Church Renewal by Church Planting: The Significance of Church Planting for the Future of Christianity in Europe

The current secularization of Europe faces churches with two challenges: poor contextualization and a lack of credibility. It is clear that innovation is needed to answer these challenges. Planting new churches, instead of being a rapid way to numerical growth (which it is not, at least not in Europe), can become a road to this innovation. This is an important reason to plant churches, apart from other, ecclesiological, and missiological reasons. Church plants are ecclesial laboratories: free havens for missiological experiments. This thesis is defended with an appeal to innovation theory, with historical examples, and with some promising recent developments in one of the most secular countries in Europe: the Netherlands.