Reaching a Lost Generation; Lessons from Church Planting

Bob & Mary Hopkins, Church of England Newspaper Article July 2005

On returning from three years in Brazil in 1972, a year later Mary and I recovered a living faith in Jesus. This enabled us to rebuild our marriage, which had been in a state of breakdown for eight years, within the loving community of Christ Church Chorleywood. However, we also became convicted that the UK to which we had returned was more of a mission field than Brazil and many of the foreign parts to which we sent missionaries. This crystallised into a sense of calling as missionaries in our own country which soon focused around the idea that church planting had a key role to play in restoring a missionary dynamic to the British church. What has followed has been a thirty year adventure in which we are still wrestling with what it means to be a missionary church and the contribution of church planting to that end.   

We have been asked to contribute to this series with a focus on the lost generation, by drawing on our experience in church planting over the past couple of decades. Now in the 70’s, we had experience of the tendency among Church Consultants to encourage parishes that there was more than enough work to focus on bringing their fringe contacts back into active membership. However, early lessons from Anglican church planting in the late 80’s had already confirmed that the real missionary challenge was “beyond the fringe”! Whilst most of those added to church plants in the 80’s and 90’s were what were later recognised as de-churched, research has also affirmed that church plants have been among the most successful at conversion growth and at affecting their social context (Bob Jackson & others).

The experience of church planting also brought to our attention that the truly non-churched were overwhelmingly amongst the emerging generation and as the church has dramatically lost contact with children, youth and young adults through the 90’s, this trend has clearly accelerated. However, great fruit has come from attempts to shift from the youth group approach, to planting youth congregations, youth churches, student cells and young adult clusters. These have all shown what is now well documented, that the emerging generation are very spiritually open, desperate for genuine community and most effective in reaching their own in mission. It’s just inherited modes of church that fail to deliver for them and their friends.

Here we should perhaps digress to take note of the fact that the projection of current population trends shows that it is likely by 2020 that there will be 5.2 million more 45-75 year olds compared to 1.2 million less 16-44 year olds! Whilst this highlights a massive mission opportunity in the older generations that many should serve, … Beware lest it distract us from the most important challenge. The bulge of the increasing over 45’s will pass and it is our success or failure to effectively engage in missionary church planting within the emerging generation that must be the decisive theatre of operations, determining whether Jesus is to be recovered as the transforming heart of our society in this century.

 So what are the mechanisms and processes involved in church planting? Church Planting is born when a vision grips people to re-direct their lives in order to join in God’s mission to extend the Kingdom in a particular context. It develops as the Spirit calls out leaders among them who oversee processes of forming team, researching the culture and context and gaining blessing from existing churches. It continues to be shaped by engaging with the context in humility and sacrificial service, discerning points of change and openness as the team work in partnership with others responding to aspirations and needs and taking opportunities for the gospel to be lived and shared. This results in growth as new folk are drawn into an enlarging community and the emerging new church expression continues to express its corporate life of developing disciples together in worship, community and mission, in relation to the wider body of Christ.

This is the theory that we have sought to unpack in all sorts of church planting training from a 3 month residential course that we pioneered with YWAM in Merseyside for 6 years from ’89 and then through the 90’s in accessible local training schemes across this country and elsewhere in Europe. However, there is a world of difference between theory and practice! Throughout the last twenty years of the Anglican church planting movement, we have been seeking to learn from our weaknesses and mistakes. Nonetheless, whilst church planting has undoubtedly had many weaknesses, one of its great strengths has been to focus the whole church on the right questions! (As I spelt out in the last chapters of both Grove evangelism No 4 and No 8 in 1988 and 1989).

So what were some of the weaknesses that emerged as early pioneers pushed the boundaries and posed questions to challenge us all through the 90’s and beyond. Most of these questions could be summed up in “what are we planting?” and “what is church?” (quote from Mike Breen and I in Planting New Churches, 1991, p124). And most of the problems have stemmed from not having a whole life understanding of church. These questions also represent enormous challenges as they underlie the corporate “dying to live” theme of John 12:24 that runs through the Mission-shaped Church Report and which I highlighted in 1991 in my introduction to Planting New Churches, p14.

“Stop Starting with the Church!”

