Kairos Church Planting Support

Have you ever heard someone say, 'Yes, our church would like to church plant, but we can't possibly do it until we grow to X number of members'? Or perhaps you've thought that yourself. We hear this statement because, typically, most of us think in terms of only one kind of church planting: when a congregation sends out 50 to 100 of its current members to a nearby location to begin another congregation. We call this type of church planting hiving, like what bees do when a swarm moves out of an established hive to begin a new one. There are, however, other types of church plantings. This week in our countdown article we're looking at different types of church planting, including hive planting, daughtering, mission planting, and vocational church planting teams.

First, let's consider church planting using a biological analogy based on DNA. We are familiar with the function of DNA as that replicating mechanism within cells that guides their reproduction and growth. Healthy cells multiply themselves according to their DNA patterns, creating new cells which have the same DNA structure as their parent cell.  This is the whole basis around which cloning occurs. When an animal is cloned the resulting new animal carries the same genetic codes, DNA, that the original animal had. The same is often true for the hiving method of church planting. When a large group of people from one church move out to form a nearby, new church, they will typically take with them most of the same ways of thinking and acting that they experienced in their original congregation. It is who they are, their DNA. So the new church is likely to be a clone of the old church in function, structure and practices. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with church cloning, but just like in the animal world, when there are too many 'identical twins,' the gene pool becomes depleted and these churches will begin to experience a loss of vitality. There is not enough diversity in the churches to meet the challenges of new people, new circumstances, and new thinking in the world around them. The old ways become simply that 'old ways' not sufficient to sustain viable life in the new world.

One of the great benefits of church planting is that there are ways for churches to reproduce rather than clone. Just like in reproduction where parents produce children who are similar to them, yet different, with lives and character of their own, church planting using reproductive methods creates churches that are reassuringly similar to their parent, yet vitally different.

The reproductive analogy is easiest to see in daughter church planting. Daughter church planting occurs when an originating church (the mother church), supports the establishing of a new church through people, financial and expertise resources.  While we don't know for sure, it is probable that a number of churches in Acts were begun using such a pattern (Acts 21:20). Like hiving, daughter church planting is usually geographically near to the mother church; near enough where fellowship and shared activities can occur fairly regularly. What distinguishes daughter church planting from hiving is that daughtering focuses on evangelizing unchurched people to form the central core of the church while hiving forms the church core from transfer members. Daughter church planting is a powerful method to raise the density of churches in a focused geographic area. This quality makes daughter church planting well suited for urban environments.

Another type of church planting is what may be referred to as mission planting. This is what Paul and his band of traveling companions did during Paul's missionary journeys. Paul was commissioned to preach and assemble new bodies of believers (Acts 13:2; 14:21-22). What distinguishes mission planting is that there is an identifiable individual or team of church planters who typically go further afield than daughter church planting. The greater distances require more preparation for the church planter(s), often times more financial support and greater attention given to communicating and encouraging the church planting effort. Sometimes mission church planting is referred to as parachute planting because the church planter is dropped into a new area isolated from other churches in the fellowship. Mission church planting is a powerful method for increasing the extensiveness of the church across large geographic regions or nations.

Right now there are teams of college students planning to move to target cities around the United States with the express purpose of planting new churches. There are at least 3 vocational church planting teams committed to come to the Northwest from Harding, Lubbock Christian University and Abilene Christian University. These teams may have one or two full-time church planters, but for the most part the 5 or 7 or 10 families are planning to come as vocational missionaries. These teams are similar in that respect to the exodus movements of the 1960s. The team will locate in their target city, get jobs as school teachers, bankers, computer programmers or whatever vocation they are trained for, and through friendship evangelism make contacts, develop evangelistic small groups in homes, and coordinate these church cells into a cell-based church, or perhaps, eventually, into a more traditional church.  A primary benefit of vocational team church planting is to help re-distribute the concentration of Christians, moving committed Christians out of highly churched areas to settle in less churched regions of the country.

Hiving, daughtering, mission planting or vocational church planting teams, there are a variety of ways to plant new churches. Each approach brings its own distinctive strength to the arsenal of kingdom advancing strategies. Now which one you or I or any other church might choose will depend much on what God is calling you or I to do, but the critical idea is that each of us hear God's call to advance the kingdom- then answer Him with action.

For the sake of the kingdom,
Stanley Granberg