The Northshore Baptist Association has set some guidelines for church planting through the association that will help to focus church planting efforts on reaching the unchurched. Here’s a few of the statements within the guidelines:

• we will plant churches where there is the greatest need.
• our strategy will involve the use of church planting methods that are easily reproducible.
• Biblical Church planting is evangelism that results in a new church designed to develop new believers and not existing church members…
• our priority will be to develop new believers.
• we will seek to have a plan by which we can respond to any transfers who may desire to become involved with the new church plant.

Is this necessary? I think its a great move. With the rise of the nones, even in the south, & fewer & fewer people even considering church as a part of the solution for their lives, it’s so important that our church planting be done with intentionality & focused design on reaching unchurched people. We need to break our satisfaction on transfer growth & mimicking successful models & do the hard work of contextualized evangelism & evangelism in hard to reach areas. What we are learning is there is a lost population out there that’s beyond what worship style we practice & how clever our sermon series are. Listening, imagination, cultivation, & patience will be required to plant these kind of churches. And I appreciate the willingness of this association to define the kind of focused church planting through this set of guidelines.

Thoughts?

Dr. J.D. Payne first presented the idea for these guidelines. See his original doc here. I’ve mentioned his work in my post on The Great Transfer Growth Boogie Monster.