Philip Bryant was the church planting field worker when I planted our first church over 20 years ago. I recently caught up with him and talked to him about turning around a declining denomination.
How did you catch the church planting bug?
I was training at the Baptist College in Queensland. Mission to Queensland heavily promoted church planting to the students. They kept reminding us of all the opportunities to start churches.
A friend at College decided to do something. So he booked a new TAFE centre and told the denomination that we were starting a church. I was pastoring a church in the area so we and sent some of our people.
Years later that church at Bracken Ridge is still going strong.
I saw how the denomination had a vision to plant churches in a State that was and still is booming in population. They were looking for pioneers. Funds were limited. The church planters became “missionaries” and raised their support from within the churches.
That’s when the vision for church planting was born in me.
Tell us about your first church plant?
In 1983 I was interviewed by a church in Melbourne to become their pastor. I did my research and found that the nearby city of Keilor had 90,000 people but not one Protestant church. So I told the interview panel, if you call me as your pastor, I'd like us to plant a church in Keilor.
They called me and so in my second year I gathered a launch team and in 1986 we launched a new church. So now I was pastoring one church and planting the other at the same time. Today the church we planted has about 400 people. It’s in an ethnically diverse region and the church reflects that diversity.
How did you get involved at a denominational level?
Around the same time I took up the leadership of the church planting taskforce for our denomination.
John Simpson, who became the leader of the denomination, saw my commitment to church planting and challenged me to help turn the denomination around by fulfilling one of his three denominational emphases. With John’s support in 1987 I became the church planting field worker for the denomination.
Where did you begin?
I researched back to the 1860s when the denomination started and tracked the pattern of church planting. I found it went in fits and starts. In the postwar boom period (1945-60) we had planted about 40 churches. This was mainly due to the work of the “home missioner”. He traveled around in a van starting churches then moving on.
I learnt that the denomination was most successful in church planting whenever it gave the responsibility to someone to make it happen.
I made sure that only practitioners got to sit on the Church Planting Taskforce. They had to have church planting experience or be planting a church out of their existing church. I didn’t want professional committee members. I wanted people who were used to taking action.
For two years we researched the whole state and developed a vision, goals and plans to make it happen.
I had a firm belief that churches plant churches. Our role in the denomination was to act as a catalyst to help churches plant churches. That meant the “parent” church had to own the vision and find the money and people to make it happen.
Tell us about Frontline
We set up a training institute for church planters called “Frontline”. The course ran for twelve months with a basic overview of Biblical and theological studies, church history. We provided training in practical ministry: church planting, evangelism, counselling, making disciples, training others.
Students had just two days a week in the classroom. We made sure that they were taught by seasoned practitioners. The rest of the week they were involved in ministry.
We attracted a different type of student than were attending theological colleges. They tended to be entrepreneurial people who were willing to go out on a limb and take risks. Many of them came from the larger evangelical churches.
One of our students, Gary McGinty, had started his own business, employing fifteen mechanics. He continued to run it while he did our training.
That’s the sort of people we wanted—pioneering leaders with faith to step out into the unknown.
Sometimes our theological colleges can deselect those sort of people. We attracted them.
How did you get the denomination on board?
Well I didn’t need to sell the idea to the denominational leadership. John Simpson was fully supportive and believed in the validity of church planting.
Geoff Holland, editor of our denominational newspaper, got right behind us. You’d open up a copy of the paper and there on the front page would be the story of a new church started. His support was invaluable.
I was constantly out on the road talking to pastors and churches, casting a vision for church planting.
The annual Assembly of churches always included a church planting focus.
We were a plateaued and declining denomination and we weren’t facing that reality.
How did you help people face reality?
I looked into the health of our churches and discovered that most churches had plateaued or were declining. Some of our churches had not seen a baptism in twenty years.
We looked at our mission field and saw that many regions had no evangelical church.
I kept bringing these uncomfortable truths to our churches and their leaders. I helped them see that the situation was drastic but there was hope.
Was there any resistance to church planting?
Sometimes. Baptists don’t have parish boundaries but they know how to draw them pretty quickly when a church is planted in their area.
The more we planted the more we saw this happening. We tried to bring them on board but if the resistance continued we still allowed the plant to go ahead. We had to think about the thousands of unreached people in that area and place their needs first.
The amazing thing is that our research showed the churches that gave people way to church planting continued to grow after they had done so. They gave sacrificially and God blessed them.
We also found that the new churches were significantly healthier and more likely to reach new people than the older churches.
What outcomes did you see?
From 1960-87 the rate of church planting dipped to no more than 15 new churches.
After our taskforce was set up and I was appointed we planted 39 churches from 1987-93. And your first church was one of them!
As you look back, would you have done anything differently?
I don’t think so at the time. But if I was to do it today I think I would strongly promote the multi campus and multiple service models of church planting.
I also think that we could do much more in training pastors and leaders by providing more mentoring today. However in 1987 no one knew a lot about church planting. Those old church planters who were survivors of the post WWII boom used the model of commencing a Sunday School first but that was not going to cut it in the 1980’s – kids from outside the church no longer went to Sunday School. Each age needs to be relevant to its culture.
