About

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.

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.

We believe that to reach a diverse world demands diverse churches with diverse leadership. We do not make diversity an end in itself but we recognise the strong 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 unity in diversity. We desire leadership training which is culturally intelligent, which hears from diverse voices, is led by diverse leaders and which listens to Scripture together to discern where our practice of planting and church leadership has become unhelpfully culturally conditioned.

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 the 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.

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 – planted and revitalised.

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.

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.