Category: Disciple Making Movements

From Brian Hogan’s story of a CPM in Mongolia:

We had been trained to expect that cross-cultural evangelism would be one of the first and most difficult hurdles our team would face. I know that many church planting teams working among unreached groups experience much of their struggle just getting the Good News across the cultural divide in a bold and effective manner. We were ready for this battle, but it never came. The one church planting task our team did not handle “in-house” was evangelism. We outsourced this job to overseas Asians. Mongolians have a natural gifting when it comes to sharing their faith. They just can’t keep good news to themselves. After short-term teams of Mongolian believers won a foothold for God in Erdenet, we had watched in amazement as those first converts, not hindered by cultural differences, quickly began to win their friends and neighbors to Christ. In the first year the teenaged girls who formed the early core won their peers, but through summer and fall of ’94, the Gospel spread like a grassfire through all age groups and both genders. Our New Believers classes were crowded, with many older people getting saved, and even some of our shyest and most unassuming members leading their neighbors to Christ. The believers poured out their hearts in prayer for family, neighbors, their countrymen and even other nations in our weekly prayer gatherings and in the house church meetings. And those prayers were answered. We church planters were so quickly thrust into discipling the growing band of converts that we never really had to do much evangelism ourselves—at least among Mongolians. But we did look for opportunities anyway, at work, on the long overnight train journeys between Ulaanbaatar and Erdenet, and as we lived out our lives in the community. Indeed, with so many Mongolian believers, it made little sense to cross barriers of language and culture to carry the Good News ourselves when we were far more effective training Mongolians to win their own people. We had learned during our training that when locals began sharing the Gospel with their neighbors, it was a signal to the church planting team to shift gears and concentrate their energies on discipleship and leadership training.

From There’s A Sheep in My Bathtub
by Brian Hogan

“Gohar is a farmer and day worker. He earns about $1.75 from the landowner for each day of hard work in the rice field. During good weather, he works 25 days out of an average month. Gohar also takes care of his own 1/3 acre and supplements his income by growing rice and fresh vegetables. One day his father learned about Isa (Jesus, in Arabic) and became a disciple of Christ. Through his father’s inspiration, Gohar became a believer in the Lord and became active in telling his family and friends. At the time of this writing, he has baptized 230 people and started 35 churches. Gohar has reproduced himself in many other leaders and now invests in ten Learning Communities, where the leaders of these churches gather for support and ongoing instruction.”

from Movements That Move

by Robert Reach

“One man who is able to plant a church so modeled that very few ever could approximate his success is not thinking world evangelization. He is nearsighted. There may be room for unique models that are not reproducible, but if the world is to be reached, it will be by multiplication and not by addition. “

from Indigenous Church Planting
by Charles Brock

“Perhaps ironically, as we plan for multiplication, we will find that we probably need to do less rather than more. Multiplication needs a spontaneous component, and humans tend to impose their own agendas. In this chapter, we will discover premeditated actions that open the way for multiplication.”

We Are Not The Hero
by Jean Johnson
Loc 3018

“As a church planting coach in Cambodia, I once brought lanterns for use in a drama, a contextualized performance of the Bible story about Ruth and Naomi. I say contextualized in that the Cambodian church planters allowed the surrounding context to influence the style and nuances of the play. The Cambodian farmers were only able to meet at night after they came in from the fields, so I thought it would be beneficial to provide artificial lighting. I also brought a few other resources from the city to enhance the drama and create a pleasant atmosphere in this village setting. I viewed the lanterns as a simple act of kindness and a way to increase the effectiveness of this friendly community event.

A couple of weeks later, the church planters and I were preparing for another storytelling gathering. The church planters gave me a list of things I could bring to the gathering: a tarp, a car battery, and a portable stereo. As I held the list, I realized that I had made a momentous mistake. I was thinking of the success of the immediate event. “What will make this ministry event that I am a part of succeed in a timely manner?” This short-term thinking was a problem for several reasons. One, I communicated through my actions that the local resources of that village were somehow inferior. Two, I conditioned the church planters to feel a need to access resources not readily available to them in order to succeed in this ministry and future church plants. Third, if the church-in-process were to daughter a church in the future, they would want to use external resources to do it, as I had modeled to them.

This whole method can be summed up in one word: nonreproducible.”

We Are Not The Hero
Jean Johnson
Loc 1201

“One of the surest ways to cripple a Church Planting Movement is to link church reproduction to foreign resources. Whenever pastors look beyond their own membership and local resources for salaries or buildings, they bleed the life out of their movement.”

David Garrison

Church Planting Movements