There is an assumption many churches make that will not turn out well in the end.
What is it?
Assuming you start a church and its “one and done.” It is that the church is an end unto itself rather than the perpetual place where new things are born. This is true of home churches and traditional churches. There are many home churches that become an end to themselves. They get focused inward and lack a mission. They devolve into fellowship groups that lose their purpose.
God created things to reproduce
Creation was made to reproduce.
Animals, plants and humans were made to reproduce.
Even stars recycle material to form new stars.
Disciples were made to make disciples.
Churches at their healthiest start more churches.
Why is this hard?
Now, that last one sounds difficult and it is at scale (as things grow large). But it is actually quite feasible for churches to reproduce at smaller scale. What gets in the way is our perception of church and how we define church. Church is a gathering of God’s people for a specific purpose to do specific things. That doesn’t need all the things that make it hard to reproduce. In its most basic form, reproducing that is actually quite simple.
When churches don’t start churches eventually we have less churches because churches (congregations) don’t live forever.
My hope is that traditional churches would open to up to start home churches rather than small groups. This is going to be necessary going forward because of the barriers to starting new traditional churches and home churches tend to be more impactful (and biblically aligned).
This Requires Vision
Last, when a church has a vision for starting new things that church will most likely be healthy because of all the things required to get to that point.
So what is your church’s plan to start new things: new churches, make new disciples, raise up new leaders, etc.?
We need to start thinking more and more this way, imo.
