For three years my wife and I helped put away the chairs following the worship service and clean up until the room looked like a school gymnasium once again. There was a similar cleanup routine in all the classrooms used for Sabbath school. If our church wanted to gather during the week, the school building where we met on Sunday wasn’t an option.

If a few families were away on a given week, the singing in the worship service suffered dramatically. The signs for church services were by necessity small and portable, so it was sometimes difficult for people to find us, or to consider us to be a “real” church.

Members of a budding church, a church plant, have some heavy burdens and even odd challenges, depending on where they meet and how many are in their core group. The demands on each person in a church planting situation are high, and visitors quickly ascertain that if they stay around the demands on them will be high, too.

Some church plants just don’t survive the strain. For years my current congregation, Covenant Fellowship, made strides to plant a church in a largely Jewish neighborhood. We particularly targeted Jewish people in our evangelism and discipleship. There was a Bible study that took place there each week. Establishing a church would have been an enormous leap forward for God’s kingdom in Pittsburgh, we believed; and yet the potential of a church plant evaporated.

That is a look at the negative side, I suppose. (But read Richard Gamble’s article on page 6 for enlightenment amidst the failures.) I enjoyed my three years in a church plant. Because everyone had to be very committed to be there, there was a vibrant spiritual life and a camaraderie in the work. There was great unity and purpose. There were close relationships.

When you are involved in church planting, either in the “daughter church” or the “mother church,” much as when you get involved in foreign missions, you touch the future. About twenty percent of the congregations in the RPCNA today didn’t even exist two decades ago. They were begun as a church plant sometime after 1988. A lot of people have come to faith and been nurtured in Christ through the ministry of those relatively recent church plants. A lot of leaders have been trained there. And even some church plants have been, or will be, birthed from there.

At this summer’s Synod meeting, both the Home Mission Board and the Revitalization Committee emphasized strongly that every single congregation must cultivate a missionary spirit. There is no church in the RPCNA or anywhere that can rest in being established and expect to survive. The work of evangelism, the work of church planting, the work of missions to North America, the work of missions to the world, belongs to every congregation without exception.

It’s hard work, it’s rewarding work, it’s God’s work for the church on earth. It’s worth shaking up business as usual to focus anew on that priority. May God lead and bless us in it.