Church Planting Round Table

Reflection Group Report:

• Dean and his team has created an atmosphere of openness, sharing, collaboration.
• Reflection group has met daily to process what has  been said and heard.
• This conference represents a daily a conversation
• Lift our eyes to the greatness of our Commission
• There is a passion expressed:  a passion for evangelization.: Unreached peoples must be reached.
• Specific opportunity to fit together two very important movements: SCP and CPM
• Even though there are 18 organizations represented, it has never felt like 18 organizations, rather one conversation, one passion and commitment.  This is an attitude that will be needed for the completion of the Great Commission:  A oneness of heart and mind
• There are many who have genuine interest, a longing to do something in our generation.  People are ready to take up action for this.
• As far as the CPM process, and the SCP, we have found something to take with us for the fulfillment of the passion that we have.
• God calling us to go back to the simplicity of the Gospel.  The gospel is able to be understood by everyone. Prayer is the key, with the Word of God.
• We are being called to work in unity; the time has come for the body of Christ to work in unity.
• We have different gifting and skills
• He is calling us to take advantage of global problems.  These can open doors.
• He is calling us to take advantage of technology and use it as a tool to disciple the nations.
• As we allow the insiders to lead Bible Studies, we have to empower them with skills, both physically and spiritually.  Mistake made was that nationals were never empowered.  God said “I am raising an army of men and women who will go out and do my work.”  This is the time God is raising us up to fulfill the GC in our time.
• In connecting with other leaders, in general sense that everyone is willing to go back and try to implement what we’ve learned.  It is confusion, a bit frightening, but we are willing to go back to practice what we have learned.
• God bless you David.  God bless you Dean and your team as we move forward.

David Watson, Session 14

• None of us has a corner on anything.  We’re not the only gun in town.  David wants to communicate that he knows that there are lots of things that are working well out there.  He wants to help us.
• The pyramid (see Resource DVD) represents a system.  Take any part out and it weakens the system.  It takes all aspects working together,  We need each other.
• Many churches want to plant new churches, but many simply don’t know how.
• Regarding holiness, it’s not the obedience that matters.  It’s the striving toward obedience that matters.  It’s not how obedient we are but about striving to align myself with God in all that I do.  If the whole church were living out this principal, we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.
• As professional churchmen, we expect other professional churchmen to be kind, virtuous, etc.  Not always like that.  The church is made up of sinners, and the world is made up of sinners square.
• A symptom of lack of vision: going in every direction.
• The person of peace model is a handle, or a way to get a start.  There are other ways, but this is one way.
• Plan to invest two years to implement what we have heard here.
• In CP: instead of struggling to win the fringes of the unsaved world, we focus on winning the heroes of the unsaved world, who would win multitudes of the unsaved world.

David Watson, Session 15

• Resource sites:
  • - www.reachingtheonlinegeneration.com (Paul Watson’s blog)
  • - www.cpmtr.org (Church planting training materials)
  • - www.DavidLWatson.org (David Watson’s blog)

• Top things learned
  • Obedience trumps Knowledge
  •  Invest your life in a small team
  • The concept of “Never”: never teach, never lead, never give answers
  •  Both/And:  Work with existing body while creating space for innovation and celebrate when it happens
  • Outsiders deculturalize and insiders contextualize.
  • Get a vision for the lostness of people – Jesus’ focus was on them
  • Meet the needs of people in a way that proclaims Jesus (partner compassion ministries with CP ministries)
  • Keep disciples in their communities so they can be a transforming influence
  • Church Planter spends time focusing on his relationship with God (beacon), getting involved in community
  • Find person of peace, transfer gospel family to family
  • (other statements on the wall sheets were not shared with the group–sorry)

