What does it mean to successfully plant a church? If you build a church of 200 people, is that success? If it becomes financially self-sustaining, is that success? If you have your own building, is that success? If you accomplish all three of those things, but it takes 10 years, is that failure?

Is it as simple as having the money to pay a full-time pastor? What if you don’t get big attendence - but you do provide children’s programs, Sunday School, a monthly community outreach event, a Christian sports league, a singles group, an addiction counseling program, an abuse hotline, a college bible study, and a support group for single moms? Is that enough to be considered successful?

The problem is that all of these answers take something for granted. First you have to have a church. My contention is that you have successfully planted a church once a new church exists.

“But” you might object, “many new churches come into existence only to disappear within a few months. Surely we shouldn’t call that success, right? Doesn't a sucessful church have to be, well, successful?"

Recently, in an effort to avoid the blatant worldliness of some church evaluations, some people have started defining a successful church as one that is ‘missional’. However, the problem remains. How many outreach programs do you have to have before you can be considered truly missional? How many unchurched people do you have to have attending?

Simply replacing the word ‘successful’ with the word ‘missional’ doesn’t change anything. A Mormon can be considered a successful church planter under the typical missional rubric. It is simply a more spiritual-sounding way of pursuing the same old idols: prestige, power, popularity.

We must replace the words ‘successful’ and ‘missional’ with ‘true’. The real question we must answer is, “What is a true church?” If we can answer that, we can define successful church planting. Success is when a true church comes into existence.

Fortunately for us, this is not a new question. Historically a church has been defined by 3 things:

1. The true preaching of God’s word.
2. The right administration of the sacraments.
3. The proper exercise of church discipline.

Those are the outward marks of a true church. If one of those things is absent, it is not a church.

Unfortunately, many church planting resources, methods and ideas neglect or even hinder the marks of a true church. Instead, they seek to produce signs of success in the world’s eyes: size, budget, building, programs, etc. Is there anything wrong with these things? No. But ‘churches’ that have these things, without the 3 marks are no churches at all. They “are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.” (Matt 23:27)

Next week I will talk about what it looks like to pursue these marks of the true church, rather than worldly measures of success.

Note: As always, please use a variation of your real name when posting (e.g. John, JDoe, John Doe) and a working e-mail.