The 2018 Sola 5 Conference was held from 5–7 September 2018 at Brackenhurst Baptist Church in Johannesburg, South Africa. The theme was “Partnered to Plant,” and focused on what it looks like for churches in association to partner together in church plants.

Phil began by citing Joshua Project statistics: Roughly 987 unreached people groups across Africa, representing around thirty million people with no gospel witness and no healthy church presence. He argued this gap reflects a failure of the pulpit—churches turning inward, preoccupied with organisational machinery and felt needs rather than the Great Commission.

Using Acts 13:1–3, Phil traced the pattern of the Antioch church discipling leaders, then being led by the Spirit to commission Barnabas and Saul for mission work. He then identified three pillars of church planting from Acts 14:21–23:

1. Evangelism (v. 21) a commitment to gospel proclamation, not merely from the pulpit but as the mandate of every believer. He supported this with quotes from Bill Hull and C. H. Spurgeon, and a survey of biblical motivations for evangelism: God’s glory, the actualisation of redemptive purposes, obedience to Christ’s command, God’s compassion for the lost, love for God, and the reality of eternal judgement.
2. Discipleship (v. 22)—strengthening and encouraging new believers, including preparing them to endure suffering for their faith.
3. Indigenous church planting (v. 23)—appointing elders and entrusting new congregations to the Lord, forming churches that are self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.

He built his case for a burden toward revitalisation on three biblical grounds:

1. Christ’s burden (Revelation 2–3)—Christ’s messages to the seven churches, including Ephesus, which had abandoned its first love despite its earlier influence on the surrounding culture. Rather than immediately removing their lampstand, Christ called each struggling church to repent and return.
2. The apostles’ burden (Acts 15; 18)—Paul’s return visits on his second and third missionary journeys were devoted not only to reaching the unreached but to strengthening existing churches, and he left Titus in Crete for the same purpose.
3. The church’s burden (Acts 11)—The Jerusalem church sent Barnabas to strengthen the young church in Antioch, and believers there later sent relief to Judea during a famine, modelling partnership rather than self-focused ministry.

Doug Van Meter opened with Romans 15:18–33, framing the theme of the meeting around Paul’s model of gospel partnership — church planting undertaken not alone but through fellowship, prayer, and shared resources, echoing Sola 5’s purpose of planting and revitalising churches across Southern Africa.

Focusing on vv. 5–6, he outlined three marks of an outward-focused church:

His first major point: Church planting must be intentional about breaking new boundaries. He traced how the Antioch church became a strategic “inflection point” where the gospel burst out of exclusively Jewish territory into Gentile lands. Beginning with Peter’s vision and visit to Cornelius (Acts 10–11), through the unplanned preaching to Hellenists in Antioch (Acts 11:19–20), to the Spirit’s commissioning of Barnabas and Saul (Acts 13:1–3), Conrad showed that even the apostles were initially reluctant, still prioritising synagogue ministry to Jews until hostility forced them to declare, “we are turning to the Gentiles” (Acts 13:46). He argued this same pattern repeated when God redirected Paul from Asia into Macedonia (Acts 16), making Philippi the next missionary hub, as reflected in Philippians 4:15–16. The lesson: Missions must not merely be a reactive, incidental “next-suburb” strategy, but a deliberate response to God’s ongoing agenda to push the gospel’s boundaries further.

His second point: Church planting must also be strategic. He highlighted subtle textual clues in Acts 13—Saul’s name changing to Paul; Paul displacing Barnabas as the named leader; and John Mark’s departure—as evidence of a deliberate leadership change suited to Gentile mission work, culminating in Paul and Barnabas’s sharp disagreement over John Mark in Acts 15:36–41. This, he argued, demonstrates that strategic decisions, even costly ones involving personnel, were necessary for advancing the mission.