I coined this slogan over ten years ago as we saw that, whilst church planting teams broke the mould in so many areas, they were still stuck with the notion that church was what happened in a special building on Sunday. And so what started in mission dynamics ended up still shaped by inherited assumptions about the public form of church. This led in the early 90’s, to the description of cloning rather than planting. Whilst we shared the diagnosis of this weakness one hundred percent, we have always seen this as a less than fully adequate analogy. Firstly, the word cloning has a very bad press because its associated with human tinkering. But using the term biologically, in creation whole rafts of natural species only reproduce by cloning (having only one parent and therefore passing on all the same characteristics) and do so very successfully wherever there is a similar environment. So with church planting, its only in cross-cultural planting that we need to re-imagine the church. But increasingly we are surrounded by new cultures and especially among the emerging generation we need to be liberated to start with the context and not rigid notions of church.

“Congregation is the concrete in which our cultural concept of church is set!”

This was our second slogan as we reflected on lessons of planting in the 90’s. It also highlights the second weakness of the cloning analogy. Since cloning is about keeping absolutely all genes/characteristics identical, nothing could be further from the truth of church plants through the 90’s. Groundbreaking changes were happening on most fronts, which fully warranted the title of the 1992 report “Breaking New Ground”.

For example, church plants brought new missionary genes to the church in a) breaking clericalism with many or most church plants lay-led; b) recovering the biblical unit of mission team as three-quarters of all plants were initiated by teams; c) plants were born from a recognition of the non-churched beyond our fringe in unreached estates or cultural networks and involved a change of priority away from existing members; d) they shifted the fundamental direction from “Come” to “Go” … even if when they got there the public meeting altered little; and e) they began to birth a breed of tent-making missionaries who made sacrificial job choices and house moves solely to serve the church planting mission endeavour. These things taken together, we believe, amount to one of the most radical changes in how we practice and understand church within our own shores.

As Murray, Lings and others of us observed, a type of pre-packaged flaw there certainly was all too often in church plants. But that has been more of a “defective gene” or two, than anything like cloning. That defective gene certainly disabled the plants in their mission. And that defective gene was in our mental association of church as defined by our understanding and practice of church as “Congregation” …. a presentational religious event in a special building on a special day. All planting that has been healthy, and especially that among the emerging generation, has re-discovered the small group as the crucial place of belonging and of cultural flexibility. This may be informed by insights from cell church, base communities, household church or café church which are most readily embraced by youth, students and young adults. Furthermore, as these models have more often released authentic community, so clusters of cells together in mid-sized groups recovering biblical congregation (quite different from inherited ideas shaped by Temple) are delivering more muscle to engage in effective incarnational mission.

Evangelism is just part of discipleship

Although in my first writing on church planting in Grove Evangelism No. 4 1988, I devoted chapter 2 to seek to recover an integrated view of evangelism as inseparable from community development, the practice of church planting has rarely expressed this. We have continued through the decade of evangelism to see it as defined by our individualistic culture. Hence, when we plant new church, our idea of evangelism is to find individuals who respond to the Gospel and then add them to our teams’ version of church. This robs the endeavour of the dynamic of converts from the new context being the leaven to transform the teams experience of church and in turn robs the emerging church of the potential to transform elements of the new culture with Kingdom values. We fish them out of their culture into our “transported church culture” rather than sticking with their authentic network and together discovering the Gospel challenges to change.

Discipleship is the whole Christian endeavour

Then again we have minimised the biblical record of Jesus’ ministry of disciple-making. In church planting we have accepted the view of inherited church which sees discipleship as a limited process or even just a course following conversion, to educate new folk in the faith. In contrast, we read the new testament presenting discipleship as the totality of the following Jesus thing … including learning and growing in understanding and in a lifestyle of community, worship, missionary service, leadership development … and all. This holistic discipleship happens in an apprenticing community.

In post-Christendom, our culture has been eroded from the centre … the Judeo-Christian worldview, outwards to Christian values … and on to behaviour. Only a whole lifestyle counter-cultural community discipleship will deliver a gospel post-modernism among the emerging generation. Youth and young adults are longing for peer-led communities, mentored and apprenticed by those more mature in the faith and in which their friends can readily be incorporated. But the trouble is this challenges the whole understanding and practice of leadership development within inherited church.

