The Church Planters: A Musical

(Apologies to all for my lack of inspiration over the last month. Apologies also to Mr Brooks for this sudden burst of inspiration!)

OK, lemme pitch ya this for a plotline. Think we could get it made?

A worn out church planter sits in his midtown office counting his woes. His last few church plants have not been successful and the current state of diocesan poverty makes it unlikely that he will succeed again. The arrival of a financial whiz-kid who dreams of the glamourous life of a church planter heralds a new dawn.

The kid explains that, with a little "Creative Accounting", it is possible for a church plant that flops to make more money than one that succeeds if donations/pledges exceed evangelism expenditure. The elder sees the possibilities in an instant and embraces the young man with glee.

Together they start on a massive fundraising drive while simultaneously constructing a church model that is Doomed To Fail. They decide that the essentials for such a church will be:

• A distant relationship with the Jesus of the Bible. If people heard the truth of his teaching they would be convicted of sin and turn to God in repentance. You can't escape from Jesus, so best to say that he was a mystic-hippie with a primarily socio-political agenda (like so many others before and since). No-one will fall for that one!


• Making the Gospel all about The Self. Why would people come to a church that just tells them what they already believe?


• Promote ungodly virtues. Emphasise at all times Success over Suffering, Choice over Obedience, Greed over Contentment, Experience over Wisdom, Pleasure over Joy.


• Teachers who are personally distant and logically incoherent. No-one will follow them.


• Make the people work for God's Grace. Only if they sing louder, slave harder, and give more will they be worthy of salvation. If you can convince them that there is a Higher Level that only the most Spiritual can achieve then so much the better!
  

The church planters then start such a gathering, convinced that no-one would belong to a church that bore such scant resemblence to the faith of the apostles...

To their dismay, the church is the Runaway Hit Of The Season! People arrive in droves, keen to get a spiritual pick-me-up without the need for radical personal change. The faithful saints who had given money now demand its return, unwilling to be associated with such rank apostacy a moment longer. The church planters, caught between a rock and a hard place, are forced to continue their Runaway Hit in order to stay ahead of their creditors. The show ends with them bewailing their amazing success.