Mercenary for Hire

This morning I read Jordon's post describing the incredulity with which people are responding to the fact that the Church of the Exiles does not receive funding from any denomination or agency outside of her membership. The assumption today, mostly in the West, is that outside funding inputs are necessary to successful church launches. Captivated by technology, sometimes it feels as though vital, agrarian church planting has been replaced by the modern industrial complex - which has, not-so-incidentally, replaced our understanding of how food is grown. For the most part, our food is grown in large industry-run factory farms with large inputs of fuel (to keep the tractors running), fertilizers (to stimulate growth) and pesticides (to kill the undesirable elements). Having spent a great deal of time over the past months reading the agrarian essays of Wendell Berry, I am convinced that the experience of replacing vital, soil-conscious farming with the industrial variety can be seen just as much in the area of church planting as in the ecclesial arena. Where once church planting came out of a knowledge of the neighbourhoods into which they were planted, we now prefer to launch them with large industrial budgets, hoping to compete against anything else vying for our culture's attention. Such an industry leads to the employment of ecclesial mercenaries whose job it is to go in and all the latest gadgets to catalyse a church into existence. Attending a conference in Toronto some weeks back, I shuddered to hear a church planter from Texas claim that you needed to set aside a significant budget for musicians in order to successfully plant a church. If worship is about more than performance or attractionist technique, perhaps we ought reconsider such necessities... I've always been suspicious of this industrial approach, which is probably while over the next few weeks I'll be devoting most of my time to writing it out in some (hopefully coherent) manner in order to graduate. And once I graduate, well, I don't know what will happen, but if there's anyone looking for a church planting mercenary, I come at a very reasonable price...