• Next steps shared by the participants
  •  Share the vision with peers
  •  Start the practice of my team’s hand-writing the Scriptures
  • Begin rethinking teaching curriculum and refine it.
  • Line up seminars to pass on what was learned here
  • Fast and pray for more Godliness/holiness
  • Get pilot projects going in as many regions as possible
  • Read more from the DVD conference materials in order to understand better the process, especially in order to assist in research and evaluation
  • Pray, Share with key mission partners.  Pray specifically on strategy questions (Where, who when)
  • Become a beacon for the man of peace.  Bring our staff into thinking this way.
  •  Be more fluent in God’s language of love, which is obedience.
  • Do paradigm shifting with fellows I’m working with.
  • Network, partner with others in the region
  • Share with two groups of people (in the Philippines)
  • I meet with two young guys who want to do church differently.  I want to share these ideas with them to see where this can go (CPM in the US)
  • Form a discussion group to meet one hour a month to discuss this.
  • Do a pilot project in Europe.
  • Share this information with others from my group who were not able to come to this conference.
  • I’m going to start using the question approach in my church, at the top with my elders, to get to the bottom line quickly.  This may slow things down initially, but I think that this will ultimately speed things up.
  • I will recognize that people who have been drawn to me may indeed be persons of peace.  One of them may be key to starting studies in my neighborhood.
  • The first step is that I need to bring the leaders of existing movements together.  Otherwise, the SCP folks may hinder the CPM folks in my region.
  • Ask myself how to promote CPM even more widely in Indonesia.
  • Remember that we’ve never said “house church” or “cell church”.  This methodology will work for starting any kind of church.
  • We will seek to bring the head of GEM and some other mission leaders together to talk about this and share contacts to expose other workers to these concepts.
  • I will plant 200 churches this year.
  • In Beijing, we want to see open (not underground) churches planted.
  • I, as a person representing a group that has promoted SCP, will no longer see CPM in a way that considers it interference.
  • In North Africa, this is a situation that is just ripe for a process like this.  I look forward to see how God will work.
  • I would like to see the home groups of my local church replicate.
  • I would like to study this more.  The pyramid is daunting.
  • I would like to do some evaluative research.
  • Start valuing obedience more than knowledge
  • Go back to the basics of pouring my life into a few people.
  • In my role on the Asia leadership team, I want to pour myself into our workers in Asia.
  • Ownership a key, and part of that is the voice from which new ideas are heard.  We will invite some of the folks here from India to speak to our partners in Orissa.
  • I want to investigate Internet-related stuff in India.  They have a vehicle but no fuel to run it.
  • Dialogue and take things forward with brothers here from North India.
  • Start a discovery Bible study among women already in my sphere of influence.
  • I will go back and work with a person in my life who I believe may be a person of peace.
  • Make disciples. Multiply churches.  The M & M candies are a simple, straightforward representation of what we’ve learned here.  Taste like Jesus.
  • Pouch of M & M’s.  Participative discussion characteristics (Bible teaching.  It centers on application.)  Obedience to Scripture by members and the group is the measure of success.  Unpaid, often semi-literate lay people co-lead.  Cell groups or small independent churches of about 15 members are usual.  Houses or storefronts are typical meeting places.
  • I will pray and ask God how he wants me to apply this to my own life.  I want to share the Shema principles with my family.
  • Talk to the GEM leadership team and ask how these principles might apply to the context in Europe.
  • I want to look for the person of peace in my neighborhood.
  • I want to spend the best part of every day with my sons, impressing on them how to seek the Lord—in person and on-line.
  • The Lord has given me many relationships with Kergys, Uzbeks, and others.  I want to bring blessing to their lives (healing, etc.).
  • I want to help others discover the CPM process.
  • So many people of peace may have been with me, and I never recognized it.  From now on, I’ll be ready for them. Waiting for them.
  • Obey God without asking questions like “Is that really what He said?” and teaching others to do the same.
  • Becoming obedient to God’s language of love to be a beacon
  • Share CPM with ministry partners and pray about implementation
  • Pilot projects in Europe fields
  • Take question approach to leadership
  • Ensuring SCP doesn’t limit CPM – working to overcoming barriers between the two
  • Set church planting goals using CPM
  • Some fields are ripe for CPM – meetings already set up to introduce CPM
  • Need for the right cultural trainers to gain acceptance – plan to find them and bring them to India
  • Apply at a personal level – family, neighborhood

