Church Planting Round Table

David Watson, Session 4:

• Debriefing Time:  Important things we have learned (3 from each table):
  • Obedience oriented Discipleship
  • The Insider/Outsider Perspective:  It is the job of outsiders to deculturalize.  It is the task of Insiders to contextualize.
  • There is no substitute for taking responsibility and intentionality.
  • Church planting is an integral part of community transformation.
  • Obedience is the goal and not transfer of knowledge.
  • Paid staff, buildings and personal evangelism can kill a movement.
  • Discovery vs. Teaching/reaching- letting “them” lead.
  • The Outsider does not plant the church.
  • Simple obedience to Christ, authority of Scripture, and Holy Spirit build churches.
  • Develop access ministries­/BAM (Business As Mission/needs based.
  • Target families, not individuals
  • Let the lost facilitate
  • Not professional but lay leaders
  • Culture- we need to be intentional about removing our culure from the Gospel
  • Leave quickly­before everyone thinks they’re ready.
  • We need to discover what it means to be a spiritual person in that culture
  • All churches are heretical at the start
  • Disciple to conversion
  • Look for a “man of peace.”
  • Need for a global/national heart with local engaged hands
  • Focus on the few to win the many
• Teaching time:
  • You may have all twenty-one elements but still not see a CPM happen if they’re not put together in the right way.
  • Romans 12:1-2:  When you become a follower of Jesus, the Spirit begins to transform you from the culture you’re in into something else.  Within two-years you begin to move away from the values, responses, etc. of your culture.  This is an act of God.  There are some who have the capacity to be maturing believers and still stay connected to their base culture.  We call these people evangelists.  They are a very special group of people, and we in missions need to do a better job of recognizing this.  We should have our eye out for them, to invest in them and build safety nets for them in their growth.
  • When someone comes to you with a question or problem about a community church start, you never ever, ever give an answer.  Send them to the Scripture and ask them to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to lead them as to how to address the problem.
  • We are very binary in our thinking.  It is the West that wants everything to be confrontational.  You’re either with us or you’re not.  In other thinking systems, things are in a continuum and there’s room for negotiation.  They don’t see the process of conversion as a “moment” but rather an process over time.
  • In order to find a person of peace, the outsider must be able to communicate that he is a spiritual person, and this must be a constant and continual thing that he manifests.  He must become a “spiritual magnet” that will attract.

David Watson, Session 5:  CPM Cycle

• Appropriate communication:  Our lives, actions and words need to all be flowing in the same direction / consistency in public and in private.  This is especially important in early exposure to insiders.  We have to use the whole communication spectrum (verbal, behaviors, etc.).
• Appropriate evangelism is a discipleship process.  Making disciples ­ begins before people become Christians ­ disciple them to commitment and beyond.  Surprisingly, people started replicating this process even before they became believers.  Disciples make more disciples.  It’s their nature.  Just who they are.  When we live in a obedience-based discipleship world (vs. a knowledge-based discipleship world) it is natural.  By and large, the Western world comes down more on the side of knowledge-based faith.
• Be careful not to expect lost people to act like saved people.
• New people do not join existing groups.  As what is happening is shared with others, and they want to join the group, group members start their own groups, do what they have been doing ­ multiplication is built in from the beginning, based on Scripture, not dependent on trained leader.
• CPM cycle:  If we interrupt the cycle in any place, we inhibit it from replicating in other communities.  Becoming a disciple, becoming a church, starting new churches - all the same process.  Like fractal geometry.  The whole cycle can be done in oral or literate cultures.  This process was actually begun in/for oral cultures.  Oral systems can also translate into literal systems (but not vice versa).
• Starts with finding the person of peace in a community, takes engagement with the culture, based on relationship.
• Lost people lead their group/family who are not believers ­ discussions are based on reading and discussing Scriptures trusting the Holy Spirit to reveal God. Obedience-based discipleship.
• Groups eventually become churches, when they baptize believers.
• Discovery Bible Study (DBS):  A simple inductive Bible study.  The writing process (hand written into a three-column notebook):  You review what you write multiple times.  And, among Muslims, it communicates disrespect for the scriptures if you write in the margins, underline, etc.  DBS begins with relationship; its purpose is to lead a person/family/group to discover God and his salvation; it prepares people to know the Word and share the Word.  First column, simply copy the Scriptures.  Second column, say it in your own words (by doing so, you prepare people to say what they’ve learned in their own words).  Third column (for unbelievers) “What does this passage tell us about God or man?”; for believers “What must I do or be?”, Our goal is thought-pattern and behavioral change.
• Keep the Word central, God the authority, not the leader; be a facilitator of discovery not a leader.
• DBS Elements:  From the beginning group sharing leads to prayer, ministry , worship even before people are believers. Built in are Bible study, responsibility (action-based obedience), accountability.
• Heresy:  Historically has come out of dictatorial leadership.  Heresy comes from individuals, not group.  The group process is self-corrective.

