London Church Planting Academy – Bringing together planters and training

bringing together planters and training

LAUNCHED SEPTEMBER 2019

Imagine a beautiful dish of curry. Steaming hot. Smells amazing. A careful balance of spices and textures. Then imagine someone else brings along another dish. A blend of crunchy vegetables. Full of colour and flavour. Then someone else brings along the rice. Light, fragrant. Then along come fresh naan breads and chapatis, the poppadoms and the chutneys. You get the picture.

Wouldn’t it be great to bring together like-minded but culturally diverse church planters from across London? Meeting together, eating together, training together, sharpening each other, learning from each other’s experiences, encouraging and praying for one another.

A band of brothers.

Wouldn’t it be great to bring together the best training for church planters? High quality training offerings, different sizes, different flavours, meet, veg, breads, from different networks and providers. A menu of great dishes to enjoy together.

Why? Not just because it is more fun, but because this great city of London needs many more well-trained, well-rounded, robust, godly, Jesus-loving, servant-hearted, gospel-preaching church planters who are well-equipped to plant healthy biblical churches that will take root and last and bring many thousands from darkness into the marvellous light of Christ to the glory of God.

A TRAINING SUITE FOR YOUR CITY

CO-MISSION PLANTING
21 HALF DAYS PER YEAR
Biblical, highly practical, road-tested urban planting specifics for lead and co-planters.
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CITY TO CITY UK
From Sept 2019: CENTER CHURCH UNPACKED
4 HALF DAYS
Unpacking Tim Keller’s seminal book on urban church planting

From Sept 2020: INCUBATOR
8 FULL DAYS PER YEAR
Orientation in contextualised urban planting
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CROSSLANDS SEMINARY
1-4 YEARS PART TIME
Seminary level training created by Acts 29 and Oakhill College.
Biblical theology applied in mission and church.
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UNION MTH
2 YEARS PART TIME + DISSERTATION
Higher level equipping for serving the church as a pastor theologian,
delivered through the LCPA Learning Community.

BLOG

Planting Immersion 2020

You can read about insurgency in Afghanistan… and you can be an embedded journalist in an army unit in Helmand. You can read about Bible

Because Hell is real, we work together as a matter of urgency

Neil Powell addressed the Planting Collective conference in May 2019 and this was his final point of a weighty message: —————— For 2000 years God

The dangers of over and under contextualisation

Zim Okoli leads New Life Catford with Remi Adedire. Here Zim brings to bear research on the history of the Nigerian church on the issue of contextualisation.

A SHARED VISION

A step change increase in the number of enduring, faithful, fruitful church plants of every kind in London, for the salvation of many to the glory of God.

What we want to see

200

PLANTERS

PLANTS

2019

We are committed to

Explicit gospel ministry – We glory in the gospel of God, the word of his grace, Christ crucified. We treasure the good news of God’s sacrificial gift of his Son to make hell-deserving rebels his children; the news of the Bridegroom winning his bride the Church by a bloody dowry; the news of the King, punished in the place of his sinful people, risen victorious to rule, give life by his Spirit and return as Judge; the news of the righteous dying for the unrighteous to bring us to God. We believe that people are saved from destruction and grow in Christ by the verbal proclamation and application of this gospel.

Bible-driven ministry – We trust in the inerrancy and sufficiency of the God-breathed Scriptures. This is where we see the glory of God in the face of Christ. This is where the power to change lives and build the church is found. We are committed to training and leadership and church planting that works with an open Bible, carefully and prayerfully listening to the meaning in the text, humbly sitting under God’s authority, wanting to be continually reformed by his Word, seeing how the Word speaks into every area of life and 21 century culture. We desire churches centred on, ruled by and delighting in the Word; where the unfolding of the Scriptures and driving home of their implications is what equips all other ministries.

Valuing ethnic and cultural diversity – We believe that to reach a very diverse city demands diverse churches with diverse leadership. We do not make diversity an end in itself but we recognise our common humanity, the theme of ‘every nation’ all through Scripture and the Lord’s work in wining people and raising up leaders from every culture. We long for many more churches which display the glorious wisdom of God through a gospel-wrought diversity. We are committed to developing leadership training which is culturally intelligent, which hears from diverse voices, is led by diverse leaders and which goes back continually to listen to Scripture together to discern where our practice of planting and church leadership has become unhelpfully culturally conditioned.

A culture of training – We believe that training in church planting is critical to achieving the vision of a step change increase in the number of enduring, faithful, fruitful church plants of every kind in London. We need training for those launching life boats. We believe in value of in-context, Bible-driven, theologically-informed, culturally-aware, practically-grounded training for the formation of faithful and effective church planters who can minimise mistakes and maximise the likelihood, under God, of planting successfully.

Valuing London – We share God’s concern for this great city. London is reportedly the most culturally and ethnically diverse city in the history of the world. We grieve that 2.5 million Londoners are unreached, having no contact with a Christian and never having heard the gospel. We need hundreds more churches, particularly in the more deprived parts of our capital. We need training tuned to urban realities and urban church planting.

A culture of church planting – We believe that the Great Commission is accomplished not only through evangelism but vitally through the establishing of churches – gathered flocks watched over, fed and equipped by shepherd leaders, missional communities of disciple-making disciples, life boats reaching the lost, bodies being built up in number and maturity, living demonstrations of grace-shaped kingdom life. We believe we need more churches – healthy biblical churches which themselves are wanting to plant again as soon as possible.

The primacy of the local church – We believe that the local church holds the mandate in guarding and entrusting the gospel, training, sending and church planting. The London Church Planting Academy in no way seeks to dictate, direct or control planting in London but rather seeks to serve the planting agenda of local churches and networks of churches by facilitating training for their planters.

The value of networks working together – We recognise that the vision of raising up many planters to plant diverse churches to reach the diverse unreached millions of London is a vision far bigger than any one church or network can achieve on its own. We are committed to partnering together, with a posture of generosity, humility and respect; eager to see planters benefit from the varying strengths brought by different networks. We believe that this collaboration produces something greater than the sum of its parts.

Bold gospel ambition – We believe that Christ is unstoppably building his church, that the Spirit of the Living God is able to move mountains and that our Almighty Father is honoured by big prayers. While very aware of our inability to do anything of any lasting value in our own strength, we are expectant, positive and pleading for the Lord to work powerfully in this city through his Word, Spirit and Church to draw many to Christ.

CONTACT US

Whether you are an active church planter, a potential planter, a pastor, leader or interested in partnering with the London Church Planting Academy to raise up more planters, we’d love to connect and get talking.

The London Church Planting Academy is hosted on Wednesdays and Thursdays by London City Mission and Hope Church Vauxhall on the Vauxhall Gardens Estate.
5 minutes from Vauxhall Station. Disabled access.

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