Structures, Strictures, and Spontaneity Robert J Vajko, The Evangelical Alliance Mission Structures exist today that can become strictures against a movement becoming dynamic and spontaneous. What are some of the structures that can easily become strictures that hinder both the growth of a local church in quantity and quality as well as the multiplication of that church leading to a church multiplication movement? In a recent ministry trip I saw again how structures that are not biblical can hinder the growth, the expansion, the health, and the multiplication of churches. We need to read and realize the implications of what Roland Allen wrote in his book The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes which Hinder It. I would like to encourage us to look at structures that hinder the spontaneous expansion of the church and apply them to your context. Structures are not wrong in themselves. All work or ministry requires some kind of structure but there are hindering structures that become strictures and there are what could be called empowering structures that encourage expansion, growth, and health. Christian Schwarz calls these types of structures effective structures i.e. structures that work rather than hinder (Schwarz, 2006, 30). Here are twelve examples of non-functional structures that end up being strictures that discourage spontaneity. First, the creation of structures that had a goal of outreach by church planting and multiplication but have turned inward to care for churches that do not reproduce. This happens as denominations or fellowships of churches come into being with a vision of reaching the lost and planting new churches. But then they turn inward and live to keep their structures alive rather than to spontaneously reach out, disciple, and plant new churches. Roland Allen states: There is a horrible tendency for an organization to grow in importance till it overshadows the end of its existence, and begins to exist for itself (Allen 1956, 129). This can happen to missions or missionary organizations that move from multiplication to maintenance. This inward turning is usually towards the tightening of control in such a way that spontaneity is stifled. Second, a wrong distinction between clergy and laymen. Leaders are necessary but a wrong distinction between those set apart for paid, full-time ministry compared to bi-vocational or tentmaking ministry hinders the expansion of the church. In a seminar given by Donald McGavran on networks or denominations that grow and those that do not grow, he pinted out that the to a growing movement was lay leaders who plant new churches. (Vajko 2009). There are vast untapped resources for the planting and multiplication of new churches that is hindered by what could be called elitism in our church structures. Structures that recognize leadership are not wrong but structures that stricture ministry because of a lack of formal education and formal recognition are deadening to the growth of the church. This is also seen in the restriction of the ordinances (or sacraments in some groups) of baptism and the Lord s Supper to only ordained leaders. It is important to not handle the ordinances lightly and there needs to discipline in the local church. Nevertheless to restrict godly leaders from caring for the ordinances will hinder the growth of the church especially in starting new churches. In a recent article in Christianity Today on the growth of the churches in Cuba, Jeremy Weber states: The church is growing because pastors have loosened power, said a 34 year-old pastor in central Cuba. Pastors in his rural network of nine house churches are allowing lay missionaries to plant churches and even conduct baptisms and weddings because the pastors can t travel enough to keep up with demand (Weber 2009, 24). Page1
One of the great encouragements in the fellowship of churches that we worked with in France was the setting apart of a young man as a recognized evangelist even though he was lacking educational requirements that are so often deemed as necessary for those who want to serve the Lord. The result of this was the planting of a new church in a new region as Charles Sionath served with God with the gifts God had given him. Third, what Roland Allen called Fear for the Doctrine in chapter four of his book The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church (London: World Dominion Press, 1956). The idea here is that if we expand and start new churches or if we unleash potential leadership, we risk a move away from biblical doctrine. Listen here to Greg Hubbard, if we are honest, only God controls His church. Moral failings and doctrinal issues have plagued some of the most structured and controlled church denominations throughout history. Control structures have not proven effective in eliminating problems. It seems that control structures may do more to limit the spontaneous expansion of the church than they have done to preserve its purity. (Hubbard 2004, 59). There are good structures that can be put into place that encourage faithfulness to biblical doctrine such as a daughter church having as its doctrinal statement that of its mother church or all new churches being protected from false teaching by a clear statement of faith. Fourth, The bias of previous experiences and traditions. Jaroslav Pelikan has said, whereas tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. (Pelikan in Bellah 1985). The seven last words of the church are we never did it