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.