A (Mostly) Pointless Debate of Huge Importance
It's not often that I write something that in my heart I feel is mostly a pointless, semantical debate. I just can't think of any important points that this debate is useful for... except for one thing.
And as it turns out, that something is sort of important to a very small niche of people within the Independent Baptist world — church planters!
As a side note, some missionaries refer to themselves as "church-planting missionaries," which in my opinion strikes a good balance and moves people toward thinking more about the terms we use.
But let me explain the basic way that this debate has made things stupid…
If Paul were a foreign missionary, then the precedent for missionary financial support has been set by the Bible, easily. But in our modern Christian culture, for whatever reason, we have a different ministry class that our nomenclature has created (not the Bible). They are often viewed as second-rate missionaries because they rarely, if ever, have to endure the challenges of language and culture shock. Their stories are often not as cool, and they don't typically have to eat bugs.
I'm of course talking about state-side or domestic church planters.
These men are expected to perform all of the same spiritual/ministry responsibilities as foreign missionaries. Sadly though, they often have higher attendance expectations placed on them than foreign missionaries do because it is often wrongly assumed that seeing people saved in America is easier than in other places. I have no idea how anyone would draw that conclusion... ever. Yet that presumption persists. I have evidence for this as you will see below.
Our movement is often divided about how church planters are to be supported, with the church planters often being told by some pastors to simply trust God for their finances. Meanwhile some of the same pastors just rip their people over not tithing when times get tough instead of taking their own advice. I don't think they're being intentionally inconsistent. I think it's just a blind spot. But church planters are often told this because they're allowed to hold secular jobs in this country when they get in a financial pinch, while missionaries overseas often cannot do the same because of their visa restrictions. But there's more.
The expectations on both the church planter and the missionary are still often the same, and in many cases higher for the church planter. The church planter is expected to produce a vibrant, financially-free church that has the same look and feel as supporting churches in a fraction of the amount of time of anyone else on any field worldwide. This is evidenced by the still pervasive "2-3 years of committed support" for church planters. He has about 2-3 years to produce before he knows his finances will dry up. He has 2-3 years to have a large enough church of faithful people, mature enough to tithe consistently and know how to support a pastor. Good luck with that. The church planter has about 2-3 years before he will have to choose between the people he ministers to and the feeding of his family.
All the while, if he were to start his church on a piece of dusty land in a single-room block building with no HVAC or public restrooms, a thatched roof, and no website, things aren't going to go so well here. American consumers have different expectations of the domestic church planter than they do of missionaries. And so do the Americans who support the church planter financially.
Church planters are thus held to much higher production standards, higher attendance expectations, shorter timeframes, higher budgetary constraints, building codes, and all of the petty creature comforts of the average American consumer and regulatory bodies. And within 2-3 years, he is expected to get perfect strangers to pay for all of it, including his own salary. For a church planter who insists on true, biblical ministry these expectations can simply never be met in any real sense. No human being can do this in modern day America without relinquishing some aspect of integrity. The alternative is simply to plant churches in parts of America that are not yet like modern-day America.
I was blessed with a small number of wonderful churches that partially supported us in the ministry of church planting, several for longer than 2-3 years! The rest of our needs, I had to work for, which I was actually happy to do — too happy in fact (see My Addiction).
But lest any of our brethren think it was wrong or unbiblical for me to have taken any support at all, the debate can easily be settled by answering this mostly pointless question - was Paul a missionary, or a church planter? Groan.
Throughout his ministry, Paul received offerings from a number of churches in different nation-states all within the Roman Empire. While few admit it, this is more similar to church planting in America than it is to our current model of world missions abroad.
Today, we send missionaries around the world to different governments in which our American currency is not accepted. Yet Jesus referenced Caesar's image as the one on the currency of the first century, and that is to whom taxes were paid everywhere Paul would later go. The offerings Paul would later receive were then most likely spendable just about anywhere he went, meaning there was interstate commerce. The roads he travelled were built and maintained by Rome regardless of the "country" in which he found himself. Roman soldiers were the standing military wherever he went. There was even an official language used in legal proceedings of the empire. These things above often define what a country is, functionally.
Had Paul gone to the far east, that would have been more like the description of modern day missions abroad with different taxation, different currency, different military, different statutes and laws, and so on. Thus, Paul was not a "foreign missionary". He was a domestic church planter to nation-states within a single federal body. Again, I hate making a distinction between those two roles, but it matters to those who seek support for ministry in the U.S.
The nation-state concept is actually what our founders in America had modeled at first. Early on before the Union, the colonies themselves each believed they were separate countries. Today, each state in America is sovereign, however they all share a common federal military, currency, and federal laws as part of the union. Rome was an early, rudimentary example of this, but with a number of tyrannical flaws of course. In Jesus' day, we can see that Judea had its own laws regarding crimes that warranted public stoning, crucifixion, and many other things. But they had to balance those laws with the "federal" permissions of Roman rulers like Pontius Pilate.
Similar to the Roman empire, there are even vastly difference cultures in America. If you don't think the northeast is different than the south, and the south is different from the midwest, you are known as "uncultured." People are not the same everywhere in the U.S. And until you've lived all over, you won't even realize all the ways these regions are like different countries entirely. Likewise Paul, having been from Tarsus, but then mostly growing up in Jerusalem, would have had some culture shock in Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome. But he was still within the same empire in each place.
Now, obviously there are differences between the America we know and the Roman Empire. American states opted in to being part of the union over time, and can secede. Under Rome, countries were conquered and made part of the empire, like it or not. But the functional results were similar. Paul was afforded cross-boarder travel, a united currency, interstate commerce, and even military protection from two hundred Roman soldiers at one time when he was nowhere near Rome! All of this means that Paul was more like a modern day U.S. church planter than an overseas missionary. And that's not to mention his citizenship status that afforded him a Roman legal appeal process others did not enjoy.
What makes this a mostly silly and pointless debate is the simple fact that all true church planters and missionaries are doing the same work regardless of where they are. The goals are fundamentally the same and the same gospel is preached. The terms have made unnecessary distinctions. But this debate is important to U.S. church planters surrounding the financial support discussion. This is not to say that U.S. church planters should always receive support. Of course the goal is eventual financial independence of the church. It's just that the distinction in terms has placed undue burden on U.S. church planters and placed them under needless financial risk.
I remember feeling like a complete sap accepting missionary support to start a church in United States. And to be honest, I came across people that had no qualms attempting to make me feel like a sap over it. But knowing that the church-planter Paul received support too, any U.S. church planter can know that they're in good company, as long as independence is their eventual goal.
So, the debate is not so pointless after all, now is it? It's just that unless you're a U.S. church planter, you might not notice it's importance.
Finally, the question of course remains — Since a U.S. church can in fact receive support biblically, does that mean that it's helpful to them to do so? After reading all of this, my answer may surprise you. Part 2 - The Free-Footed Preacher coming soon.