Ninth, a rigid ecclesiastical structure for church planters that does not allow for non-formal approaches to pastoral training. This means that the structures of the church fellowship or denomination are rigid in their insistence that all pastors must have formal theological education. This system discourages older men who will not be able to attend a formal theological training to enter into the ministry of church planting. This kind of structure lends itself to an “elitist” approach to leadership –in other words the leaders have had training that the average person does not have and so they are incapable of ministering as they should.
Also this structure eliminates the Holy Spirit who gives gifts as he wills and not on the basis of diplomas. This kind of structure would have eliminated Charles Haddon Spurgeon from ministry for he had no formal theological training. Although he did start a pastor’s training college during his ministry, it had as a requirement that those who were accepted for training should be gifted in preaching and winning souls.
Church multiplication is not antagonistic to theological education. It is simply that holding back multiplication because of structures that do not allow for decentralized training will hold back the planting of new churches. See David Garrison’s answer to the question “What is the role of theological education?” in church planting movements in his book Church Planting Movements, pages 269-270.
Tenth, an unhealthy structural dependence upon funds from outside of the region to insure church multiplication. Dependency upon the flow of funds to finance pastors and church planters will always finally be a structure that becomes a stricture for when there are no more funds available, then there will be no more churches planted.
But a structure that finds not only church planters from the harvest but also finds funds for the harvest will have no limit as to its potential. In my July 2005 article in the Evangelical Missions Quarterly, I explained that churches that reproduce do not make finances central to their reproductive cycle. When I asked a church planter in Grenoble, France, whose church had planted some six daughter churches, how much he had given to help those new churches, he replied, “nothing” (Vajko 2005, 297).
Funding is not wrong but what is wrong is making the planting of new churches dependent upon available funds for as soon as the funds stop so will the church planting and multiplication. In all effective church planting movements, unpaid lay leaders are predominant and provide the church planters to see true multiplication. See my study adapted from a presentation by D. McGavran (Vajko 2009).
Eleventh, a structure that limits church planting to traditions and does not allow for the flexibility of the Spirit of God. There is a great biblical example of this not being done in the churches planted by the Apostle Paul. At the beginning, there was a concern in Jerusalem that the churches Paul planted be bound by the structures of Christian Judaism as seen in the Jerusalem Church.
But in Acts 15, the apostles and elders came to the conclusion that there must be freedom by the Spirit to form churches that had Christian liberty.
So we must allow for the fact that where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty. Structures that want to stricture church planting will always hinder spontaneity.
Twelfth, a structure that wants all church planters and churches that has a cookie-cutter rather than a God-formed freedom approach. This is similar to example number 11 above, but merits further development for it is not just a question of liberty but also of creativity in philosophy of ministry. Just as a daughter may resemble her mother to a degree, many daughter churches resemble their mother church from previous experience. However, we all know that a mother that wants her daughter to be exactly like her is heading for many problems.
So a daughter church must have the liberty in its functional structures to be different from the church that founded it. Our experience of daughter church planting in France taught us that by letting the new church planter develop a church that creatively evangelized not only saw his church grow but also plant a new church. We appreciated that in Australia the daughter church that we were part of planting was given freedom to be itself and not a cookie-cutter type of the mother church.
