Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Organic Church Planting

Welcome to the church planting blog! My name is Mark Weible and I serve as the Director of Church Planting for the Greater Orlando Baptist Association in Florida. My role is that of encourager and coach to churches and the people they send out to start new churches.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

I believe in organic church planting. Throughout the New Testament, the church is described in organic terms (body, field, bride, etc.). Answers.com defines or·gan·ic adj.: Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms: organic matter.

  1. Having properties associated with living organisms.
  2. Resembling a living organism in organization or development; interconnected: society as an organic whole.

A church is an organized organism. That means that churches have organizational structure and organic properties such as birth, growth, reproduction and death. Healthy churches are birthed by healthy churches. As soon as a single cell is developed, an organic church is legitimate, although not necessarily viable. I will explain more later, for now check out the article by Julie Belding entitled “Church Planting that Works” at goba.org/cpn. This is a simple story about a church planting movement in Thailand. Throughout the story you will see concepts like [energy transformation] in brackets. These words and phrases are known as biotic (organic) principles. These principles are the dna of organic church planting.