How the New Testament Did the Great Commission and

What it Means for the Church Today

—by—

Rev. Michael Kelly

Executive Director of the Northwest Church Planting Network

We Must Change Our Metric for Successful Church Plants. 

It is often said that it is the leader’s job to define reality. True enough, however, before leaders define anything they should at least try to describe it. Many pastors have given it their all to define their reality bigger and bigger. If one of us actually manages to create a big church reality, we have him do a seminar so the rest of us can learn how to re-define our realities upwards. A friend of mine in British Columbia finally came up with the perfect answer to the persistent question. When asked how big his church is, he’d smile and reply, “Between 10 and 12,000.”  That was true since he saw about 120 souls on Sundays.

The ecclesiastical reality, as God has defined it in America, is that the average church is somewhere around 80-100 people. Evidently God likes neighborhood churches a lot, since he builds a bunch of them. This presents some problems for planters and church planting leaders. Church planters are risk-taking visionaries and the idea of working for eight years and looking out over 117 folks on his 9^th Easter morning can be incredibly defeating. 

On the more missional side of that struggle, it takes almost the same effort to pull off the weekly work of a church for 125 as it does for 250 folks. It is much harder to sustain the volunteer energy in small churches. What’s more, margins are thinner and after bills are paid generative resources for mission are very difficult to create. In sum, all the money and all the people power can be spent on sustaining what is instead of realizing what could be. Anyone who has pastored knows these realities can be massively discouraging.

The Pastor’s instinctive response to all this is to pray and drive and work for more. That is not all bad.  But perhaps we can take a chapter from one of the leaders of the Revolutionary War. By January 1781, Brigadier General Daniel Morgan noticed an abiding battle-field reality. Soldiers with state militia would take one or two shots with their musket and then flee before the Red Coats. Try as they might, no one had successfully “defined” another reality. So, in one of the most decisive battles of the war at Cowpens South Carolina, Morgan decided that describing reality was better, or at least primary, to defining it. He built his battle plan on the assumption, which he then made a direct order, that militia would fire twice, and they run. They did and just as he knew they would. Then the British did just as he thought they would and charged sure of a total rout. Then, in the queue Morgan sent his regulars who pinched the Red Coast from the flanks and soundly defeated Colonel Tarleton’s troops.

We must recognize what comes of most church plants and find a way to make the true-size church, as I call them, not only work but be recognized as a valuable part of the Body of Christ.

The church planting leader can step in to help at this point. His first job is not to allow small to be the new big. In other words, being small is not any better in and of itself than being big. Planters need to be expected to see progress, conversion and transformation in their lives. We don’t need men complacent with small, no-impact churches any more than we want men boasting about big, shallow churches. 

I realize that success in American is measured by scale, so this is counter cultural. And as one who reviews scores of church budgets, I realize that we face hard economic realities. But prizing true-size churches does not create any of those realities.  Rather, it accepts them so that we can lead effectively.  Our churches will fall neatly into the standard ecclesiastical spreadsheet of history. It belongs to us to figure out how to pay for them and how to prize them or we will forever burden preachers with a brass ring only a few ever grab.

Our Network is discovering that depending on the philosophy of pastoral remuneration, which is the largest part of the fiscal demands on the young church; it takes between $130-165,000 per year to operate a congregation in Seattle or Portland, at least.  That is not a Lexus, but neither is it a clunker.  The number can be reduced through the bi-vocational ministry but let us remember that it is not free to give up 1/3 or more of your planter’s time. That also costs the mission. 

At the higher end of that range, our churches can begin to create generative resources. For some historical perspective, Faith Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, one of our founding board member churches, began in 1953 with an annual budget of $15,000. In today’s money that equals $129,000 per year, which is right at the entry point of the range we see in the Northwest Church Planting Network.  Of course, depending on the demographic a plant exists to reach, we find that an average of about 130 (middle-class) worshippers is the tipping point for those numbers.  Remember, that while numbers like that would put the plant on the right side of the American Church bell-curve, they certainly wouldn’t get the planter invited to do any seminars.  I would say that maybe they should.

These factors can all be managed, of course. The church has been figuring out how to pay for ministry since Moses trashed all that gold Aaron made his idols from.  More importantly and more urgently, we need to celebrate true-size churches as described earlier. In the language of the Northwest Church planting, our plan is to start Ace Hardware, not Home Depots.  What if we end up with a Home Depot?  Great, I’ll meet with the elders and ask them for money to plant more Ace Hardwares.

