Submitted by Todd Murphy
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Acts 2:42 NIV
Last October I had the opportunity to participate in and attend the first annual Plant New England Conference which was held in Watertown, Massachusetts, part of the greater Boston area. The theme of the conference was "The Message is the Medium" and on this point, the conference seemed to deliver well. The conference was sponsored by the Gospel Coalition, the NETS institute for Church planting and Nine Marks. Keynote speaker was Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Bible Church and Nine Marks. All the major combined sessions were done by either Dever or Rev. Wes Pastor of NETS. I have to say, both of these men delivered fantastic challenges to potential church planters here in the North East. While there was a realistic discussion regarding cultural contextualization, there was no hint of trendy attempts at being "hip" or "relevant." Both are mature men of the Church, sitting on well established ministries of about 20 years. Both are making disciples and have internship programs for future Church planters.
Dever himself brought a robust and historical vision for the Church. This conference was sounding a different tone from many Church planting conferences I have attended. Many over the last few years seem to have an underlying message that the problem in the church is mere tradition and lack of creativity. The seeming solution is that if we are creative or "think outside the box" then we can somehow make the Gospel more palatable or "relevant." I personally think this line of thinking is foolhardy nonsense. I do not think the genuine Gospel really needs our help. What these guys brought was profound message. The problem is a failure to understand and preach the true Gospel and a failure to understand the Church. Rather than presenting the more common ethos of creativity, Plant New England rather communicated a genuine spirit of "reform."
At one point Dever pointed out that if the Church planter chooses to follow everything being said about how to do church that is rolling off the presses from Zondervan, he is just going to burn out. It reminds me of a church planter I know who came to be discouraged one time. He said he had read everything he could get his hands on about ministry and church planting. Then he remarked, "I have read so many differing opinions I do not know which way is up anymore!" I would go a bit farther to suggest that our Christian book industry is probably doing more to hurt church planting that help it because of the constant belch of conflicting creative ideas just creates a bewildering onslaught of ideas.
Dever presented a strongly historic Christian vision of a word and sacrament church, a church that is driven by the proclamation of the Gospel and God's ordained means of grace. He admonished those of us there that whether or not we do the sacraments is not a decision that is up to us (the pastor or church planter). Jesus commanded us to do them, and therefore it is a nonnegotiable. I made the similar point in my breakout session on "making Disciples In a Post-Christian/Post-Catholic Context." In this talk I suggested that where most Evangelicals start by assuming that unchurched Roman Catholics are "lost pagans" is not only wrong, but also arrogant and presumptuous. We do not know who God is going to choose to save so any person who has some Christian background we should give the benefit of the doubt and just enter into dialogue over the Gospel and scripture with them. I admonished those who attended my session that whether the person claims to be Christian or not, whether they attend church or not, out job is exactly the same; our job is to nurture them in the process of repentance through a robust proclamation of the Scriptures.
Thus our job is to make disciples. How do we do this? We do this through the ordinary means of grace that Christ gave to his church in Acts 2:42. These are the proclamations of the Apostle's doctrine, the Christian community, the Lord's Supper (Sacraments), and the prayers. These are the normal breasts which all God's children are nourished at. At the end of my session a bright, young guy asked me a great question. I had shared how in my context in Providence, the things that we as Evangelicals often think have become "obsolete" or "irrelevant" such as liturgical prayer and the Lord's table have turned out to be a key point of contextualization of some of our Roman Catholic families. He asked how we balanced the old and the new to contextualize. I could see his concern. Do we contextualize so much that we let people's preferences completely determine what we do? No, not at all. There is always some contextualization going on. We do our service in English, not Latin or French, and for good reason. But what I admonished him and those who listened is that we need to lead with our principles. While we are communicating a message, and need to always think about how best to do that, we need to do things because they are right. I shared how we did not do liturgical prayers and the Lord's supper every week because it was a gimmick, but because they have been ensconced as an essential part of Christian worship for two thousand years. My point was this: A real Church is always built on Acts 2:42. If you get these things right, you can kind of do what you want. Do you want contemporary music? Fine. Do you want traditional music? Fine. I pointed out how true Gospel ministry is not dependent on style. Tim Keller has proved this by his robust proclamation of the Gospel with umpteen thousand members who come to sing straight out of a traditional hymnal.
One of the biggest detriments to church planting today is that most of the young guys embarking on this are not first men of the Church. They do not have the vocabulary and paradigm of historic Christianity. Because of this, it creates a reactive Christian ministry that is easily tossed to-and-fro upon the waves of every new ministry idea. Real ministry is rooted in the robust Gospel proclamation of a big Gospel, grand narrative which is then continually applied to the life of the Church through its regular means of grace. This is the way both to healthy Churches and virulent gospel mission.
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