Three Pillars of Church Planting
A Missional Background
My wife and I served among the Yembiyembi people for 13 years. How the gospel came to them could model what church planting looks like in today's day and age as we send out workers to go to the ends of the earth.
We told them we were going to do four things: learn their language, teach them how to read and write in their own language, translate this really important book, and teach them what that book says.
We started learning what it was to be a Yembiyembi. We had to learn how to do these things that were intrinsic to Yembiyembi society to become as much like them (without sin) for the sake of the gospel. Two and a half years later, after learning their language and culture, we started prepping for the process of teaching them the scriptures. Finally on April 21st, 2008, the first time in the history of the world, 40 to 50 speakers of the Bisis language understood the grace of God and were saved from their sins.
We then stayed for eight more years to help those believers grow into a strong New Testament church. How they lived and how they died attracted more and more people to the gospel and to the church.
We see a model in the way that Paul planted churches. He didn't just leave them on their own, he would go back to check on them to encourage them. I get the privilege of going back every year to check on that church.
From that, let me draw three lessons from my time in Yembiyembi that are so foundational, but seem to have diminished in our day and age.
First Pillar of Church Planting
Church planting is the goal of the Great Commission. Missionaries rarely achieve greater goals than what they aim for at the outset, and church planting, the most difficult of all jobs, should be their aim.
This is not a short term endeavor. It took us 13 years to see not only the gospel shared but also the church established among the Yembiyembi. You've got to commit for the long haul. We see the apostles doing this.
The recorded life of the apostles is the strongest argument for why church planting is the goal of the Great Commission. The church is the very essence of the Christian community. Churches are strengthened and grow in number, churches send their members to see other churches planted, and the church proclaims the gospel to the ends of the earth.
When we moved into Yembiyembi, wife beating was common. We could have tried to stop these things immediately and while that may have been short term preferable, we didn't think it would have long term fruit.
The alternative was to learn their language to full fluency, preach the gospel, raise up disciples, gather those disciples into a church, and let the testimony of the church start to influence the culture. We started to see the testimony of the believers change the culture. If you want to see a change in wife beating, plant a church. If you want to see a change in a people group in any sort of abuse, in any sort of poverty stricken situation, plant a church. If you want to see the gospel go to the ends of the earth, it's through the church.
Paul says in Ephesians 3:8,“To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan and the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.”
It's through the church that the glory of our God has proclaimed. That's the dominant method of the Great Commission. All other things find their support in church planting and church strengthening.
We don't rush around trying to do things quickly. We try and kindle these centers of life that will continue to grow. The goal is to see these churches press out where outside missionaries will never get to. We build up churches and through the church we see the fulfillment of the Great Commission.
Second Pillar of Church Planting
Language is a metric and means for the Great Commission.
In our day and age there is no agreed upon definition of missions. It seems that anything and everything, as long as you're doing it with a non-family member outside of your house, counts as missions. The lack of a proper definition has caused much confusion. Missions is churches sending qualified workers to start and strengthen churches across significant barriers, geographic and cultural, but especially linguistic.
Let's talk about metric first. When we try to define missions, number one, the mission of God and the mission of the church are not the same thing. To conflate the mission of God with the mission of the church is to flatten the distinctives of the Great Commission. Social change is always downstream from the proclamation of the gospel. We must remember the primacy of the tongue when it comes to a lost and dying world. Let's not lose the distinctiveness of the mission of the church in a sea of good things.
Number two, language is the dominant barrier to the Great Commission. When God chose to separate people, he didn't choose to separate them by height, race or any other factor. He separated them by the language they spoke. You can never know someone's culture fully until you know their language.
When we hear men proclaiming the glory of God in their own language, we’re starting to see the undoing of mankind’s separation.
Number three, we need better categories for missions. Let's not say only “ends of the earth” missions is true missions. Remember that Paul sent out Timothy and Titus to strengthen churches, but Paul had a particular ambition, “I go where no foundation has been established.”
Let me propose four categories of missions. First, the training of national pastors. The strengthening of local pastors is not going to be done from foreign missionaries. It will have to be local guys training those men.
Next, English speaking churches. Never in the history of the world have we had so many biblical resources gathered into one language. We see churches established and built up in these communities, but they still need strengthening.
Third lane: the national languages of the world. These are not unreached language groups. There are churches among them, but not enough.
And then finally, the fourth lane of missions, minority language churches, which are languages where no church exists. This is the Pauline end of the spectrum. There's roughly 3,100 of those languages left today that do not know of the glory of our God.
We must press on in all four of these lanes, diminishing none of them. This isn't meant to suggest that the church and language are the totality of the Great Commission, but rather a better biblical metric for measuring progress.