that way before. We get entangled in our sacred cows traditions which hinder us from creative ideas. Christian Schwarz states, Our research confirmed for the first time an extremely negative relationship between traditionalism and both growth and quality within the church (Schwarz 2006, 30). IYKDWYBDYKGWYBG which translates to if you keep doing what you ve been doing you ll keep getting what you ve been getting. In other words, if we keep doing ministry that is unproductive in terms of winning disciples, planting new churches and raising up leadership things will continue that way. However, if we seek to break through this vicious cycle and move into new ways of doing ministry we may see new things happen. This was the experience of the Jerusalem Council as seen in Acts 15. The apostles and elders decided to move ahead in a new way and the result was the great breakthrough as seen in Acts. When I was in Melbourne, Australia, in May of this year, I had a fascinating discussion with Jossy Chacko, director of Empart, a church-planting mission working in India. Their vision is to plant thousands of new churches in Northern India by the year 2030. He shared that the best church planters are gleaned from the harvest and that they discover that workers who have had a more traditional approach to church planting are less effective because of their previous experience (Chacko 2007). Fifth, what we might call a baggage-laden concept of what constitutes a New Testament Church and its structures can hinder spontaneity. This has been addressed by me in a study where I deal with What is a Church? What is my Goal? Ch 1, 2, & 3. If we add our own cultural baggage as to what a church is to be, then we will be hindered in our multiplication of churches. In his book Starting a New Church, Ralph Moore, founder of the Hope Chapel Movement which has planted some 200 new churches explains: The North American church paradigm seems wired against the rapid multiplication of churches. At its core are three major impediments to the rapid multiplication of Page2
the church. Each roadblock is a useful tool, yet each comes with a price tag that is often out of reach or difficult to pay. The costs that stand in our way include the following: 1. Required seminary training for pastors. 2. A dedicated building for church services. 3. Full-time remuneration for pastors. (Moore 2002, 102) Note that in China they are keeping the churches simple and developing their own leaders from within the churches and this leads to true multiplication. The more one can keep the concept of church and churches in a denomination rooted in biblical norms, the more we will see structures that will result in biblical growth and multiplication. Sixth, a non-contextualized concept of church planting can be a structure than hinders growth and multiplication. We think that we can import a model which may work well in one culture forgetting the importance of context. This does not mean compromising the basic principles of Scripture but it does mean being flexible in all the areas that are not clearly spelled out in Scripture. The worst thing that one can do is to copy a model from another country or even another area of the country in which one is working without contextualizing. Seventh, the concept of planting one church and majoring upon it is a structure that is non biblical. This is one structure that is really deadly to church planting and multiplication. It usually involves building one church and not seeing the importance of churches giving birth to new churches. This onechurch model forgets the organic nature of the Church which is that it is a living church that grows and multiplies organically and not mechanically. Pastors and missionaries struggle with the paradigm of multiplication by thinking (and sometimes stating), I have such a hard time getting one church planted that I do not have the energy or the vision to see regional church multiplication. However, this betrays a wrong vision of what God wants to do and means that the DNA of a given church does not have the multiplication factor built in. So in spite of the struggle to see one church born and growing, we must add the further struggle to see that church giving birth and thus multiplying itself. Eighth, one of the modern hindrances to church planting in a spontaneous way is a wrong megachurch approach that leads to sterility. This is linked to the one church mentality. Large churches are not wrong but what is wrong is the idea that we are to build one large church rather than multiply ourselves. Some mega-churches have been fantastic at planting new churches and so it is not the mega-church concept that is wrong. What is wrong is the mega-church model that does not lead to some kind of daughter church multiplication. Big churches need to add to their paradigm the vision of big churches that plant branch churches. Ninth, a rigid ecclesiastical structure for church planters that does not allow for non-formal approaches to pastoral training. This means that the structures of the church fellowship or denomination are rigid in their insistence that all pastors must have formal theological education. This system discourages older men who will not be able to attend a formal theological training to enter into the ministry of church planting. This kind of structure lends itself to an elitist approach to leadership in other words the leaders have had training that the average person does not have and so they are incapable of ministering as they should. Also this structure eliminates the Holy Spirit who gives gifts as he wills and not on the basis of diplomas. This kind of structure would have eliminated Charles Haddon Spurgeon from ministry for he had no formal theological training. Although he did start a pastor s training college during his ministry, it had as a requirement that those who were accepted for training should be gifted in preaching and winning souls. Page3
