In the article, “Go and Plant Churches of All Peoples,” writer Tim Stafford reports that denominations increasingly are turning to church planting as the most effective evangelistic outreach. The Covenant is not mentioned in the articles.
The Covenant has been at the forefront of this new move, however, Covenant leaders say. “We’ve understood the importance of church planting for reaching more people for a long time,” says Gary Walter, executive minister of the Department of Church Growth and Evangelism. “It is no coincidence that our rapid growth coincides to a recommitment to church planting in the 1990s.”
Stafford writes that church plants also are targeting an increasingly ethnic and post-Christian population, a trend mirrored by the Covenant. David Ripley, the leader of ethnic ministries at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois, is quoted as saying, “If we are challenging people to reach their neighbors, the reality is that the neighborhood is changing.”
“Church planting has spurred our ethnic diversity since about half of those new churches have been ethnic or multiethnic,” Walter says. “It’s also helped us reach into the emerging generations. So, with church planting as a key driver, the ECC is growing numerically, growing more diverse, and growing younger.”
Stafford also maintains the United States is caught between an increasingly broadening gap of values. “Despite what some say, the United States is not a post-Christian nation. It’s more half Christian and half post-Christian, trying to make up its mind.”
Dave Olson, the Covenant’s director of church planting, says people considered post-Christian people don’t necessarily accept traditional Christian values as valid.
“It’s not so much that they’re anti-Christian as they’re not wanting to engage with the Christian culture,” adds Ron Short, pastor of Lakehills Covenant Church in El Dorado Hills, California. That means new church plants have to work harder at developing relationships with the community.
The percentage of the post-Christian population varies dependent on region. “It’s not like Seattle, Minnesota, and Kansas City are the same,” Olson says. “The closer you are to salt water the more likely you are to be post-Christian.” He adds that urban Anglos also tend to have a more post-Christian mindset than suburban Anglos.
Olson does believe a change is continuing to take place. “America is in a transition from being mostly Christian to post-Christian,” he explains.
That transition already has occurred in the Pacific Southwest Conference, says Associate Superintendent Greg Yee. He notes a widely recognized landmark study by Olson that says only 14 percent of Californians attend church on any given Sunday.
Yee says it is important to look at church planting as more than a strategy. Rather, it also is a means of “letting apostolic pastors do their thing.”
Planters often have had to make sacrifices that others don’t, Yee says. “They work two jobs while planting a church. They do Bible studies at midnight because that’s what’s best for some of their people. They actually put their family at some very real risk in challenging neighborhoods.”
The challenges facing denominations is not choosing between established churches and plants, however. Strong relationships are beneficial for both. In the February 2006 issue of The Covenant Companion, Olson wrote, “There is a synergy between church planting and healthy, growing established congregations. My research has shown that denominations that effectively plant new churches have much healthier established churches and creative ministry energy flows back and forth between them.”
