I want to begin both by thanking Drew for his opening essay and by highlighting how counter-cultural (counter, even, to church growth culture in the contemporary west) it is. Don’t be fooled into thinking that all of his typology is mere Theopolitesque window-dressing laid on a more standard-grade call to “be missional” in the generic and abstract sense. It would be easy, I think, to do that: “Lights in the firmament, hm, what a *nice* symbol…” For words like “nice” and “symbol” are often the kind deployed to insulate ourselves from the personal implications of typology. No. Let us receive the full hammer of the implications of typology. What Drew has done, in my estimation, is to raise an alternative biblical theological imagination for church planting today. It is one that is fundamentally different from that which has been the defining idiom for church-planting in the west for at least the past 70 years or so (generally since the post-war boom of the 1950s and 60s and the publication of Donald McGavran’s The Bridges of God [i]): one that I will simply call “hyper-church” as a kind of short-hand in what follows.

Both Drew and Dan identify, even if not as explicit as I am being, the massive problems which churn in the wake of hyper-church’s hegemony. “When done well” (the key phrase that Dan draws-out from Drew’s essay) is to imply that under the operations and imaginations of hyper-church things have tended towards the opposite. Moving the conversation along from Drew and Dan I want to offer reflection on a few ways in which I think the character of church planting today is unwell and needs to change in order to be in shape with the kind of gospel vision laid-out by Drew; and then I want to sketch-out a couple of things that should mark church planting as we move forward into God’s future for his people.

I. Life in Omriland; Or, Contours of Hyper-church

What do I mean by “hyper-church”? Briefly, this: a mode of “doing church” which borrows its methods from the other contemporary “hyper” forms of operation —forms I think heretical and bad: “hyper-war” “hyper-power” “hyper-culture” and “hyper-reality”.[ii] Within the “hyper” used in this way (no, I do not mean all forms of the semantic domain covered by the Greek notion of ὑπέρ) everything is instrumentalized in the interest of sheer acceleration so that rapidity —which is to say naked haste— is the priority of life. These forms of contemporary life, made possible in part by the technological developments (primarily communications) of the last century, purport to provide unmediated, instantaneous, ahistorical, “nowness”; a kind of pseudo-eternity with all moments and cultures and tribes ages gathered into the palm of the hyper-state and rationed-out like the Roman grain-dole to consumers in the form of life-style.

A grim irony resides in the “hyper”, however: because the things that the prefix “hyper” modifies are temporal things, things that move in time, the speed of the “hyper” always ends-up erasing the modified noun. “Hyper-culture” ceases to be anything like recognizable culture; “hyper-war” ceases to be anything like “war” and is reduced to cold calculations churned-out by probabilistic algorithms; and “hyper-reality”, precisely because it removes time and space (the two features which Jean Amery[iii] identifies as central to embodied life), is actually just a euphemism for the erasure of reality. The “hyper” is interested, above all else, in the erasure of horizons and narrations. Byung-Chul Han, on this point is excellent:

“Our present age is characterized by the collapse of horizons. Contexts that provide meaning and identity are disappearing, and the symptomatic results are fragmentation, a kind of pointillism, and pluralization. This also applies to the way we experience time. There is no longer the sort of fulfilling time that is due to a beautiful structure of past, present and future, that is to a story, to narrative suspense […] Because it is poor in horizons, this kind of time is not able to carry much meaning.”[iv]

Nowhere is this tendency of the “hyper” to erase the noun it modifies more apparent than hyper-church where our demand for immediacy (which means, of course, un-mediated) and accessibility undoes the actual meaning of the Church. The “hyper” offers to exchange the costliness our call to be “catholic” (the unity of many different places) for the hyper-church option of being “worldwide” and “streamable” (which is not the unity of many different places, but the subsumption of difference under the homogenizing power of the web). Likewise the “hyper” offers to exchange our cruciform place in the Fullness of Time (eternity) with an anaesthetized timelessness. Those of us who run in the world of church-planting know the formula on offer:

1. Raise immense capital;
2. Build sexy website (make sure that your lead pastor’s bio mentions him as an “author” of some kind; extra points if his hobbies signal his bourgeois desire to be thought of as a “normal dude,” such as “likes good coffee” “enjoys hiking” “delights in craft beer” and “is an avid </insert sports team here/> fan”);
3. Conduct sociological surveys of neighborhoods, drawing on the models of human behavior that regard your future parishioners as “consumers” and the life of your future parish as a “brand”;
4. Cultivate church-plant leadership along the best practices of Taylorist management;[v]
5. Purchase your “church-plant” equipment using companies like Church on Wheels or Portable Church Industries; move aside Bezalel and Oholiab, no more of this hammered gold or spun crimson or pomegranate bells, give us our steel scaffolding and jumbotrons;
6. Boom!

