Have you ever wondered why the overwhelming majority of church planting in the North American context is a plant-and-pastor model? Why is a Pauline apostolic approach so radical and foreign to our imaginations?
Of course, there is no one cause, but I do want to draw attention to our history. We imitate what we know; we know what has been modeled before us.
Is Our Church Planting Apostolic or Colonialism?
European colonists were a product of Christendom and brought their variation to North America. When the new government launched in 1776, religious establishment was rejected for a plurality of religious minorities. Andrew Walls notes “the United States became a semidetached form for Christendom, with a generalized adherence to Christianity but without a state church” (Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement from the West, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, forthcoming 2023, 32). Now, Protestants lived alongside unbelievers.
Though evangelization, especially toward indigenous tribes, was advocated–even written into charters–land acquisition and Christianization, rather than widespread evangelization and contextualized churches, became common. Walls continues, “These protesters against European Christendom were caught up in the structures of Christendom even as they separated themselves from it.
