Get Hold Of Apostolic Church Planting: Birthing New Churches From New Believers Scripted By J.D. Payne Accessible In Readable Copy

planting is not about attracting a crowd or launching a worship service rather, it is about the advancement of the kingdom as unbelievers become followers of the living God through local expressions of the body of Christ.
Though attracting crowds and starting new worship services are not always bad things, their manifestations do not necessarily mean the kingdom had advanced.
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I will be chewing on this for awhile, Payne's emphasis throughout the book is that biblical, apostolic church planting always started with "evangelism that results in new churches", not from simply starting new churches "with longtime believers".
He believes the latter model ought to be the "exception, not the expectation, "

It is a compelling thought, Maybe Western Christianity's struggle to actively evangelize and make disciples, and its emphasis on pragmatism, performance, programs, and perfectionism has led to our current model of planting I don't know.
I'm still a fan of all types of planting, . . if people find Jesus, I'm a fan!! But Payne has made me think, Which is why I reviewed this book highly, Any author who challenges the status quo and my own perspectives, while using the Word of God as his foundation, gets mystar vote even if I don't agree with them.
Overall really good book on a basic understanding of church planting, I thought this was a quick read, This book is a good introductory book, and was written to be a complement to JD Paynes much longer Discovering Church Planting book.


Throughout Apostolic Church Planting, JD Payne emphasizes and outlines church planting with an eye to planting churches among Unreached peoples, both overseas and among the Unreached peoples in our backyard an argument he more fully develops in his other book Strangers Next Door.


Some thoughts central to his book are:

“Biblical church planting is evangelism that results in new churches, ” P.among countless other places in the book

Per the subtitle “birthing new churches from new believers,” and in other parts of the book, JD Payne argues that new churches should primarily be composed of new Christians, this is in contrast to the prevalence in the West where new church plants are initially composed of Longtime Christians.


making the distinction between the Universal Church All believers, every where, throughout all of time and the Local Church Believers in a specific place.
He then draws the distinction between what the church IS and what the church Does, JD Payne defines the Church as a baptized group of followers of Jesus, who have identified themselves as the local Church rather than say a bible study, small group, etc.
, covenant together, that then DO the things that the Church is called to do, gathering together regularly, appointing elders, teaching and preaching the Word, the Lords Supper, baptizing new believers, church discipline, etc.


An underlying assumption of the book is that church planting teams will be formed within and sent out by a local church, rather than having “Lone Ranger” church planters who labor alone.


In the book he provides an outline for church planting from PreEntry amp Team Formation, through PhasingOut amp Mentoring the planted churches.
He also discusses methodology, and guidelines for developing a strategy, He then lays out ethical guidelines for wouldbe Church Planting teams to adopt and use,

All in all, a good book, I plan to read Discovering Church Planting to see and understand the larger context that this book was written within, One of the best books I have ever read I recommend this to any person that follows Jesus, Not a howto guide, rather a book that reveals to the reader how churches are developed out of evangelism, Love this book. The Apostolic Church Planting's strength is its simplicity it's also the glaring weakness, There are some decent practical thoughts here and there, but little that a moderately sensible person wouldn't think of, The bullet point summaries at the end of each chapter may be helpful for reference, He gives some guidelines and outlines processes and transitions which could prove profitable, if not to follow exactly then at least as stimulus for further thought.


But the book suffers from severe anemia in its lack of laying out doctrinal fundamentals in a comprehensive and rigorous sense, rarely moving beyond strict words to proper principle and sense and application of such.
Among the problems here are the simplistic and baptistic assumptions and assertions which run throughout, The author is emphatic in his conception of biblical church planting as "evangelism that results in new churches, " This is true, in a sense, in that where the gospel is preached and Christ is received among former pagan unbelievers, a church then may blossom.


But it is not true in another and equally biblical sense, one that is contemporaneously relevant to the USA today.
For example, in the NT much evangelistic effort was not spent on unbelievers, per se, but on believers, i, e. in the synagogues among the church there of that time, many of whom worshipped and believed

in God and had the Scripture, yet had not yet heard or believed in what the Puritan Nathaniel Stephens calls "the final exhibition of the promise.
" Still others, like some of those to whom Peter preached, were in the visible Jewish church synagogue yet had consented to the crucifixion of Christ, and thus, though they were the people of God, they were entirely without the essence of true religion according to their relation to the progress of redemption in history.