• Kent Parks, Mission to Unreached Peoples:  Organizational Cast Study- Transitioning an Organization
  • Kent’s wife is a “Staff Utility Player” – his partner in ministry.  Has traveled worldwide with him during the past two months.
  • Curtis Sergeant is 20% of his time to MUP
  • Worked among the Sunda in Indonesia.
  • This is indeed a global sending era.  Even so, if we continue the same kinds of numbers and see the same kinds of results, we will not get the job done.
  • If the job was only about the task, we could do it easily.  But it is about putting the body back together and then engage the task.
  • By serving the greater good an organization will grow.
  • Focus: UPG, Strategy teams, CPM.  Every staff person is focused on these 3 priorities
  • The Great Commission is about putting humanity back together and getting the job done.
  • For a movement to happen all of the many things in the pyramid have to happen, and they take different giftings, so the Lord brings together teams.
  • We’ve been doing CP by brute force instead of by leverage principles.
  • Ethne is a steering committee representing many cultures and orgs to focus on reaching the unreached.  Its composition is more and more reflecting the proportions of the body of Christ worldwide.
  • We need to do things differently, or we’ll never finish the job.  At the current rate, it’ll take until the year +/-2350 if there were no population growth.
  • You need enough structure and enough flexibility in order for reproduction to take place  (Principles in The Starfish and the Spider, Wolfgang Simpson).  Need both leadership and flexibility.
  • If we mandate things, we can cripple their implementation.  If we invest a vision, we can mobilize our entire organizations.  Seek the Lord, set strategy.  Sometimes this means stopping good things to do the best things.
  • The MUP Board has just given unanimous approval to embracing CPM.  It is no longer Kent’s vision, and is now a mission-wide vision.  It is now in a planning process.  The starting gun has just gone off.  They’re going to have to stop some things that the organization has done.
  • Commitments:  1) We will do this well as an organization; 2) We are going to help others do the same.
  • No longer taking people on and saying do whatever you feel called to do. We are not forcing any of our old workers to change.  We’re inviting them to change, and all new people who come on will be committed to this new strategy.
  • Why CPM? Won’t get the job done without rapidly multiplying churches led by indigenous people
  • Why Strategy team? Unity of international teams working together is God’s global story. If the Great Commission was about task we could get it done. It’s about God’s people coming together and then working together on the task, reflecting the Body of Christ. God is raising up and sending multi-ethnic teams – leveraging power of networking, partnerships.
  • Commitment to transnational collaboration

• Next Steps:  A proposal for a Global Church Planting Network
  • Question: Is there a place for SCP and CPM networks globally to cooperate towards completing the great Commission?
  • There was a meeting in London in 2008, in the home of Dr. Stef Nash, to which former DAWN Associates, representatives of the 3P charity, a representative of a prayer network, two OC Area Directors, and representatives of other ministries, to discuss how to nurture and accelerate continued church planting.
  • 4 meetings next year with global focus – CP focus unique – strategy? Or? What will set it apart? Clear rationale, clear expectations of the network. (Diminishing focus on pioneer planting, etc)
  • Observations/Comments/Suggestions
  • Sometimes when you interface with an organizational leader, he sometimes doesn’t even know what’s going on in his organization.  You may want to interface with someone else in the organization.
  • When calling this kind of gathering, need to define the profile of the person you’d like to attend (Gather people through relationships worldwide).  Also, describe what you intend to accomplish at the event.
  • Don’t plan on being a decision-making gathering. It’s a conversation – decisions have to be made by the leaders in the organization
  • In a process like this, a group of people doesn’t simply announce the existence of a partnership.  Rather, invite people to talk and they decide whether there is validity for the group to exist.
  • This is already happening in India (see Rodrick)
  • Don’t leave out local church and denominations in this conversation/network.
  • The non-formal leaders may not have organizational positions but they may have network influence.
  • Be meticulous to connect existing networks.  They need to be talking to each other.
  • We might want to ask, do other related networks exist? We might want other groups (Ethne, Cell Church Missions Network, House Church Network,etc.) to co-call the network gathering.
  • Some of the other groups are not solely focused on church planting.
  • Emerging mission networks globally do also have church planting at their center.
  • Possible continuum of purpose of this event: strategy < ——————— > dissemination of info
  • Network will net clear rationale; will also need clear expectations
  • Will need to keep in mind: What is missing that constitutes the basis for needing this network?
  • Perhaps a larger group would be better – 100 or more

• Evaluation March 20, 2009
  • Things for which we’re grateful:
  • Sheryl’s stories
  • New Internet initiatives
  • Our roommates, special connections with those with whom we’re rooming
  • Coaching specialists among us
• • Research specialists among us
  • etc.
  • Suggestion of Exposure trips:  A “come and see” opportunity. Be highly intentional to see what God is doing.  Eg. 2400 churches in Ethiopia among a Muslim people group.  Look inside a movement.  What is the DNA like at the 3rd and 4th generation?  Also Sierra Leone.  These movements are mature enough that it won’t spoil things to have a different face come by to observe.
  • Rodrick says they receive groups all the time.  Come and do a prayer walk.
  • Oswaldo would gladly receive people in Brazil.
  • It’s amazing what a vision trip can do.
  • Suggestion of Internships:  Do a CPM internship with Paul to the on-line generation.  Not just people good at programming on a computer, but also people with a passion for the lost.  Paul is willing to teach how to do ministry through new technologies (e.g. How to set up a blog, .  Three goals:  follow up those who have exposure to the gospel through other means, creation of on-line communities, and evaluating whatever good tools he finds from a church-planting perspective to make it available more broadly.  Also there are many people involved in Skype coaching (1 to 1.5 hours per week).  For David, he is trying to limit his mentoring to ten people because his schedule is so full, but normally has about 10 people he’s mentoring.
  • For distance mentoring and meeting—Go to www.oovoo.com.  It is like skype but the focus is on video chat.  Three people can participate for free, and for $10 a month up to six can participate.
  • Partnership, strategy, training consultation:  A possible follow-up next year to these meeting.  The only way we’re going to be able to get the job done is to collaborate.  Some collaboration tools are actually quite simple to use.  We have a felt need in OC to do it better.  One way that David Watson does this is to second people for a year or so and then send them back to their own organization.  If you would like to work with us in the planning process for this follow-up, please let Dean know.
  • Learn from organizations doing adult learning.  David Watson would love to see more training of people for key leadership positions (in the whole pyramid) for these movements.
  • Ethne:  A bunch of networks that show to together to do things.  The core of the steering committee changes for each cycle.  It’s a network of movements.  It’s not creating a prayer network; it’s about connecting networks.  Ethne 09 will be in Bogota in November.  Trans-organizational/trans-national. There are a lot of resources on www.ethne.net.  It will be multi-lingual.

