Often when considering a church plant those involved do one of two things. They either announce that they are starting a church and advertise this fact thus attracting disconnected and often disgruntled believers together to form the base of the new work. Or, they send out a launch team from a local church comprised of a few families willing to do what it takes to begin a new work. Either way you are beginning a church with a church.

The concept I am presenting is totally different than the way things have been and continue to be done to spread the Christian faith. It is about creating church where it does not exist. The apostolic flow begins with nothing. It is not starting a church with a church. This new approach begins with a concerned group of disciples who form an apostolic team . This is simply a band of concerned disciples send on a mission for God. This mission has a specific flow to it which can be seen by breaking it down into three steps – Engage culture; forming community; organic life flow. Let me begin by looking at the first one briefly...

The first thing a concerned group of disciples does in the apostolic flow involves cultural engagement. Engagement of culture may sound like evangelism, but it is really about “context.” Context is a basic apostolic concept we must learn before beginning a new community of faith from scratch. It is best understood by looking at the negative definition of “taking something out of context.”

We all know what this means. It involves missing information, exploiting one side of a story for one’s personal agenda, or naive handling of an idea. The word “context” itself means, “the whole situation, background, or environment relevant to some happening or personality. So, an apostolic team must first discover what its context is. Otherwise, they will be sharing the good news of the Gospel out of context and will not be connecting the way they will need to so as to plant a lasting work for the Lord and His Kingdom.

How do you discover context? Well, in the past we have studied demographics and read studies about the city or people group we are attempting to reach. We read books about the makeup of generational thinking, societal trends, and personal worldviews; but we rarely did what the early church did when taking the Gospel into the Roman Empire. Here they simply lived among the people and become friends with them – long before initiating or starting a “church service.” They connected relationally with those they were wanting to reach for Jesus.

So, our task as an apostolic team in the place where we live is to build relationships and slowly create a relational network from which we can then come to understand the people we are trying to reach, In this way, in time, we will be able to present the gospel in a way that is relevant to the people we are attempting to reach.