Today I was reading a discussion over at Bob Robert’s blog about how getting conversions should not be the primary goal of church planting. Instead, we should aim for what Jesus tells us to aim for, which is making disciples.
The issue, of course, is “How best do you make disciples?”
For now, the comments by Bob Roberts reminded me of something very similar I read in Exiles by Michael Frost. He writes that after they started their church in Australia, some older Christians started coming “to take quick look at how we were doing and if it was working.” He says that he “discovered that most of these older people were survivors of similar community-building experiments from the 1970s” and had become jaded and cynical. They told Frost that his new community “wouldn’t last” (p. 108).
He goes on to say that after studying the transitional nature of the early church in Acts, he realized that aiming for community is not a goal in itself, but is instead a by-product that is gained through aiming for a better goal – that of mission (p. 109).
And this brings us back to the question of discipleship and reasons for church planting. How does a person become transformed? How best can we make disciples? I’ll take a quick stab those questions tomorrow.
A pastor wants to get paid by the people of the church so he can free himself up to do “ministry.” This is not bad, but a missionary will often get a job in the community so he or she can live and work among the people, and be seen as one of them.