But the true-size church must also be true to the Church’s calling. We cannot excuse mission-less, comfortable churches that have no impact on people of place and don’t seem burdened by it.  Those who have an impact appropriate to their Calling should be celebrated for the value they bring to the lives of millions of Christians and, of course, in the heart of God.

To that end, Church Planting leaders must establish another metric by crafting a profile of a vital local church of about 150 that is effective, relevant in all the best ways to its neighborhood and theologically sound. Aiming at 150 pushes church leaders beyond their comfort while not pretending everyone is Tim Keller. We must delight in churches of this scale that pay their bills and have generative resources left over to build the Kingdom beyond their doors and where people come to faith or are renewed and rescued from their brokenness.

Until we are ready to celebrate these kinds of churches, we will continue to burden our people and our planters with the tasks of defining a reality that only “works” for a few, while God sees fit to have a vast majority of Gospel work done in much smaller settings.

We Must Take Care to not become Mere Developers.

The danger of calling the church an institution or at least institutional is that while it is impossible to build a true Church on our own, it is very possible to build institutions without the Holy Spirit. We have models to follow and Meyers-Briggs profiles to recruit and money to spend and social media to deploy. I am not categorically opposed to any of those. However, they all present the same danger God’s people have always faced.

It is the danger of outward circumcision, of the blood of bulls and goats and on and on. We can become developers and build facsimiles. That can be done. Or we can lean into faith and call on the Holy Spirit and insist from one another that what we build through God is truly something God is building through us. The answer will not be to forsake the use of means and models. If we take the Bible seriously, we will see that doing so would be a fool’s errand.  Instead, we must exercise means with faith, integrity and a mutual commitment to working in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Trust That Christ Knows How to Build His Church

At least once a year I make a point of telling my congregation, which is about 85% under 35 that the Church is by divine design an institution. As an Irishman, part of me does that simply so I can watch their reactions. The more noble reason is pastoral. Whatever the challenges folks face when they encounter the shape and structure of the Church, we must trust that our Lord knew full well what we need. Our people need the Gospel, and they need the community of the Gospel in its full profile.

Of course, that calls her leaders to the highest standard of life and relationship. We must become men full of love and wisdom as well as truth and boldness. Our people must see that we love the Church as it is and believe it to be God’s gift to all of us. They must also see that we love people. The two are not in opposition, but if we are to embrace, serve and in some way embody the organizational authority of the Church, then we must be men of humility. Our King will show us the way and when he does, we can be sure that every generation will have people waiting to respond.

Almost three years ago Jefferson Bethke uploaded a highly polished video called “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.” Within a few days, it had 18,000,000 hits.  I am reminded of the Onion’s headline, “Priest says He’s Religious, but Not Spiritual.” Needless to say, that wouldn’t capture the imagination of a new generation. However, Bethke’s video caught the attention of the NYT’s David Brooks who wrote a column titled “How to Fight the Man” on February 2^nd, 2012.

“It speaks for many young believers who feel close to God but not to the church. It represents the passionate voice of those who think their institutions lack integrity — not just the religious ones, but the political and corporate ones, too.  Right away, many older theologians began critiquing Bethke’s statements. A blogger named Kevin DeYoung pointed out, for example, that it is biblically inaccurate to say that Jesus hated religion. In fact, Jesus preached a religious doctrine, prescribed rituals and worshiped in a temple. Bethke responded in a way that was humble, earnest and gracious, and that generally spoke well of his character. He also basically folded.

“I wanted to say I really appreciate your article man,” Bethke wrote to DeYoung in an online exchange. “It hit me hard. I’ll even be honest and say I agree 100 percent.” Bethke watched a panel discussion in which some theologians lamented young people’s disdain of organized religion. “Right when I heard that,” he told The Christian Post, “It just convicted me, and God used it as one of those Spirit moments where it’s just, ‘Man, he’s right.’ I realized a lot of my views and treatments of the church were not Scripture-based; they were very experienced based.”

Bethke was responding to Kevin DeYoung. You can read about that on The Gospel Coalition site. What an impressive response. He is not atypical, however. Even a generation that has been taught to “non-conform” as a habit of being, cannot deny the human need for community and common value, as well as real shape and even authority. As James Thurber famously challenged an earlier generation, “Why be a non-conformist like everybody else?”

Jesus knows how to design the organizational reality of the Church, as well as its proclamation. We should trust him and his ways. He does not call us to lead-from-behind whatever that empty wisdom is supposed to mean. We must lead from the front, but do so with love, faith and boldness that makes room for broken people in the institution of the Church.