• Panel Discussion:  How does it all fit together?
  • Need to bring the 2 streams together to talk, cooperate to prevent one movement hindering the other.
  • SCP was well-received by the church in Indonesia, but CPM is new and needs a new effort.  These two groups need to sit together and work out how to work together or it will be harmful.
  • How would you coach a SCP national task force to adopt CPM.  David says, CPM is extremely difficult and takes a lot of work so people don’t turn to CPM until they are desperate.  If SCP people would get to the point that they aren’t satisfied with planting one church at a time and want to see churches that reproduce and leadership that reproduces, there would be great opportunities to strategize together.
  • Murray says, the denominational leaders who are involved in SCP sometimes feel that CPM people don’t love and accept them (they feel second class).
  • Roy says, that back in the late 60’s the study that started Jim Montgomery toward SCP may have been classified as CPM if the study were done today.  There is significant definition drift on both sides.  The non-negotiables need to be defined and then we need to decide how to work together from there.  There are SCP movements poised for CPM and there are CPM movements that are ready to be joined together into SCP.  There is a need for the body of Christ to work together better, or competition takes over.  SCP and CPM address this in different ways.

• Open time for questions:
  • Question:  21 nations represented here with national task forces dealing with seeing people reached - what should be communicated?
  • Unless people are desperate they don’t adopt CPM – easier to plant one by one. If the SCP people in their mobilization of churches will include CPM a synergy will develop
  • Denominational leaders who are part of SCP sometimes make decisions out of emotion rather than strategically. Important to communicate that those bringing new training/ideas in partnership gatherings love the whole church
  • Nations with either an SCP or CPM movement without the other should be encouraged to intentionally bring the two together. Include the newer organizations on the cutting edge of CPM – include them now.  SCP provides an atmosphere of cooperation rather than competition – this is needed too.
  • Question: if there was a relatively successful SCP movement that wanted to add CPM principles into it, what could be done to help them?  The deal breakers (David):  1) High and structured leadership requirements (Low tolerance for chaos doesn’t work); 2) Moving from a knowledge based to obedience based discipleship; 3) Replications process of disciples, groups, etc. from one system to the next needs to be move over or it won’t work.
  • In Orissa, they’ve seen a similar situation.  You need to appeal to the orgs sense of vision.  Does the current process get you to your vision?  Help them see that the current procedure isn’t getting them there, so they will be desperate enough to go to a new model.
  • Pilot projects will often help denominations be willing to try something new.
  • Denominations need to be willing to live with ambiguities.
  • Question:  Is there a way to access if a region or country or people is ready for SCP or CPM?
  • DAWN came to the conclusion that there needs to be about 2 or 3% of the population Christian in order to be able to gain the modem of a national movement.  There need to be 75% of the denominations committed to it for it to go.  However, David says CPMs succeed in inverse proportion to the number of Christian churches present.
  • Question:  How do you keep heresy from creeping in, like crept in in the early church?
  • In SCP, you invite the Trinitarian churches, but the more liberal ones usually don’t show up.
  • In CPM, the doctrinal purity issue is usually what cause denominations to not want to be involved.  However, if you are teaching obedience from day one, you will have some heresy, because they don’t know the whole Bible yet, but in denominational models, the comply without understanding, while in CPM, as people learn more of the Bible things tend to correct.  They say they need to give two years for this to happen.  If you are about developing your own brand of church CPM won’t work.  CPM will result in some churches that don’t want your denomination.  If the denomination is about Kingdom work, then that’s okay.
  • History shows heresy is not limited to small groups.