Church Planting & Being Uprooted

Pioneering a church plant into a new town, city or nation will involve the disorientating challenge of leaving home. How can you resettle & put down roots well in the midst of planting a new church?

Waking up in a Jason Bourne movie

The first morning in a new home, in a new city, in a new nation is a disorientating experience. Everything feels faintly familiar; the sunshine streaming through the window, a distant police siren, the bird’s morning chorus. But somehow, even that which should be familiar doesn’t quite fit. For instance, a police siren, not an unusual sound to hear for any city dweller, but yet the tone, pitch and cadence of the siren wail are strange and abnormal. It sounds foreign like you’re waking up in a Jason Bourne movie.

Even all the things that are the same — a morning coffee, a quick shower, toast for breakfast — somehow feel ‘off’, different, out of kilter.

You soon realise that this disorientation is less about the location you’re now in than the person that has arrived there — you. There is nothing wrong with the coffee or the local police siren but you are just not ‘at home’. The French describe it as ‘depaysment’ — the feeling of being out of place, of being uprooted.

This isn’t an article about homesickness (I’ve tried to write about that already and after 25,000 words I’m still struggling to make sense of it) but rather the unique challenges that this ‘depaysment’ brings to church planting.

The early church & leaving home

Mike Ehrmantraut, in the TV series Better Call Saul succinctly stated; It’s human nature to wanna stay close to home… Nobody wants to leave home.

And yet if you want to pioneer a church plant into a new town, city, or nation this is exactly what you have to do — leave home.

The first church planters that we read about in the New Testament certainly left home. To give just one example; In Corinth, Paul meets Priscilla & Aquila who have recently arrived in Greece having been forced out of Rome (Acts 18:2). After about 18 months Priscilla & Aquila leave with Paul for Syria and then soon after to Ephesus where they seem to settle as Paul continues to travel.

We don’t know if Priscilla & Aquila missed Rome after they left. Was it a wrench to have to move on from Corinth after only 18 months of living there? Did they settle and begin to feel at home in Ephesus? We don’t know.

Is this uprootedness/homesickness just a modern phenomenon? No. Priscilla & Aquila and the apostle Paul may not have understood the word ‘homesickness’ (it’s a relatively modern concept) but the feeling behind it would have been familiar to them and the other NT believers.

We know that Paul was ‘torn away’ from his friends in Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 2:17) and greatly desired to see them face to face again. He missed the Philippians, ‘how I long for all of you’ (Philippians 1:8) and he longed to see Timothy, ‘Recalling your tears, I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy.’ (2 Timothy 1:4).

We can also see that these themes of movement and exile run through the Bible and that homesickness is not an idea foreign to the Bible. For instance, the Jewish exiles in Babylon grieved for their former home: ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion’ (Psalm 137:1)

Jesus encouraged his disciples and future church planters in Mark 10, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30)

In short, movement for the sake of mission is a common practice in Scripture and throughout church history. The associated pain and discomfort of ‘being out of place’ are also normal, however uncomfortable it might feel.

If you’re a church planter who has recently arrived in a new city/nation, or indeed anyone who has recently located, don’t worry — what you’re feeling, your ‘depaysment’ is very normal indeed.

Putting down roots and resettling your life in church planting

Here are a few things we learned amid church planting about putting down roots:

1. Allow at least a year to move house and prioritise settling your family as a key church planting goal

An important church planting goal — perhaps the most important initial goal — should be to settle you and your family, and there isn’t a quick fix for this.

Shortly after moving to the Netherlands, I had a conversation with Terry Virgo (founder of the Newfrontiers family of churches) who was visiting the Hague for an event, he encouraged me by saying that for those moving overseas “it takes a year to move house”. This was helpful advice at the time and allowed us some breathing space when we weren’t feeling at all settled.

However, in hindsight, I think it took us closer to 5 years to be settled as a family and now, even 10 years later, I’m still not entirely convinced we ever reached that goal (whatever that looks/feels like).

Avoid the temptation to shortcut the process

For the church planter, you’ll want to get on with a bunch of other things. They may even be a nice distraction from the arduous journey of settling down. However, don’t bypass or try and shortcut the settling down process.

There will be attractive shortcuts, hacks, and sticking plaster solutions that may be nothing more than shallow roots. Depending on your context, they may be the choice between:

• Placing your children in a local school OR an international school. There will be some nations where neither of these options is viable but in general, in non-English speaking, urban contexts you (unless you are a native speaker of that country) will be faced with these choices.

• Connecting with Expat communities OR building friendships with local neighbours. Expat communities flourish in urban international contexts and are often useful for relocation advice & support, and can be a reassuringly familiar presence. But be aware that in transient cities (like Amsterdam), the expat communities are usually the most transient — they are probably not the place to find friends that will last.

• Consuming news & content from your old context OR local media. With the proliferation of social media, streaming platforms, and internet access, it is entirely possible to move countries but still read the same news, watch the same TV shows, and view the same social media content. There is something comforting about this and is perhaps an unavoidable result of our globalised world. However, still seek out local news sources, follow local people on social media, and watch local TV shows.

• Traveling regularly back to your home nation OR being a faithful presence in your community. We deliberately didn’t travel back to the UK as a family for a full year after moving.

2. The cross-cultural experience accentuates church planting loneliness, so find local relationships outside of your normal ecclesiological comfort zone

All church planters feel lonely, ask any of us, it’s true. However, the added dynamics of moving to a new nation make this much harder. Why? Let’s explore a few factors that may accentuate loneliness for the church planter:

• You’ll most likely be stretched much further from existing denominational / network relationships and support. However much willingness there is to maintain connection, distance from the supply chain will slow & disrupt the arrival of encouragement and support.

• You’ll step away from the denominational / network knowledge base. They don’t know your nation or city, so any support/counsel they give you will be immediately hindered by a lack of local knowledge.

• You may struggle to find local church leaders that ‘get you’ or understand your ‘kind of church’. Local leaders may even be threatened or suspicious of you as an ‘outsider’. Approach them with humility and seek to learn from their experience.

• In highly secular contexts you will struggle to find many other believers. This is obvious and yet can be a shock to the system, particularly if you’re from a large church or a more Christianized (even if only marginally so) nation.

Prioritise friendship, even if it’s outside your normal cliques and comfort zones.

3. A move to a new city/nation will empty your diary. Take the opportunity to reimagine what it means to practice your Christian faith

It’s not until we leave a church that we realise how much our own walk with God was intertwined with the church community (and rightly so). Regular patterns of prayer and fasting are often dictated by when the church is praying and fasting, our weekly worship is dependent upon weekly church services, we’ve developed discipleship relationships/accountability partners/ prayer triplets that suddenly no longer exist.

You’re left with the question — How do I Christian now?

Many church planters/believers arriving in a new city without an established church community to walk into, have to wrestle with this question. 

Not only does it add to the aforementioned feelings of loneliness and isolation, but it can also leave you feeling guilty that your Christian faith is so relent upon the spiritual practices of the community and therefore weak.

Find the opportunity within this. When you move house you have an opportunity to declutter your possessions and rethink your goals and aspirations. In the same way, you can reimagine your walk with God. Your diary will suddenly be empty, what will you fill it with?

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