How the New Testament Did the Great Commission and

What it Means for the Church Today

—by—

Rev. Michael Kelly

Executive Director of the Northwest Church Planting Network

Our Apologists Must Turn Their Energies to Defending the Church in History

Our apologists have been busy these last decades.  Atheist zealots have laid waste to more than one soul. At the very least, they have been very loud about it.  And our new priesthood in its lab-coat vestments continues to challenge fundamental doctrines with their scientific-absolutism while academic philosophers and their pop-minions in entertainment, have successfully sown seeds of soft-nihilism. Thankfully commercialism tempers our dread with the gospel of more and cooler new stuff. There is a lot for our apologists to deal with these days. 

All of it is important, but the vortex of the Church’s supposed shame and oppression of truth and culture is the force that first delegitimizes the Gospel in the eyes of the rising generation. In an age that prizes community as the definer of values, it makes deadly-wise strategic sense for the enemy to undercut the integrity of the Church with just enough truth to tell a false story about our history. May God raise-up historians to help the world rightly understand the story of the Church.

It is expected at that point that I acknowledge the many sins of the Church as Miller encouraged us in Blue Like Jazz. However, I will demur. Of course, we have been sinners, but we have also been saints. And the imperfect saints of our history have for all their flaws brought incalculable comfort and learning and progress to every culture in which the Church has had a measure of influence and even beyond.

David Bentley Hart exhibits the kind of forceful ecclesiastical apologetic we need in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. It is a brilliant book with not a little edge, as you can hear in this quote

…[Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was–above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion–rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy (page 6).”

We must embrace humility and be honest about the failures of our history, but honesty moves in both directions. And it is imperative that her people and her ministers rise in defense of the Bride of Christ.

We Must Plant Generations and Generations of Churches.

Some of you have heard of the Rev. Mark Matthews, the firebrand biblical Calvinist and social reformer who took the pulpit at First Presbyterian in Seattle from 1902 through 1940. If you’re not familiar with him; he planted an entire presbytery while he carried two six-shooters the whole time. What’s not to love about that? Dale E. Soden’s biography “The Reverend Mark Matthew: An Activist in the Progressive Era” is a fine introduction.  In that work, Soden briefly discusses Matthews’ church planting methodology. First Presbyterian planted with something of a hybrid between a mother-daughter church model and, interestingly, the multi-site ministries of today. 

The importance of that movement for us is that 80 to 90 years later very few of them still preach the Gospel. We are thankful for those who still do, but we are also aware that most of those have not been immune to the biblical erosion that overtook the others. 

What is the lesson? Simply put, the lesson is to keep planting churches. Some might see the declension of congregations as an argument against church planting.  However, history and theology lead to different conclusions. As we’ve seen the theological methodology of the New Testament is church planting.

How long is the Church supposed to continue that business in any one part of the world? Well, history teaches us that neither individuals nor individual congregations live forever. So, we keep planting.  Of course, there are outliers. First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS is over 175 years old and still preaching the Gospel. And to return to the fruit of First Presbyterian in Seattle, the church I now serve was born out of as a Sunday School class First Presbyterian Church members started for neighborhood children in 1921.

Still, churches do not last forever and sadly many last longer as entities than they do as true churches. The work of continual church planting recognizes this historic reality by answering it with the action of the New Testament mission in order to replace dying forest with new growth.  It also reveals a stroke of divine wisdom. God, whom we might rightly call the first and best sociologist, surely understood the power of what we now see clearly. 

We Must Plant Generations of New Churches for Generations of New People

As Tim Keller pointed out in his well-circulated article “Why Plant Churches,” new congregations not only have a replenishing effect, but they also provide new sociological ecosystems in which converts and new generations of believers find equal footing in a local ecclesiastical space.  I cannot recommend the piece highly enough. There is much to commend it, but this extended quote makes our present point well enough.

First, younger adults have always been disproportionately found in newer congregations. Long-established congregations develop traditions (such as time of worship, length of service, level of emotional responsiveness, sermon topics, leadership style, emotional atmosphere, and thousands of other tiny customs and mores) that reflect the sensibilities of longtime leaders from the older generations…

Second, new residents are almost always reached better by new congregations. Older congregations may require a tenure of ten years before someone is allowed into places of leadership and influence….

Third, new sociocultural groups in a community are always reached better by new congregations… … Also, new racial groups in a community are best reached by a new church that is intentionally multiethnic from the start. For example, if an all-Anglo neighborhood becomes 33 percent Hispanic, a new, deliberately biracial church will be far more likely to create “cultural space” for newcomers than will an older church in town.

As we already saw this same article tracked the church planting trend in the United States and established that as Church Planting outpaced population growth overall church attendance grew to record highs.  Whatever the cause of the post-WWII drop-off in church planting, it is unlikely to be mere ecclesiastical coincidence that attendance dropped precipitously as well.

