Editor’s note: The following is a statement on church planting from The Pillar Network, a church planting network consisting of Southern Baptist churches. We appreciated their emphasis on healthy churches and believe the statement is worth sharing with a broader audience.
Planting churches isn’t enough. The goal of the missionary task is to plant healthy, strong, and biblical churches. That’s how they portray the manifold wisdom of God and establish a long-standing, faithful witness to the gospel in our community.
But in order to accomplish this task, we need to know what the Bible says a church is.
The goal of this document is to describe 13 pillars for planting healthy churches. These are necessary supports. They aren’t merely important “in the early days” but at every stage of development, even if it takes wisdom to apply them during different phases of a church’s life.
PILLAR 1: A COMMITMENT TO BIBLICAL ECCLESIOLOGY
The local church is the means and end of mission (Acts, Rev. 2–3).
God’s appointed missionary to evangelize and make disciples is the local church, to whom he has promised his ongoing care, granted his mantle of authority, and ordained as a pillar of truth and outpost
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