David Watson, Session 6:  Training for meetings:

• Opening:What are you thankful for today?  This week?
• Are there any needs that you have or that you know that our community has?
• Can you think of any way we can meet those needs? (Be brief)
• Reporting (As this represents a first meeting, there is no review session, nor reports of a previous sharing time.)
• Study the passage together using the 3-column method
  • The job of facilitators is NOT to teach.  By third week, facilitators should have become coaches.

Case Study: West Africa

• M convert, working among Ms. Tried DBS experimentally ­ unsupervised, trained and set loose. Rapid multiplication of churches, with a leader who did not believe the method would work!  Did not use all the principles, mostly just finding the person of peace, and it still increased the number of church being planted.
• Surveyed the community in order to find that person. Churches began to multiply rapidly ­ 1600 new churches in 4 years, in an UPG that had been unresponsive before.  Only those who choose to follow the entire process will see the rapid multiplication ­ those who don’t, always see a boost in CP.  Look for 4 generations quickly ­ if that’s not happening something is wrong.

Brazil Case Study:

• Brazil 21 Project:  A Church within Easy Access of every Person in all of Brazil in this Generation
• How did the Brasil 21 Project start?  The roots were formed at the AD2000 Movement:  There were twelve tracks, one of which was Church Planting.  Then, in 1993, a thousand people attended the Brazilian Mission Conference.  Representatives of DAWN ministries were present at that time and helped to galvanize the commitment to church planting.
• Currently, evangelicals represent 24% of the population of Brazil.  Evangelicals are growing at more than 4 times the populational growth rate.  However, there are still 73 cities below 1%, and 112 cities below 5% evangelical.  Also, there are 253 (of 258) indian tribes that still have no translation of the Bible.
• Challenges:  Mega Churches:  The norm is for pastors to try to grow their churches into large churches, as there is much status involved in being the pastor of a mega church.  They are less willing to plant new churches.  There are problems related to growing secularism and nominalism.  There are theologies that discourage mission.  Many pastors have very little Biblical knowledge.
• The Tribal Generation is a movement designed to assist the church in reaching this generation of youth (the emerging generation), which has uniquely similar characteristics throughout Latin America (and, indeed, throughout the world).  It is seeking to reach the fringes of the new generation.  It provides training and coaching for church planters.  It is not a denomination of its own. Nor does it propose a singular methodology.  It is a network of friends helping friends to effectively plant churches that speak to this generation of youth.  Involved in training leaders, discipleship roundtables, stimulating church planting, based on 24/7 prayer.

Indonesia Case Study: Edited from public notes for security reasons.

Roy Wingerd; “Informed Church Multiplication”

• Research:  It’s important to determine how to gather information and which kind we need. It’s difficult to get accurate information.  Most important information is not the statistics themselves (tracking expansion) but being able to determine if extension is happening, and if it is, how?
• Research needs to be cyclical.  It must happen throughout a whole project.  Every worker should be engaged in some way in research.  There is a need to have us change our thinking, that we are all responsible for gathering data.
• Research is motivating, needs to be ongoing to adjust our actions, make our ministries more effective.  Luke 8: Parable of the soils; Meaning of facts.  Part of our responsibility is to determine how we can better prepare the ground for the gospel ­ prayer, spiritual warfare - how to stand strong in the face of persecution, materialism.  Determine where to go next, what to do next.
• Some say that the most effective church planters have no mechanisms for reporting.  They allege that counting happens by and for those who have an interest in the totals (because of funding, constituency, supporters, etc.)
• Two camps:  Church planting camp, and research specialist camp.  How can we come together for benefit and create synergy?
• There are different methodologies of counting:  Estimates, Census, Sampling.  Does it matter which method we use?  When?  How often we use it?  In what contexts?
• Research challenges for CPM:  a) Limited capacity to remember details, b) Bias (researcher and respondent), c) Over use of extrapolating, d) Distinction between expansion and extension, e) Recognizing variation within a group, f) Measuring outcomes and impact, g) What happens if nothing happens?
• We have to be thinking of specific end goals when thinking about info:  a) Helping us make good decisions, b) Give shape to activities we’re already involved in, c) Achieve the vision God gave us
• Bottom line is being obedient to the fulfillment of Jesus’ command to go make disciples of all nations, and not miss any group, where the church both makes disciples and transforms society.  Can we figure out if we can actually do what Jesus asked us to do when He commissioned us to make disciples of all nations?  Precisely?
• Recommends book Mission India, by President Abdul Kalam. We need to understand theology, strategy and God’s heart.