Here, in the land where the high places of hyper-church have not been removed, production value is of the utmost importance. One need only perform a cursory search on YouTube for countless hours of trainings on how to “amp-up” the Sunday service to get a pulse on just how important it is. A lot goes into it. Millions of dollars are spent each year in America on stage, sound, and musical equipment to effect ultimate entertainment quality. Everything becomes a “user experience” from the fillable forms on the website to the parking lot signs to the way we think about caring for children during the service. This is not a trend that is neutral to faithful theology, it is antithetical to it. Christian theology must oppose “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”[vi]

Leadership in all forms of the “hyper” tends towards depersonalized managerialism. In hyper-church this results in head pastors who function more like CEOs whose lives are defined by the control of information and a focus on success than they are by Word and Sacrament.[vii] This amplifies some of the worst features of Adamic leadership upon which all the recent effulgence of Safety Policies and watchdogism and abuse reporting systems cannot remedy. For one cannot solve the very personal ways managerialism hurts people in its dehumanizing impersonalism with the application of impersonal HR policies and electronically signed petitions. We can signify this as an equation:

Charismatic persona + impersonal management of teams = ripe conditions for scandal.

John Milbank is, on this point, brutally clear: “‘Management’ cannot be ethicized, since the term denotes merely the meaningless but efficient manipulations which are  all that is left to do with things once they have been de-sacramentalized [sic].”[viii]

Though the church-growth movement began with a Gospel motivation (to win the lost and to get the Western Church back on mission wherever it had veered from it to pursue worldly success), it has tended towards making sheer attendance the metric of success. Sure, I want the Gospel preached to the ends of the earth and the islands which stud the boundaries of the world (actually, that is technically where I live) and I want to see God’s salvation come to those who a far from him. The Harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few and I pray the Lord of the harvest that he may reap mightily (Matt. 9:35-38). But sheer attendance is not, sorry to say, equivalent to kingdom growth, just as the sheer amount of plant matter collected by a farmer is equivalent to marketable produce. Not only is this not the right metric (put crudely, “the bigger the numerical value of average Sunday Attendance the healthier the church”) it’s the wrong goal. The goal of a church-plant is not “saving people” per se. The goal of a church-plant is to love God with all one’s heart soul mind and strength. People are “saved” in order to do this. As John Piper[ix] puts it succinctly: “Mission exists where worship doesn’t.”[x] Maybe it’s also an ineffective goal in the long-run (counted in millennia, not decades); Maybe bigger is not better,[xi] and what we are going to witness in the next 100 years of church-planting are diminishing returns on all our investment in “hyper-church.”

The church-growth movement gets it wrong precisely here. For a church’s own growth in sheer numbers is not why it is placed on earth. We’ve put something in the “first place” position that doesn’t belong there. Perhaps it will please the Lord to crush me or you or this or that church plant; perhaps that is how we will be fruitful for the kingdom. Sheer numerical values are not what the Lord will inquire of us church-planters on the last day, but rather something more terrible, something I tremble to consider; something like “was the Cross of Jesus magnified in you?”

Around us things are shaking. All of the “booms” have begun “busting.” Burn-out, suicide, misconduct, scandal upon scandal, litigation —things which must not be named among us are so named among us. We must wonder, without being mean about it, whether the hyper-church model is going to continue to be a viable model for church-planting in the future; and if it even can continue to be one. Perhaps it’s too big not to fail. We must wonder, more painfully, if it was ever a viable model for planting the Gospel, or, if it was something God used in spite of itself… He does that sometimes yunno, like with Henry VIII.

Surely some will protest, “Mark, do you deny that people have encountered the Lord at hyper-church?” Flatly, no. I know many people who have encountered the Gospel of Jesus mightily in places under the long shadow of hyper-church. God has used it a lot in the past seventy-five years and I think he continues to do so. Praise Him. But there is a very big difference between God using a thing in spite of itself and God intending a thing to be a certain way. Often, the best to happen in moments wherein the church is captive to systems God has to work-in-spite-of is for those systems to be subverted and, eventually, collapse. Obadiah did good work in Ahab’s court. God moved. But the consequence of God moving-in-spite-of Ahab was the subversion of Ahab’s court (Obadiah keeping the school of the prophets alive, cf. 1 Kings 18:4) and its eventual collapse (a member of the school of the prophets anointing Jehu, 2 Kings 9:1ff). I can say that God did a lot of good through-though-in-spite-of Henry VIII, and also be very thankful for Elizabeth… and even more thankful for when the throne of England passed from the Tudors to the Stuarts.