It's unwise to measure the Great Commission in an effort to accelerate or try and time Christ's return. Careful with the completion language. No man knows the date or the hour except God the Father. But the church can and should be more strategic, more intentional in her efforts of clarity on terminology and thinking.
Now to the second half of this point, let's look at language as the means for the great commission. The hardest task of missions is the learning of another language. There's a humility that is needed to go back to speaking like a child. There is a perseverance that is needed to overcome the monotony of language learning. And too many men want to see quick results. They have a thirst to dive into ministry too quickly without paying the price of admission to a new language and culture. This results in a weaker gospel and quite often weak translations of the Bible that sound wooden and foreign. All languages, because they're created by God, have a particular way that they put things together. It's up to the diligent missionary to know these things before we bring the word of God in so it doesn't sound like something an outsider would put together. If you are a foreigner to the language, so is the God that you represent.
A recent Radius graduate said that it's not uncommon for missionaries to go over and wing it when it comes to language learning, only to be discouraged by their lack of results and eventually quit. These missionaries then settle into work that they can accomplish in English, ultimately limiting their long-term effectiveness. They will forever be dependent on translators or broken language to communicate.
The entire missionary task is front loaded in pain. It's at the back end that you have Bible translations, elders and deacons, clear communication. If you, by God's grace, persevere, you get to see the benefit at the back end.
Don't go for the short term, go for the long term. Through slow painful progress, we moved from outsiders to insiders. There was no date that that happened. It happened over the time period of learning and stretching. The gospel was able to ride on the back of that sweat and credibility. They saw what we'd gone through and it made them want to hear the message. The gospel was given credibility and our God was able to use it to great effect.
Third Pillar of Church Planting
Finally, slow, patient growth is far preferable to fast and quick.
In order to see growth in missions, you have to first start the race. I'm particularly saddened by the statistics that 2 to 3% of all missions giving and less than 3% of all missionaries end up going to unreached language groups. There's not a lot of people signing up to go to these places where the gospel and the church do not exist. There's a lot of money raised off of the verbiage of unreached people groups, but very few of those dollars and very few of those people end up making it to those places. But the God of heaven and earth has chosen to make the proclamation of the gospel ordinarily: through His church, through His members, through His family.
Those languages have to get to those places and there is no other backup option. Martin Luther said it's inconsequential if Jesus died a thousand times, if he is not yet heard. John Calvin said that the gospel does not fall from the clouds like rain by accident, but is brought by the hands of men to where God has sent it. There's no backup option.
Romans 1 teaches us very clearly all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and everyone will stand accountable to God.
Commonly, domestic ministry trumps overseas ministry by a wide margin. By God's grace, we have good churches in every major city in the United States. Too often the patient, persevering teaching of the word is set aside for the fast, the quick, the rapid.
Speed is the enemy of missions. Quite often, you don't have time to make the gospel clear in their particular context. This has resulted in explosive syncretism, the mixing of two world views. Too many missionaries do not fear syncretism as much as they should. They go too fast. And what they get is addition to the pagan worldview, not displacement by the word of God. What we're fighting for as missionaries is not addition, but for displacement. We're pushing out an entire worldview and replacing it with the biblical worldview. Syncretism is why you have so many foreign churches where members gather for worship on Sunday, and on Monday when their sons and daughters are sick they go to the witch doctor. Syncretism is one of the worst things that has been exported from the west because we did not patiently learn to become a learner before becoming a teacher, and then to speak with wisdom. We are farmers planting crops. We plow, we sow: God waters. And we watch, and we pray.
The churches we plant are not prepackaged adults awakened by grace. They're newborn children coming out of darkness and they need to be taught, defended, and nurtured to see maturity in Christ. The law of slow and gradual growth is the norm in His kingdom. Yes, God can bring rapid results. That's not normal. We don't measure progress in results. We measure it in faithfulness. Will you stay? Will you continue to slog on? Even the secular world knows this, that things of value typically aren't acquired in short periods of time. How much more the eternal in lands and tongues where the kingdom of darkness had held sway for generations!
When we taught the Yembiyembi the gospel, we stayed for eight more years to see that church established, to see it brought to maturity, to see elders raised up, so that when we left they had seen their own members of their own community raised up to be teachers, elders, and deacons.
Friends, the final command of our Lord rests on his church. The gospel will not fail because our God will not fail. He has said that he must have those sheep from other sheep pens. They too will listen to His voice and be gathered into the one flock, but the message they hear has been entrusted to the redeemed. Those ones are the ones who will bring it to foreign lands quite ordinarily. They will come through human tongues sent by churches to establish beachhead outposts of light in lands of darkness. Let us work patiently to build up with lifelong care those Christ-centered embassies.