A Dream for Church Planting in Murdoch

A chance to try something new...

Planting a new church is a great opportunity to try new things in reaching our community with the gospel.  We are working towards planting a family church which, amongst other things, will have a special intention to share the gospel with students at Murdoch University.  Planting this church will involve interaction with the melting pot of cultural forces found in the University community, while also having interaction with the wider community.  This will create an outstanding opportunity for us as the WPC family of churches to grow in the ongoing task of maintaining the reformed faith in a changing world.

A model for keeping things the same...

Never changing anything would eventually undermine our reformed faith.  For example, we are committed to having Bible translations in the vernacular language.  Because languages eventually change, eventually we need to change the Bible translations we are using.  However, that doesn't mean we should go about changing things willy-nilly.  We need to make sure that the new church protects our corporate understanding of Scripture as expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith and our Book of Church Order.  In order to avoid following the winds and waves of the ideas of the world, we need both a clear idea of what we are not going to change but also a clear idea of what we are going to change.

When a young adult visits church….

Increasingly in the western world, people are identifying themselves more with smaller less clearly organized groups of people.  This tendency is sometimes referred to as tribalism.  An example of this is the growing popularity of participation in sports in sports centers rather than membership in clubs.  Instead of joining a club and being allocated to a team, many people prefer to form a team with a group of friends and register in a community competition.  This is not to say that no-one joins large organizations or that everyone prefers smaller groups of people to participate in.  Nevertheless, participation in large groups is increasingly restricted to entertainment.  Identifying with a large group of people, let alone making a commitment to one, is becoming increasingly unusual. 

In fact many young adults associate clearly organised large groups with inefficiency, inflexibility and depersonalisation.  There is a steady stream of companies advertising themselves as the option that treats you like a person.  This is not to say that the advertisements that say “we are the biggest therefore we are the best” are going to stop anytime soon.  But the relationships that people have with large organisations are reflecting less commitment.

As a result, there are a growing number of people who walk into churches and the thing that they really notice is the infrastructure.  Now, it is right for churches to be organised because God is a God of order.  But the personal nature of a relationship with God is even more important.  The danger is that a growing number of unchurched people who become Christians will be distracted from Christ by the way our churches are organised.  This may dissuade people from being part of organised churches or give people the impression that we grow in Christ through being organized!  The former is reflected in the growing number of small non-denominational churches and the latter in churches chasing after methods that work rather than methods that are Biblical.

So the main thing that will be different in the church planted at Murdoch, is that it will be composed of a number of small congregations rather than one large one.  In practice, this will mean the pastor (me) will be preaching the same sermon a number of times each Sunday.  It means we will be aiming to split congregations in half and form new congregations whenever they get too big for everyone in that congregation to know everyone else.  It means it will take some getting used to for anyone who is used to normal churches!

But we also pray that it will feel very natural for unchurched people who become Christians through the evangelism of members of the church.  Under God we expect that these people won’t initially notice how hard we are working behind the scenes at keeping ourselves organized as a single church.  Rather we pray that they will see a group who are growing together as God’s family through God’s word and prayer.  In particular there will be less to distract young adults from true discipleship.