Reports from the Listening Committee

Our task as a listening committee is to bring together some of what we have heard and respond – by bringing our observations while birthing more questions for us to consider together. I have been listening around the edges and at the center. What are some words we have heard?

We have good news for a broken world, and our churches must be good news for that world as well. I sensed the call to plant niche congregations – churches that are distinctive and peculiar according to the values they hold. These values/themes will not be heard in our world unless we speak them. This is especially necessary in this time of liminality – between what is and the postmodern, post-Christendom world we are entering. How are the trainers and equippers preparing church planting pastors for a multimedia culture, a wired generation?

There are several church planter training opportunities available, such as that at Ashland Theological Seminary. But what follows? What happens then? How are we continuing to network, nurture, and support church planters and their people? How might we be connecting within our denominations and transdenominationally? Perhaps it’s time that we hold a retreat for church planters and call it a Church Planters Advance. This might be an opportunity that New Life Ministries could facilitate.

As we hear church planters’ concerns from the Anabaptist Church Planting Survey, we need to articulate the values we bring to the churches we plant. And we should do that in a place where they can be worked out, tested, and supported. Can we articulate these values transdenominationally or must it be done separately?

Regarding the diversity of church planting models, there was a time when there was only one model – that of the entrepreneur. What does the diversity of the appropriate models have to say about our assessment? We need a balanced approach. We know that women have often been discouraged from becoming church planters. We heard here that they have an important role to play today. That is good news. Hallelujah!

Church planting pastors need to be listeners. And we need to be listening to each other in order to develop supportive relationships.

Further, we need to be self-reflective. Our speaker said we must have church planters who are theologically reflective as well as "doers of the word." My mind was drawn back to the model I have used to help ministers make meaning in the context of ministry. For this particular model, one needs to think of an equilateral triangle with each of those angles named as follows: A = Thinking, B = Doing, and C = Being

There are hazards if pastors focus on only one of the angles:

But there are also hazards if we focus on any two combinations and not the third:

So where does this leave us? For church planters in the Anabaptist/Pietist tradition, all three aspects or angles need to be present to make meaning in the midst of ministry –
A + B + C = M (Ministry) – and sorry if my algebraic equations are a bit obtuse (no pun intended). Meaning making brings all three together and sets them in the context of the new church development. I affirm the reflective aspect that our speaker has drawn us toward as one of the angles of the ministry. But without all three in balance, we will end up planting churches that are culturally irrelevant, spiritually empty, imaginatively impoverished, or black holes for burnout. All this points back to the importance of training and support of the church planter.

On another note, I began to think of a larger sociological question: who follows the founding church planter? Should it be the same type of pastor or someone quite different who may address the different needs as congregations mature?

We do have good news. Congregations and individuals must live it out in effective ways. What that means for our ministries in education, encouragement, and engagement is waiting to be manifest in new ways. God’s urging for us to discover those new ways propels us forward in lives of faithful evangelism – and that is what this is all about!

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