Stop Funding Church Plants? David Fitch Stirs the Pot

I have friends who have invested their lives into bringing Jesus' message to people who don't know what it means to be part of a community of people who are loving God and each other and caring for their neighbors - in other words, a church. These friends are real heroes to me. They are church planters. (I'm looking at you Tim Fowler and Joe Gnatek) Bunny and I were involved in a church splant early in our ministry with a group of people called Grace Baptist Church in Juliette Georgia. It was the best of times and the worst of times, but those people were awesome and things happened among us that still give me goosebumps.

So when I share this article from David Fitch, I am not anti-planting. Planting works... when it works. Tim and Joe have proven that as have many others.

But I do think that we need to step back and look at what we are doing and what the real costs and benefits are. Here at New Hope, we run the leanest we can, and will get leaner still when I am teaching. I think we'll do more ministry then, meeting more people and being able to help more. I like the idea he puts forth of teams of people rather than one family, and I like the idea of people working in the community alongside the folks they would do life with in a church.

So I guess I would give Fitch more a listen than most. Click over and check the article out.

STOP FUNDING CHURCH PLANTS and Start Funding Missionaries: A Plea to Denominations

Just when we thought we had it down - down becomes up

Oh the thinks we do think. In the space of one day I have read an article in USA Today praising the "guy church" and now in weighs David Fitch to not only take on that but every other context specific church.

Actually, I think he's right in the long term. But we're so short term minded that the tendency is always to go for what draws a crowd and work back from there.

Read David's article and see if you don't find yourself agreeing too.

Reclaiming the Mission :: The Weblog of David Fitch

Contextualization extracts the gospel message (like a concept), reduces it to a narrow point of contact and seeks to attract people via this appeal to this contact. Contextualization by its very nature is attractional in the Frost/Hirsch sense. I would suggest then that contextualization makes it almost impossible for the church to be transformational.

Incarnation on the other hand seeks to incarnate the gospel over long periods of time culturally within a context. It enters into a culture as a communal presence whereby it is able to discern its surrounding contact points. It will accept some things in the surrounding culture and bring them into captivity for the gospel. It will flat out reject others. In the process it becomes a display of a redeemed form of that culture.

Contextualization is possible only within a modern milieu: the milieu that stresses the gospel as a translatable trans cultural (as opposed to intra cultural) concept. Contextualization like this makes the church susceptible to the territorialization of the market, where everything becomes splintered into market niches inevitably separating us from one another. The church thereby becomes bi-furcated ever repeating the modern move to identify and separate. We break up and divide: contemporary churches from traditional churches, black churches from white churches, Republican churches from Democrat. Motorcycle culture churches from suburban churches who drive sedans. "Real men" churches from woman churches from sensitive guy churches. The church becomes another form of "identity politics."

Evangelicals, uncritical of their modernist bias, are addicted to contextualization.