I keep coming across the phrase ‘rapid church planting’ in many house church circles. What’s that all about then?

An excellent question! Basically the idea at back of this is that if you plant a house church which then plants another one really quickly, and then that new house church, along with the one that originally planted it, does the same thing all over again, and then the ones they plant do likewise, then you have what’s called exponential growth, and inside a few months there’s hardly an unbeliever in sight because everyone’s gone and gotten themselves saved and you have literally thousands of little house churches all over the place. Think of rabbits breeding and you’ve got the general idea. And I must say it sounds great! Imagine, whole cities and nations coming to the Lord because of rapid church planting. Wonderful! Except, well….em….em…well, except that it doesn’t actually work, and because no one, including those who keep going on about it, have ever been able to do it. And the reason it doesn’t work is because it’s based on the complete and utter misconception that if you work a particular formula then certain predicted results can virtually be assured!

What tends to happen is that the people who are teaching this visit places where the Holy Spirit is moving in such a way that you only have to smile at someone and they turn to Jesus, and then return home imagining that if only they do this, that or the other, then the Holy Spirit will do the same thing for them. It is really an example of inverted logic pretty much devoid of biblical understanding. A sort of spiritual pragmatism that sees the Lord a bit like a chocolate vending machine: You put your money in the slot ­ that is, you implement the appropriate plan of action in faith - and out comes the Snickers bar ­ that is, mass conversions, miracles, healings or whatever it is you are believing for. In other words, it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the Lord’s way of doing things as revealed in the pages of scripture, and is actually the result of wrong teachings getting into house churches from the charismatic movement.

Various things happening today in places like India, China and some parts of South America, where people are coming to the Lord at a phenomenal rate, are just marvelous beyond words. But rather like what happened in the New Testament at Pentecost and the years following, it is hardly the norm. If only it was! Further, we must be realistic and not even try to read the Pentecost experience of mass conversions as reported in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles into its later chapters. Pentecost, as I just said, was quite exceptional and not the norm, and the closer we get to the end of the time frame in which the New Testament was written, the further the churches appear to be from their earlier experience of numerical growth. Think of the early years following the Pentecost outpouring of the Holy Spirit as the booster rockets that get the Space Shuttle lifted off the ground and out of the earth's atmosphere and gravitational pull and into orbit, but which then falls away having done it's job of creating the necessary initial thrust. Paul the apostle didn't experience much of what the other apostles saw at Pentecost, and neither did they experience a great deal of it again afterwards. So we must conclude that the norm for churches is to see people being converted at a much slower rate, and with the emphasis being upon discipling people and establishing mature and biblical churches.

What we must be wary of, and this is the basic error not just of the ‘rapid church planting’ movement but also of much charismatic belief and practice, is people in what one might term a revival situation thinking that every believer ought to be seeing the same thing in their situations too. That what God is doing in situation A is by necessity what He intends to do in situation B, and it’s believers faith which will make it happen. We must remind ourselves that even the early church didn't see continuous and ongoing mass conversions as it’s normative experience, and we must be clear that that only what the Lord does, as opposed to our ridiculous man-made techniques and practices, is of eternal value. Such moves of God’s Spirit are based purely on His sovereign will, and whereas we must be faithful in evangelism, though obviously according to personal gifting, we must never get hung up about results. They are purely the Lord's department! However, neither should we do anything to call such revival situations into question. We just need to realize that you can't be part of, or co-operate with, something the Lord isn't actually doing. After all, His sovereignty means that you can’t make Him do anything at all, and neither ought we complain because He isn't doing something we would like Him to.

