The First Christians did NOT Plant Churches

In the CGGC, during the era of shepherd domination, the local church has always been the center of universe. Jesus has not been.

These days, the church is more central than ever in the CGGC. Hence, the ERC's new New Strategic Plan and its goal of creating healthy, life-giving churches.

As the ERC Shepherd Mafia prepares to summon the Conference's parish priests and lay delegates to its special Conference session on January 13...

...it is important to note that the church was not core among the people of the first generation Jesus' disciples.

For, what? three decades? the CGGC, and especially the ERC, has hinged its hopes for church growth on the planting churches.

Church Planting has been the end all/be all...

...let's face it...

...during the era of our body's most disastrous decline.

I first wrote what comes next waaaaaay back in the days of the Emerging Church blog:

Church planting was never in the minds of the early disciples of Jesus. Neither was church multiplication. These failed and failing approaches to Kingdom expansion are fruit of the Shepherd Mafia's most essential heresy, Flockism.

Early disciples didn't plant churches.

As I say ad nauseam Jesus almost never talked about the church. In fact, the word church is absent from three of the four Gospels.

When Jesus mentions planting in the parables, obviously, He's not referring to churches, He's talking about spreading truth.

When Paul talks about planting in 1 Corinthians 5, he's not talking about planting a church in Corinth, he's talking about planting the GOSPEL there.

For three decades, then, the powers that be in the CGGC have been investing oodles time and energy and goo gobs of moolah in planting churches...

...when church planting wasn't even in the minds of Jesus and His first followers.

Is it any wonder that the Lord of all authority and power and grace and mercy and blessing is not blessing the CGGC?!?!?!!!!

In the three decades or so that the CGGC has been obsessed with church planting, truth, especially the simple truth of the gospel, has come to mean less and less in what it does.

And, as I say, and as we all know, the Lord of all authority and power and grace and mercy and blessing, very simply, is not blessing us.

---------------

The new New Strategic Plan is all about churches...

...and parish priests...

...and, an expanded and more powerful than ever, Conference hierarchy.

But, the first followers of Jesus didn't plant churches. They planted the Word, the gospel.

They preached the gospel...Jesus.

We must do that.

We must repent.