Craig (here) talks about how Driscoll is against giving hand outs to church planters. They should support themselves until they have a congregation who will pay them. Fair enough. But he also says:
- Church planters must prove themselves in their own homes first, by getting married and having kids
- Husbands should not send their wives out to work to feed the family. He said that in the early days of Mars Hill he did wrong by his wife in this.
- Husbands should be present in family life
Not sure how these all fit together. Perhaps church planters are a special breed of men who are able to work two full time jobs and still be good fathers and husbands.
I think I'd be more in favour of some kind of sliding scale outside funding. 100% year 1, 50% year 2, 10% year 3.
Driscoll's answer is either the planter has to 'make tents' or else raise his own funds.
ReplyDeleteA whole range of studies I have read suggest that giving a planter too much funding is a factor that increases the likelihood of the plant failing.
It kinda makes sense. You want the planter to really feel in every way, that unless a new church is established, it'll all go 'splat'! Providing a secure income can lead to complacency.
While there is an issue of complacency, there is also an issue of practicality. We live in Australia, not Africa. It costs a lot more to live here. I speak from experience: my husband and I sold our house to afford three years of full-time theological study for him and while we have been able to maintain a reasonably standard of living (my kids mostly wear second hand clothes but we do get to eat meat more than once a week) we have also spent most of the 100K we got from selling the house. Even with the prospect of my husband working for an established congregation within a denomination which supports it's ministers reasonably, we will never again be home owners.
ReplyDeleteWe have four children, I do not work because they are all below school age. Even when they are all at school, I know that, because my husband will be working for a congregation which cannot afford to pay extra staff, I will need to be available to help my husband. If we want the women of our church to be able to attend a Biblically sound Bible study, I will probably have to run it. I will also probably have a role in Sunday school teaching and/or organising. And I'll need to keep our house at least somewhat presentable and be available and helpful for manse hospitality. For all these reasons and more, I won't be going back to work.
The basic fact is, the money has to come from somewhere. if you want new churches planted, you need to pay someone so they can do things like walk around the neighbourhood and meet people and strike up evangel-minded conversations. They might need to sit in cafes chatting to people. They will most definitely need to spend a lot of time praying. And none of these things bring in cash, at least not directly.
Perhaps the idea of "too much" funding needs to be considered in more detail. Frankly, after living off 20K a year for three years, our family is really looking forward to something more than minimum wage.
It would also be appropriate to consider just how a church plant is being supported outside of the finances. How many people are offering to run Bible studies or evangelistic dinner thingames or doing the photocopyig for Sunday school or whatever else it takes to take care of a new church and help it grow? Church planting is a lot of effort. Dividing big churches before they get gigantic just might be a whole lot more practical.
~ Sharon