I like the short piece Ray Ortlund posted this morning on his Gospel Coalition blog, a judicious and compact statement of where church multiplication – what in our circles falls under the heading of “church planting movements” – comes from.

Strategic plans are good and helpful, he says, but they are not what brought about the exponential growth of the early Church described in Acts 9:31; that comes only by the miraculous work of God to transform people’s character. It’s a good word for American evangelicals whose churches have tended to be enamored of programs, strategies, vision statements, branding and the like, often under the influence of the thought world of corporate business. Without any such deliberation, a little Jewish sect became a world-transforming people, because they were characterized by the “fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.”

I like this because it pushes against some really harmful ideas about what sort of an outfit the Church is supposed to be, but despite Ortlund’s avowal that he doesn’t at all object to strategy in church planting and leadership, I can’t help feeling a little defensive. Our missionary call right now, after all, is to go and serve a church plant that was started by a group of people trusting God to provide growth – by helping (among other things) to develop and implement the vision and strategy they have lacked, and in the absence of which they have not multiplied.

Strategic planning is easy to defend pragmatically, or even theologically “as a matter of wise stewardship” (Ortlund’s approach). But I think both of these defenses of the kind of work we will be engaged in tend to promote the idea that strategy is our part of the equation, while the Spirit is God’s. There’s a sense of sacred/secular divide here: by our strategic efforts we stitch together a Frankenstein’s monster that God must then enliven with a bolt of lightning; or God kindles a fire that needs our carefully constructed log pyramid to reach its full bonfire potential, something like that. Part of the work is God’s business, and part of it is ours, and we get things right by not getting the wrong idea about how big our part ought to be. (Ortlund does not mean it this way, of course.)

But the Lord’s work in the world isn’t like that. It is really dangerous to imagine that we can strategize on a purely pragmatic basis and offer this up as a component of God’s work to grow His Church, just as it would be fatal to imagine that Jesus was 35% man and 65% God (or any other proportion of each). It matters what kind of strategy we’re trying to develop and implement, and our categories, even if they look like or are inspired by what we’ve learned from the business world, need to be drawn from God’s revelation to us.

The sermon at our home church on Sunday hit home with me as I think through this. The pastor, preaching from Colossians 4:2-6, taught that the Church’s mission comes down to three tasks: faithful prayer, wise conduct, and gracious speech. If our vision and strategy aren’t really efforts to promote these three things by proclaiming the grace that trains us in godliness (Titus 2:11), then they are really impediments to the work of the Spirit – just as a “Spirit-led” approach that refuses to be trained in these things can itself constitute a strategy that hinders that work.

So we will think and talk about a “target group” for our church plant, but if we don’t mean by this a simple awareness of who our neighbors actually are in the place God has put us, we’ll be of no good to that group or any other. We will think and talk about a “philosophy of ministry,” maybe even a “mission statement” (much as I abhor that particular jargon), but if we don’t mean by that a commitment to praying for our neighbors and giving them the proverbial cup of cold water in the Lord’s name, our philosophy will be at cross purposes to God’s. We may put together an evangelistic strategy, but if the heart of that strategy isn’t building up the church in faith, hope, and love by word and sacrament, it will be doomed sooner or later.

The medium is the message. The strategy has to be the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit, or else it is no stewardship at all.

-Ben