Many tout themselves as apostles and modern-day church planters like Paul, but where’s their Antioch?

Although Paul functioned as an apostolic church planter, his self-expressed credentials included the fact that he continued as an elder – meaning he remained grounded in and part of the local leadership of his home church in Antioch.

All too often we ignore the fact that Paul went on his apostolic missions only after being commissioned and sent by his local church, and that happened only after he’d proven himself over many years in the context of a local, functioning fellowship.

At the end of his various journeys to help start and encourage other churches (except for his last, where history says he was beheaded in Rome), he would then return for a season to his home church in Antioch before being sent out again.

In contrast to Paul, be wary of gifted but itinerant men and women who want to “help” you form or succeed as a local church – through their books, blogs, podcasts, seminars and requests to visit you – yet lack ongoing community with, roots in, commission from, and accountability to another functioning local church.

Some of us have been around long enough to see past incarnations of such floating, unattached “ministries” to local churches.

In the 70’s and 80’s, they proliferated within the Charismatic movement – mainly among those who were certainly gifted but nonetheless could never succeed at finding healthy church with accountable community in their own lives.

Often, they were authors or good aspirational communicators who had exciting ideas, but only answered to themselves.

Sometimes, however, they’d form loose associations where they purportedly answered to each other in lieu of having any Antiochs in their lives – which only tended to reinforce the shared theological and personal idiosyncrasies which attracted them to each other in the first place.

More recently, we saw it in the “organic church” movement, as itinerant “workers” (their euphemism for “apostles”) wreaked havoc on countless house churches. Almost none of those assemblies survived.

Without exception, over time problems emerged with each and every of those so-called apostles and “church planters” – and with the churches that listened to them. (And I mean that – I can’t think of a single one who did not fall prey to one disqualifying problem or another, often related to pride or just becoming increasingly weird!)

There’s too much of this stuff starting to emerge again today, especially among those wanting to be the church one with another. 

Those who promote themselves, their services, and their agendas without living it and having made it first work – with accountable and sustainable results – in their own lives and hometowns are fraught with danger.

Ignore their lack of grounding in an actual, functional church like they promote to others, and you too will reap disaster.

~ Jim Wright