How the New Testament Did the Great Commission and

What it Means for the Church Today

—by—

Rev. Michael Kelly

Executive Director of the Northwest Church Planting Network

Part 2

The Challenge and Necessity of New Testament Mission in the 21^st Century—

Historical Trends—

Speaking of the advent of voluntary mission agencies, which burgeoned in the 19^th century, historian Justo Gonzalez observes that “for centuries virtually all mission was carried out with the official support of the state. But, in the nineteenth century, most western governments had little or no official relationship with the missionary enterprise.” (The Story of Christianity, Vol. II, pg. 307).

That shift had profound implications for missions, most obviously, Gonzalez notes, on the ability to finance the work. Both State and Ecclesiastical financing were disrupted by the change, which came in large measure due to the Enlightenment.  In God’s gracious providence, however, powerful movements were afoot as England and the New World experienced spectacular awakenings in the 1700s and then again in the 1800s.

The great Missions agencies of the 19^th Century were born out of these tectonic rumblings. As the state withdrew God’s Spirit advanced, and his people’s passion multiplied. Ordinary saints with extraordinary faith partnered and deployed the unbounded energy and optimism of the industrial-modern world in service to the Great Commission. The result was a flurry of entrepreneurial faith and heroic personal risk that brought the Gospel across the World in measures that out did anything we see in the Book of Acts.

The London Missionary Society established in 1795 is a primary example of non-denominational missional faith and energy, but some were denominational. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions is another. The American Board, as it was called, began with the faith of recent graduates from Williams College in response to the Second Great Awakening. What is important for our discussion is that these organizations were voluntary, rather than ecclesiastical or state directed. Believers with a common passion banded together to fulfill the Great Commission.

Of course, the Church’s renewal and expansion are always accompanied by competing forces and the Enlightenment wrought confusion and decay in the Church during the same time frame. While mission agencies sowed seeds across the globe and worked tirelessly to reform prisons and schools and feed the poor, rationalism within the Church became a dry rot. Countless ministers, local congregations and entire denominations would eventually become clouds without rain.

In the 20^th Century, the founding of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1950 was the apex of the modern mission movement. By this time, Missions agencies had established themselves as primary movers of Kingdom expansion. They had deployed vast resources and personal energy and faith-based risk. They brought the gospel and social reform to both sides of the Atlantic and across the globe to unreached peoples. Billy Graham’s ministry was a salvation to multitudes and a complete expression of the power of para-church mission.

And so, the Church, always imperfect was now also bifurcated, but not simply along theological lines.  Its approach to mission was also divided.  Now, a large portion of the vital and effectual missions work was distinct from any ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Although very different in expression, this division between the faithful zealot and the decaying Church-proper is reflective of the hermit and monastery movements of the 4^th and 5^th centuries. They too sought true Christian living and mission outside the decay of a declining Church. 

Regardless, it is worth noting that by the 20^th Century ecclesiastical wandering and theological declension, led many we would call “missional” to embrace the Great Commission outside of the local church. Ministries like Young Life, where I was converted, and Campus Crusade which also had a profound impact on my life, became vanguards for Kingdom outreach.  Inevitably, these trends created tensions among missional thinkers who were wondering what it all said about mission and the Church.   

A View from the Para-Church Generation—

Before we identify the central theological question that tension raised, it will be helpful to consider how it played out in the practical life of many ordinary Christians.  If I may take a chapter out of Paul’s epistles with a twist, “Surely you haven’t heard of my former way of life among the lost…” Nor did you want to, I’m sure. Still, I grew up in an Irish Catholic family that went to Mass as often as it went to Ireland, which we did, for the record.  In God’s sovereign mercies, I came to faith through Young Life and then was discipled by Campus Crusade in college (which notably, eventually began to actually plant churches!). 

During that seven-year period virtually my entire Christian life was lived without contact with the local church. I came to faith, engaged mission and first felt the call to ministry in virtual isolation from the Church. And so, I was learning a set of ahistorical and misguided assumptions about the Gospel mission. We saw the historic Church doing nothing while the para-church movement reached multitudes, including us. And that was just about all the “ecclesiology” I needed. I was part of what I call the para-church generation.

Of course, we were wrong theologically and also blind to God’s work in the Church, but the para-church generation would soon be the adults in the room. And for the para-church generations it seemed obvious that that the church was simply not central to the mission. To us para-churchmen, the Church had become para-missional.  It may have a hallowed place in the life of the believer; but then again maybe not. Regardless, the Church apparently was not necessary for the Great Commission.  This perspective became in large measure the ecclesiastical milieu of a generation of active Christians.  

