Church Planting: What We Need to Do

Why I Won’t Leave

Our Fellowship has had a rich history of church planting, nationally and internationally. We are a movement motivated by the mission Jesus gave to His disciples – to be fishers of men. We have bled evangelism for decades.

Both of my grandfathers, my dad and my father-in-law pastored BBF churches. My entire life I’ve heard stories of our missionaries starting churches all over the world. Here in the States, young men and women were planting churches without financial support or formal training beyond their Bible college education. It’s what we do – we start churches and help others do the same.

When God gave my wife and I the opportunity to plant a church in Boston, it was this network that rallied behind our family to help make it happen. Fifty-four different BBF churches pulled together so we could focus solely on church planting and connecting our spiritually disconnected friends and neighbors to faith in Jesus. One of the more beautiful aspects of this journey was the unity and love we felt from churches that looked like ours and churches that didn’t. There was no single voice of support or encouragement – there was a chorus of voices. God gave us a team of cheerleaders, financial partners, and prayer warriors from all over the country and blessed us more than we ever dreamed.

What We Must Do

Leaders do a good job when they solve problems and do a great job when they seize opportunities. I can see two things of which we are not taking full advantage. First, we offer a no-strings attached network for pastors of Baptist churches. We don’t tell you where to plant your church, what to name it, where you meet, what to preach or make you sign a covenant pledging a certain percentage of your offerings to fund the machine that keeps it going. All we ask is that you pay it forward to others in this Fellowship. Which “others”? That’s up to you. They can be churches that look like yours or churches that don’t. They can be dually affiliated with other theologically aligned groups or not. If they’ve got the same doctrine and are filled with the Holy Spirit, then we know we can work together to get the job done. I’ve been around a lot of other church networks and none of them have the heart of cooperation and generosity that we’ve had in the past and are capable of again.

The second thing is a burden that I know has been placed in my heart by God. We need to acknowledge that our movement does not reflect the racial demographics of our country and there are reasons why. When I observe the ethnic diversity of the church of Antioch and the lack of that diversity in our Fellowship, I can say that we do not reflect the heart of God for our communities. We do not care what color your skin is or what accent you have. If you share our theology and are called by God to plant a new church, revitalize a stagnant church or pastor an existing church, there is room for you in our Fellowship.

If you share my concern, start praying and looking for under-coached, under-networked, and underfunded minority pastors and planters. Invite them to your state meetings, bring them with you to a national meeting and introduce them. Not as a token of your open-mindedness but a token of God’s grace. Leverage your connections for them like others leveraged their connections for you. We can open up this network to the untapped leadership potential all around us in ways that NO OTHER MOVEMENT is doing right now and unleash a Holy Spirit-driven revival.

Where We’re Going Now

Thanks to the hard work that Dan Greer and Tim Long have done over the past four years, we have the margin to get back to the mission of planting new, autonomous Baptist churches. What this will take is what it has always taken – a cooperative spirit, a humble heart, a praying posture, generous checking accounts and the benefit of the doubt. We need to begin assuming the best of intentions in the pastors around us and the planters being sent out from among us. We’re going to need to trust the Holy Spirit to direct the decisions of those He’s put in positions of service. We need to get involved personally and lead our congregations to do the same. We need to rebuild our base. What good is the “strong right arm of the Fellowship” if it’s attached to an anemic and divided body.

We find unity in our common theology, our mission, and our Baptist heritage. We can agree that Paul and Peter preached to different crowds in different ways with the same Truth and God blessed them both. We will give each other more than the benefit of the doubt, we will give them our help. Because that’s what we do – we start churches and help others do the same.