Why?
Why Plant? Why Now? Why Lexington?
Why plant another church?
Honestly, this question has plagued me each time I’ve considered church
planting. Aren’t there enough churches
in America? It seems that what we need
are not more churches but more Christians filling out the churches that we already
have.
But that’s just the
trouble isn’t it? Studies show people
aren’t filling out churches.
Americans, in turns out, are no longer interested in going to church.
But just below the surface, God is doing an incredible
work. Businessmen worship beside the
homeless at a park in Modesto, CA, leather clad bikers are studying the book of
Matthew in Virginia Beach, and youth in the South Bronx are learning to lead
like Jesus. In the 21st
century God’s Spirit is moving in new and remarkable ways to bring the message
of God’s love to the most unlikely of places.
It would appear that God, too, has grown tired of being stuck in a
church.
So should we be concerned that church attendance is
down? I think the answer is “yes, we
should,” but maybe not for the reasons that one might expect. Perhaps our
problem is not that people are rejecting the Christian faith. Perhaps our
problem is that we’ve simply failed to provide a compelling example of what our
faith looks like in action.
That’s the reason we need new churches,
not to replace the old but to include such an example, to add another voice to
the conversation.
Lexington, Kentucky is in need of just such a voice. We live in unpredictable and turbulent times,
not just in Kentucky but all across our nation.
And of all times to be the Church in America, we in the Brethren in
Christ have something unique, something profound, and something important to
say to our culture and to the church in the United States.
In fact, the BIC, with its unique blend of Anabaptist, Pietist, and
Wesleyan traditions, has a perspective that the church needs in our current
day.
We value community in an age of transiency, personal
experience in an era of virtual reality, and life transformation in a world
struggling with disillusionment. I can
think of no other church that holds these values in such balanced tension. But there’s something even more timely that
the BIC has to share. In a time of
racial tension, extremist politics, and a breakdown of public civility, we seek
to follow Jesus in the way of peace and reconciliation.
The world needs this message; Lexington needs this message.
It’s not that there aren’t churches in our area that value
peace and seek to follow Christ, but there are no other churches with roots
that run as deeply into these areas, with a theology of peace and
reconciliation that has been so thoroughly refined by prayer and practice as
the Brethren in Christ.
But it’s not just Lexington that stands to gain from such a
church in our area.
We in the BIC need Lexington.
If the Brethren in Christ is to thrive in the 21st
century we must be dedicated to expansive growth and devoted to cultivating
fresh expressions of our Core Values. We
need a church that not only plants new churches but also grows and develops new
leaders, leaders with a clear vision of who we are and how we may contribute to
God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
We need a church-planter incubator.
With our proximity to Asbury Theological Seminary and all
the resources available here we have the opportunity to grow just such a
project. We have the opportunity to grow
leaders who will discover new ways of sharing our time-honored traditions and
values and who can effectively bring these to the world around us. We need leaders with a vision so big that,
unless God intervenes, we would have no hope of seeing them come to life. The good news is that we have such a
God. A church committed to raising up
new leaders in a “post-Christian world” is a church with unswerving confidence
in the God of audacious vision.
And that leads me to the final and greatest reason for why we should
plant a church in Lexington: Because
it’s exact what God is calling us to do.
Now I’m not suggesting that God appeared to me or anyone
else in a vision, pointed a flaming finger at a map and said, “Go ye,
therefore, to the city of horses.”
Nothing quite so dramatic. But I
am suggesting that God’s vision, God’s heart, God’s love is so great that we
would be fools to try to contain it. The
love and grace that we’ve received in the Brethren in Christ compels us to
share it with the world around us.
We simply must grow. God’s love demands it, God’s grace compels
it, God’s vision inspires it, and our hearts cannot help but to respond “yes.”
It is for all these reasons, but especially the last that we
propose that the Brethren in Christ plant a church in the Greater Lexington
Area with close ties to Asbury Theological Seminary for the purpose of reaching
the lost and raising up the next generation of leaders and church planters for
the BIC.
In
His Peace,
Luke and Christian
Embree
