Church Planting and Missions: RationaleA major part of Redeemer's vision is the planting of churches in New York City and other major cities in this country and the world. To this end the Redeemer Church Planting Center (RCPC) has been established. The Center facilitates the selection, training, placement and coaching of church planters. It is Redeemer's conviction that filling greater New York with city serving new churches is the only way to truly renew our city. For roughly 1,000 years, in Europe and North America, a relationship between Christianity and public culture existed called "Christendom". Civic institutions 'Christianized' people culturally. Schools actively taught Christianity and other institutions stigmatized non-Christian behavior. The role of churches in Christendom was to re-confirm and process Christianized people into personal commitment and membership. As a result Christianized people were deeply programmed to 'show up' at church. First, if you wanted to be considered a legitimate part of the establishment of any town, you needed to belong to a church or synagogue. You were excluded from social, civil, cultural power if you didn't toe the line. Second, people were programmed to 'show up' at all major transitions with a deep internal need for the church's blessing and help: marriage, death, first children and times of crisis. When they did show up, the church's job was to teach/exhort people into personal faith. The essential message: "You know what you should be doing. Get to it". Under Christendom, 'mission' was something done 'overseas'. A church could 'do' missions as a department and extension of its regular ministry. Christendom is essentially over. The broader cultural institutions do not 'Christianize' the folk for the church so that the church can simply re-confirm and process them. The new 'folk culture', with its stories, ethics, world-view categories has profoundly changed. It is not necessarily gone from 'conservative' to 'liberal', but is fundamentally secular and individualistic. So the church today must be engaged in mission once again, especially 'at home' and 'overseas'. What is Redeemer? Redeemer is a (very imperfect) effort to be a 'missional church' in New York City. That means, first, that we do not want to assume that our skeptical (of Christianity) friends around us are naturally traditional or conservative in their thinking. (Of course, they aren't!) Nor do we assume that you have to become a conventional, straight-laced, conservative person in order to be a Christian. That fits with the freedom and grace of the gospel. That means, second, that we want absolutely everything we do to be 'missional'--engaged in showing the beauty of the gospel to the world around us. There isn't a single staff person whose job is to go and 'win the lost'. So why are there more 'spiritual seekers' around than often seen in a congregation? It is because, to some degree, the church itself has a 'missional form'. That does not mean that everything we do is designed to 'convert people', but that every part of the church is being contextualized and adapted to simply be Christian 'gospel people' of service in a culture of people not Christianized and have modern and 'post-modern' sensibilities. Therefore in order to be 'missional' we attempt to show the glory of the gospel in our lives, we plant churches in our city that reflect God's love, and we assist leaders in global cities like New York to start 'gospel' churches. The old distinctions of 'home' and 'foreign' are now gone and inappropriate. |
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