Hear me friends: I throw no stones. You are a part of this and so am I. It is not just “around us” in the culture it is “in us” as church-planters today; in our appetites, our worries, our strategies, our postures, our discourse of leadership, etc. I know the feeling of wishing, vainly and filthily, that my church-plant’s media presence was more like such-and-such; or that we could manicure and posture this or that way for greater (cue jazz hands) **attractiveness**. I’m with you. My name too is written in the dust along with yours. I am chief among the sinners. This is no mad Jeremiad, this is a confession and a call. Let us wash ourselves and return to the ancient paths, I think we’ll find rest in them (Jer. 6:16).

II. Typology and Implications; Or, So Then What?

I promised to do one more thing before handing this over to our next conversant: I promised to sketch a few things that in being reclaimed by the church generally and church-planters in particular would (1) confront our high places of “hyper-church, and (2) equip the Church for future mission. Or, to phrase it as a question I imagine is rumbling in the mind of my most skeptical reader “So then what?”

Three things: (1) move all or most of our energy and resources currently devoted to “the show” to equipping the people of God to sing his praises (of which the psalter must have preeminence); (2) to recover an image of ministry that is defined by to co-images of “Word” and “Sacrament”; and (3) to reimagine how we think of the phrase “engaging with culture.”

1.
As much as us moderns pour our ecclesial resources into the kind of “service,” which is a secular concert with Christian appropriations, we may have missed something: we have undone the Reformation. For we mustn’t forget, dear friends, the way in which the Reformation was primarily a reform of worship. The people weren’t being fed the Scriptures, nor were they receiving the Sacrament of Holy Communion with any regularity. The liturgy was done by professionals in voices totally foreign to them. Let me be very bold: you have not understood the Reformation until you have understood it as a liturgical revolution, as a demand of the people of God to be something more than spectators in His worship.

What has happened across the denominational spectrum by and large in the last century is a return to the worst of the pre-reformational practices. Once again most people who go to church go to church to hear worship done in voices not their own (everything, almost, is written for high Tenors or Soprano leads, leaving at least 50% of the congregation with no musical part for them). What would a Bass or an Alto, for instance, do when Chris Brown leads “Lion of Judah”? Or, more cuttingly, what is an actual urban church plant (not a suburban commuter church who leases space in the city) with limited resources and a failing community garden and an almost entirely blue-collar male population supposed to do with it? Heed thou the reformation!

Take all of that money, all of that energy, all of that talent, and teach your people to sing the liturgy. This is a proven method. It’s what the Jewish missionaries did with Gentiles in the first century; it’s what the brave twenty-year-old celibates did with illiterate Germanic and Celtic folks in the fifth century; it’s what sustained mission in Appalachia in the nineteenth century (e.g. shapenote music); and it’s what the “Anglo-Catholic slum priests” of the nineteenth and early 20th centuries did among the urban poor of Britain.[xii] Teach your people to sing and chant. Teach them to make music, not merely to watch it, and you will be digging deep wells of revival in your city.

2.
Word and Sacrament must be the mark of pastoral ministry in the future of church-planting.[xiii] The world of “the show” is dying… as a mater of fact it never was really a world, it was just an event. Give them something their phones cannot. Invite the hungry lost to hear the very Word of the God who loves them. Invite them to enter his Water. Tell the lost not only that “God will fix them” tell them that there is a Father who has “killed the fatted calf” of his Son and who waits for them on the road with a ring and a robe. Give them Bread and Wine. One can conceive of church-planting as our response to the Welcome of the Father which we ourselves have received. There are people in your city who have not come to the Lord’s Table, have not heard his Word, and have not eaten his Meal. Go! Plant a church! Run to them and bring them to the Lord.

Still struggling with missiological skepticism? Think: people in your city can find tickets to shows and concerts that your church cannot compete with. Friend, do you think they came to your service in the local elementary school gym because they thought you’d outdo the nearby Billie Eilish performance? Think better of their hungers. They came to your paltry set-up where your brother-in-law is playing ukulele and the A/C is out because they saw the word “church” on the sign by the road and something magical in that word hooked them, or because their neighbors (part of your launch team) had them over for dinner and said something unimpressive and eerily arousing like “you should come to church with us.”

