Worth Fighting For
Planting New Churches with an Irenic Spirit
Every church planting conversation eventually runs into the same quiet fear. If we start something new, will it cost us something old? These are not unspiritual questions — they come from people who love the Church. But Scripture offers a better frame than scarcity and suspicion.
It offers unity, not as the opposite of multiplication, but as its precondition.
“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
— Ephesians 4:1–3 (ESV)
Paul writes this from prison, not from a place of comfort. He still begins his appeal to the Ephesian church with a plea for how they treat one another. Notice what he does not say: he does not say unity happens automatically because we share a Savior. He says unity is something we are to be “eager to maintain” — an active, Spirit-empowered pursuit, built on humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love.
That is an irenic spirit: not conflict avoidance and not doctrinal mush, but a disposition that actively seeks peace and protects the bond between believers even when there is real reason for tension. It is exactly the posture church planting needs from those of us leading established congregations.
Why Planting Needs Unity, Not Just Vision
Church planting movements rarely stall for lack of vision. They stall when established and new churches start seeing each other as rivals for the same limited pool of people and dollars. An irenic spirit refuses that framework. The Body of Christ in a region is not a pie to be divided but a field to be sown — a new congregation reaching people the existing church never will is not a loss to the kingdom; it is the kingdom doing what it was always meant to do.
A new church down the road is not a competitor for market share. It is a sibling congregation reaching people your church may never reach.
This is where Ephesians 4 does real work. Bearing with one another in love means an established pastor can genuinely celebrate a new plant's early wins, even when his own numbers are flat that same quarter. Gentleness and patience mean a planting team can disagree with an existing church's methods without treating them as the enemy. Humility means neither the sending church nor the sent-out planter claims to be the “real” expression of the gospel in that town. Unity, maintained on purpose, is what keeps church planting from fracturing the very Body it is meant to build up.
A Challenge for Established Pastors
So here is the challenge, offered in the same irenic spirit this article is arguing for: pastors of established, healthy churches, do you have a vision for starting new churches?
Not a grudging willingness to let a young leader “go do his own thing” elsewhere. An actual vision — a conviction, held with the same seriousness you hold your Sunday preaching calendar, that your congregation exists in part to give birth to congregations that do not yet exist. That conviction changes how you pray, develop leaders, allocate resources, and talk about your church's future with your elders.
Practically, it can start small. Identify one leader God may be shaping for church planting and invest in them before they raise their hand. Set aside a percentage of your budget as a standing commitment to planting. Bring your elders into a real conversation about commissioning a plant in the next two to three years — governed by Ephesians 4: patient, humble, unhurried, but eager.
Eager to maintain unity, and eager to multiply. Paul does not ask us to choose between those two. He assumes a church secure enough in its unity that it can release people, prayer, and resources toward something new without feeling threatened by it. That security is the fruit of a congregation that has actually practiced humility, gentleness, and patience — and has therefore learned to trust that the Spirit who holds them together can hold a new work together too.
Worth Fighting For
Unity of the Spirit is worth fighting for — Paul's own language of urgency makes that plain. But so is the next church that has not yet been planted, and the leader in your congregation right now whom God may be preparing to start something new. An irenic spirit does not mean picking one and letting the other go. It means holding both, with humility and gentleness, until the Body of Christ in the Great Lakes region is more unified and more multiplied than it is today — not unity instead of planting, and not planting instead of unity, but both, together, in the bond of peace.
