Mental Musings

Why would anyone leave the security of a paid position at an established church in order to go into church planting? The obvious and possibly only valid answer is that they are called to it by God. If they are not called by God, they most likely will not last very long. However, there are often other underlying reasons. Some of these could be that: they don't like the design of most established churches, which are based on the traditional model of congregational control, or even worse, committee control with a few key individuals  holding all of the real authority of the church; they fell in love with a hurting community that has no real evangelical church; they are tired of working with a senior pastor that is focused more on caring for the needs of the members rather than reaching the community around them (for reasons why senior pastors do this, see number 1 above); they have a vision for something different than what they are currently doing; they don't fit in wit...

There are many fallacies when it comes to church polity; the operational and governance structure of a church or denomination-also denoting the ministerial structure of the church and the authority relationships thereof. In fact, it could be said that the almost every concept of church polity in the modern church is based on false teachings. The Catholic Church believes that all catholic churches fall under their authority and conversely the authority of the Pope. There begat the hierarchy that ensued flowing from Christ to the Pope to the rest of the authoritative collection. Each subsequent leader is ordained as a spokesperson for the Church, but only the Pope is a spokesperson for God. There is no Biblical evidence that shows this structure existed for the early church. The closest approximation to this design would be during the Jerusalem Council as seen in Acts 15, but it falls far short of initiating a hierarchy in the church or as a denomination. In this setti...