Church planting panel offers insight on culture, church, community

FORT WORTH – A Nov. 11 dinner and dialogue event at the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s annual meeting featured a panel of five church planters discussing various aspects of their ministry. SBTC Director of Missions Terry Coy moderated the discussion and guided the planters as they spoke about culture, church and community.

Glynn Stone, pastor of Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview; Ben Hays, pastor of Church in the Center in Houston; Steve Lee, professor of Baptist church planting at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; Shanon Thomas, pastor of Rockwall Friendship Baptist Church in Royse City; and Shane Pruitt, pastor of Connection Community Church in Rowlett comprised the panel.

On Culture 

When Coy asked the group if they considered culture to be an enemy of Christians and of churches, they all agreed they do not.

“I don’t think culture is our enemy,” Hays said. “I think culture is a way to define the group of people we want to plant the gospel within.”

He went on to recall from Scripture that Jesus did not speak in a way that implied culture as an enemy. Christ, he said, did not pray that Christians would be taken out of the world but that they would be kept from evil.

On Church

Stone, quoting G.K. Chesterton, said Mobberly doesn’t want to be a church “that will move with the culture” but one that “will move the culture.” He believes the problem lies more with a lack of understanding about what the Christ-centered culture of the church should be than the culture of the world. The average Christian, he said, doesn’t understand Christ’s culture.

“I’m trying to get the culture out of them to get Christ in them,” Stone said.

The church can only be the witness to the world—to the culture—that it is designed to be when the church knows what that Christ-culture looks like and aims to live it out, Stone explained. It’s a culture that is often preached from pulpits but not lived out in the lives of Christians.

Churches, he said, must remember the high holiness of God and recognize how far from holy they are as people.

“We’ve forgotten the Holy Spirit’s first name is ‘Holy,’” Stone said.

Pruitt said churches must be willing to function according to Scripture and not according to what people say.

“We preach verse by verse,” Pruitt said. “We let the text dictate the topic. We just three Sundays ago finished 29 months—118 Sundays—in the Gospel of Matthew.”

Mentors, coaches and pastors told Pruitt not to do that, saying he would certainly kill the new church that way. 

“What? Preaching the Word kills a church plant?” Pruitt exclaimed in conveying the remarks to panel attendees.

Preaching the Word—whether it offends or encourages—is part of what makes church different than mere social clubs, Pruitt said.

“If the church looks no different than the Rotary Club, then why go for an hour?” he said.

On Community

A church’s involvement in and care for the community also sets it apart, they agreed.

“We want to be a church that’s so in the city that if C3 (Connection Community Church) ceased to exist, the city would miss us,” Pruitt said.

All of the panelists have worked to make their church plants an integral part of their respective cities, all of them being mindful of the unique attributes of those communities. Thomas’ church has begun Bible studies in five local schools as well as a recreation ministry. Mobberly has taken a cue from one of the teams it sent to plant a church in offering to install smoke detectors in homes, using the time spent in the home to share the gospel. Church in the Center, an urban church with a large number of nationalities represented in it and in its neighborhood, has held cookouts to make veggie burgers and all-beef hot dogs for their Muslim neighbors. Lee leads in ministry at local colleges, bringing food for “study breaks” and being ready to engage in spiritual conversations.

Stone said he encourages planters to become as “local” as soon as possible, and Lee explained that planters should commit to be learners and servants. The panelists agreed that pastors must be willing to listen—to really listen—to their churches and their communities.

“When you listen, you understand that there is something in their background that gains an ear for the gospel,” Hays said.