Church Planting in the Mission of the Church

The Lord Jesus Christ yearns to share with all humankind the oneness with Himself which He has won for them by the sacrifice of His own life on the cross. Therefore He has sent the Church, His witnesses, upon the mission of offering life to all, of telling the Truth about life with God and of nurturing people to faith by feeding them with His Word. This is the God-ordained, the God-commanded way. If God's people do not tell God's story, Jesus promised that the rocks would cry out. But what a shame, if the beneficiaries of God's abiding love choose to keep it to themselves. It is rather the privilege and the mission of the Church, the saints of God, to bring life and light, health and wholeness into the darkest corners of the human existence.

Population Shifts Create Need

The population of our nation is constantly expanding and shifting. The tide of people in any geographic region rises and falls over time. Because the population is growing overall, the waves of new residents create new communities on the fringes of our metopolitan areas, the OUTER CITY. Or existing population centers, the INNER CITY, change their culture, their ethnicity, or their family makeup.

The Church, the body of Christ, is an integral part of these population movements. Thus God's people often find themselves farther removed from the ministry of existing congregations, yet in need of such ministry.

Like the early Church, they voice the sentiments of the writer to the Hebrews:

We must also consider how to encourage each other to show love and to do good things. We should not stop gathering together with other believers, as some of you are doing. Instead, we must continue to encourage each other even more as we see the day of the Lord coming. (Hebrews 10:24-25 GWN)

So they need to plant a church, these transplanted believers. They need to gather around the Word and the sacraments in a new location, forming a new congregation, however small. They need to call a pastor to shepherd them in this new land. And they need to touch the hearts of the lost around them, drawing them to the cross, and to the fellowship of the faithful.

Church planting is one means of responding to the mission of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore lies at the heart of the mission of the Christian church. It is both a function and a fruit of the Word. Therefore it behooves us to give thought and energy to the process of church planting, to use the resources which God is providing, and to step boldly into the shifting waves of population with the precious Water of Life, for the glory of God and for the sake of the lost.