Missiologists Speak—

Thankfully, these matters were not left to 22-year-old ministry volunteers.  In more academic circles the conflict was taken up by missiologists who identified the central question. In his magisterial work “Transforming Mission” David Bosch noted that the efforts of these missions’ agencies eventually forced the Evangelical Protestant world to address the question of just what the goal of missions was to be. He writes,

During the heyday of non-denominational missions’ societies, the mission had been understood primarily as conversion gentilium— the conversion of the individual persons. It was only natural that in the defensive reaction of denominationalism missions… … … would again, as in the Medieval Catholic paradigm, be defined as plantatio ecclesiae. The non-denominational societies, heavily influenced by the Great Awakenings, had been preaching “a Gospel without a Church” (S.C. Carpenter…). The remedy was planting distinctly confessional churches… The new slogan was “self-governing, “self-supporting” and “self-propagating” younger churches.

Bosch was not over-enthusiastic about that change and saw, in part rightly, that the Church as Organization can be coopted by its own powers and blind to the cultural biases of its primary geography. Those fears are perfectly reasonable. They are also true of every community, every agency, every person and I would add every movement.

But the question at hand is not simply “What could go wrong?” We are not to ask whether the Church has weaknesses. Of course, she does. We are to ask what the Scriptures offer as the intended outcome of the Church’s mission. Without unearthing the annals of Missiology, theologians have offered a range of answers. A representative list includes the salvation of the individual, the expansion of the Kingdom of God, the defeat of evil spiritual forces, the Glory of God, the realization of the Missio Dei, which is conceived as a comprehensive supra-ecclesiastical, supra-Kingdom and trans-cultural restoration of all things. Sadly, Missio Dei became a rallying cry for liberal denominations in the 1900s and was reduced to looking out for good things happening around the world and then simply lending a hand. “Preach the Gospel. Use words if you must” as the saying goes. As it turned out there was virtually never a “must” moment and very, very few words were spoken.

The fact that I am not a missiologist puts me in the perfect position to provide the definitive answer and announce that the winner is “Yes.” It seems that anyone who loves Jesus and people would want all those things. But our aim is not to discern the ultimate purpose of God in the mission of his people. I am more interested in penultimate matters; specifically, what does the Great Commission require if it would be extended until the whole earth is filled with the Knowledge of God?

The biblical answer to that question is, “Churches, of course. Churches will fill the earth with the knowledge of God.”  The Church has been both the agent and the outcome of the mission for two thousand years.  It is the agent is as much as it sows the seed from its own fruit. It is the harvest in as much as that seed itself grows into “church,” which in turn sows its seed again. As the 1989 Lausanne II Manila Manifesto declared:

We believe that the local church bears a primary responsibility for the spread of the gospel… … … In this way, the gospel creates the church that spreads the gospel that creates more churches in a continuous chain-reaction. Moreover, what Scripture teaches, strategy confirms. Each local church must evangelize the district in which it is situated and has the resources to do so.

The Church is one earthly entity that Jesus said he would actually build (Matthew 16.18).  The word in Matthew is instructive.  οἰκοδομέω brings significant weight from the LXX,

which is important for the NT. “To plant” and “to build” are here related concepts (opp. “to root up,” “to tear down,” “to destroy”). God can build, plant, set up or convert Israel, and in judgment… He can also overthrow and destroy His work. The image of building is also common in later Judaism, perhaps because it is suggested by the idea of the “house of Israel.” In the Rabb. God is the builder of the world cf. also Hb. 3:4: ὁ δὲ πάντα κατασκευάσας θεός. (Vol. 5: Theological dictionary of the New Testament).

Clearly the Scriptures use image of building-up for the spiritual growth of individual Christians; however, the Apostles also saw their mission as the means by which Christ would fulfill his promise to build the Church. In Acts 9.31 Luke uses the same term to summarize the progress of the Gospel, “So, the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied”  (Acts 9:31).The Apostle Paul uses the same imagery in a passage we’ve already cited to when he writes, “[The Exalted Christ] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,” (Eph4:11–12).Westerners will read that passage through individualistic goggles, and that is not without exegetical grounds. However, the latter portion makes it clear that the saints are equipped so that the Church can be built, just as Christ said he would.

The Church should be both the instrument and in a penultimate way, the outcome of our mission.  And as we have seen the Church is more than a koinonia club. It came to us with a body of doctrines, a structure of officers, patterns and elements of worship, a code of life and was given heavenly authority to train, admonish and even discipline.