Penetrating a Gospel Resistant Culture

I recently consulted with a group in the Denver, CO area.  We were considering a creative church plant strategy in a church resistant area.

When our demographic study of the Lowry area indicated a strong resistance to traditional church planting methods, we asked Gospel Saturation Missionary Kenny Moore to help us understand the Celtic model of Evangelism.

Here are some vital principles:

A Few of the Essential Core Values For A Celtic Model

1. Must get to know and understand the context—the demographics; psychographics and ekklegraphics of an identifiable community like Lowry

2. Must be incarnational

• a. Planters must live, work, play, serve, worship, and educate children in the local (Lowry) community

• b. We need to learn: to move a team in; begin to engage opinion leaders

3. Must not compartmentalize the gospel

• a. We need to learn: to depend upon God; listen to the Spirit; trust the Spirit; receive the empowerment of the Spirit

4. Must not default from prayer to activity or default from simple to complicated

• a. We have made church plants like Lowry harder than they need to be

• b. We need to learn: to let God do the heavy lifting and that if what we are doing seems complicated, exhausting, stressful, family damaging, etc., it is not Sprit led

5. Must not be in a hurry to “be” the church gathered, but rather establish the DNA that the church scattered is more the body of Christ than the church gathered

• a. Do not make “church” the center of the Christian life, but rather Christ as center

• b. Need to learn: to move at the Spirit’s pace and receive the Spirit’s empowerment

6. Must reverse our strategy

• a. Conventional wisdom: to first gather a crowd, begin to disciple converts/build core group, and then engage in community transformation

• b. We need to learn: to first engage in community transformation, disciple converts/build a core group and then gather a crowd

7. Must approach target community in more of a post-modern way instead of a hyper-modern way

• a. Celts were more right brained than left brained

• b. We need to learn: to embrace a more random, intuitive, holistic, synthesizing, and subjective manner instead of a logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective mode of church planting

8. Must jettison western evangelical ethos for a Celtic ethos

• a. Western evangelical ethos: “A place to BELIEVE, BELONG, BECOME”

• b. Celtic ethos: “Belonging comes before believing”