Timothy Keller,the prolific author of books on church revitalization, gives this example in his talks: There are three towns with identical demographics, each with 100 churches.
In Town A the majority of churches are over 15 years old. The total number of members in those churches (the number of Christians in Town A) will steadily decline, even if there are a few growing congregations.
In Town B, five of the churches are under 15 years old; here the growth in the younger churches will merely offset the decline in the older churches.
In Town C, 30 per cent of the churches are 15 years of age or younger. Here the total Christian population will increase by 50 per cent in a generation.
What Keller is saying, not so subtly, is that the older the church, the less likely it is to grow in numbers and revitalize itself. Ouch!
And Keller is speaking of churches older than 15 years. Here in our little denomination we proudly celebrate anniversaries much older than that.
“Church planting is the single most effective way to revitalize a denomination.” Martin Spoelstra makes that absolute declaration, without reserve or hesitation. Statistics prove, he says, that only one in a hundred churches will revitalize. We in the Presbyterian Church in Canada don’t need the depth of statistical analysis; we need look no further than our lukewarm pond.
Spoelstra is church planter and co-pastor, along with his wife AJ, of Discovery Church in Bowmanville, Ont., and part of a church planting team for the Christian Reformed Church. He spoke last year at a conference sponsored by Canadian Ministries.
“To revitalize a church,” he says, “and move it from its existing cultural context to something that is vibrant and growing is something that is very difficult to do. And often the better bang for the buck, so to say in the church planting world, is to start a new church.”
What he means and is too polite to say bluntly—though “cultural context” is telling code language—is the obvious: Congregations want change without changing; they want young members without making room for them. More than one clerical career has crashed against lazy and desperate congregational expectations. So, the best way to revitalize a church is to start from the beginning.
Spoelstra reminds us church planting was at the root of the PCC’s early growth—new churches in new communities for new Christians. Buildings were filled by mid-century. Then the planting efforts stopped, and now some of those churches celebrate their centenaries with empty pews. They have not been reborn.
It’s called church planting and the metaphors write themselves: You need a gardener, labourers, healthy soil, nurturing, guidance, good weather and much more. Within the PCC there are very few people who fit the bill as gardener or even labourer. And as has been discussed many times within the PCC, our polity has lost its elasticity. While many turn in frustration to Canadian Ministries and other national offices, it is the presbyteries that control the empty buildings and have, in theory, the local knowledge. And, Spoelstra adds, church planters need to be evangelical and entrepreneurial. The PCC has not developed that person through its colleges. We need people who can till this particular soil.
Presbyterian College in Montreal is hoping to reverse that trend. The smallest of our three seminaries, PC is developing church planting programming that will grow energetic entrepreneurs to go into the suburban wilderness to build a church from scratch.
The CRC has been doing this for a while. Martin Spoelstra has a commissioned pastor’s ordination, which allows him to serve as a minister to a called mission or congregation. Along with scriptural training, not as thorough as an MDiv would provide, he learned the skills needed to plant churches.
Whether the PCC will develop this sort of program only time will tell, but the need is there.
And it will need one more thing: Money. Operating budgets are shrinking, but at the same time denominations, like the PCC, have closed a lot of churches and collected a lot of cash. Debates rage within many presbyteries about what to do with those hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank—to hold on to the cash to delay briefly the coming end, or to risk it and create a possible future.
To circle back around, that means denominations need people who are trained to build missions and churches, find the new members, raise the funds, all the while preaching and teaching the gospels. In short, to both till the soil and nurture it.
Rev. Graham Singh was born in a Guelph, Ont., hospital where his father and grandfather were doctors. He grew up in Presbyterian churches but it was in the United Kingdom that his life was turned around. Following a different career path he got irreversibly side tracked by Holy Trinity Brompton, a Church of England institution most famous for developing and exporting the Alpha Course, an introduction to the Christian faith.
“I don’t know whether the Lord found me or I found Him as an adult, but it was a real moment of experiencing faith through the Alpha Course, and being excited seeing new churches reopened,” he says. First involved in Alpha, he later joined the church planting team at Holy Trinity Brompton.
Over 8,000 churches have closed in the U.K. since 1980. The HTB formula requires one energetic leader and several dozen members from thriving churches to move into one of the derelict buildings and start from the beginning.
“We found that people were travelling from quite far around cities to come to the large city centres like Holy Trinity Brompton. So, eventually, we said, ‘Why don’t you stop travelling for an hour to get to church? There are 50 of you coming to this church and there is an empty building in your neighbourhood. So, why don’t we begin to train new clergy and send them out with you and we’ll reopen that building in the same kind of style?’
“In total, over the past 15 years or so, we saw about 45 churches like that reopened in the London area.”
(Again, the PCC has plenty of near-empty churches, which need a trained gardener, and some eager labourers.)
A few years ago, Singh returned to his hometown to plant in a nearly empty United Church of Canada building. This year he moved to an Anglican church in Montreal. Along with planting churches he is also executive director of Church Planting Canada and a popular speaker. He teaches dying churches how to have hope.
“A denomination that has been present in a community is known as ‘Christian presence.’ I think that gives us an exciting opportunity.
If we just say the Presbyterian Church in Canada is an extension of a Scottish type of worship into the Canadian nation, I don’t think anybody would be convinced about the future of that. If we say the Presbyterian Church in Canada is an important presence of gospel in all kinds of communities, and we need to look to proclaim the gospel afresh in every generation; if we look and say, ‘What could be done now with the assets of community trust we have?’ I think that’s absolutely huge. We’re facing green field opportunities.”
This must be what entrepreneurial evangelism sounds like. The PCC could use a dose of that unbridled enthusiasm.
REVS. ALEX DOUGLAS AND DAVID MOODY were not looking to change their postings. But as they are the first to admit, “God intiated and dropped a vision on us.”
That vision was to rebuild Heritage Green, a struggling church in Stoney Creek, Ont. They started to discuss this calling, working out how to plant a church within the church. (A profile of Heritage Green follows, and you can watch an interview with Douglas and Moody online.)
The congregation was seriously thinking about closing its doors. They were despondent and tired. Along came these two young ministers, filled with energy and enthusiasm.
Douglas met with each member of the congregation, one at a time. “It was a draining time; most people were like, ‘You know this isn’t gonna work, right?'”
The congregation, as it turns out, had community assets, a Presbyterian presence in the suburbs, a ripe field for planting, but they hadn’t been able to tend that soil properly.
Moody and Douglas had no formal training as church planters. But they had a strong calling entrusted to them. They passed that on systemically and with patience to the original congregation, adding seed members from other congregations, and slowly attracting new members.
It was an act of faith. It took pastoral care and it took time and money, but most of all it took a strong sense of calling dropped on the ministers to then share with the other workers needed to plant and grow the church.
