"Church planting includes an obligation...."

Church planting efforts need to distinguish between the dispensable and the indispensable issues. No longer should church planting efforts focus on creating replicas of the church body back home or on that entity which sponsors the project. Take South Africa, for example: large buildings and the use of pipe organs and brass instruments are indicative of foreign missionary import among the Zulu and the Tswana people. The lack of funds and skills needed to repair peripherals once the majority of missionaries had returned to their home countries have left such structures and instruments dilapidated and in disuse. What is indispensable, however, is the community raised on essential elements of the Christian faith. Church planting includes an obligation to the proclamation and teaching of all essential elements of the Lutheran faith as found in Scripture and as they are expounded in the Confessions.

Detlev Schulz, "The Mission of the Cross: The Lutheran Theology of Mission" p. 207.