Over the last few weeks and months I’ve been thinking a lot about partnership, particularly partnership and what that looks like among churches. Often you’ll hear Pastors speak about partnership and how different churches work together for the good of the gospel. Sometimes those partnerships look like joint services, joint evangelistic endeavours or sharing resources about a particular topic or issue in society. All of those things are great and most certainly have their place!
But my thoughts have gone a little bit deeper than that. Other times that churches speak of partnership normally surrounds things like church planting, church revitalisation and support (pulpit supply).
It’s wonderful when a church comes alongside a smaller church and helps them to revitalise, that can take on many different forms. It could be that the church sends a small team to basically start afresh after a time of the church closing doors. It could be that a bigger church sends a staff member there for a time to support and give the church a bit of direction or a new lease of life after people have faithfully served for a long time.
It’s great when bigger churches plant other churches too! There are countless of unreached people in our nation who need to hear about Jesus and one of the ways that this seems to be happening, in the UK at least, is through new churches being planted in local communities where there previously was no church. New church plants can be a breath of fresh air into a community and can spur other churches on in the process (providing it’s done well and no parachute-ministry-model was used).
However, I think there’s a missing element of partnership that not everyone thinks of. Here comes the plea…
If you are a bigger church, who has people living in a specific area of your town or city, before you consider planting, could it be that one of the most effective things to do would be encourage your church members to move to the local church in their community?
I get that this isn’t always possible for a number of reasons, however, in a lot of cases smaller community church share theological positions and are like-minded in the gospel, their view of ministry and of missions. In those cases, instead of thinking about planting a church, why not send a group of 10-20 people (or however many), who have been discipled and trained into that smaller church to encourage them, spur them on in their work and continue the work of being disciple-making-disciples.
Don’t hear me wrong, I’m not saying “don’t plant or revitalise churches”. I’m saying that if we truly believe that churches are involved in the same Kingdom work, then why not send members to a more local church to help that church thrive?
Particularly in a city context, people travel in from all sorts of distances to go to a city centre church. Sometimes there are good reasons for that, but I do always wonder ‘how many good churches, that are smaller, are they driving past to attend that church?’
Over the last few months I have met with a few Pastors who have all mentioned that people are traveling from their communities to go to bigger churches and that has been a source of discouragement. Going local helps your evangelism, going local encourages local believers, going local means that you can be more involved, going local helps you bed into the community better. So if you’re a church member, consider going local. If you’re a Pastor or elder, ask yourself if you have a handful of members that you could commission / send out to another church to support, encourage and continue the work of the Kingdom by intentionally being disciple-making-disciples in their local community.
This kind of partnership goes beyond the surface, it binds churches and leaders together and helps church members get a glimpse of what deep gospel partnership can look like.
Chalmers' Blog 