Rethinking church planting

The Great Commission commands us to teach the nations (disciple all nations). But what does scripture mean by "nation".

It's always good to question the meanings of words we find in scripture - they are translated from another language after all, and sometimes for the flow of a passage a word rather than a descriptive phrase is given as a translation, to keep the translation from sounding awkward. Sometimes another word is given just to prevent it from sounding "weird" - for instance, baptism is a transliteration rather than a translation, it actually means "burial" or dipping.

Others, like the word "nation", is generally first thought of in other meanings, and thus often a bad word for the translation, but remains due to tradition or other reasons. The Greek word translated "nation" most commonly from Matthew 28:19 is the same word that we get the word "ethnic" from. It is actually a word that can translated "people-group" or "culture" or "subculture". And perhaps the latter choice is more appropriate in today's world in order to convey the original meaning to modern readers.

Thinking in these lines, imagine what it means to modern missionology. Today's society with its lack of unifying elements has splintered to thousands of subcultures, all spurned on by hundreds of entertainment options many catering to smaller and smaller niches, with the internet spurring even smaller subcultures. According to the new book The Rabbit and the Elephant: Why Small Is the New Big for Today's Church by Tony and Felicity Dale and George Barna, the University of Texas (Austin) consists of over 1000 subcultures - over a thousand little "nations", meaning each averages less than 50 members.

I see two ramifications of such a view of "nation" - first, mission work becomes as much a domestic issue as one for overseas. Taking the case of the University of Texas and extrapolating to the whole of the United States, that could mean between that the US is a "nation" of hundreds of thousands to millions of "nations". Reaching those little subcultures is a herculean task without God, and forces us to rethink missions.

Second of all, think of the size that means to the average "church". To reach each of those little nations at the University of Texas, for most you are talking at reaching populations less than 50 each, and its easy to see that many would be less than 20. To form churches within those "nations", most churches are going to have a max possible size of less than 50.

God's call is not to make a nations of disciples, but rather make disciples of nations. Yet most mission techniques and approaches we have inherited from previous generations are in effect requiring us to take on the near impossible task of making nations of disciples to reach every nation. These approaches that involve making churches that support vast infrastructures involving paid pastors, etc invariable require us to pull disciples out of nations to form a new nation, to change their culture.

Would it not be better to redeem these cultures, to form churches within them, training up these smaller churches to reach those cultures close to them and forming other small churches within those cultures? Would it not be better missionology to think small? To make disciples within new cultures, and leave them in those cultures to make other disciples?

I think it would. But I still wonder what it would look like in detail and what it means to me to think this way.