Peyton Jones: Reimagining Church Planting—Part 1

In the more than 25 years that veteran church planter Peyton Jones has been in ministry, he has served in almost every incarnation and context of church. He is founder of the New Breed Church Planting Network and is an expert in the field of missional engagement strategy. A self-described “accidental church planter,” Jones has planted in a Starbucks and in inner-city Long Beach, California, and serves as the church planting catalyst of the Western U.S. and Canada for the North American Mission Board. 

Jones is also the host of the Jump School Core Team Training Series, managing editor of Church Planter Magazine and the co-host of the weekly Church Planter podcast. His latest book, Church Plantology: The Art and Science of Planting Churches (Zondervan), represents what he calls his magnum opus, distilling hard-earned principles of early-church-style ministry from his colorful and poignant experiences in modern contexts. 

Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor caught up with Jones to discuss the differences between church planting and church starting, what a good church planter has in common with a Hobbit and how COVID-19 represents a chance for all of us to recapture some first-century freshness in ministry.

Opposite of many stories, you began as a pastor at a large church, then started a ministry of church planting. What was that journey like?

I started my ministry as a pastor at a megachurch in Huntington Beach, California. I began serving as the interim pastor after being an assistant for years. But I felt called to Wales in the United Kingdom and did not feel that staying in that pastorate was the path God had for me. I informed the church leadership that I would be leaving for the mission field. 

On the other side of the Atlantic, I ended up being the evangelist at Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ famous church Sandfields in the steel town of Port Talbot. It was a rough place. Within six weeks of arriving, I was beaten up by a drunken rugby player. It wasn’t easy. After only a year, my support from home had dried up and I quickly learned a new way of doing ministry. I had very little fruit to show for all my formal evangelistic efforts, but I had to make ends meet. It was within months of taking a job in a factory that people began to come to faith on the assembly line.

I saw, like so much in ministry, that what I had been doing for years would not work overseas. It was my time of ministry deconstruction. I felt like a Rubik’s Cube, when you’re trying to get the combination right but you just can’t get all the pieces to line up, and finally you just take a hammer to it. I felt God breaking me apart over the next few years, slowly taking apart my ministry philosophy and big thoughts, then putting me back together in a way that made more sense—in a way that began to look a lot like first-century ministry.

How did that all lead to church planting? 

I began to plant churches accidentally. I was serving as a pastor at a local church but planted another church on accident in a university town with a bunch of students who were rediscovering church in public space. It looked very different from any kind of ministry I had ever done—more conversational. We began to simply have discussions around things like “Who is God?” with great conversation starters, like “Does God have a sense of humor? ” 

It was natural. We laughed a lot. People asked probing questions. During that experience, I rediscovered an interesting equation: Conversations equal conversions. Our conversations started looking a lot like what we find in John’s Gospel, the most evangelistic book in the Bible. The highlights are conversations with Jesus, mainly. Conversations with the woman at the well, with Nicodemus, with the man born blind, even with Pilate himself.

“I felt like a Rubik’s Cube when you’re trying to get the combination right, but you just can’t get all the pieces to line up, and finally you just take a hammer to it.”

Eventually, I decided I was going to quit formal ministry. I got a job at a Starbucks while finishing up my master’s in theology. That led to accidentally planting a church in the coffee shop around a group reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. After the first night, 30 unchurched Europeans turned up ready to talk about Jesus, and I’ll tell you, over my seven years in Wales up to that point, if I had tried to get 30 unchurched Europeans in a room to talk about Jesus, I couldn’t have done it. But there was something about having that book—which we totally debunked within an hour—and by the end of the night, the people said, “Can we do this again?”