Conference on Church Planting

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Conference for Church
Planting (KfG)
logo
legal form Registered association
founding 1983
founder Eckehard Strickert and Ernst G. Maier
Seat Hünfeld
main emphasis Loose association of independent free church communities
Action space Germany
Chair Wilfried Plock (1st chairman), Michael Leister (2nd chairman)
Members 234 municipalities (2012)
Website www.kfg.org

The Conference for Congregation Planting (KfG) is a Protestant , evangelical association, the aim of which is to promote new, free-church organized congregations.

tasks and goals

The KfG sees itself as a loose association and, as a platform, wants to give Christians help in founding and building up Christian communities that are faithful to the Bible . It expressly does not form a closed association of municipalities, but takes the more relaxed form of the "conference". She wants to “promote the exchange among churches that are faithful to the Bible” and warn against “dubious developments in the area of ​​church building”. It fulfills its tasks by organizing conferences, publishing the journal church planting and other materials, and maintains contacts with around 200 independent churches with a total of around 10,000 members. The KfG is currently headed by the evangelist Wilfried Plock, who is also the editor of the journal church planting. Michael Leister is the second chairman.

history

The association was founded in 1983 by Eckehard Strickert, a graduate of the Bibelseminar Wuppertal, and by Ernst G. Maier. Both were community leaders and wanted to create an alternative for newly emerging communities due to "necessary developments" in existing community federations. In 1998 an association of the same name was also established in Switzerland.

Positions and Orientation

The association maintains loose contacts with small, often newly founded congregations, some of which reject the popular and regional church structures as “unbiblical systems”. Dispensationalism plays an important role in terms of content . In the piety attitude of "perfectionism", according to which man strives for perfection and complete freedom from sin and can at least partially achieve this, churches should be built that "consistently orientate themselves on the biblical example of the Christian original church".

The association and the associated congregations see themselves as "biblical, non-charismatic and non-ecumenical". Lutz Lemhöfer from the Evangelical Central Office for Weltanschauungsfragen (EZW) emphasizes in view of a KfG conference held in 2005 on the subject of "How can Catholics be won over to Christ?" The board member Hans-Werner Deppe takes the view that “the Roman church with its teaching does not convey any salvation at all”, because today it still teaches “exactly the same work righteousness as at the time of Luther”. The members of this church are to be freed from this “out of love for the Catholics”. According to Lemhöfer, the z. For example , the ecumenical movement cultivated by the Working Group of Christian Churches in Germany is that participating churches and congregations renounce the claim that they only have the correct belief that, conversely, the KfG is about “Christian sectarianism”.

The association problematizes evangelical strategies for church growth and building. Wilfried Plock's book Gott ist nicht Pragmatisch was published in 2004 . How expediency-thinking destroys the congregations , in which, according to Reinhard Hempelmann (EZW), he criticizes numerous evangelical initiatives such as ProChrist , the Willow Creek congresses, but also the concept of alpha courses or the congregational growth movement to the effect that marketing methods “have more weight than the letters of the Apostle Paul ”. The numbers and growth fever would trigger “disastrous changes”, not only in the “packaging”, but in the preached message itself and, as a result, in the identity of churches. Evangelical community building should be a contrast society and return to the "New Testament church model", the core of which is the unchanging preaching of God's holiness. According to Hempelmann, one of the practical consequences for Plock is the exclusion of women from management and teaching positions. “He sees the fact that women have leadership and teaching responsibility in evangelical initiatives as a central problem and deficit.” Reinhard Hempelmann characterizes Plock's view as “liaison with yesterday's zeitgeist”.

Using the example of the KfG, Hempelmann shows the need for a differentiated perception of the currents summarized under the term "evangelicalism", to which both Plock and those criticized by him belonged in terms of external perception, and characterizes Plock's position in contrast to the latter as "evangelical-fundamentalist" . He also attests that the KfG and the communities associated with it have a "rather [...] biblical fundamentalist piety".