Conrad closed by applying this to the present day, urging churches across Southern Africa to move beyond comfortable, familiar church planting into unreached nations and the 10/40 Window, using models such as discipling and sending back trained nationals. He challenged listeners to be remembered by future generations as an intentional, strategic generation of church planters, and closed in prayer asking God to help the church think and plan with the same intentionality he modelled through Paul and Barnabas.

Working through Acts geographically (Jerusalem, Judea/Samaria, the ends of the earth), he traced several episodes of discomfort that accompanied the early church’s growth:

• Jerusalem (Acts 5)—The judgement on Ananias and Sapphira brought “great fear” upon the church, a picture of the discomfort inherent in church discipline, yet it directly preceded multitudes being added to the Lord (v. 14).
• Jerusalem (Acts 6)—Ethnic tension between Hellenist and Hebrew widows over food distribution required wise, deliberate action (appointing seven mostly Greek-named men), again followed by numerical and priestly growth (v. 7). He contrasted this with popular “homogeneous unit” church-planting strategies, arguing that growth without the discomfort of diversity is social growth, not gospel growth.
• Judea/Samaria and beyond (Acts 10–11)—Peter’s discomfort over table fellowship with Cornelius, a Gentile, illustrated the cost of setting aside cultural assumptions for the sake of the gospel, met with amazement that the Spirit had been poured out on Gentiles too.
• Acts 15—The Jerusalem Council’s negotiation over which Gentile customs to retain or drop reflected ongoing cultural discomfort as the gospel crossed into new cultures.
• Acts 15:36–41—Paul and Barnabas’s sharp disagreement over John Mark showed that even necessary, strategic personnel decisions in church planting can be relationally painful, though later resolved (2 Timothy 4:11).

Both men gave brief personal histories: Phil described being called to missions as a teenager in the USA, marrying his wife Laurie, and arriving in Zambia via Kenya 26 years earlier after Zaire proved inaccessible. Conrad described growing up in Lusaka, training as a mining engineer, and becoming Kabwata’s first pastor in 1987. Conrad then traced the origins of Zambia’s Reformed movement—beginning with Banner of Truth books circulating in the 1970s, informal fellowship among newly converted pastors, and the founding of the August Conference in 1990—growing from roughly six churches to 40–50 today.

On strategy, both emphasised that church planting was rarely as intentional at the outset as it appears in hindsight; growth often came from members’ own burdens for under-reached communities, requests from struggling churches, or unsolicited outside offers of support (including a notable call from Paul Washer that pushed Kabwata to formalise a missions policy). Kabwata’s policy targets provincial capitals and unreached major towns along Zambia’s main roads, later expanding to English-speaking African capitals, with support tapering over roughly eight years (100% for four years, then reduced 25% annually).

Audience questions covered reaching non-English-speaking communities (letting local vernacular dictate the church’s language rather than dictating from Lusaka); balancing mother-church planting versus inter-church partnership for cross-border efforts; challenges of weaning poorer urban and rural churches off financial dependency; navigating the “satanism” stigma and cultural stereotyping (e.g. imposing foreign hymnals) faced by new Reformed church plants; doctrinal boundaries for supporting missionaries with differing convictions; and accountability structures preventing missionary churches from breaking away from their sending church.

Recurring themes included the necessity of “everyday evangelism” over programme-dependent evangelism, discipleship of “faithful men” (2 Timothy 2:2), resisting pride that prevents struggling Reformed churches from accepting help, and trusting God’s providence even amid imperfect planning—echoing Hunt’s earlier remark that “church planting is easy” compared to revitalisation.

Working through 1 Corinthians, he identified four pictures of pride in the Corinthian church:

He argued that church planting and revitalisation must be done in genuine partnership rather than isolated local effort, reflecting on his own history with Sola 5 as a model of churches across Southern Africa working, praying, and sacrificing together. Referencing Conrad’s earlier description of the South African church as a “sleeping giant,” Chris warned that growing strength and resources bring the temptation to arrogance, and closed by calling the conference to deepen cross-church partnership—“not just look what I’m doing, but look what we’re doing … look what God is doing”—praying for humility and unity in gospel work across the region.