Planting Churches vs. Planting Services

Josh Cousineau is church planter of Redemption Hill, located in Auburn, Maine, and core team member of the Gospel Alliance New England. He enjoys spending time with his high school sweetheart – now his bride since 2002 – and their four children. Josh blogs at JoshCousineau.com.  

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As a church planter over the last year, I have been blessed to interact with many different guys who are planting churches. They come from many different denominations and networks, with just about as many different styles of church that they are seeking to do. I have noticed that as I have talked to these planters and guys who are future planters, many of them are not planting churches as much as they are planting services. I know that may not sound like much of a difference, but trust me there is a big one. However, what we have done with Redemption Hill is attempt to plant a church which will have a service; but the service is not the end goal, the church is.

Planting a Service

Most people I know that are church planters actually end up planting a service. What I mean by this is that they spend their time, energy, effort, and money on the starting of a weekly meeting of some sort. This is usually called “church” and it happens on Sundays. There is music, offering, and a message, to name a few things. Once they have planted their service, they then gauge the success or failure of their plant based on the attendance to this service, how much people gave, how many people come back each week, etc. This has been the common plan on planting churches throughout the United States (and beyond). For example, I have talked to organizations that have “practice services” or “preview services” for people to come and get a taste of what church will be like. If the service is not the end goal, then why are they giving a taste of the church by showing them a Sunday service? The reason is that we have boiled down church to an hour and a half meeting, once a week.

Now I am not opposed to having a Sunday service. We started Redemption Hill with a core group meeting in August of 2011, and then we developed two missional communities that met weekly for a meal and discussion from August to January. When January came, we started gathering weekly as a church family on Sundays. We had music, a message, kids ministry, offering – all the things that you would expect to find in a ‘church.’ However, when we started this Sunday time of worship, it was without much fanfare. No press release, no promotional effort whatsoever. Actually, if you wanted to learn when and where we gathered, you would have to know someone who went and ask them. We didn't even put it on our website or Facebook page.

The reason was that we were seeking to plant a church, not a service. There is a difference. Our goal was to spend time pouring into the church (which we define as the people who are part of Redemption Hill and the global church). We wanted to help them better understand the Gospel, what it looked like to live in community as part of the family of God, and how these two things lead to us living on mission for those who knew Jesus. We were planting the church and preparing them to be the church, not just simply encouraging them to attend church. We were cultivating a heart and passion for disciples who make disciples.

Planting a Church

Planting a church will include a service that meets on Sundays (or maybe Saturdays, or who knows, maybe a Monday afternoon… okay most likely not Monday) to gather, to celebrate, and to worship Jesus – but that is not the main focus of it. Planting a church is not gauged by how many people attend the launch service or your special Easter service, nor is it a failure if you don't have explosive growth on Sunday. Why? Because the goal is not to make a great service with amazing music that draws hundreds of people to hear your amazing oratory skills; the goal is people who are built up as disciples who actually make disciples rather than just attend a killer service. Let me explain.

When one plants a church, they are actually working with the end in sight, meaning that they have a view of what the church should look like. They are working towards the future and growing people and building the team to help them facilitate that goal. When one properly understands ‘church,’ they will see that it is the people that are the church. So building a church means helping the people to see this truth and live in light of this truth. It means that the pastors’ time, energy, and effort should be poured into the people who are the church, not simply the service which is a part of the church life. Even though those who plant a service have the best of intentions, they are in essence putting all their eggs in one basket. What has happened is that they have attempted to accomplish everything a church should be in one swoop on Sunday and have failed. We likely do not have churches that are overflowing with elder qualified men and we don't have men and women who are disciples who are making disciples. One of the main reasons is because the time has been invested wrongly. It is possible to plant a service and have some people who will fulfill these things, but let’s be honest about how much time, energy, and effort it is to have a killer service with lights, projectors, fog machines, etc. Our time is often put into these tings, not the life-on-life training that comes when your focus is on the church and not the service.

I want to reiterate that there is nothing wrong with having a service, focusing on the service, or even investing time, money, and energy into it. We spend (limited) time each week working on the flow, the message, the music, and all the other elements of our Sunday gathering. But I think we miss the point if this is the main focus of church planters.