Controversy

In December 2011, the head of the KfG, Wilfried Plock, was accused by the NDR in a TV report of advocating punishment as part of raising children and of describing its use using the example of his own children. Plock argued that his statements were taken out of context. At the center of the upbringing that he represents is love. He only described the biblical statements of moderate chastening and did not endorse their use. Plock and Michael Leister discussed his point of view in the association's magazine as follows:

“In the area of ​​child-rearing, the law unfortunately no longer differentiates between bodily harm to children on the one hand and controlled physical punishment that is appropriate to the age and the occasion and carried out in love and responsibility on the other. The parental right to punishment has been definitively abolished by the last amendment to § 1631 BGB since November 2000. If, in spite of this, we advocate the corporal punishment of the child publicly or in conversation with parents, we may since then have been inciting a criminal offense.
Without prejudice to this, however, the right to freedom of expression still applies. That is why we want to continue to teach what the Bible says about all areas of our life. "

The KfG sees a possible conflict between divine and state order in the state ban on corporal punishment:

“Only when state authorities demand things from us that are directed against God's instructions do we have to obey God more than men ( Acts 5:29  LUT ). At the moment there are mainly the following areas of conflict in our society: the rejection of homosexuality or same-sex unions (cf. the attacks by the Green Party, Volker Beck against the Christival organizers) and the use of corporal punishment in raising children. "

In a lecture by a lawyer, whose name has been anonymized, printed in the magazine of the KfG, after an extensive discussion of the current legal situation and the history of the ban on punishment, the conclusion is drawn that everyone chooses between obedience to God and consent to the current legal judgment to choose corporal punishment:

“After all that has been said, we see that the legal assessment of corporal punishment of children by their parents, even if I have not addressed them, does not match the biblical finding, especially, but not only, when children are with percussion instruments be chastised. The crucial question in this context is whether we want to obey God more or not. This is a decision of conscience that everyone has to make for themselves and that I would like to leave to each of them. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Origin and objectives of the KfG. Conference for Church Planting eV, accessed on June 6, 2012 .
  2. ↑ See the list of German-language Christian magazines and newspapers and information on the magazine community planting on kfg.org
  3. ↑ a b Lutz Lemhöfer: Converting Catholics - but how? Evangelical Central Office for Weltanschauungsfragen (EZW), 2005, accessed on June 6, 2012 .
  4. ↑ a b Reinhard Hempelmann : Evangelical movements. Contributions to the resonance of conservative Protestantism, EZW-Texte 206, 2009, p. 22
  5. ↑ Reinhard Hempelmann: Perfectionism. Evangelical Central Office for Weltanschauung questions , accessed on June 6, 2012 .
  6. ↑ Four preliminary investigations against evangelicals dropped. Evangelical News Agency Idea , May 31, 2012, accessed June 6, 2012 .
  7. ↑ Reinhard Hempelmann: Are Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism identical? Evangelical Central Office for Weltanschauungsfragen , January 2006, accessed on June 6, 2012 (quote from Wilfried Plock, God is not pragmatic. Oerlinghausen 2004, p. 56).
  8. ↑ a b Reinhard Hempelmann: Are Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism identical? Evangelical Central Office for Weltanschauung questions , January 2006, accessed on June 6, 2012 .
  9. ↑ Training with the rod? (December 22, 2011) on idea.de; Retrieved April 15, 2014.
  10. ↑ Wilfried Plock, Michael Leister: Community and dealing with media representatives . In: Community planting No. 110 (2/2012), p. 17 (PDF; 3.5 MB)
  11. ↑ Wilfried Plock, Michael Leister: Community and dealing with media representatives . In: Congregation No. 110 (2/2012), p. 16.
  12. ↑ Article Juristic Aspects of Corporal Punishment published under the pseudonym Markus Friedrich . In: Congregation No. 110 (2/2012), p. 27.