Church Planters Must Focus on Missions

A group of Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and Reformed Church in America (RCA) congregations in Arizona are working on a partnership through which they can train the next generation of church leaders for their area.

A network of young church planters called Surge, sponsored by several large RCA churches in the Phoenix, Ariz. area, are the ones meeting every month to explore the idea.

They say they aren’t exactly sure how the training will ultimately take place. But they do believe that the “future of the church is in planting,” says Derek Van Dalen, pastor at Palm Lane Christian Reformed Church in Scottsdale, Arizona.

“The question is, however, where are these planters going to come from? It is not a bad thing if we bring them here from other places, but developing them locally would be much better.”

This new missional training partnership called Surge emerges from a discussion of local needs involving members of the Phoenix Kingdom Enterprise Zone, which is itself part of the Church Multiplication Initiative (CMI).

CMI is a joint church-planting program involving the CRC and the RCA in Kingdom Enterprise Zones in several areas across the U.S.

Members of the effort to assess the possibility and nature of establishing a training effort in Arizona meet once a month to hear well-known speakers on the topic of establishing new, vibrant churches.

One speaker in particular has become a favorite of the young church planters: Michael Goheen.

Goheen is a professor of missions who divides his time between Calvin Theological Seminary (CTS) and Newbegin House of Studies in San Francisco, Calif.

Synod 2012 last June approved Goheen to work as a professor of missions, with a reduced load, at CTS.

In a class this month at Calvin Theological Seminary (CTS), Goheen has detailed the approach he recommends for those church planters involved in missions.

He says the overriding significance of doing missions is to authentically live out and pass on the Good News of the new life and salvation that Jesus brought and taught and made evident in his death and resurrection.

He encourages those planting churches to make sure that doing missions is an important focus of their work and that this be done in a fresh but biblically orthodox way.

“God commissions us to announce the kingdom,” says Goheen, author of such books as A Light to the Nations: The Missional Story in the Biblical Drama and co-author of the best-selling Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story.

“We are sent to do this imaginatively and creatively among our new cultural circumstances. We have to ask, ‘How do we find language that fully translates speaking about God’s kingdom into the 21st Century’.”

Surge members have enjoyed Goheen’s ideas and teaching so much that they have teamed up to have him teach classes to members of the Surge network in Phoenix.

In the class at CTS, he spoke to students of how important it is to realize missions begin in the church, since it “is the place where the Gospel and culture meet. The cross and the resurrection are where the new community is being gathered.”

The initial pilot session of classes in Phoenix began last August and will run through April 2013.

Several RCA and CRC pastors are taking the classes, and the feedback so far is positive. “I’m very excited about it,” says Gary Jarvis, associate pastor at New Hope Community Church, an RCA congregation in Gilbert, Ariz.

“Through these courses I have already built partnerships that have great potential to bear fruit moving forward.”

Organizers hope to develop these initial classes into an accredited degree program in missional theology, perhaps offered in conjunction with CTS, Newbigin House of Studies, and Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich.

Jarvis says this first year is all about seeing what works and how it might work. The final product may turn into something other than an accredited degree program if they find that something else works better.

“There has been a networking gap as well as a cultural gap in the ministry field of Phoenix,” says Jarvis.

“Leadership training locally would solve this. Having these networks in other places is definitely a good thing, but there is nothing like building those relationships locally and in person.”