Church planting reflections

I responded to a question today about church planting here in Mexico, particularly about the advantages and disadvantages of a physical church building vs. the philosophy of small groups without a building. For what it's worth, here's my two cents.

1. A physical building or property is very helpful in establishing a point of witness in a community. People begin to identify the church. Without a building, people never quite know where to find you or how to identify you. The building becomes a center of activity, activity of all sorts, including evangelistic outreaches, special services, mobilization emphases as well as the weekly meetings.

2. I believe that subsidy can be used effectively to get over the huge, almost unsurmountable challenge of acquiring land or a property. The church itself should take over the payment of the mortgage as soon as possible. We raised funds for the church plant in Iztapalapa, and here in Ixtapaluca. In both cases the church has a church building, small and inadequate perhaps, but better than nothing!

3. Mexicans gravitate towards a meeting place. A scenario all too common (and ranging between sad and terrifying!) is that a missionary invests many years in a place, only to leave and see the work pretty much disappear, or be absorbed into other local congregations. A physical meeting place, although not spiritual in and of itself, tends to unify the group and create a certain identity. No, a church building does not guarantee or even foster growth, but it does foster survival!

What do we plan to do when the building fills up?

Well, right now we've just knocked down more walls. We're increasing the building's main room in size as much as we possibly can, making modifications that permit more people to fit. In our case, the church began meeting on Sundays on July 17, 2005, and we now have around 70 people. Mayra and I will be moving on late 2009 to start another work. We will be recognizing capable leadership in March, one elder and one deacon. Our leadership situation is because of God's grace, not because of anything that we've really done.

There are 4 Oxxos in our housing development. Our vision is to see multiple small churches in this area, instead of one large church. It multiplies leaders and makes a congregation managable for a layleader or part-time minister. Although our desire would be to have full-time, paid people in churches, we recognize that this probably isn't going to happen at least initially, maybe ever. If the house church can double as a parsonage, however, this greatly increases the possiblilty of having a full-time pastor.

To answer your question...yes, we are definitely limited by our church building, but we would be a lot more limited without it. We store musical instruments there, we teach ESL year-round there, the ladies meet for prayer there, we have music classes (keyboard, drums, singing) there, we meet for prayer meeting there...it is the base of operations when we have church teams from the U.S. (there's a stove, refrigerator,etc...).

Here's a couple pictures of the current construction...thanks Jim Cottrill!






















Quote of the Day:
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
- Pablo Picasso