To the Baptist mind, this probably doesn't make much if any sense, due in large part to their view of Scripture, covenant, etc.
To the typical Baptist, the church is considered, directly or indirectly, as a spiritual institution that began in Acts, comprised exclusively of the elect or saved.
But that's not true. The church began in Genesiswith Adam and Eve, given the first gospel promise Gen,:and worship ordinance Gen.:,:, and continued immediately to their posterity, Cain and Abel in Genesis, the former being merely a part of the visible church before being judged and cast out for impenitence, the latter dying a martyr in the invisible church.
Essential principles like this simply aren't dealt with in this book,

But such is unfortunate, because, this is particularly relevant to the question of church planting and missionary efforts today, Payne's assumption and assertion, throughout the book, is, that missionary labor must chiefly be spent on "unreachedunengaged" people groups, whether here in the USA or elsewhere.
But "unreached" is defined by him in such a way as to make much of the evangelism in Acts to be superfluous and wasteful, being that it was not always to particularly pagan unbelievers, but to the church, both Jews and Gentile proselytes, which had yet to learn of and apprehend the final exhibition of the promise in Christ having come.


What does this mean What is a present day application In principle, it means that missionary efforts are not strictly or even necessarily chiefly to pagan unbelievers, but they can and should also be to the church visible, even to believers, but of those who are immature, not fully instructed, and stuck in a declining, apostate, or erroneous expression of the church and of the Christian religion, even without their knowing it: and such was the case in the NT in principle.
If that doesn't sound like much of the American church today, I think it's time to check our hearing,

On these points, and others like them, the book is largely without meaningful perception and discernment, but is content to skim the surface.
Its simplicity affords it an ease of accessibility and immediate practicality, while it simultaneously hamstrings it from being particularly profitable with the principles and sense of Scripture perhaps most relevant for us today.
In this way, I actually think such approaches will prove to be long term harmful to the church, A short helpful read on what it looks like to plant a church, Payne was helpful in that he made the process simple and to the point, He kept his methods biblical and focused on people and not merely methods or programs, Too often churches or Christians get caught up in activities, programs, or methods and fail to be with people, pray with people, and evangelize people.
In a sense, this book is a valiant attempt to try to think about church planting without the church, For Payne, the primary instrument of the Holy Spirit is the parachurch, a churchplanting team, This team has been called by the Spirit to bring about the individual conversion of certain individuals, lead them to selfidentify as a small group and only then a local congregation, and then guide their leadership as the new Chrisitan community matriculates.


Now, Apostolic church planting might be a misnomer here, For the Apostles, the ecclesia was the place of personal conversion, That is, personal conversion had a form, a character, that wasnt "expressed" in a liturgical community: rather, the liturgical community was the very place where sinners encountered the Risen Christ.
Baptism was not an expression of a previous conversion: baptism was conversion, Pastors and elders were not ethically mandated community leaders: rather, they were integral to the community as giftgivers, as those who gave that which provided community form and substance the word and sacrament.
It is ludicrous to speak of planting a “church” first and then adding the sacraments and the ministers after this: these things are the form the Apostles gave to their churches, they are the substance of apostolic church planting.
By relegating these things to a secondary position below the personal conversion of the sinner, Payne actually departs from the apostolic church planting he hopes to emulate.


A lot of the problem seems to stem from a confusion in the meaning of “paternalism, ” It seems that for Payne, “paternalism” means imposing any external form on new believers, There are indeed certain ethical mandates one must place on themsuch as after conversion you must meet together, you must be baptized, etc.
But these do not make up the substance of Christian life: they are a matter of expression, not the thing itself,

Of course, this is all nonsense, A healthy “paternalism” is a good thing, if it means entering into the wider stream of Christian tradition and allowing your local congregation to benefit from over twothousand years of Christian belief and praxis.
The Gospel is not simply the material for a personal conversion, but effects a certain and tangible and traditional form of life, centered around the communio sanctorum as we say in our Creed.
This form is not of ethical necessity as an extrinsic dictate of irrational will: it is constituitive, necessary, internally coherent and formative of the Christian life.


Payne seems to assume that we are at the beginning of the historical process, and that the church planting team is made up of apostles, and that they are church planting with Paul in Asia Minor.
But they are not. The Apostles faithfully did their calling let us do ours with an equal fidelity to Gods word, Second read through, and this book got more challenging this time, I greatly appreciate Payne seeking to be faithful to the text, This is a vastly different model of planting churches than what most are advocating for in our age, However, I think Payne has his finger on the pulse of Apostolic Church Planting and actually captures the essence of what NT multiplication looked like and how it can be contextualized today.
We've made church planting far more difficult than what it really is, and one of the major results is we have churches full of people who claim too be disciples, but have never made disciples in their lives, and don't even know where to begin.
I think implementing planting new churches from new believers would not only be a return to a more biblical approach to church planting, but would also solve the discipleship crises that many are dealing with.
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