Church planting involves gathering a group of believers and new believers into a new church community that didn't exist before for the purpose of becoming a gospel community on mission in the world.
This gospel community is energized by faith in the good news of Jesus: who He is and what He has done and how that makes all the difference for me and my calling.
Church revitalization involves something similar, except, in this case, the church community already exists. But, though it exists, it is not a gospel community on mission in the world--if it has a mission, it has lost sight of it due to various reasons (conflict, leadership failure, personal sin).
Plus, such a church community often has a formal knowledge of the Gospel, but functionally, it is not energized (as it should be) by the Gospel.
Church planting also involves gathering either new believers or veteran Christians into a new church family. In either case, though, there are preconceived expectations about church, ministry, leadership, and family life that must be addressed and reshaped and reformed by the Gospel.
Think of this like deconstructing people's expectations and rebuilding them around the mission of God. Interestingly, this "deconstruction" is the same work that is involved in church revitalization: reforming people's expectations with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Both church planters and men involved in church revitalization fall into trouble when they forget that the primary power of ministry is the gospel: who Jesus is, what He has done, and how that shapes the way they should live.
But nature abhors a vacuum, so when this happens, what is substituted for this gospel engine is some other program, strategy, or ideology that may be good, or better, but not best.
In 2002, when I was a pastor of a small congregation in the midwest, I attended a church revitalization conference in the PCA called Embers to a Flame. At this conference I learned about how important pastoral leadership, and prayer, is to the work of church revitalization. As a new pastor, these were new concepts for me.
While I had learned a lot about theology and church history and philosophy in graduate school, I didn't know how to help a struggling church recapture it's first love and experience that spiritual dynamic of church health mixed with church growth.
Along with eight other men from our congregation, we had a tremendous experience together and it is credit to God's grace that so many of the leaders of that church were interested in seeing God move powerfully among us.
As I think about the difficult work of pastoral ministry, whether on the side of church revitalization or on the side of church planting, I'm reminded that it is a super-human task. It involves daily death (1 Corinthians 15:31), it involves putting both hands to the plough and not looking back (Luke 9:62), and it involves the highest moral standards which are under constant spiritual attack (2 Timothy 2).
The only sufficiently strong counter-force to these challenges is God Himself. God has made Himself known in Jesus: who lived, died, and rose again to provide the foundation for His church to grow in the power of the Holy Spirit.
It is this spiritual power that ultimately must be unleashed in our churches (new or old) that is required for the church to be, as Jesus intended, a city set on a hill, and a light to the world. In order for that to happen, we need training and inspiration; we need to be called back to our first love.
Conferences, seminars, books, and retreats are all useful in this regard. So, while this is not intended as an endorsement to Embers to a Flame, it is one ministry that I think many churches could benefit from.
In some ways, it doesn't really matter what it is, as long as there is some intentional effort made toward church renewal.
I would encourage anyone interested in helping to catalyze change in their local congregation to pray for God to move: first in your own heart. If that means you attend this conference or some other, ask God to lead you and go in the expectation that your faith in Jesus will be rekindled, and your desire to make a difference in His church will grow.
One more thing: if you go, don't go alone. Bring at least one or two others with you so you can process what you learn together back in the context of your church family.