This week’s guest post comes to us from Jeff Christopherson for christianitytoday.com. 

Does church planting foster healthy relationships between pastors and a collaborative spirit between local churches for a shared kingdom mission?

Not often.

At one time, the motive for church planting revolved around a desire to impact a new community with the good news of Jesus. A church in the city recognized that regions lacked access to the gospel, so rather than asking people to commute 30 minutes, they determined to plant a healthy, autonomous church in this new locale.

But the motivations for church planting aren’t always so pure.

Common today is a spiritually disguised mantra that in essence says, “Our church is way better than yours.” Church planting is not immune from this hubris. Church plants can emerge from dissatisfied leaders determined to launch an upgraded experience that will fix the liabilities of frumpy and unfashionable sacred assemblies.

An entrepreneurial spirit fleshed in this pseudo-missional disguise often swaggers a mile down the street and goes to market with a new brand, where “it’s ok to not be ok.”

Not to be outdone, another ecclesiastical sherpa, impatient by the pace of change at First Presbyterian, flanks the entrance to the city’s new community center with shiny new A-frame signs announcing a new church with a strange Latin name and a tagline, “This isn’t your grandparents church.”

And the market-share of the community’s religiously predisposed shifts from holy cathedrals to high school cafeterias. But is this a kingdom win?

What is a kingdom win?

Missionary thinking automatically recalibrates for increased evangelistic effectiveness, but the proposed remedies shouldn’t be aimed toward existing believers to create a sense of ecclesial dissatisfaction. Church planting by disruption is always a zero-sum game, leaving a disturbing trail of carnage in its wake.

It’s worth pondering whether the cost is worth it. Is it truly a gain for the kingdom for one new church to come into existence while another church (or two or three) suffer and die in the process?

Leaders of existing churches are right to question these practices and approach new church plants with caution. The motives of many planters has been far less than ideal, and many pastors who’ve labored for decades in order to foster church health have been crushed and their churches deeply wounded. The air of suspicion and doubt among church leaders—both new and existing—is well-founded.

One need simply to step into a city as an outsider to learn the harsh reality of church division. A future church planter desiring genuine partnership and collaborative mission is likely to meet with resistance among the fellow pastors and church members in the new city.

Often, pastors are unreceptive to appeals for conversations with a new church planter, thinking either that this person only wants the church’s financial support or, on a more sinister level, that the new planter is simply out to appease the conscience before destroying the churches in the area.

Those who are willing to meet will testify to the pain of church planting gone wrong—many times within the first coffee conversation. A planter is likely to listen to horror stories of pastor’s undermined, church’s ransacked, and reputations tarnished in previous church planting initiatives.

This makes relationships between pastors a daunting challenge.

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