Church multiplication is not antagonistic to theological education. It is simply that holding back multiplication because of structures that do not allow for decentralized training will hold back the planting of new churches. See David Garrison s answer to the question What is the role of theological education? in church planting movements in his book Church Planting Movements, pages 269-270. Tenth, an unhealthy structural dependence upon funds from outside of the region to insure church multiplication. Dependency upon the flow of funds to finance pastors and church planters will always finally be a structure that becomes a stricture for when there are no more funds available, then there will be no more churches planted. But a structure that finds not only church planters from the harvest but also finds funds for the harvest will have no limit as to its potential. In my July 2005 article in the Evangelical Missions Quarterly, I explained that churches that reproduce do not make finances central to their reproductive cycle. When I asked a church planter in Grenoble, France, whose church had planted some six daughter churches, how much he had given to help those new churches, he replied, nothing (Vajko 2005, 297). Funding is not wrong but what is wrong is making the planting of new churches dependent upon available funds for as soon as the funds stop so will the church planting and multiplication. In all effective church planting movements, unpaid lay leaders are predominant and provide the church planters to see true multiplication. See my study adapted from a presentation by D. McGavran (Vajko 2009). Eleventh, a structure that limits church planting to traditions and does not allow for the flexibility of the Spirit of God. There is a great biblical example of this not being done in the churches planted by the Apostle Paul. At the beginning, there was a concern in Jerusalem that the churches Paul planted be bound by the structures of Christian Judaism as seen in the Jerusalem Church. But in Acts 15, the apostles and elders came to the conclusion that there must be freedom by the Spirit to form churches that had Christian liberty. So we must allow for the fact that where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty. Structures that want to stricture church planting will always hinder spontaneity. Twelfth, a structure that wants all church planters and churches that has a cookie-cutter rather than a God-formed freedom approach. This is similar to example number 11 above, but merits further development for it is not just a question of liberty but also of creativity in philosophy of ministry. Just as a daughter may resemble her mother to a degree, many daughter churches resemble their mother church from previous experience. However, we all know that a mother that wants her daughter to be exactly like her is heading for many problems. So a daughter church must have the liberty in its functional structures to be different from the church that founded it. Our experience of daughter church planting in France taught us that by letting the new church planter develop a church that creatively evangelized not only saw his church grow but also plant a new church. We appreciated that in Australia the daughter church that we were part of planting was given freedom to be itself and not a cookie-cutter type of the mother church. References Allen, Roland. 1956. The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes which Hinder it. London: World Dominion Press. Chacko, Jossy. 2007. Interview at Empart Headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, May 15. Page4
Garrison, David. 2004. Church Planting Movements. Midlothian, VA: WIGTake Resources. Hubbard, Greg. 2004. Simple Churches. In Church Planting from the Ground Up. Tom Jones, Editor. Joplin, MO: College Press Publishing Company. McGavran, Donald. 1969. Five Kinds of Leaders Needed. Conference presented at Winona Lake, Indiana, September 5, 1969 Moore, Ralph. 2002. Starting a New Church. Ventura, CA: Regal Books.. 2009. How to Multiply Your Church: The Most Effective Way to Grow. Ventura: CA: Regal Books. Pelikan, Jaroslav quoted in Bellah, Robert N. & others. 1985. Habits of the Heart. New York, NY: Harper and Row Schwarz, Christian. 2006. Natural Church Development: A Guide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches. 7 th edition revised.. St. Charles, IL: ChurchSmart. Vajko, Robert J. 2005. Why Do Some Churches Reproduce? Evangelical Missions Quarterly. July 2005 issue.. 2006. What is a Church? What is my Goal? Ch 1, 2, & 3. Study used in seminars training for church planting.. 2009. The Five Kinds of Leaders Needed for the Multiplication of Churches. Study used in training seminar in Budapest, Hungary, Friday, March 20, 2009. A resume of notes taken during a conference given by Donald McGavran at Winona Lake on September 5, 1969 to which I have added some of my thinking and experience in church planting. Weber, Jeremy. 2009. Cuba for Christ. Christianity Today. Vol. 53, No. 7 (July): 20-28. Page5