In response to my post the other day on church planting in the Muslim world, or the lack thereof, I got this response for a good friend who I respect deeply who is a missionary but not a church planter:
“God is not judging our usefulness, but our faithfulness. We have a saying in our home, like our grade school teacher used to say, “Keep your eyes on your own paper.” We will not be judged on where He puts us, but that we do His bidding while we are here. God bless you and keep you safe. ”
So I wanted to clarify what I meant by my comment. I stated that only 1 in 70 “Tentmaking” missionaries are successful in planting a church. I can see how that would appear judgmental of others. So let me clarify that the greatest reason there are so few churches planted is that it is not a priority to missionaries and missions organizations. Not being involved in this part of the world, it would be impossible to know that.
So I am not calling out the effectiveness of missionaries at all but OUR lack of faithfulness to plant churches. We need to focus on doing the work of God through churches.
If the failure of church planting is not that we have tried and succeeded only to a certain point but have barely tried at all. I have kids and if they are obeying I don’t get upset when they aren’t able to accomplish a job in the time period I give them but I jump in and help them. But if they are going about accomplishing their own priorities then they are in trouble.
God gives fruit and just because a church plant effort fails (apparently) it doesn’t mean the worker wasn’t faithful in his task. God is the God of the harvest. Nor is every worker given the same skill and the same task (church planter for example). However, we as His disciples are to be about the task of the glory of Christ through His bride the church.
I hope that clears it up. We must be faithful to focus on the task of church planting in cities, town, and villages where there are no churches.