by Rev. Dr. Martin Robinson

The DAWN Congress, held in Birmingham in 1992, concluded with the
setting of two ambitious goals for the Christian Church in Britain.
20,000 new congregations to be planted by the year 2,000 resulting in
20% of the nation attending church on a regular basis. These bold goals
were backed to a degree with a methodology, the DAWN strategy, and some
idea of which denominations and networks would do the planting.

An office to facilitate and monitor the process was opened. Despite
some minor disagreements as to what exactly constitutes a new
congregation, it is now widely recognised that with approximately three
years to run until the end of the year 2 000 these goals will not be
achieved.

Does that spell the end of a church planting movement in Britain? I
would argue that despite some disappointment concerning these specific
hopes, the church planting movement represents a significant point of
hope for the church in Britain.

Pre-DAWN church planting

The present church planting movement predates the DAWN Congress of
1992. Arguably there would have been no congress without the emergence
of an earlier movement. The first signs of that movement can be detected
in two related developments. First, although Pentecostal and new
churches, together with some other smaller denominations, had been
planting new congregations for some years, this older phenomenon was
given a new significance when Anglicans and others in the mainstream
churches began to intentionally plant new congregations. The Salvation
Army, inspired by this new initiative, has opened 50 new corps in the
last five years. Congregations which had been planting previously set
even more ambitious goals. Kensington Temple, in Notting Hill, has
planted 125 congregations in the last eleven years. Often, as in the
case of the Baptists through Oasis, and the Methodists through the Seed
Teams begun by Rob Frost, the initiatives were relatively small scale
and predominately located in the charismatic/evangelical wing of these
denominations. But they heralded a shift from a pattern that had seen a
depressingly familiar and apparently unremitting pattern of
congregational closure.

Second, there was a gradual recognition that some of these new
church plants represented a difference of approach from an older
"church extension" model. What was the difference? Church
extension has always taken place on larger new housing developments, in
particular within the new towns of Britain. The major denominations have
recognised that some of their members will have moved to these new areas
and have always sought to follow population shift by providing
facilities for the faithful, usually a building and a clergy person. In
a more stringent economic climate some of these new worship centers have
followed a pattern of ecumenical or shared worship centers. By contrast,
church plants have not always sought to provide a professional clergy
person on site and have often utilized a wide range of other buildings
without any immediate pressure to provide a recognizable church
building. Although such plants have sought to gather the faithful where
possible, there has been an equal emphasis on the making of new
Christians and the reawakening of the faith of the lapsed. In short a
strongly pastoral model was substituted for a mission model.

Experimental approaches

The missionary intent of the new church plants has provided fertile
soil for a complex set of experimental approaches and alliances with
other related movements. Three examples serve to make the point. First,
some church plants have learned from the Willow Creek, "Seeker
Service" model. Even when they have not sought to produce an exact
replica of the model, the insights have been learned and adapted in an
attempt to become at least Seeker Sensitive if not Seeker Targeted.
Second, in some cases, alternative services for youth have effectively
become youth congregations. The lessons learned from such experiments
have further encouraged the intentional establishing of youth churches
as a way of reaching out to identifiably different "people
groups" amongst a youth culture. Third, the Cell Church Movement
has been pressed into the service of church planting as a means of
planting effective missionary congregations. Other examples could be
drawn from rural, inner city and ethnic minority situations.

To date, the overall result of church planting has impacted
relatively small numbers of people if the total population of Britain is
taken as the starting point. However, the significance of the church
planting movement does not lie in numbers of conversions so much as in
its encouragement of the church to consider new ways of being church.
Here lies a practical laboratory for missionary experiment. Instead of
replicating failure, which has so often been the outcome of church
extension models, the church planting movement has encouraged laity to
find their place in mission, the place of teams to be explored, the
nature of ministry to be examined and the content of evangelism to be
rethought. In the long term, these developments may well turn out to be
more important than the numerical goals of the original DAWN Congress.
The West is a mission field, we all know that to be true. We have known
far less about how to respond to that challenge. Church planting is
increasingly fueling the response.

Reproduced with permission – http://www.lausanne.org