Thriving Churches

CMC’s Church Planting Team and other interested individuals have met via Zoom every Thursday morning at 6:30 AM for an hour of prayer, crying out to God to move us from our current reality of relatively random, occasional church plants in CMC, to one where church planting is the norm among us. Something else has happened as we’ve prayed together. In addition to seeing new churches planted, God has stirred our hearts with a passion to see the existing churches of CMC thrive! This shouldn’t surprise us. From the beginning, the church planting vision has been about so much more than simply adding to the numerical count of CMC churches. Rather, it has been rooted in the “mature and multiply” vision, a desire for God to do such a significant work in our churches that the reproduction of new churches is a natural outflow of it.

In the beginning stages of the church planting initiative, the Church Planting Team drafted the following statement:

“We are compelled by Christ to enter into the darkness of our world to proclaim the good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, healing for the broken, and freedom for the oppressed. We will prevail against the darkness by mobilizing everyone, everywhere, every day to help people find their way back to God. We have a sense of urgency to see every church intentionally making disciples to multiply the gospel. We long to see every church engaged in praying, preparing, and planting (or replanting) new disciple making churches that reach lost people and transform neighborhoods, communities, and cities.”

What might it look like for CMC churches to thrive in such a way that our proclamation of good news spills over into disciple making, and our disciple making spills over into new churches being planted, and our church planting spills over into the transformation of neighborhoods, communities and cities? I believe there are several things that would mark that kind of movement:

1. A renewed commitment to prayer. Because prayer is the work!
   
   
2. A renewed commitment among us to lay down our lives for the sake of the gospel. There is a constant pull in our culture away from meaningful discipleship and toward the empty promises of materialism, comfort and the American dream. We need a fresh experience of true fulfillment that comes from surrender to the will of the Father and the power of his Spirit.
   
   
3. A renewed commitment to the priesthood of all believers. Church as a spectator sport where only the professional pastor and a few other gifted individuals perform while everyone else consumes the product will not cut it. Pastors must become equippers who entrust meaningful ministry to other leaders, who in turn seek out and equip others, and so on. I suspect that thriving churches as described in the church planting vision statement above are diligent in their efforts of developing leaders, equipping the saints, and engaging their members in the work of ministry to each other and to the world.
   
   
4. A renewed commitment to the community outside the four walls of the church. In a blogpost about church planting, pastor and author Tim Keller suggested that as a church ages, more and more of its resources and energy are typically allocated toward the concerns of its members. What if all CMC churches would do an audit of their budget and their church calendar? I suspect that when it comes to finances, many of our churches allocate a significant percentage to mission endeavors. But what about our church calendars? What percentage of our activities are devoted to “entering into the darkness of our world to proclaim the good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, healing for the broken, and freedom for the oppressed?”

What would you add to this list? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what a movement of thriving churches might look like.