Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Church Planting Movement


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   merge to Church planting. actually either way round but the consensus is we need one not two article Spartaz Humbug! 05:59, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Church Planting Movement

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The topic of this article does not meet the general notability guideline Iairsometimes (talk) 23:25, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete as WP:FORK of Church planting. It is a notable topic, though. --AJHingston (talk) 00:06, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Christianity-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 01:58, 30 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Merge to Church planting. The term seems common enough, and there seems to be some good references, but Church planting is definitely the topic to which it belongs. StAnselm (talk) 02:03, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep. The article on Church planting is as a general overview of the process of starting new churches by various methods.  The Church Planting Movement article is an expansion with detail of an emerging trend and method which is sufficiently different from other church planting approaches. Merging this article within the church planting main article risks overwhelming the rest of that article. Note it is not, as some who commented on the page have suggested, a marketing approach by the Southern Baptists, but rather a multinational movement which began in several indigenous denominations and has propagated through the various missions communities, including the Baptists.--DeknMike (talk) 12:42, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Time out: The reasoning here is that this article is a fork of church planting, but an admin just redirected church planting to church planting movement. Now, deleting this article also delete the article you are saying it is a fork of. If that redirect is going to stay, then the delete reasons hold no weight. Niteshift36 (talk) 19:23, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Correction, Niteshift: I redirected that simply as a bold editor. I am sitting in the kitchen, not wearing my tin-foil admin hat. Anyway, it's already been undone, and I guess the D of the BRD cycle is happening here and on my talk. Drmies (talk) 20:16, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not starting a conspiracy theory, just pointing out what is going on for those who might not have been looking at the other article. And I Started putting this here before you commented (hence the edit conflict). Niteshift36 (talk) 22:18, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I know: I'm just indicating to other editors (less seasoned than yourself) that there are no special powers or privileges involved in my redirect, just to make sure. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 01:11, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

<--No it's not, I'm afraid. The "planting of churches" is not yet proven to be a topic in its own right, as distinct from the spread of a church/denomination by way of moving to new areas and building churches there--PhD or not. But all that is neither here nor there. This is about CPM, which appears to be a topic. Church planting is next, no doubt. Drmies (talk) 02:11, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep. That's funny: I just redirect Church planting to this article, and then I saw that this was nominated for deletion, by someone who failed to provide much of a reason (well, the errors of youth). Anyway, Church planting is a terrible article: seriously, it's awful, full of advice and without any kind of a reliable source. Deknmike, above, argues that this is the more general term, as does Anselm, but I disagree: I don't think church planting is a concept at all outside of the movement (Protestant, esp. Southern Baptist) of church planting--that is, the Church Planting Movement. (I could go on, but that's for another discussion, possibly a merge discussion if my redirect is removed.) The CPM article, as it stands, is not great, but it's notable enough, even if most of the literature I dug up isn't exactly of the highest neutrality. See the Don Fanning article, for instance--hardly neutral, but very insightful, and indicative of the importance given tot his kind of mission in certain congregations. Drmies (talk) 19:20, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep (both). Yes there is work to do, but that work can be done. The books are all in a booklist on the page! Church Planting Movement is the pet project of one small part of the church planting world. Some who have tried to implement it have found, to their cost, that it is a modernist construct without any track record. The point here, is that these are not identical ideas. Hyper3 (talk) 19:45, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The books in those list don't qualify as academic or otherwise notable and independent publications that discuss the topic. Rather they are (or were) manuals published by various churches. But that's beside the point--I find it sad that such work wasn't done for these articles, at least not from the point of view of improving the encyclopedia. Drmies (talk) 20:14, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Some, you are right, but not all by any means. Hyper3 (talk) 09:08, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Certainly the Church of England 2004 report 'Mission-shaped church' (subtitled church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context) cannot be so lightly dismissed. It would easily meet the WP notability requirement in its own right and has been endlessly quoted and built upon. The expression church planting is widely used by people who would not all identify with a Church Planting Movement. This does look very much like a POV fork to me and if it is to survive as a separate article it would need to place the CPM within the context of church planting and explain what made it a distinct movement within that. Otherwise it just looks like an attempt to claim exclusive possession of a common term. A sadly familiar situation for Christians. --AJHingston (talk) 09:38, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The problem, as I see it, is that the one term is general and vague and points more at the dictionary than anything else; the other (the topic of this AfD) is a specific name for a kind of strategy. "Church planting" as a concept is simply not precise enough to build a definition/article with: it is an aspect of missionary strategy. I have tried to make that article more precise, but at some point it just seems like these are just two words put together. BTW, you are welcom to restore links, preferably on an individual basis with an explanation. But these articles cannot be hijacked and used as repositories for propaganda material. Drmies (talk) 20:51, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Its like the difference between talking about the nature of a cow and the needs of a herd: the planting of an individual church has many books written about it, and is a topic in itself; a CPM, on the other hand is a movement within a culture that results in many churches being planted; the planting of churches is almost subsidiary to the initiation of the movement. For those of us who work in this environment (my PhD thesis involves these definitions) these two things are very different. They need different articles. Hyper3 (talk) 22:41, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * " The "planting of churches" is not yet proven to be a topic in its own right" -???? Hyper3 (talk) 18:05, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, this may surprise you--but I wonder if you've ever looked at WP:RS. Notwithstanding the claims that CPM is a fork, Church planting is actually an incredibly bad article on a topic that isn't yet proven to be a topic. Drmies (talk) 03:08, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I suspect that the Church planting article was written from a British perspective. It is most certainly notable in the UK and as pointed out above has a distinct meaning certainly within the Church of England. There is a great deal written about it, and the Church of England report 'Mission-shaped Church' is the place to start - as a source it belongs in the Church planting article rather than the CPM article. But it isn't an area I'm interested or involved in and I'm not the person to improve the article. It is important to understand that it has a different significance and meaning within a church organised on a parish system with geographical boundaries for organisational purposes, in independent churches essentially competing for market share in a competitive religious 'economy', and for churches trying to expand into areas where there are few or any churches already. The philosophy and strategy may be different in each case and in some instances difficult to distinguish from any other approach to church foundation since the time of the apostles, but that is a problem for those improving the article(s) and does not really go to notability. There is a danger of allowing our own POV to intrude here. --AJHingston (talk) 11:33, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah I get it.. Drmies thinks that Church Planting Movement (CPM) is just another way of saying Church planting... like its the movement in the church that advocates Church planting. This isn't true at all. CPM is proposing that there are culture-level (nationwide sometimes) approaches to spreading the gospel that result in many new churches being planted. Church planting (a term that forms the title of many, many books is about the beginning of individual churches, and is much more prosaic. Hyper3 (talk) 09:16, 4 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete as WP:FORK of Church planting.--Cox wasan (talk) 23:39, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete as lacking evidence for notability from third-party reliable sources. There is no question that the broader topic of the expansion of some Protestant denominations in less-developed parts of the world in recent years is notable (by any standards, not just Wikipedia's), but this article seems to be about little more than a catch-phrase or metaphor used by certain groups. Without verifiable evidence that this 'planting' differs from other methods used to spread 'the word', this article will surely fall on stony ground ... AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:29, 3 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Redirect back to Church planting as a content fork. There are issues with notability as well as presented by others adequately above. I think that perhaps merging the content as well into a section would be fine. Steven Zhang  The clock is ticking....  00:05, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.