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 9th 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 2nd, 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.
