Objections to Church Planting

by Jason Robertson
According to their website Stuart Murray is a trainer and consultant under the auspices of the Anabaptist Network. Based in Oxford, he travels widely in the UK and overseas and works with local churches, mission agencies, denominational leaders, conferences and individuals. He has worked with at least 25 denominations in recent years.

In chapter one of his book Church Planting Stuart Murray interacts with three objections to church planting.

OBJECTION #1: There are enough churches already. We should concentrate on improving existing churches rather than planting new churches.

ANSWER: First, church planting assumes a context of growth rather than decline in church attendance. Second, church planting is not concerning with the number of churches but the location of churches.

Stuart discusses starting new churches, adopting existing churches that need help, and replanting existing churches into better “soil.” Furthermore, Stuart discusses “church pruning.” Stuart explains, “Euthanasia may be problematic in the case of human lives, but it should be regarded as a sensible policy for churches, since all that will die is a structure.”

OBJECTION #2: Church planting weakens the mission and ministry of the churches by dividing their resources and minimizing their impact.

ANSWER: Church planters believe that the more healthy churches that a city has the more impact Christianity will have in that city. More churches means that church is more assessable to the community; more churches means that there are more opportunities for believers to use their gifts. With more Christians involved in active ministry then the gospel will penetrate even further into the culture and all churches will be blessed.

OBJECTION #3: Church planting has become an end in itself rather than a means to an end. It has distorted the biblical understanding of the mission of the church.

ANSWER: Church planting is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The establishing of a new congregation is a penultimate rather than ultimate goal. Church planting is a means of the Lord’s continual expansion of His kingdom, a means of fulfilling the Great Commission.

This book as a whole is helpful in getting aspiring church planters to think. But there are dangers that lie within its pages. Indeed, the book as a whole is quite confusing, asking a lot of questions but not really giving any definitive biblical answers.

Furthermore, the Anabaptist Network has within it some theologians who are not very sound. J Denny Weaver is such an example, who wrote The Non-violent Atonement. Speaking of the doctrine of the atonement, on their website the Anabaptist make the following conclusions:

Two things have become very clear to us over the past few months:

1. Many more evangelicals than we had realised dissent quite strongly from penal substitution – but several fear to say so publicly for fear of how others will respond. We hope that in time a more open atmosphere will allow for free discussion of this subject without fear of reprimand.
2. Many evangelical churches teach a very crude version of penal substitution – nothing like the more nuanced version that the July 2005 symposium advocated. If this more nuanced version is the one the Evangelical Alliance is defending, we would encourage them to do much more to ensure it is taught in evangelical churches.

The forum in this section remains open for further comments, but we do not intend to feature further articles on this subject on this website or in our newsletter for the time being. But we look forward to further conversation at some point about models of atonement that are theologically and ethically more integrated than we find penal substitution to be and about appropriate ways of talking about the work of God in Christ in contemporary culture.

I have written on FIDE-O about the importance of protecting the doctrine of the penal-substitutionary atonement of Jesus from the attacks such men as J. Denny Weaver. But I think the best on the internet to have addressed this issue is our beloved pyro-maniac Phil Johnson.