflections and Practical Implications
Part 4

Steve Clapp

3. We need to consider the benefits of doing more in house-to-house outreach within the neighborhoods in which our new churches are planted. Increasingly congregations in North America are not really neighborhood churches and draw members from a reasonably wide geographical range. Many church plants, however, are made in neighborhoods which are not "overchurched" with other congregations, and much of the hope for the church plant is to do effective mission in that neighborhood and to reach new people from that neighborhood. Fewer than one-fourth of the congregations returning surveys, however, utilize any kind of door-to-door contacting within their ministry areas. This appears to be missing a significant opportunity.

During the week that I was working in my home studying the church planting data Angela so skillfully compiled and preparing my presentation for this event, I found myself interrupted twice by religious visitors: first by Jehovah’s Witnesses and second by Mormons. The people who came to my door were very sincere, polite people who were there because they were concerned with the state of my soul. I felt compelled to be polite to them, especially since Fred Bernhard and I have just authored another book on the importance of hospitality in all of life (Hospitality: Life without Fear). Fred and I did not make an exception for Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons! As I listened to these visitors at my door and longed to return to work on the computer, I began to think that the expectation of hospitality should be slightly lower when dealing with persons who are set on converting you to another faith!

As my conversation with them continued, I found my mind shamefully going to an image of grabbing my Louisville slugger (a high quality baseball bat, for those of you not familiar with this fine athletic product) out of the closet and chasing these people down the street and out of the neighborhood. I did not have an image of touching them with the bat – just of chasing them. Such thoughts are obviously not good for the spiritual life. And you and I do not want to become like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons, no matter how much we appreciate their sincerity and commitment.

In fact, there is almost no danger that those of us in the Anabaptist community are ever going to be mistaken for Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons! We do not show that much excitement about our faith, and we are not always comfortable sharing that faith with others. We also have too much respect for the right of people to privacy and for the right of people to choose other faiths (or no faith at all) to impose a testimony on others. I certainly would not advocate copying the style of such groups. Yet there may be things we can learn from them.

It is no accident that the approach to church planting of many mainline Protestant denominations always includes a stage of going door-to-door to determine the religious affiliation of people who live in reasonable proximity to the proposed location of the church plant. Such visits do not have to involve imposing a testimony on others. The visits, made prior to the plant or near the beginning of the plant, can serve some valuable functions:

As previously discussed, people in church plants are more likely than those in established congregations to reach out friend-to-friend with invitations and faith-sharing. That is still likely to be the major means of growth in numbers for new churches (and for established churches in most instances). We are living in a time in which networking is very important in reaching new people with the gospel. But that does not mean the neighborhood or ministry area of the church should be forgotten. Door-to-door visits can be especially valuable in the early stages of the church plant. Future visits might take the form of servant evangelism through the sharing of information or small gifts that will be helpful to those in the neighborhood.

4. It is interesting to note that about a fifth of the new congregations in this study were the result of a split from an existing congregation. Differences in perspective on what the church should be doing caused division, which was no doubt painful at the time. Yet those congregations in our study which have split off from existing churches appear to have attained new life and strength. Our study was not designed to secure information about the churches from which the new congregations split. The comments offered by survey respondents do not suggest that those churches have been destroyed as a result of the split.

Church conflict can be very harmful, but we also know that a certain amount of that conflict is inevitable. If the church conflict results in a group splitting off from the church, we are conditioned to consider that a significant loss and a tragedy. Perhaps we need to reconsider whether or not all church splits are in fact losses. Some may be opening up new opportunities for mission and outreach. Obviously that is not always true, and I would certainly not argue that it is true in any particular percentage of instances. This is a topic that it would be interesting to study in more detail within the Anabaptist tradition.

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