Measure Your Efforts

I am extremely grateful for the renewed passion and the many young men who are being called to plant churches throughout the world. I am excited for what is happening in networks like A29, SBC, E-Free, and others. But if a church plant is simply defined by setting a date for an event, inviting a bunch of people to that event and calling it ‘church,’ we have missed the point. This is not what Jesus called us to do. He called us to make disciples who make disciples (Matt. 28.19-20). If we measure success when or if people show up, and failure if people don't, we are in grave danger. The church is not an event, it is a called out people – a people that Jesus died for. As church planters we should be willing to invest the time into the people rather than the service.

My hope is not that you would cancel your Sunday service and go all ‘super-organic’ and neglect the gathering of the saints for simply hanging out with people as you drink beer and coffee and then call it church. No, my hope is that you would take a real honest look at your investment as a church planter. Measure the time you spend each week, the way your budget is broken down, and where the people’s time is being invested and ask: Have I planted a church or a service?

Mission New England (Part 2)

Josh Cousineau is church planter of Redemption Hill, located in Auburn, Maine, and core team member of the Gospel Alliance New England. He enjoys spending time with his high school sweetheart – now his bride since 2002 – and their three children. Josh blogs at JoshCousineau.com.  

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In my first post I talked a little bit about the culture of the Northeast, especially New England. In this post I wanted to put forth a couple thoughts on the 'how' of mission. The question begs to be asked, 'If people do not know their need for a Savior, how do you reach them?' The short and simple is that it has to be a work of the Spirit. If He is not living and active in New England, or anywhere for that matter, then there is no hope and no point to our efforts. But the glorious truth is that the Spirit is at work, especially in the hearts of those who do not know they even have a need for Him.

Preach Jesus - The number one thing our churches must do in any culture, especially one who doesn't know anything about Jesus, is to preach the real Jesus. We need to stay far away from the 'your best life now' Jesus. The Jesus of the Bible will be the only one who can reveal people's need for healing from the brokenness that is this world.

Preach Truth - We need to not waver or wallow in our view of firm Biblical doctrine. Many people will 'water down' things that are clear in the Bible under the name of 'reaching out' to the lost. While this could be considered noble, it misses the point. What is needed in a world full of people who claim truth, is a people who's lives point to an ultimate, life-changing truth.

Be Real - Fakeness has struck many blows to the church. What is needed now is not more hypocrisy, but transparency. People need to hear about how we have failed, how we have messed up, how we have been about us or about an agenda and not about what Jesus was about. We need to confess our sins to those in our midst and show them how we turn to Jesus! Only in our real, brokenness will the world be freed to be broken.

Be Normal - All those things listed above are not to be done on Sunday during an hour-long service, but in our daily, normal lives. We need to be real at our 9-5, when we drop our children off at day-care or school, when we go on a date with our spouse, or sit and play catch at the local park. We also need to preach truth in our dealings with our boss and co-workers. We need to show that the truth we believe in is not simply a good, morally upright set of beliefs, but something that has changed us from the inside out. We need to be people that will hold firm to the truth of the Scriptures and be willing to take it on chin if need be.

Church in New England will never penetrate the culture by meeting for an hour each week, even if it is the greatest show in town. What we will do when we have the greatest show in town is draw people away from the other shows and have them join ours. This drawing is not true conversion, but transplant growth. No matter how great our show is, people that are not interested in watching the show will never attend.

Think of it this way. I don't play disk golf. So if a new course was to open and be the best in town, or even the region, or the world, it would not entice me in the least to go try my hand at it. The most it will do is draw people from the other 3 or 4 disk golf courses around my area. This makes total sense in the setting of something we do not like to do, or care to do. Yet we are baffled when we try it with church and it doesn't work. Here is the reason; you and I love the church. If you are spending time reading this blog, then you love the church. You are the disk golfer who is at the ribbon cutting for the new course. Just replace 'disk golf' with church, and you get the picture.

Yet we, in New England, live in a world that couldn't care less about church, so no matter how much we tell them it is amazing in our advertising, or no matter how 'cutting edge' we think we are, the only people wowed by it are those who are already playing church.

This is where things need to change. We need to take Ephesians 4 and live it out. We need to be pastors and ministers who equip our people to preach Jesus, be real, and stand firm on the truth of what Jesus has done for them.

