Should the “church meeting” or the “church community” take priority at the outset? (Part 2 – A “community led” model)

This post is part of a number I'm doing for the Radstock Ministries blog, which can be found here.

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COMMUNITY-LED CHURCH PLANTS:

Under this approach, the church planting team focus on community formation through strengthening relationships within the team, and building new connections with the community they seek to reach. Their concern is to commend the depth and quality of Christian relationships to the watching world, and to listen to the new culture before establishing a public meeting (if ever).

Again, this approach has a number of immediate positives:

• Creates a strong & immediate emphasis on relationship building: The church plant is established with a culture that is all about mission through relationship building (as opposed to a “hold a meeting and they will come” approach). The business of mission is more likely to be understood as a deliberate pattern of life rather than a something limited to times in the week.
• Energies are devoted to relationships which then act as a pathway into Christian community. In the early days (when resources are limited) energies can be given over to spending time with other Christians (e.g. house church, team bible study and prayer,…).
• Builds a strong awareness of local culture before committing to forms/styles of public meeting and teaching. Delaying setting up a meeting, delays the first impression until it can be more tailored to the context.

However, this approach also has potential limitations:

• Delays creating a potentially important pathway into Christian community: In many (sub)cultures, a church meeting remains an normal/acceptable thing to do, and an easy way, low commitment way to “check out” a new church plant. Likewise, it delays “flushing out” Christians in the community the planters seek to reach.
• The danger of intensity: A small group of people who know each other well, and share important common features (e.g. a lifestyle shaped by the gospel, middle class accents, everyone in work…) can be intimidating for newcomers. A public meeting provides a degree of distance and freedom to opt in or opt out. A private gathering does not.

These portraits of meeting-led and community-led plants are simplistic (even caricatured) to emphasise the contrasts. They do I hope serve to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of the two extremes.

The question then is: How do you establish a right balance in a particular context?