Stop Planting Churches

This is going to sound pretty arrogant, but here goes anyway: I am pretty sure that even in the tough soil of New Zealand I could plant a successful new church. I would need some help - particularly with music, as we would need quality contemporary music and therefore quality contemporary musicians. Producing outstanding expository sermons shouldn't be too problematic, I can speak pretty well and I have a good network of others I can call upon. Add in some amazing small groups, and I reckon they would flock in.

Supporters would be impressed, and maybe even increase their giving. I'd feel good about our new church. The problem of course is that in all likelihood those who come would probably all be existing Christians looking for a more fulfilling church experience, so in reality I have achieved next to nothing.

That's presumably why Jesus didn't command us to plant churches. And why He did command us to make disciples. Putting it simply, "healthy disciples will go on to form healthy churches." (Rick Wood), so making disciples must be our priority.

This is not new of course, it seems everyone is talking about making disciples these days, but sadly the focus is usually in further educating those already part of our churches - the problematic words here being "educating", and "already part of our churches." According to Jesus in the Great Commission in Matthew 28, discipleship is about obedience not knowledge, so, wherever and however you consider you are in the disciple-making business, your first self-evaluation question has to be "are the people I am discipling becoming more obedient to Jesus, and are they in turn discipling others?"

Equally important is the issue of who we are discipling. It will not be easy to motivate those who have followed Jesus for years while cheerfully ignoring the Great Commission. By contrast, new disciples of Jesus seem to get it straight away. As someone must have already said, "next year's best disciple-making disciple-maker is probably not yet a Christian." So our second self-evaluating question is "am I merely trying to disciple those already established in their following of Jesus, or am I going out into the harvest field to find disciple-making disciple-makers?"

If it sounds like I am suggesting evangelism is a prerequisite to true disciple-making, well, I am!