Church Planting

This week I became 56 years young in Budapest, and, with the help of my son Daniel, I have make my first blog. I had two reasons for being in Budapest. The first was to attend a conference on church planting and renewal. Church planting has become the hot issue in Christian mission and for those who want to extend the influence of the church.

‘Church planting’ involves planting a seed and nurturing its growth into a healthy plant. The kind of church depends on the message and the soil where it is planted. A worker in Sri Lanka once said if you plant a seed in American soil it will become an American church, Scottish soil will bring about a Scottish church, and in Indian soil an Indian church, and so on. But the big cities of our nations do not reflect one national culture – especially port cities like Rotterdam where the whole world is present. As Christians migrate from different cultures they bring the Gospel with them and a church often grows up around them. I believe that is something God is doing and is not about our clever strategies. He is scattering the peoples of the world in the largest migration movement in human history. Jesus’ parable of the sower (see Matthew 13) describes the scattering of seeds where some are fruitful and others which are not. I think that migration whether because of war, education or economic advancement has scattered the peoples of the world. Churches spring up where migrants are.

My congregation in Rotterdam was a migrant church three hundred and seventy years ago. It became probably the largest Scots church in the world in 1690 with a thousand members. In the twentieth century it became a Scots-Dutch community but, after the church was destroyed in 1940, it was Dutch people who asked for a Scots minister! From the 1980s new patterns in world migration brought about a transition to an international community and now it contains more than forty nationalities and many first generation migrants. They bring renewal with them and the majority of the leaders are non-Western. As a church we also support migrant churches through a network and assist new churches in their development.

In Budapest I heard young Hungarian pastors who are my friends (Lovas Andras, Harmathy Andras and Eszter Dani) talk about their experience of church planting. Some were involved in planting new churches while others were working with slightly more established ones and seeking to renew their vision. Our cities today are multicultural though the politicians in the Western Europe are afraid of what that may lead to. Politicians and church-planters do not create communities. I fear that both politicians and church-planters are too mechanistic and need to adapt to the new realities of a globalising world. By the way, there are many church-planting movements and one of these is meeting in Berlin next month with Tim Keller from New York. “The Gospel to City” Conference is on 25-27 October – contact Martin de Jong: info@citytocityeurope.com. The latest issue of a Christian research journal is devoted to church planting and gives more information on the different movements. See “Vista”, July 2011, no. 6, contact: www.europeanmission.redcliffe.org which is particularly useful because it challenges those church-planters to evaluate their work in different ways.

The second reason I had for being in Budapest was to attend the board of regents of a new graduate university that I have been serving for the last nine years. For Bakke Graduate University, see www.bgu.edu. Ray Bakke has been my mentor since I read “Urban Christian” in Glasgow in the mid-1980s but this week I decided to resign from the board. The main reason was that the project has become too North American for my liking and I want to spend my energy on approaches that more synchronised towards effective ministry in Europe. This is what I was doing last week and I am thinking my thoughts aloud. Maybe this will be the first of more reflections – let me know what you think!