***** (continued)
Our first cross-cultural church planting project is illustrative of the potential risks of church planting. After two years of Japanese language study followed by two years of launching a church planting project, the time had come for our one year home assignment. And yet after two years of investing our energies into essential church planting activities such as fellowship with a core group, teaching, preaching, and evangelizing, not a single person had become a new believer. The prospect of failure, which in our initial excitement and preliminary strategic planning had seemed so remote, was now almost uncomfortably tangible.

I entertained various possibilities as to the cause of our difficulties. But no matter what scenario I sketched, the theological context for our church planting always provided hope. You see, I am convinced that church planting is rooted in a theological framework and therefore is not ultimately reducible to missional methodology or strategy, even though some of those discussions are helpful. Church planting is essentially a theological activity.

In 1952 at the Willingen meeting of the International Missionary Council of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the concept that mission derives from the nature of God himself received much attention. The mission of God, or missio Dei, was formulated so as to extend the idea that God the Father sends the Son, and God the Father and the Son together send the Spirit. The new extension comprised the addition of a third “movement”: Father, Son, and Spirit together send the church into the world to fulfill the purposes of God. According to this new paradigm, the church’s significance derived from understanding mission as belonging essentially to God, and only secondarily to the church.

But since the time of this formulation of the missio Dei, the concept in WCC circles has thoroughly marginalized the church such that God is seen as fulfilling his mission in and to the world outside of the instrumentality of the church. At best, the church became only incidental to God’s mission. At worst, church and mission had been divorced. On this understanding, the missio Dei is perceived to be as effectively implemented through socio-political and cultural macro structures as through the church. This marginalization of the church in mission occurred against the wishes of theologians like Karl Barth who originally participated in coining the term missio Dei.

In evangelical circles such as mine, however, the missio Dei can be understood as emphasizing that because mission derives directly from God himself, the church’s work in mission is in reality God’s work. That is, missionaries, including cross cultural church planters in Japan, participate in God’s mission as they go forth in mission.

Fifteen years after the “about to fail" church planting project mentioned above had been launched, the church had called its own national pastor and was growing. Although it felt to us as if we were risking failure at the two year mark, the one who is building his church knows all things, including all free choices of humans, and is therefore not the God who risks. He is not the God of only the possible. He is still sovereign. We were simply participants in God’s mission at one place on planet earth. But even if we had “failed,” as has happened numerous times in Japan sometimes called the “graveyard of missionaries,” we still would have been participants in that grand and unshakable divine mission.

The success of missionaries is ultimately measured by faithful obedience to their missionary God, not by their quantifiable accomplishments.

Confessing that our missional task is only a part of God’s mission, that our mission belongs ultimately to God, provides us with spiritual resources to face the potential risk of church planting failure in resistant cross-cultural contexts. We can remain calm and confident in the midst of difficult church planting assignments knowing that God is fully trustworthy and faithful to his obedient servants. This theological confession also requires that we remain humble and modest when we actually do experience God using us to coax into existence churches where there are none or very few.

If we understand that the outcome of our ministry is entirely dependent upon our church planting’s sure location within the global mission of our unfailing and sovereign God, we are given both the freedom to “fail” and the humility to “succeed.”