(Photo courtesy: TGC)

Mission New England (Part 1)

Josh Cousineau is church planter of Redemption Hill, located in Auburn, Maine, and core team member of the Gospel Alliance New England. He enjoys spending time with his high school sweetheart – now his bride since 2002 – and their three children. Josh blogs at JoshCousineau.com.  

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I have heard stories about people who live in the Bible Belt and how everyone down there is a 'Christian.' I have visited the South and been blown away by how many church buildings there are, and how big they are. I grew up in the Northeast and this is my home. I love it, but it is a little (ok a lot) different than what I hear the South is like.

I remember one trip to Alabama where I met with a Southern Baptist pastor for breakfast. When we were at the local breakfast joint, he started to pray for our food. There was nothing special about his prayer, nothing that stood out to me as unusual. During the prayer the waitress came to the table. Now, I don't know if you are like me, but this seems to happen often when I am out with my family or friends for a meal. We pray and almost like clockwork, the waiter or waitress walks up to see how our food is. This is what stood out to me. Not that she walked towards us during our prayer; that was normal. The strange thing was that the waitress stood about five feet from the table, bowed her head, and waited for us to be done praying. This would never happen where I live. More often than not they just walk up and ask you their question. It is not that they are intentionally interrupting your time of prayer, it is that they don't even know or notice what you are doing. In the Northeast, people don't pray before meals.

It is not that those who serve us in the Northeast are slow to notice that we are eating and those in the South are that quick. It is that the thought of praying before a meal is not normal to those who call the Northeast home. Not only do people not pray before meals, but the 'Christian-culture' that so many of us have grown up in and are used to, is non-existent in the majority of people's daily lives.

Gospel-Depleted Culture

To say that we (those who live in the Northeast, especially New England) are in the midst of a gospel-depleted culture would be an understatement. I could throw around statistics about how dry it is up here, but who really cares about statistics. I would much rather talk about real life stories of real people, with a real eternity looming on their horizon. I could point to a local coffee shop where the people who work there are all about spirituality, but this spirituality has nothing to do with biblical worldview. It is actually fully opposed to those beliefs. I could talk about a guy who told me he could not believe in a church that has rooms full of gold and does not care about the poor or the down and out. I am not sure, but my church doesn't have rooms full of gold. The church he was talking about is the Vatican. His view of Christianly and the Church is based only off of what he knows about the Roman Catholic church, not my little church plant, or any other church I know of. I could tell story after story about students, parents, and teachers who do not see an issue with premarital sex, as long as you use protection.

In the Northeast, Christian is more likely to be found on the lips of someone making a derogatory comment, than someone talking about the hope which they live their lives by. Jesus is about as far back in people's minds as who won the medal count in the 2008 Olympics. Not only do the vast majority of people not know about Jesus, they don't even care that they don't know about Him. It is not relevant for them, so therefore there is no need.  See, it is not that they have turned their backs on the family religion, or let their parents down by bailing on the Easter service this year, or the Thanksgiving Eve prayer service. Their parents probably didn't go to church much in the first place, so they don't really care. You would have to go back to grandma, or even great-grandma before you would find someone who actually had a 'Christian-Rhythm' to their life. This is just how life is, and there is nothing one can do about it.

There is Hope

In the midst of this darkness, I find hope. The pastors I talk to have a joyful expectancy upon their lips. Student ministers are eager to pour their lives out for the next generation. To be honest I would rather work with people who don't have a care in the world about God, the Bible, the Church, or Jesus. Because what I find is when these people come face-to-face with the gospel, it changes everything. They are more like the prodigal son who 'comes to his sense (Lk. 15.17 NIV) that living as a servant with his father is better than the life he has now, eating pig slops, than the elder brother who sits by ticked that his sinner brother got back into the family (Lk. 15.28).

No matter if the waitress comprehends that people will pray before a meal or not, the gospel is still the same. That is our only hope. Not that she would see us praying and think, 'oh, I need to be considerate and wait.' No, our only hope is that Jesus is in the business of bringing people to Himself, lost, sick people. People who don't know they are lost or sick. People who think they have it all together. This is what Jesus came to do, and as a pastor and missionary, this is what I cling to. Jesus came to save the sinners.

(Photo courtesy: TGC)