Weathering the pain

Every parent knows the joys of bringing up children, but is not always prepared for the pain of their departure. Those of us who remember what it was like to live in our own family home know what it is like to yearn for independence. We eventually leave home, set up our own independent living and never think of what it’s like to be the parent who bears the pain of losing a child – until we become parents ourselves!

However, parents need to recognise that their responsibility is to bring up their children to become independent. They should therefore plan for the time when their child will leave home to set up a new family unit of their own.

The pain of parenting is similar to the pain of church planting.  When a church seeks to multiply, it needs to send away some of its own children, or more significantly, it needs to let them go.  It is like leaving the family home, as members of the church seek to establish a new church family with its own service time. This is painful for the parent church because there is a sense of loss of the company of believers – those with whom they have enjoyed fellowship and praise for many years.

And although they know it’s a good thing to multiply new congregations, it’s still painful to lose members to a new church plant. In similar ways, the pain of childbirth soon disappears with the joy of new life, so the pain of birthing a new church needs to focus on the joy of a new church coming to life.

The best way to handle this pain is to prepare for it ahead of time. Parenting churches must be prepared for this pain, the pain of separation, and the pain of no longer seeing the family members in the ways they used to do.

Yet this is the natural cycle of growth, in the same way you can’t take a snapshot of a human family and freeze that moment in time, declaring that will always be my family!  Families change; children grow up and new members arrive.  Families are dynamic, not static.  In the same way congregational life is dynamic and not static.

Life involves growth, and growing pains are part and parcel of the process. Therefore, churches need to be always thinking in terms of growth – how do we grow up and grow out? –  rather than merely thinking in terms of how can we keep things the way they are. It is not the attitude of church growth to ask, ‘how can we preserve and conserve, like a snapshot in time, what we’ve got now?’

Those who have been involved in church plants know this pain. Those who have sent off their best and brightest men and women to College for theological training also know the pain of losing gifted members of the congregation.  Yet they also know that God replenishes the loss.  The body of Christ continues to grow and his kingdom expands. Churches who multiply congregations therefore need to be prepared for the pain, and learn to trust God in the process, so that they may rejoice in the growth.

New church plants need to be aware of the pain of the parenting church, and be sensitive to the grief of losing part of the family.  It’s true for natural families, and it’s true for church families.

Glenn Davies
Bishop of North Sydney
October 2004