Before Your Church Plants, Ask Why

My church in Singapore is preparing to plant a church. We knew there would be questions, starting with “Why are we doing this?”

Why choose to make ourselves smaller? Why “lose” faithful members and leaders? Why not just keep growing here?

Those are good questions. To lay the groundwork, my elders asked me to preach a sermon series on why we plant churches.

Where would you turn?

Here’s one place to begin: “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied” (Acts 9:31).

Healthy churches multiply. The reason God saved us is the same reason we plant churches. It’s all for the glory of God.

God Saves for His Glory

In the beginning, God made all things for his glory. He made us to reflect that glory, then commanded us to multiply and fill the earth (Gen. 1:27–28).

We were finely polished glory mirrors, but sin left us shattered.

Yet God would save his people. In Egypt, God declared, “I will get glory over Pharaoh” (Ex. 14:4). And in exile, God promised salvation, not for their sake “but for the sake of [his] holy name” (Ezek. 36:22).

The reason God saved us is the same reason we plant churches. It’s all for the glory of God.

Glory took on flesh (John 1:14). Jesus’s glorious life culminated in his most glorious hour: the cross (17:1). The risen Christ commissioned his disciples to make disciples of all nations by “baptizing” and “teaching” them (Matt. 28:19–20). Where are disciples baptized? Where are they taught? In churches.

The church isn’t an afterthought to the Great Commission; it’s the vehicle for it.

God saves for his glory. He displays that glory in the church (Eph. 3:21). And as healthy churches multiply, “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).

If God saves for his glory, then God’s glory must be our supreme motivation for church planting. So before you plant, examine your motivations. Not every reason to plant a church is a good one, and even some good reasons aren’t supreme.

Lack of Motivation

I could imagine my congregation thinking, I get it. But does it have to be us? Can’t somebody else plant churches?

So I reminded them: There’s no such thing as an unplanted church. Every church was planted—including ours. And just as dog-lovers love puppies, church-lovers ought to love church plants.

It’s always easier not to plant. It’s costly to go, and it’s costly to send. Left to our flesh, we’d never choose it. So if you feel even a spark of desire to see a church planted, know it’s a gift of God’s Spirit. Praise God for that; it brings him glory when you do.

Consider the need. Some fellow elders and I have been mapping out our city, marking the areas of greatest gospel need. We thank God for every faithful church here, but Singapore has some 6 million people who all need a church. We long to see more churches planted. I suspect your city needs more churches too. Pray that a generation from now, a glory beacon would shine in every neighborhood—yours and mine.

But don’t think only about need. Think also about opportunity. The Lord turned my heart toward Singapore for both: the need, yes, but also the strategic position as a landing pad and launching pad for gospel work among the nations. Wherever God has planted your church, he’s given it sending opportunities too.

The church in Thessalonica was young, vulnerable, and not well resourced. Yet from that little church “the word of the Lord sounded forth” throughout the region (1 Thess. 1:8). Even a young church can be a gospel exporter.

Bad Motivations

Worse than no motivation is a bad one. Many so-called church plants are really church splits, born of division and rivalry.

Note the pace. Splits happen fast, while a healthy plant develops in the womb of a mother church until it’s full-term. Fractured churches divide. Healthy churches multiply.

Pride is another bad motivation. It gives rise to churches planted for brand-building, lifting up the cross only to hang our own glory on it.

One way to work against pride is to commit to single-assembly, autonomous churches. Rather than adding services and campuses, send people out to start and strengthen other churches. Let Jesus’s name increase while your church’s name decreases (John 3:30).

Good Motivations

Finally, some motivations are good—just not supreme.

Church planting encourages cooperation. The need is too big for any one church to tackle, so gospel-preaching churches in an area learn to see one another not as competition but as partners. Here’s one way to start assessing whether you’re ready to plant: Does your church pray for other churches?

Let Jesus’s name increase while your church’s name decreases.

Church planting develops leaders. When God transplants some of his people, opportunity opens. Others step up and serve as “good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pet. 4:10). There’s good ministry on both ends of a plant—for those who stay and for those who go.

And church planting multiplies outreach. Your non-Christian neighbor is more likely to visit a new church than an old one. As Tim Keller observed, a church plant strengthens evangelism throughout other churches in the area.

These are good motivations. But they’re not supreme. Let God’s glory be the weight at the center, with every other motivation in orbit around it.

How One Plant Multiplies

In 1871, First Baptist Church of Minneapolis sent 22 members to start a new congregation for the Swedish immigrants arriving in the city. The plant took root, multiplying over the next century—planting eight churches, reviving a dozen more—until, in 1980, the renamed Bethlehem Baptist called an inexperienced young pastor.

His name? John Piper.

Across the next 33 years, Piper helped a generation of Christians see the centrality of God’s glory in all things, as Bethlehem went on to plant many more churches.

None of it would have happened if First Baptist Church of Minneapolis hadn’t sent out 22 members a century before.

In preparing to preach on this topic to our congregation, I asked Piper, “Why must God’s glory be our supreme motivation for planting?” He wrote that this desire “should drive everything—including church planting (1 Cor. 10:31),” that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,” and that “the church is the place where the corporate experience of joyful satisfaction reaches its crescendo (Rom. 15:5–6).”

That’s why we plant churches: for the glory of God.