Ed Stetzer's Planting Missional Churches

As an updated and renamed version of Stetzer’s 2003 text, Planting New

Missional
According to Stetzer, being missional means assuming the posture of a
missionary—one sent—as Jesus was—to “seek and save the lost.” Stetzer’s
opening chapter seeks to establish church planting as the most appropriate
missional response to what he portrays starkly as a North American church in
decline and growing ranks of non-Christian Americans. Being missional, for
Stetzer, means taking action to reverse these trends, and he presents planting
new churches as the proper remedy, touting it as both the “most effective
method of evangelism” and the biblical response to the church’s “decline”.
Chapter two is
devoted to “redeveloping a missional mind-set” and invokes classic quotes from
Newbigin, Bosch and Kahler to present the church as the sent agent of a sending
God, and as the instrument of the mission Dei, a popular term which Stetzer
invokes but leaves disappointingly unspecified.
In chapter three, Stetzer looks to the Bible to establish a connection between the
missionimperative given to the church and church planting as the normative
way of fulfilling it. In so doing he echoes four themes common in missionary
literature since beginnings of the Protestant mission movement. The first of
these relates to the Great Commission—to which Finney appealed—but rather
than focusing solely on that single Matthean text, Stetzer identifies four
commissionings of
Jesus. First, “I am sending you…” (John 20:21) is highlighted as a crystal clear
instruction to “pick up Jesus’ earthly work and continue doing it,” especially his
work of seeking and saving the lost. Second, Stetzer notes the call to “make
disciples of all nations” which is taken to indicate a focus upon evangelizing
and congregationalizing every people group. Third, he clips a few words from
Luke 24:47 to construct the third commissioning, to “preach repentance and
forgiveness”. Fourth, and finally, Stetzer notes that Christian mission is intended
to expand from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, indicating it is properly
thought of as a task with both local and overseas dimensions.

The second common theme Stetzer includes is the imperative that mission focus
on non-Christian (“unchurched”) persons. Third, Stetzer looks to Paul as the
missionary church planter parexcellence. The fourth and final common tack is
found in Stetzer’s appeal to the book of Acts as both proof of the normativity of
church planting in missionary work, as well as a church planting strategy
sourcebook.

Incarnational
The second critical message which Stetzer identifies is the need for church
planting to be incarnational, that is, to seize the opportunity unique to new
churches to “indigenize in ways that established churches rarely can
accomplish” due to the baggage of tradition-shaped expectations. This entails
starting “new churches that are fresh expressions of the unchanging gospel, new
missional contextualized churches in every setting across the globe” . Chapters
nine and ten exemplify Stetzer’s approach to incarnational church planting. In
“Understanding Cultures and Models” he asserts the need for cultural exegesis
that takes into consideration generational and ethnic differences so that churches
may be planted “in the heart language” of all of North America’s people groups.
While this chapter has a positive culture-friendly approach, “Church Planting in
Emerging Culture” takes more of a critical one as it stresses the need to reject
certain parts of contemporary culture, particularly postmodern presuppositions
which he deems “antithetical to the gospel” . Stetzer proposes several
incarnational strategies for reaching
emerging postmoderns, including “being unashamedly spiritual,” “engaging in
service” and “leading by transparency and team”.

In chapter thirteen, Stetzer discusses one model of church planting that is most
illustrative of his incarnational message, missional/incarnational churches
(MIC’s). In contrast to the models of church planting which are dominant—and
which the bulk of the book seeks to enable—MIC’s “let their incarnation of
Christ drive the mission in their community and beyond; and the church
emerges out of that journey”. The focus in this approach is on building
relationships and
serving rather than recruiting members and launching. The covenant
communities resulting from these other-oriented relationships, then, have the
potential to incarnate the gospel in a uniquely local and specific way.

Theological
Third, Stetzer strives to convey the importance of theological considerations
regarding church planting. Perhaps typical of conservative evangelicalism,
Stetzer understands proper theology to be simply the restatement of the static
deposit of truth that the Bible provides. This commitment to “biblical theology”
shines through most clearly in passages throughout the book when Stetzer
speaks of the “unchanging gospel” which is to be contextualized but not altered
for various cultural settings. Indeed, he suggests that although “cultures and
people are different, the gospel is the same for all of them”. As hinted earlier, he
regards the gospel as the message of repentance and forgiveness of sins through
the substitutionary atonement of Jesus on the cross.

Ecclesiology
As a subset of theology, Stetzer’s ecclesiology—the book’s fourth key message
—has a similarly dogmatic tone, which is clearest in chapter twelve where he
outlines his view of the biblical requirements in order for a church to be a
church. First, it must be a “covenant community” with boundaries such that
“some are part and some are not” (158). Second, to be a church it must meet.
That is, a group that connects irregularly or online is not a church. Third, it must
be working toward biblical leadership that fills the normal offices which are
described in the New Testament. Fourth, churches celebrate the ordinances of
communion and baptism. Fifth, Stetzer asserts, the preaching of the word must
take place for there to be church, though the form which the preaching takes is
not commanded. Clearly, for Stetzer, church planting can not approach
ecclesiology as a “blank
slate to draw out of the cultural situation”.

Spiritual
Finally, Stetzer identifies his fifth basic message as the need for church planters
to approach the work spiritually, rather than merely on the basis of their own
entrepreneurial ingenuity, charismatic personality or disciplined work ethic. The
key practice in this regard, according to Stetzer, is prayer,
which he notes many church planters neglect early on, but are eventually driven
to by the desperation born of the work (97-98). Prayer is essential as both the
means of personal encounter with God, leading to transformation toward Christ-
centeredness and as the means for finding the peace and strength needed to
succeed in the work of church planting. Stetzer also refers to prayer as a source
for guidance regarding planting strategy.