Church planters must take the time to search the Scriptures to answer the question, "What is the church?" Since the scriptures do not bow to the gods of this age, for some church planters this process will be painful, requiring them to surrender their visions, dreams, passions, desires, finances, and prestige that have developed over the years from Western cultural definitions and expectations for what constitutes a "healthy" church.
This brief excerpt from Dr. J.D. Payne's paper, "Ecclesiology: The Most Critical Issue in Church Planting Today," (available here) expresses well some of my concerns over our efforts to plant churches. I'll comment more on Dr. Payne's article later, but I have often written that our time in Western Europe has done much to strip away our "visions, dreams, passions, desires, finances [oh, yeah], and prestige" and give us a fresh, clean, simple, and, I believe, biblical idea that answers the question, "What is the church?"
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