The amazing thing about this ‘rapid church planting’ stuff though is the complete disparity between those who go on and on about church growth and planting new churches and seeing converts all the time, and what we actually read in scripture. After all, we have in the New Testament quite a few letters written to various churches which together make up really everything we need to know pertaining to God’s will for us. And what stands out, whether you read the letters of James, or Paul, or Peter or John, or anyone else for that matter, isn’t the way they in which they challenge their readers in the churches to evangelism and church planting and multiplication, but rather the simple fact that they actually deliver no such challenge at all. The cry that constantly goes out to churches in these circles today is, “What are you doing about church planting?” “What’s your evangelistic strategy for next year?” “How many new churches are you believing for in the next 5 years?” And of course what stands out in such sharp relief to this is not merely that the writers of the inspired letters to churches didn’t say very much along such lines, but rather that they actually say absolutely nothing along such lines at all. If Paul (or Peter or James or John et al) were concerned that the churches they planted and helped were growing numerically and multiplying, and that the believers that comprised them should be greatly and corporately concerned with evangelistic schemes and strategies and the like, then all we can say is that they sure had a strange way of showing it. What stands out is rather their complete lack of concern over such issues, concentrating instead on the importance of individual believers growing in the Lord and leading holy lives. We are most surely exhorted to be ready to give a  defense for the hope we have, but this is what we might think of as responsive evangelism as opposed to a proactive one. Evangelists and apostles and the like are commanded to get on with the aggressive and proactive evangelism they are gifted to function in, but never do we see such being required of others in scripture, or evangelistic schemes and strategies being laid out before churches with the expectation they participate in them.

So does this mean, in contrast to the ‘rapid church planting’ notion, that we are somehow against evangelism? And the answer is that we are most certainly not. What we are for, though, is engaging in and conducting evangelism the same way it was done in the New Testament. That is to say, let evangelists and apostles and those gifted with proactive evangelistic ability and know-how just get out there and get on with the job, and stop trying to make out that the only reason a church exists is to plant another church. That notion is, biblically speaking, nonsense, and none of the New Testament writers of letters to churches say anything at all that comes within a million miles of such ridiculous and damaging assertions. Show me a family that thinks it exists merely to bring babies into the world and I will show you a dysfunctional family where those children who have already come into the world could well be without the love, nurture and sense of personal worth they ought to be getting in truck loads. I encourage you to read afresh every letter written to churches in the New Testament and to ask yourself what the main concern of the writers is. And you will find that, far from teaching about, and challenging the churches to, intensive evangelism and church planting, their concern is rather that they are loving each other and growing together into maturity in the Lord as His extended family. Personal, and not numerical, growth is the concern and challenge behind the apostles’ teaching to individual churches.

I will end with this. An evangelist I know personally told an elder of a biblical church I also know personally that because the church he was part of hadn’t multiplied and planted out other churches, it was therefore spiritually sick. And what needs to be realized is that it is what the evangelist said that is at complete variance with the teaching of scripture. Further, the very fact that such a mature and godly man could say such a thing at all reveals the dangers and problems that arise when biblical thinking is overridden by mere pragmatism. To brand a church as being sick just because it hasn’t planted out other churches is to judge the Lord’s people by mere human reasoning rather than by God’s Word, and leads to the acceptance of ideas and actions that have nothing to do with it. Should churches exist, and I include house churches, which don’t want to see people come to the Lord, and where believers refuse to respond even to the biblically based evangelistic opportunities put before them by the Spirit, then I would agree that in such an instance something is very wrong. But where there is faithfulness in these things, even though people aren’t being converted, then I say, “So what?” Unless you subscribe to the completely unbiblical, to say nothing of perfectly daft, idea that you can somehow make people become believers, and that it just depends on doing the right kind of evangelism, then all that any of us can do is to just leave such outcomes and results in the Lord’s capable hands.

So we can afford to be wary of all this ‘rapid church planting’ stuff, however spiritual and Spirit-led it undoubtedly sounds. By calling and gifting I am a teacher, but wouldn’t it be ridiculous if I just wanted churches, including the one of which I am part, to be Bible teaching centers? So too with those evangelists and church planters who seem to just want to turn churches into centers of evangelism. It’s silly and damaging, yes! But even worse, it’s completely unbiblical!