As powerful as our entertainment industry is it ultimately cannot offer either the Word of God nor the Sacraments. All of secular modernity’s “[p]ropaganda techniques have not been able wholly to convince him that life has any meaning left” suggests Jacques Ellul, hungry the contemporary Adam turns to “amusement techniques” which “have jumped into the breach and taught him at least how to flee the presence of death.”[xiv] But these techniques are only that, diversions from Reality that returns with ever-deepening severity. What the human needs is a drink from the Deep Real —a drink which entertainment cannot offer.

Ironically we are told by consumer culture to “give the people what they want” but don’t because we (along with the showbiz folks) are confused about what it is the people want. I don’t think they came for the show. I think they came for Word and Sacrament. Therefore let me charge you here, brothers, indeed give the people what they came for: God’s Word, God’s Water, God’s Table.

3.
There are, finally, two very different modes of “engaging with culture” as witnessed typologically which we can style the “Esau option” and the “Jospeh option.” Hyper-church for the most part has allied with the “Esau Option” and that to our detriment. Esau’s marriage to foreign women was to his detriment because it came at the cost of the covenant (Gen 26:34-46, 36:1-3). His relationship with Yahweh had to accommodate the culture of his wives. This is, generally, how big-box church responds to culture. The consumer culture of “hyper-reality” is fine as long as it generally remains within the confines of Moral Therapeutic Deism[xv] and gives lip-service to a select number of socio-political Evangelical shibboleths. Who cares if what is actually being (re)produced on stage is nothing but fashionable Americanism in which God works as a byproduct in private lives? We cover all of this for the most part with language of “cultural engagement.” But we are not “engaging” in any sense of the word. We are mindlessly consuming.

We must abandon this “Esau” model in exchange for a “Joseph” model. Jospeh also takes a “foreign wife” (Gen 41:51-52) but it does not come at the cost of his covenantal relation to the God of Israel. Rather, his wife enters into the household of faith, bearing sons who bear names that relate to God. The fruits of her womb tell the story of God’s redemption. She is incorporated into the worship of Yahweh. Church-planting with a “Jospeh mindset” follows this missional logic: the local mission brings the local people into the worship of God. Jospeh does not kowtow to Egypt. He does not “Egyptize” in order to gain favor. Rather, with God’s favor he “Isrealizes” Egypt.

Sure, church-planters must conduct a kind of “cultural exegesis” wherever they find themselves. But that exegesis must “read” local culture in order to bring it into the Kingdom, not to conform to it. Ironically what hyper-church does when it “engages with culture” is far more colonial than it is integrative. Under the auspices of hyper-church the local culture is not so much brought into the Kingdom (e.g. new hymns being written Apachean, new Hawaiian feast days being added to the church’s calendar, ecclesiastic art being done in a Chilean idiom, etc.) as much as both the Kingdom and the local culture are displaced to make room for “hyper-culture” (e.g. Navajo pastors born and raised “on the Res” wearing skinny jeans and Supreme brand t-shirts, Hawaiian musicians playing Bethel music, the use of Warhol-esque pop-art on the wall of parish hall in Tahiti replacing the generations-old gold-leaf icon). This must stop. Chop down the tree. Let local culture speak but let it speak the Word of God and sing the Liturgy of His People, not the “autopropoganda” of hyper-church.[xvi]

Praise the Lord for all that He has done in and in spite of hyper-church. But if we are going to conceive of church-planting as the multiplication of the saints who shine like the brightness of the waters above (Dan. 12:3), we must make sure that those lights we plant are enkindled with fire of the Spirit (Is. 4:4; Matt 3:11-12; Lk. 3:16-17; Acts 2:3-4; 1 Thess. 5:19), and not merely “glowing” with the L.E.D. fixtures of “hyper-reality.”

III. An Ancient Model for Church-Planting, Recently Revived.

As a final word, I’ll offer a model my friend Ben Jefferies once told me about. He said it was “an ancient model for church-planting” developed in the days of post-Byzantium mission in the east. It is a time-tested model, used throughout the church’s life, but one which has been almost entirely shelved in post-Potsdam missiology, except for a few notable exceptions (e.g. the underground church in China). I offer it here for your consideration:

1. Find a young Christian man who is filled with the spirit, one who is already at work serving in his local parish. Teach him memorize the Psalms, pay for music lessons as able, have him sing the Psalter entire on a monthly basis. Let him commit the most promising moments of his youth to the worship of God and the service of the poor. Cultivate in him a love of scripture, so that he doesn’t merely “know” (Lat. intellegere) every jot and tiddle but that he “knows” (Heb. יָדַע) them in the deeply embodied Biblical sense (Gen 4:1) the Word of God. Teach him to lead the liturgies and rites of Christ’s Church with a clear conscience. Teach him to teach the Word, in season and out of season.
2. Discern with him where the Lord would have him go.
3. Instruct your household and your parish to: (a) Sing or chant three Psalms on behalf of him and his team daily; and (b) send them as much of your expendable income for the next decade as possible.
4. Send him away to be crucified on the mission field, commanding him only: “Preach the Gospel. Die. Be forgotten.”

Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur.

[i] The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions, (New York: Friendship Press, 1955). For a helpful and clarifying recap of the church-growth movement that is thankful and yet understands some of the ways the church growth movement went astray see Ed Stetzer, “What’s the Deal with the Church Growth Movement?” Christianity Today, October 1, 2012, http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2012/october/whats-deal-with-church-growth-movement-part-one.html; see also his “The Evolution of Church Growth, Church Health, and the Missional Church: An Overview of the Church Growth Movement from, and back to, Its Missional Roots,” Journal of the American Society for Church Growth, 17:1, January 1, 2006, pp. 87-112 https://place.asburyseminary.edu/jascg/vol17/iss1/4 .

[ii] For the concept I’m referring to here see the following: (1) for a primer on “hyper-war” see John Allen and Amir Husain, “On Hyperwar,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, vol. 143/7/1373, July 2017, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/july/hyperwar; (2) by “hyper-power” I mean the phrase as coined by Hubert Védrine in his article “To Paris, US Looks Like a ‘Hyper-power’”, International Herald Tribune, February 5, 1999; (3) by “hyper-culture” see the sprawling exploration in Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Medford, MA: Polity, 2022); (4) by “hyper-reality” I mean the concept as developed by Jean Beaudrillard’s landmark Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, (University of Michigan Press, 1994), and much of what has followed in that wake.

[iii] See his lengthy discussion in On Aging: Revolt and Resignation, trans. John Barlow, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp.1-26.

[iv] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture, 50; italics in the original.

[v] The best stuff on offer today which provides a theological account of managerialism is by Baptiste Rapin, but basically none of it has been translated from the French, and I am hard-pressed with my three years of high school French and my Latin to take-on such a task, what I have are my own paltry translations and the few excerpts which friends have done for me (a linguist parishioner and the Cajun proprietor of a bookstore in New Orleans). Speak French fluently? I beg you, bring full-length works of Rapin into English. Start with Au Fondement du Management, Theologie de l’Organization, vol. 1, (Les Editions Ovadia, 2014). Start a GoFundMe and I’ll make donations.

[vi] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p.52.

[vii] See John Milbank, “Stale Expressions: The Management-Shaped Church,” Studies in Christian Ethics 21.1 (2008) pp.117–128; Lyndon Shakespeare, Being the Body of Christ in the Age of Management, (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2016); Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power, (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp.70-86; and Paul Scherz, Tomorrow’s Troubles:Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance, (Georgetown University Press, 2020), pp.117-160.

[viii] Milbank, “Stale Expressions,” 128.

[ix] I don’t always quote John Piper. But when I do, it is always this one. Stay thirsty my friends.

[x] John Piper, “Missions Exists Because Worship Doesn’t: A Bethlehem Legacy, Inherited and Bequeathed,” a sermon preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church, Desiring God, October 27, 2012, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/missions-exists-because-worship-doesnt-a-bethlehem-legacy-inherited-and-bequeathed

[xi] See, for instance, Neil Cole, “Is Bigger Really Better? The Statistics actually Say “No”!” ChurchPlanting.com, August 30, 2012, https://churchplanting.com/is-bigger-really-better-the-statistics-actually-say-no/ .

[xii] No, I am not Anglo-Catholic. I am merely a Christian presbyter who thinks highly of other Christian presbyters who move to slums, offer daily Eucharist to the working poor, and teach illiterate factory laborers how to sight-read Gregorian Chant –even if I disagree with some of their theology.

[xiii] What would it look like to develop a vision of church-planting anchored in Word and Sacrament? Dan Alger has done great work in Word and Sacrament: Ancient Traditions for Modern Church Planting, (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2023).

[xiv] The Technological Society, trans John Wilkinson, (New York: Alfred Knopff, 1964), p.377.

[xv] Moral Therapeutic Deism is a termed which originates in Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford Academic, 2005). I’m using it here in its widest possible application and making big broad strokes. By it I generally refer to the neoliberal ethic of “being nice.”

[xvi] “Autopropoganda” is a term Byung-Chul Han picks-up from Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, (New York: Penguin, 2011), p.15; Han deploys in The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception, and Communication Today, trans. Wieland Hoban (Medford, MA: Polity 2018), p.3.