Mennonite Weekly Review

In 1992, churches in Great Britain launched a plan to plant 20,000 new churches by 2000.

Murray

There was some success; several hundred new churches did result. But it was not the thousands that were hoped for. Of those churches that were planted, many struggled, and some closed after a few years. Others persisted but did not thrive. Few inroads were made into the communities they wanted to serve.

Looking back, veteran British church planter Stuart Murray wondered what went wrong — and what could be done to avoid repeating those mistakes.

Planting Churches in the 21st Century: A Guide for Those Who Want Fresh Perspectives and New Ideas for Creating Congregations, a new book from Herald Press, is the result.

“I think the main problem was that people focused on speed and quantity rather than quality,” said Murray, who helps direct the Anabaptist Network in Great Britain. “We were more interested in how many churches we could plant, not what kind of church various communities needed.”

Church planting “isn’t just about numbers,” he said. “It’s about the renewal of the church and the development of new ways of being the church that are biblically rooted and contextually appropriate.”

Not all church plants will succeed, he points out. But whether they grow or fail, there are lessons to be learned.

One of those lessons is that Christianity has to be presented differently today.

“In the past, we could assume that people we wanted to reach with the gospel knew the story,” he said. “But we cannot make such an assumption today. Here in Britain, the cut-off point for knowing the Christian story is about 35 or 40 years of age. I assume that something similar might be occurring in parts of North America.”

Another lesson, he notes, is that living faithfully — in the hope that others will notice and then want to know more about Jesus — only works if people are familiar with the Christian story.