Heard today: if workers go in and do what the local church should be doing, because the local church is “not big enough” to do it (e.g. an “infant church”), they will rob the church of the chance to grow its muscles.

Should cross-cultural workers plant the church?

If cross-cultural workers never plant churches (i.e. only local workers plant churches), this suggests if there is no local church to plant, no church will get planted at all. That’s clearly bad news for non-Christian areas, so there must be at least one situation where cross-cultural workers plant churches.

On the other hand, if the cross-cultural worker is always the one planting churches, a false sense of “church planting is something the foreigner does” can also be created. I hypothesize that the Spirit of God will not allow this situation to continue long - something will happen to remove the worker from the equation. The children must stand on their own two feet.

Cross-cultural missionaries and workers need to walk a fine line between planting the church, being the church, doing the work of the church where it is not, and mobilizing the nearby church to do the work of planting. The cross-cultural worker should, perhaps, prefer and encourage the local church doing the planting—the worker should never do work that the local church can do and would be willing to do.

But if a local church refuses, shouldn’t the worker set about planting something new that would be willing?