Putting the Hip in Church Planting Fellowships : The Law of Unintended Consequences

     The other day, my wife (who happens to be one of the most hospitable and generous people I know) made a meal for some good friends of ours who had just welcomed their third child into the world. Now, my wife does an excellent job on two fronts with these meals: 1) She stays on top of caring for others with them; and, 2) She does a very good job of figuring out what kind of meal should be made and then does a great job making it. So, last week, to accompany some well-made soup, she found a recipe for bread that we hadn't tried before, a recipe that had received some good reviews from others. The soup turned out well. The "bread" did not. Accordingly, it did not accompany the soup to this family, whom we care about and did not want to be responsible for breaking any of their teeth. As an aside, if anyone works for a brick manufacturer and would like to find a way to only heat their bricks in a 300+ degree oven (as opposed to the kilns presently used), we have a bread recipe that would substitute your brick recipe well.

     Last week, I began a series entitled "Putting the Hip in Church Planting Fellowships," providing some perspective on what I see as some missteps in contemporary philosophies of church planting. Let me emphasize again that I love church planting as a ministry, which is one reason I hope these posts will resonate with folks. Because I want to see church planting increase and be done the right way. But not only one or the other. They both have to be there. And that leads us into today's post.

     Like the recipe my wife used to make the brick-bread, a philosophy of ministry that fails to incorporate the necessary components will inevitably fail. For whatever reason, the results might be endorsed by a whole host of people. And it might even seem to start out well, like a good recipe would have it. But neither endorsements nor good beginnings avail for a good loaf of bread or, much more importantly, a healthy local church. So my concern here in these posts is to address a missing step in the recipe for planting local churches that, in my opinion, is creating a local church culture in the United States that is out of character for that most precious ministry. It is the "law of unintended consequences" - well-intended tweaks to the nature of a ministry that ends up rerouting things down the road in ways not intended, yet damaging to churches, families, individuals, and the culture at large.

     This post is intended to give you a preview of some of those concerns, which I'll pick up and discuss over the days ahead. Each concern has its place and will have a separate post devoted to it. The list below summarizes the inevitable "unintended consequences" that, in my opinion, the present emphasis in the church planting culture on targeting segments of culture rather than geographic regions are creating, both short-term and long-term:

• A divergence from the biblical pattern of gospel-centered identity inevitably promoting a culture-centered identity among those gathered in the church plant;
• Focus on a segment of culture inevitably gathers a homogeneous group. Accordingly, this group fails to represent the cross-cultural character of the New Testament church that testifies to the supremacy of the gospel. Along with this, the group will find it difficult to pursue the missionary enterprise of the church in pursuit of others, both "naturally" and due to the reinforced philosophy that focuses on people "like them";
• The oft-selected subcultures tend to be widely shared in church planting fellowships. Twenty years ago, it was "unchurched Harry and Mary." Now it appears to be hipster Harry and Harriet or tattooed Tom and Tracy. But this emphasis on targeting subcultures ends up marginalizing such a tremendous percentage of the population that instead of evangelizing a community, it evangelizes a part of the community. And the rest of the community continues to go unreached, though the statistic of a "church plant" goes up, gets us excited, and leaves thousands of people without a witness while zeroing in on a few hundred.
• When emerging or popular subcultures are targeted, an inevitable premium of the church plant ends up being "newness" or "relevance." While this dynamic may "help" some folks who spend Sunday mornings in a bar, it can be a major stumbling block for the large percentage of folks who spend Sunday mornings at churches that proclaim a false gospel. When these people encounter someone from Hipster Church of Cooltown, they stumble over the apparent lack of transcendence accompanying worship and would prefer to stay with something familiar that at least "seems" like a real church. While there's nothing necessarily wrong with being from Hipster Church, why is it okay to justify the "relevance" as the removal of a stumbling block, when a large percentage of Americans are more prone to stumble over the fact that a church plant doesn't even seem like church to them?;
• When we target subcultures, we inevitable shift the focus off of the transforming power of the gospel and the saving power of the Triune God to a subtle trust that our methods are trustworthy enough to hang the church's hat of identity on. "We're not like other churches" shouldn't be the banner flying over a church unless it's because every other church in the community fails to proclaim the glorious gospel of God's grace to sinners through Christ;
• Instead of reconciling natural differences by the gospel and providing occasion for actual application of that amazingly peculiar effect of the gospel within the body of Christ, it can further harden long-held differences that are based on culture, rather than believer/unbeliever. In a culture that continues to demonstrate racism and class warfare as not only de facto, but even pursued for the sake of political gain, there is tremendous opportunity for church plants that embrace a model of ministry holding forth the gospel as a reconciler of man to God, first, and then men to men as a byproduct of great witnessing value;
• Prioritization means time and resources that are diverted from elsewhere. Which means that even the best-intentioned efforts to plant culturally-targeted local churches end up focusing more on sharpening cultural relevance than they should, while diverting resources away from the biblically emphasized ingredients for a healthy local church;
• And, finally, what happens when the targeted culture becomes over-saturated? Not only do we end up neglecting a large segment of the population, but we end up burning over a segment that will, over time, inevitably "die out." Focusing on the hipster crowd today will only last as long as there is a hipster crowd to focus on. The crowd either changes, dies off socially, or dies with the people who comprise it. The church then becomes irrelevant, unless it grows with the group it targeted, which, in my mind, inevitably means that they move closer to what should have been done in the first place: focus on the under-evangelized community as a whole instead of a small fragment of it.

     I hope these thoughts provide some more thought stirring-up in your mind. As I seek to address the concerns individually and expand on the problem and seek to show how a different philosophy of church planting can help avoid the "unintended consequence," I genuinely desire this to be a sharpening and edifying series. Stay tuned.