Identifying, Training and Recognising Leaders

Church Planting certainly highlighted that leadership is crucial in mission. It has also made it clear that the appropriate patterns for emerging church and especially for the emerging generations, is the identification of leaders while they lead mission planting of fresh expressions of church. Then continuing to develop their character, skills and theological understanding through socialisation within missional church; apprenticeship to more experienced pioneers and some sort of mixed-mode academic theology over two to seven years depending on prior learning. Worst of all for the majority of young emerging leaders (not all, as a few will be best served by residential colleges), is to engage in two years selection which may require removal to experience inherited church, 3 years removal in residential college and then 4 years removal to curacy in inherited mode church. This takes them out of the mission context to which they best relate for precisely the 10 years when they are most fruitful in leading the movement of mission amongst their own, so called “lost generation”.

Many among the younger generation of church planters are demonstrating a sacrificial calling to tent-making, self supporting ministry. They choose part time jobs at low salaries, reduced living costs in shared housing and fund their own part-time training whilst serving in mission. In this they create a very healthy mis-match with our over professionalised clergy. They also begin to open up the chasm between our inherited model of lifelong single career priesthood and the current pattern of multiple careers. The average number of life changes has dramatically increased and this can only be accommodated if pioneer church plant leading is combined with a series of other jobs each chosen to serve the planters changing context and calling.

Yet a further lesson from church plant weakness and failure is the question of succession of leadership. And the lessons surrounding the shift from pioneer plant leader are often similar to those emerging in continuing church contexts where mission driven transition has established a new DNA and often succession from within is much more healthy and justly honours life investments made within the team and wider body.

Re-allocation of Resources from Projects to Processes

The lessons here are mostly for the institution and permission givers, and suggest massive reallocation of resources – not principally to fund a few professionally led experimental fresh-expressions projects, but to fund whole new processes and structures to release, resource, train and support those in this mission movement with appropriate new pathways.

Here we can but express amazement at the completely uncharacteristic front page article of Andrew Carey (CEN 10th June) in which he welcomes the redirection of half a million pounds nationally to mission. The deferred February Synod proposal by the Church Commissioners was to build up to 9 million per year reallocated to mission! Half a million nationally spread is less than some dioceses have already done and is not even a drop in the ocean. Only multi-millions will take seriously the national need to restructure and support whole new processes. We compare our situation to an advancing forest fire. You never respond by treating the advancing edge (managing decline) but have to sacrificially take down existing standings to protect the further forest (re-distribution of resources to the emerging generation). Mike Breen has highlighted that every species in nature devotes most time and energy to the creation and sustaining of the next generation … even at the cost of their own lives. The church as institution has to learn to overcome its default to self-preservation if it is to survive (and the discipline of Learning Organisations offers further pointers here).

Worship is not just about music

I have described some church plants as “preference plants”, when they seem to be established just to suit one existing group of Christians choice of music style. However, it is particularly among the emerging generation that fresh expressions have been planted where worship is liberated well beyond just music. They have also drawn together creativity, symbol and rite from all shades and centuries of Christian tradition, with stations, incense, icons, postures, art, dance and drama, seasons, silence and contemplation etc. The young are not only tending to be post-denominational but also have largely lost allegiance to any one style or tradition defining the worship life of their faith community.

Church works better as a Verb than a Noun

In conclusion, Archbishop Rowan and others have referred to the restrictive tendency when we try to define church in static terms. This is becoming more crucial as the emerging culture in which much of the emerging generation are embedded is itself on the move and not only network based, but becoming a network of multi-layered networks. Church plants among the emerging generation have opened our minds to such expressions as café church, youth church, alternative church, school based and college based church … but these still assume that peoples’ faith is defined by belonging to one discreet ‘expression of Jesus community’.

However, some recent plants are pointing towards the possibility that Christians may in fact live out their faith in multiple communities, mirroring their co-existing among multiple networks. So they may be a part of a group on a commuter train, a group at work, a group in a leisure activity, in another faith community in their apartment block and also in a cell at their local church! Not only does this challenge our rigid mental models of church institution, but it may open the way to fundamental lessons about power, control and money (where does their giving go?!).

Back to top

Anglican Church Planting Initiatives (ACPI) Admin Office
Philadelphia Campus, 6 Gilpin Street, Sheffield S6 3BL - (Directions to office)
Tel: (0114) 278 9378 (admin)   Fax: (0114) 278 9600
Email:  admin@acpi.org.uk