Fruit for planting and planting for fruit: theology for church planting

We speak to Joshua Cockayne, Director of the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology, about the new volume he has edited: Participation and Church Planting.

Tell us about your new book (and the first in the Church Planting and Theology series!), Participation and Church Planting. What is it about?

Church planting initiatives are sometimes associated with a kind of pragmatism – the justification for starting new churches can often revolve around numerical growth. What this pragmatic approach can sometimes miss is that the life and health of the Church is found only by participating in the life of Christ by the Holy Spirit. This volume seeks to take this central theological theme of participation in Christ and ask how it might shape our theology of church planting.

What inspired you to put this collection together?

Over the past decade, I have been involved in planting new churches as a practitioner (both in lay and ordained capacities), and I have been involved in academic teaching and research. In my experience, these two worlds (academic theology and church planting) have a significant amount to learn from one another but are rarely engaged in conversation. This volume is an attempt to bridge that gap, drawing insights from experienced scholars, early career researchers and church planting practitioners, and seeking to ask what they can learn from one another. This conversation has emerged from our work at the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology and our annual conference in Durham. Many of the chapters of this book started life as part of this conversation and are seeking to continue this dialogue between practitioners and scholars. 

The book has chapters from people involved in church planting from a really wide range of contexts, written by people with different backgrounds and standpoints, which I think is a real strength. What have you learnt or what stayed with you from putting this together?

The theme of ‘participation’ was always supposed to be an ambiguous one; as I explore in the introduction of the book, one of its gifts as a theological focus is that it is a theme that has been understood in various different ways, through different theological traditions and by using different methodologies. But what I have been very struck by is the way in which these disparate voices have complemented and enhanced one another – the result is not one consistent theology of participation and church planting, but something that feels like the start of a conversation which might take many different twists and turns as it develops.

What is your goal for the book? And did you have anyone in mind while compiling it?

I hope the book does two things. First, I hope it enriches and brings depth to the ministry of those planting churches. There are hundreds and hundreds of how-to manuals for starting new churches and at times these can feel slightly thin on theological depth. My hope is that planters find some real fruit in this volume that can sustain their ministries and provide new perspectives on the work they are doing to participate in Christ’s ministry. And second, I hope the volume goes some way to alleviating some of the theological scepticism around church planting. I hope the chapters in this book can demonstrate that there is a thriving and growing scholarly community interested in thinking about the theology of new churches.

If there is one thing that you’d like people to take away from your book, what would it be?

The central pillar of the book is that the Church of Christ is not a mere human organization that can be manipulated and grown at will through human effort and strategy. The work of church planting is therefore an invitation not to grow the Church, but to participate in the work of God. In many respects, this is a simple theological truth, but it is one which radically shifts our theology of church growth, leadership and the day-to-day practice of starting new churches. I hope people grapple with this theme and reflect on how it might shape their own practice and theological thinking.

Who has inspired you in your life/faith/career, and is there a particular book that you would recommend people read?

Two thinkers have significantly shaped my own theological worldview. First, my PhD research focused on the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, who has continued to shape my own theological thinking, particularly on the importance of relating to God personally through Christ. Kierkegaard saw his life’s work as that of re-evangelizing Christendom, in seeking to show that Christ would not fit in the neat and sanitized boxes he thought many of his contemporaries in the Lutheran State church were guilty of. Second, the writings of the twentieth-century Anglican theologian Evelyn Underhill have impacted me significantly. Similarly to Kierkegaard, Underhill sees the Christian life as one fundamentally shaped by relationship with God. What she offers that Kierkegaard lacks is a deep love for the Church and its liturgical life. Her short essay ‘The Parish Priest and the Life of Prayer’ is one of the best pieces of writing I have read on the connection between prayer, spirituality and the mission of the Church, and is always required reading in my mission classes! 

What comes next? What would you like to write or see written, either within this series or beyond?

There are some proposals that are currently being prepared for the series, which I’m really excited to see develop and take shape. This series is all about enriching our practice by seeking a deeper theology and the books that are currently in progress aim to do precisely this. What excites me is that we’re really at the beginning of the conversation around the theology of new churches; there is much more to be said and thought about.

Joshua Cockayne is Academic Dean at Cranmer Hall in Durham and the Director of the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology.

The collection he has edited, Participation and Church Planting, is available here with 20% off all orders made in January.

Image credit: @jupp at Unsplash.com