There is a lot of talk in fresh expressions and church generally about church planting. A idea, or a group of people, or whatever are taken from the sending church or churches and planting in a community with the aim of growing church. The idea does not grab me and actually leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable.

I know only a little about planting in an agricultural sense – but the little I do know leads me to think that church planting is not really what is needed. To plant in this sense essentially you need a seed of something already growing, or you need to take a cutting from a plant/tree or graft and plant, nourish, feed and water that seed.

The seed, cutting or whatever will then grow – but it will grow to look exactly like the plant it was taken from. The seed grows as a copy of the seed bearer. An apple seed will look like an apple tree, a carrot seed will produce a carrot plant, tomatoes produce tomatoes and so on and so on. This is good for crop and plant growing but I suggest it is not the only way for churches.

Not all, but many church plants, adopt the practices of their sending church. This is inevitable as the aim is to grow, and growth has to occur to be attractive. I suggest this is not good because it seems to take little account of the environment into which the ‘church seed’ is being planted. The expectation of what it will look like is pre-determined. The expectation that growth will occur is also a criterion for success.

To take a seed and plant it somewhere else will always produce an identical plant from which the seed bearing plant it has come. This is simple genetics. It’s true the seed may grow into a better or worse specimen health-wise depending on the environment into which it is planted – but still the species will be the same. Planting is replication.

I don’t want to plant a church – I want to be involved in birthing a church!

I think there is a difference, particularly if we look to the human birth process – and I thought about this while I looked at my three wonderful children. My three children are great and, like most children born of the same parents, they display similarities but they are incredibly unique in their makeup and actions as well.

In the human birth process, seeds grow and the child that is then born and develops is recognisable as coming from the parents (seed bearers!), and is recognisable as being related to the siblings, but each is a unique creation. That uniqueness comes from the effect on the environment upon them both while they were developing in the womb and since they have been born, it also comes from their reactions to what is around them, it also comes from how the parents have related to them at the time, it also comes from choices they make, relationships they have, things they like and dislike or try or avoid – the variables are massive.

The person created is unique to the relationship and reaction to the particular environmental variables at those particular points in time.

To develop authentic church community I believe we need to think a lot more about the birthing process than the planting process. This will involve us more in the mystery of church by allowing the Holy Spirit to shape rather than us trying to shape, determine and control church ourselves. To birth a church we need to bring the seeds together and then allow God through the Holy Spirit to do the creative work that God does.

What particularly strikes me here is that with birthing there are no guarantees but with planting there are great expectations. Seeds are planted and growth is expected as a sign quite quickly. Many wanting to give birth can tell stories of various attempts, of the need for lots of patience and essentially there is no correct way of ensuring that the birthing process can start – the conditions may all be ‘textbook correct’ but sometimes still nothing happens – and yet other times something does.

There are pointers to church birth in both the New Testament and the early church which both surprised and excited me. Gregory the Great, in his work On the Pastoral Charge, (quoted in Cocksworth & Brown’s Being a Priest Today) used the analogy of ‘mother’ to describe a priest. He speaks of the capacity that mothers have to give birth and to nurture life. Paul refers to being in the ‘pains of childbirth’ in Galatians 4:19 and in 1 Thessalonians again he uses imagery of a mother feeding and caring for her children. This imagery is helpful as I consider the role of ‘priest’ in this setting.

Birthing and caring obviously involve a significant giving of self – involvement in the birthing of a church will be costly and involve significant energy, time and nurture – but the end result is quite a beautiful creation.