Just what is it that you want to plant? 

Church planting was a key theme at the July 2023 meeting of the Baptists Together Mission Forum, writes Sandra Crawford

 
Baptists Together Mission Forum meets twice a year and includes the mission lead from each Association, along with our General Secretary, one person representing the Colleges and another from the Faith and Society Specialist Team. For this meeting we also welcomed our friends and colleagues from the Fellowship of Baptists in Britain and Ireland (FBBI), Stephen Adams from Ireland, Simeon Baker from Wales, Glenn Innes from Scotland and Ben Drabble from BMS World Mission.

Mission Forum reflects on what we see God doing missionally within our Baptist family, and takes the initiative in shaping mission vision and strategy.
 
The scene was set by a video that had also been used to promote discussion at Baptist Assembly, referring to the post-Covid landscape we currently find ourselves in. 
 

Alex Harris, YBA Regional Minister and one of the conveners of the National Church Planting Network, then helped us explore and reflect upon the role of Baptists within the national church planting ecosystem. When referring to church planting we were talking about the widest breadth of expressions of church, anything that seeks to reach people for Jesus through word and deed and gathers people around Jesus by Word and Spirit.  

It was encouraging to hear from Alex the view of Baptists Together from the perspective of other denominations:

• Baptists are perceived as having expertise and ability in releasing diverse models and diverse leaders. We are able to work locally and collaboratively, and to appreciate vastly different expressions and shapes of church.
• We are also seen as people of hospitality, offering a vital space for community, collaboration and conversation, welcoming both historic networks, black majority networks and newer networks across conservative, mainstream and more progressive movements
• Thirdly we are seen as being able to host the migrant-mission/diaspora. It is recognised that these expressions of church disproportionately attach to Baptist identity as opposed to historical denominations or newer networks. The migrant-mission /diaspora space is the largest growth curve of church in the UK at present. 

Simon Hall and Roy Searle also presented a paper on ‘Just What Is It That You Want to Plant? A Dissenting Missional Ecclesiology’ which was first presented to the Theology of Planting Conference in Durham.

In this we explored and discussed that what we have traditionally called local church, with a sanctuary, full-time minister or priest, and manse or rectory, will soon be unsustainable in most communities.

Should we follow the trend to specialised megachurches, whether they be cathedrals, ethnic diaspora churches or charismatic warehouses, as other denominations have done?

Or will such a move inevitably accelerate the decline of local church and exacerbate what we might call ecclesial inequality: that the church and the gospel are more easily available to particular socioeconomic groups. Church-as-we-know-it is retreating most rapidly from the communities that already feel left behind in social, political and economic dimensions.

It was suggested that maybe the new, emerging future of the people of God is more likely to found in the small, the unstable and the insignificant. For many pioneers their starting place is not church, but the gospel. It is about dwelling and being in the neighbourhood and discerning what the Spirit of God is doing in the neighbourhood and in the process discovering signs of the kingdom of God on the streets. Being guests, not hosts, seeing the gospel bring transformation to individuals and neighbourhoods.
  
Pioneers are often not starting with planting a church, but rather planting the gospel and seeing and serving what emerges. If we believe in local church, we will have to work towards something that doesn’t look like local church.

At the end of our 24 hours together there were three areas that the Mission Forum agreed we need to pursue:

1. A conversation with our Baptist colleges and Ministries Team around how we train and form leaders for a mixed economy of church expression, encouraging and enabling different models of church to co-exist and flourish, working in collaboration rather than competition.
2. There is a need to research possible alternative metrics that are more appropriate to measuring the fruitfulness of mission in various contexts. Jesus describes discipleship very simply: that people would learn to obey his teachings regarding character and behaviour. So is success measured simply according to attendance and income? Or should we be looking to see whether the fruit of the Spirit is emerging in our communities and expecting transformation at the individual, community and civic levels? What are we counting as success? And how do we measure that?
3. How do we receive wisdom, insight and understanding from the migrant and diverse communities already in our midst? Drawing upon the wisdom of BMS from the overseas mission field and their learning from the Action Team Programme what are the possibilities of UK based action teams involving reverse missionaries from the Global South and connecting with internships already operating.

Sandra Crawford chairs Baptists Together Mission Forum