Читать книгу Church for Every Context - Michael Moynagh - Страница 9

The first is church planting, which has a long history in the UK. It stretches from churches built in new urban areas during the industrial revolution, to the planting of daughter churches, to the beginnings of a new phase of church planting in the 1970s. During that decade, Patrick Blair started to develop his seven satellite congregations in Chester-le-Street, and Roger Forster began multiplying churches across south London in what became the Ichthus movement.

The tributary started to flow more rapidly in the early 1990s largely as a result of church growth missiology. The latter included an emphasis on evangelism and encouraged a new wave of church planting, inspired by the international DAWN (Disciple a Whole Nation) strategy. The strategy represented a shift from ‘come’ to ‘go’ evangelism. Rather than invite people outside church to existing congregations, new gatherings were planted in the hope of attracting those who did not attend.

However, many of these church plants suffered from having a dominant gene3 that saw church primarily in terms of Sunday worship, albeit done differently. They started down the contextual road, but did not travel far enough to reach people who were outside the church. Largely for this reason, a number of these plants were short-lived, while others had little effect on the surrounding community. ‘Many new churches failed to thrive. Some closed after years of struggle. Many more are small, weak and making little impact’ (Lings and Murray, 2003, p. 4).

A deep desire to connect church with people outside, missional reflection on postmodern culture and in some cases ‘post-evangelical’ angst encouraged more contextual and diverse forms of church planting in the late 1990s, often involving small groups below the radar of the wider church. The momentum has built up since. In addition, churches serving ethnic minority communities have proliferated, but have generally not expanded to include other cultures.