Church-Planting Mentor

December 22, 2014

Craig Combs, M.Div. ’86, Current D.Min. Student

Rev. Craig Combs serves as a preaching mentor to church planters in New England with the NETS Institute for Church Planting. He graduated from Westminster in 1986 and is currently working on a Doctor of Ministry degree at the seminary. We recently spoke with Rev. Combs about his work in church planting, his D.Min. program, and how Westminster has shaped his ministry for the past 28 years.

When Craig was at Westminster in the mid-80’s, he was both a full-time student and working in ministry in Newtown Square. Because of the busyness of his schedule, he was not able to spend as much time on his studies as he would have liked. “I usually erred on the side of putting the ministry first and not the schoolwork, so I’ve realized over time that I didn’t take away as much as I wish I had. I look back and think of some of the men who were [at WTS at the time], and I think I should have stopped what I was doing and found some time to spend with those men.” Despite not having much time to spend with the professors at the time, he still gained much wisdom while at seminary. “The most influential was Dr. Clowney. What he taught me about preaching Christ changed everything—I’ve never gotten over it.”

After his time at seminary, Craig continued at the Newtown Square church before moving on to northern PA, and then Roanoke VA, before ending up in Vermont. As he matured in his pastoral ministry, he discovered more and more how much his Westminster education helped him. “Over the next ten years, as I fell into a pattern of studying the Scriptures to teach, all the tools that I had been given fell into play, and I began to really appreciate what I’d been given. The system of doctrine I had been given applied and made sense, and I could see it in the Bible.”

Prior to moving to New England, Craig had not been actively involved in church planting. However, a friend of his invited him to get involved with a plant in Vermont. “I did a year of the residency program, and then I went with an older pastor to plant a church in northern Vermont. I stayed there for about four years, and when I left there I came back to the mother church and took a role there as an interim for a little while because the senior pastor wanted to go to Wales and get another degree. I was preaching for him, but then I ended up getting invited to stay and split my time between preaching in the mother church and being a preaching mentor in our residency program.” It was this series of events that led Craig to be hired as the Preaching Mentor for the NETS Institute for Church Planting.

Because of its secularity, New England has proven to be a particularly difficult place to plant churches. “‘Secular’ is a kind way to put it. It’s very liberal in most senses of the word, not just politically. There are burned-over districts; there are a lot of church buildings that are being used for something else now. One of the things that we believe is necessary for church-planting in New England is that the church planter needs more outside support. He needs to be full-time; he needs to not come in and be bi-vocational and try to work in his spare time. He needs to give all his efforts to getting a core [group] together and getting started, and he needs to be financially supported so he’s not burdening his family. He needs to be prepared that that congregation is not going to be self-supporting for a long time.”

Craig has found that the apologetics he learned at Westminster have been very helpful in his situation. “The approach to apologetics is applicable to church-planting because church-planters are always forced to be apologists. Especially in New England, there’s a mindset against the dogmatism of Christianity, as it’s perceived. So if a man is not able to examine the presuppositions that are at work and dialogue intelligently about that, he’ll be on his back foot all the time, defending the apparent crimes of the Bible or whatever the problem of the day is. But, if he understands how to actually level the playing field in presuppositions, then he can engage in a dialogue. You can never ‘dialogue’ someone into the kingdom, but you can create a conversation and make a little space for yourself to work with and be able to talk.”

For Craig, the most important thing a church-planter can do is preach the gospel faithfully. “We’re committed to plant churches that are not premised on anything else. We’re not interested in strategies for targeting different kinds of demographics; we’re just interested in preaching the gospel. I don’t say that to sound like we’re being ‘holier’ than anyone else, but we’re committed to that methodology, and if that’s not going to work, then we don’t want to do anything else. But it does work. The gospel works.”

Craig’s heart for gospel-centered preaching has led him to pursue a Doctor of Ministry degree at Westminster with a focus on preaching. He describes his project, saying, “It’s a way to orient men to the priorities of effectual Gospel preaching: what are its indispensible aspects? There is not a cookie-cutter approach; it’s not as though there’s some surefire methodology for always preaching right. But there have to be some guidelines; there has to be some orientation that’s right. I’m convinced that a lot of guys are poorly oriented to what preaching really is, especially the essentially spiritual work that preaching is.” He is thankful for the work of Pierre Marcel in The Relevance of Preaching and Edmund Clowney’s book, Preaching Christ in All of Scripture, in guiding his thoughts and work on this project.

Lord-willing, Craig will graduate with his D.Min. this coming Spring, 2015. His prayer is that the Lord would continue to use him to raise up a new generation of church planters and gospel preachers in New England. “New England is the least evangelical and the most post-Christian area in America, and the most resistant to the gospel. I think we’re there for the long haul. I’d like to send out scores [of church planters] in the next ten years.” Would you offer prayer for Craig in these endeavors and that God would strengthen gospel ministers in New England and send more?