Part 4 – What about church planting movements?
In December 2006 I was reading 1 Thessalonians 1:2-3 one morning.
“We always thank God for all of you, mentioning you in our prayers. We continually remember before our God: your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Since I know that the reason why we work is out of love for Jesus, I asked him the question we should ask of our intimate friends, “What is on your heart?” Immediately the answer came, “I want to establish my church in the marketplace.” At that time I had been asking God about how we should be positioning our work going forward. Up until then we had various entities: one was a business, and the other was a non-profit that took businesspeople out to do short term missions. As soon as the Lord said, “I want to establish my church in the marketplace” I knew that we could on longer be a non-business. We had to reorganize, reposition and be a business. Why? Because non-profits, including well-meaning, good-hearted, long-established mission sending agencies cannot establish churches in every business, which is what Jesus wants. They encounter “barriers of understanding and acceptance” because, for the most part, they do not understand business, they do not have business DNA, and they are not accepted by businesspeople. They are perceived as being from a different tribe.
For us to have a church planting movement, or CPM, among businesses it is the businesses themselves that will have to be planting the churches, starting in their own corporations.
Does this mean there is no role for people from the “Religion” sphere, as they should rightly be called? Not at all! We who are kingdom people have a passport to move freely between the spheres. We can speak truth, we can encourage, we can equip. We must recognize, however, that God will raise up apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and pastors from within the marketplace to get the job done. Of course they will be in relationship with the rest of the Body of Christ. But they will live there, 7×24, in the world of business making sure that there is a viable expression of the kingdom of God in every business. Doctors and nurses will do the same in hospitals, planting churches in wards. Educators will do the same in schools and universities, planting churches in classrooms and lunch rooms and libraries. Media people will do the same and we will send them emails, “To the church that meets on the movie set in Hollywood…” The TV sitcom “The Office” will get renamed, “The real church.”
Business is not the be all and end all. The kingdom of God is far greater than business and than “Business as Missions.” There has been talk about “The 7 Mountains” and this has plusses and minuses.[i][1] If you are a kingdom person, however, then you are from The Mountain of the Lord. You can operate freely in any sphere. But it is unlikely that you will launch a CPM into a sphere by standing outside that sphere and telling them what to do. “Hey, you over there in business… plant a church in your office!”
This might make you uncomfortable, thinking about a church that is not locked up in the world of Religion. If so, it is probably because you are realizing that you have a responsibility to be a church planter in your place of work. You are grasping the fact that you are responsible to establish the kingdom right where you work. “Ah, but I want to go to China to do ‘foreign missions, Brett… I don’t want to stay in business.” And how do you think you are going to get into China? As a foreign missionary? “But my auntie lives in Beijing and I look Chinese on the outside!” So I ask, “Will you work in China? What work will you do? What will be the purpose of your work? …Oh, I get it, you want to reach your co-workers. What will you do with them when you reach them? I see, you will put them into a church… but that is tricky. OK, you are going to start your own church, right there at the business. I get it.” So now I ask, “Where are you getting your practice today? Are you planting a church at Google, Apple, Yahoo, or Schwab?”
If I were God I would not send you overseas to be a missionary until you had planted a church in your own place of work here in the US. Clearly God is nicer than me, and he is not asking for my advice, but he did lay out the principle of “faithful in little, faithful in much.”
Commission
I am asking you to respond to the challenge of God on your life. You have heard what I have shared today:
- A people group is a key concept,
- And it has to be re-thought given the changes in the world
- The business world does not need outsiders telling them what to do; they need authentic followers of Jesus from within the tribe modeling how to establish the kingdom in their places of work.
- That is not all: they need their businesses and corporations to become missions-sending agencies.
My concern is that we have created a new sheep pen inside the Church world. The BAM proponents run the risk of coddling the sheep instead of equipping, releasing and turning them loose in the marketplace.
So I am leaving you with a challenge today, and I am asking for you to respond. My first question is, “Will you be willing to go if God says you should go now?” We don’t get to choose to stay unless we are willing to go. What I am asking today is that your default switch gets re-set. We have our defaults set the wrong way. We have them set to things like STAY instead of GO. Our “stay” covers a lot of territory: stay home, stay sick, stay captive, stay safe, stay warm, stay home, stay unloved, stay un-empowered. In order to experience God we need to give up our rights to have our default switch being set to “stay” and flip it to “go.” Will you reset your switch to “go”? Yes, or no. This is a moment of choice for you. “But where will God send me?” That, my friend, is not the question. He is Lord, he is God, he is sovereign, and he can do whatever he wants, if you surrender. Will you get your hand of the switch and say, “Lord, set my switch to ‘go’!”?
My second question is this: “Will you stay?” This sounds like a counter-intuitive question for a missions conference, but I am not asking you to stay and be the same. I am asking you to stay on purpose, and to live on purpose. I am not asking you to only stay; I am asking you to stay and to proactively do something. What might this be?
My third question is, “Will you plant a church at work?” I am serious. I am asking you today whether you are willing to be a church planter among the Global Business Consumers? Will you start a movement right in your office, your department, your factory, your place of work? Remember, Jesus wants to establish true church inside every company. Friends, here in the San Francisco Bay Area regular church attendance is very low. I asked the head of the Baptist Church for three counties in the Bay Area, “What % of people attend church?”
He said, “We don’t really know, but we think 3-4%.”
Then I asked him, “What % go to work?” He saw it. Unless we reach them at work we won’t reach them. So, again, my question today is, “Will you establish a household of God right in your place of work? Will you be a shepherd, a lover of people, a teacher, a discipler right at work?” I am not asking you to evangelize and try to get people saved. I am asking you to bring the kingdom of God and disciple people, whether they are “saved” yet or not!
My last question is, “Will you help a GBC plant a church “there”—whether ‘there’ is in the next department, or in the next nation?” Friend, you want to be part of missions… then become an AND person. If you want to get ready to be used by God, get prepared to start a church in your workplace. Please note, I am NOT asking you to befriend people and invite them to “church” on the corner. Most of them won’t do it. You don’t ask everyone with an iPhone to come and use them at Apple Headquarters, led by the head of R&D! You don’t only allow people to use Google in Mountain View under the watchful eye of the VP of QA. That is crazy! Why do we ask people to come to our HQ to get the product? Are we nuts?
Will you become a church planter right where you are? Why would God trust you overseas if you won’t do the job here? And how will you get equipped to do it here unless you are fully willing to go there now? God is the God of AND, not OR!!
A final word: if you are thinking of business as your ticket to missions, you are missing it, you are on the wrong bus, and you are choosing a road that will circle a mountain, rather than go up it. We need to get beyond Business as Missions. We need to establish the kingdom right where the fastest growing and largest people group lives, the Global Business Consumer, which is in offices, factories, departments, libraries, restaurants, studios, etc. This is the desire of Jesus. And this is the reward of Jesus. Father, impassion our hearts to give Jesus the desire of his heart. Amen.
[1] I cover this in a separate book, The Mountain of the Lord.
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