There’s a lot of chat­ter around the Aus­tralian evan­gel­i­cal blo­gos­phere (that’s a pretty nar­row field really) about a future church plant­ing move­ment in Australia.

Some peo­ple are over in the US with Mark Driscoll and other renowned church planters right now. And they’re blog­ging up a storm. Most of the posts are buzzing with fan­boy­ism. They’re chock full of quotable quotes, photo ops, video inter­views and sum­maries from talks given at con­fer­ences. It’s no doubt very excit­ing for those caught up in the movement.

Some peo­ple are not so excited. I won’t link to the post because I’m not sure how long it’s going to stay up. Simone has a post on the mat­ter here.

Church plant­ing is excit­ing. Sure. It’s great to be pur­su­ing new avenues to preach the gospel to peo­ple. It’s some­thing I’d like to do one day myself. Maybe. But it has to be said that it takes a spe­cial char­ac­ter to per­se­vere with some­one else’s work and not go off break­ing new ground. I’d say it’s more chal­leng­ing for a min­is­ter of a church to take on an estab­lished elder­ship or church gov­er­nance structure.

These new fan­gled church planters have some com­pelling argu­ments but they’re often built with some sort of naive view of the nature of min­istry in mind. Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll’s church is in my mind a case in point. Pull Mark Driscoll out and things change dra­mat­i­cally. There doesn’t seem to be a great suc­ces­sion plan in place if your preach­ing pas­tor preaches to mul­ti­ple loca­tions via a satel­lite link. The model they pro­pose works so long as min­is­ters don’t parish hop (which they do) and as long as the church can pro­vide for their own staff mem­bers from within their num­bers (which they can’t always). When there’s a vacancy in an Aus­tralian church an out­sider has to come in and take over. That’s the way it works — par­tic­u­larly when there are more vacan­cies than can­di­dates to fill them.

I’m also not sold on the idea that all the good church stuff hap­pens in cities. Which is a key the­ory behind a lot of Mark Driscoll’s strate­gies in par­tic­u­lar. So I’m reserved in my exu­ber­ance when it comes to respond­ing to the news that Aus­tralia is going to have a net­work of church plant­ing being sup­ported by the Acts 29 movement.

The rest of this post is a com­ment I posted on Simone’s blog where she was less than enthused by the per­son­al­ity cult (my words not hers) sur­round­ing super church planters like Driscoll… you may already have read it. A few of these state­ments address the par­tic­u­lars of that post.

While I appre­ci­ate Mark Driscoll and love him for his pas­sion­ate teach­ing and church growth strate­gies — if you can call them that — I don’t think his is an eas­ily repro­ducible style.

I would say the church planters who are run­ning these con­fer­ences were not only not going to these church plant­ing con­fer­ences — but were not even fol­low­ing a church plant­ing recipe.

I don’t set out to be Gor­don Ram­say in the kitchen, and I’m not going to set out to be Mark Driscoll in church plant­ing. I think the beauty of being both a celebrity chef and a church planter is that you work with the ingre­di­ents you’re given — and in most cases the min­istry you forge (or the food you make) works best when it reflects your unique per­son­al­ity and not a cheap imi­ta­tion of a trailblazer.

These guys all seem to be want­ing to be trail­blaz­ers by fol­low­ing some­one. And that seems contradictory.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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