Introduction
What does Scripture teach about planting a new church? For someone burdened to start a confessional Reformed Baptist witness where none exists, what are the practical first steps, and what support should they look for? Pastor Jim Butler and Pastor Cameron Porter take on the question in this episode of Ask FGBC.
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Transcript
Keywords: church planting, Reformed Baptist, Great Commission, Second London Confession, pastoral ministry, mentorship, church association, confessional faith, discipleship, church leadership
Speakers: Wim Kerkhoff (host), Pastor Jim Butler, Pastor Cameron Porter
The Question
Wim Kerkhoff: All right, well, welcome back to another recording of the Ask Free Grace Baptist podcast, where we answer various questions. This is our eighth time recording, batch 8 as I call it. This will be question 73. We’ve already published 72, so you can find all of those on the website. There’s SermonAudio, there’s YouTube. The best place to go is freegrace.ca/ask, where you can search, filter, and see transcripts and links to YouTube for all of them.
So I’m here with my pastors, Cameron Porter and Jim Butler. Welcome back, and thank you for doing this.
Our first question was submitted by someone asking how to go about planting a church. What does Scripture teach about planting a new church? What are the practical first steps for someone who has it on their heart to plant, let’s say, a confessional Reformed Baptist church in an area where there isn’t one already? And what support, resources, and partnerships can they take advantage of?
The Great Commission and What a Church Needs
Pastor Jim Butler: The general overarching principle is the Great Commission. Go therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptize those disciples, and teach them all things the Lord has commanded. You’ve got the gospel preached, sinners saved, and then taught all things the Lord has commanded, and that teaching takes place in the context of a local church. So the broadest application of church planting is the Great Commission itself.
More specifically, I think it’s most important that you have people. The church isn’t a building. Churches use buildings, and that’s perfectly acceptable, but the church is the people of God. So to plant a church, you’ve got to have the people of God, and ideally someone who can teach, preach, and shepherd them. That’s not absolutely essential at the outset. Elders are essential for the well-being of a church, but not necessarily for its being. So there can feasibly be a time where a group of people is gathering without a specific shepherd yet in place, though ideally you’d have a pastor, or someone en route to pastoral ministry, serving that group.
I’d also say the people ought to be bound together by a common confession. We’re Reformed Baptists, so that means subscribing to the Second London Confession of 1677. Any church we’d help plant, we’d want to be confessional. That’s not a dig against other expressions of the church. We simply have a vested interest in seeing churches planted that represent the confession we hold to. If we’re assisting a plant, that might mean filling their pulpit from time to time, or addressing particular needs they have. There’s a financial component too. Historically, we’ve ponied up some of the funding ourselves, expected the church being planted to contribute some as well, and left the door open for other churches to cooperate if they want to.
Managing Expectations: No Perfect Church
Pastor Cam Porter: I’m comfortable with Jim’s answer. I’d add that it’s important for the people constituting a planted church, especially where there are no officers immediately in place, to have a proper disposition going in. There can be an idealistic expectation where people are chasing what they see as the perfect church, but there is no perfect church this side of glory. It’s good to manage expectations within the rubric of what a church ought to look like in glorifying God and rallying around what’s most surely believed, while still recognizing that we live in a fallen world and Christians are still marked by remaining corruption. There should be excitement about the church planting endeavor, but it needs to be held within that biblical rubric.
Why Church Plants Fail
Wim Kerkhoff: A lot of plants do seem to fizzle before they reach maturity, just from division, lack of unity, egos, pride.
Pastor Jim Butler: And insistence on preferences. The bottom line is you’re never going to get everything you want out of a church, and you shouldn’t expect to. It’s not about you, it’s about Christ. A confessional approach gives you the general characteristics and the specific marks of a true church: preaching of the Word, administration of the sacraments, and discipline. People may want extras here or there, but you have to be willing to say, the Word is being preached, my soul is being fed, what else should I want? That’s not just true in a church-plant setting, it’s true in ordinary church life too. You focus on the main things. It’d be nice to have this or that, but it’s not requisite. If you’re genuinely needing something better for you spiritually, it’s not necessarily wrong to look elsewhere, but a consumer mindset, where everything has to be about you, is a dangerous position.
Pastor Cam Porter: Going back to the point about a good confession of faith, that’s foundational to the life and well-being of the church. The best confessions will have a chapter on the church and on Christian worship, and having that chapter lets the people constituting a church plant make an honest declaration of what they believe a church is to be. Good confessions never include what’s inconsequential to a church’s life and structure. They capture what’s necessary for a church to be a church, and exclude what people ought not to be busy about.
Mentorship and Association
Wim Kerkhoff: Jim, you’ve mentioned many times the value of mentors. You worked with Dr. Barcellos for years, and you’re mentoring other people now. There’s also the importance of being part of an association, right? Don’t go it alone.
Pastor Jim Butler: That’s right. It’s beneficial to be in an association, and beneficial for younger men to find older guys who will take an interest, advise, encourage, and pray for them. It’s a group effort.
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