Category: Church Planting Movements

What kind of Growth is Healthy Growth?

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements

One of the criticisms of CPM is that the growth is too fast, out of control, and therefore a mile wide and an inch deep.

I have heard many say,

“I believe in slow, steady growth. I believe in slow, steady growth because I believe slow, steady growth is healthy growth.”

Well, that sounds good to me. I like healthy growth too. The trouble is that that is not what the Bible says. What kind of growth did Paul want? What kind of growth did he pray for? You make the call:

“Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you.”     (2 Thes. 3:1)

Paul prayed for rapid growth, and my heart’s desire is that the church would grow rapidly.

From One Magnificent Obsession by Josh Hunt

The Most Important Part

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Evangelism

A few years ago, I was talking with a pastor and wanted him to understand the organic nature of the Church. I asked him,

“If you had a plot of land and wanted to grow a crop of corn on it, what would you do?”

He said, “Well, I would till the land and remove the weeds and rocks.”

I said, “Good, then what?”

“I would add fertilizer if it was needed and make sure it got lots of good sunshine and water.”

“Good; what else?”

“Well, I guess I would take out any weeds that grow up and chase away any pests that try to eat the crop.”

“Fine,” I said. “Anything else?”

He said, “I would reap a harvest.”

I looked at him with a puzzled look and remarked, “All you would have is a pile of wet dirt!”

He had a quizzical expression on his face as his words were rewinding and replaying in his mind. Then, suddenly, a look of “Ah ha!” came over him, and he added,

“Oh, and I would plant seeds.”

Though we long for fresh fruit, many of our efforts at growing it leave us with nothing but mud because we have failed to plant the seed that brings life. It does not matter how good you are at fertilizing, watering, cultivating, and harvesting. If you do not plant the seed, you will never have a harvest-never. The farmer who skips this stage is a hungry fool on welfare.

Neil  Cole. Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (Kindle Locations 892-901).

“Now the parable is this.  The seed is the word of God.”

                                                           — Jesus in Luke 8:11

 

“you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God“

                                                             — I Peter 1:23

“Don’t be afraid of us. We need the gospel”

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Evangelism

Elias was an East African missionary living in the crowded Somali refugee quarter of a large city in the Horn of Africa. As Elias prepared his dinner alone, after a long day of ministering to refugees, he was startled at the knock on his door by a 65- year old Somali sheikh named Abdul- Ahad. The sheikh had come from the war- torn city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Elias was nervous, wondering if this would be the night that Al- Shabaab (Somali militants) chose to extract their revenge on yet another Christian. When Elias opened his door, the sheikh abruptly demanded,

“Yes or No. Jesus’ blood paid for the sins of everyone in the world?”

Elias replied, “Yes.”

The sheikh responded adamantly, “You’re lying!”

Then he hesitated before saying, “The blood of Jesus cannot forgive my sins.”

He told Elias of the violence he had committed in Mogadishu. The old sheikh began to tremble and weep.

“I need relief from that,” he said.

Elias told him, “If you and I agree tonight, then God will forgive you.”

The old sheikh prayed with Elias, and Abdul- Ahad was saved that night. Before he left, Abdul- Ahad turned to Elias, grasped his arm, and said to him,

“When you look at me on the street, you see my Muslim hat and my beard, and you are afraid of me. And, to tell you the truth, that is why we dress this way, to make you afraid of us. But you need to know— you need to know that inside we are empty. Don’t be afraid of us. We need the gospel.”

Excerpt from A Wind In The House Of Islam: How God is Drawing Muslims Around The World to Faith in Jesus Christ by David Garrison.

CPM works where nothing else has

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements

I lived in Thailand for 16 months, and am very well aware of the difficult challenge that country has been for the missionary community. There is no shortage of missionaries there and there are Bible Colleges and Seminaries built by missionaries, but I’ve seen estimates of the Evangelical Christian population ranging from 0.01% to 1.0% of the population. That may be changing now as a result of CPM. Watch this video of an interview with Lorraine Dierck, and then I’ll make some observations.

I see Four things in this video that are characteristics of every CPM/DMM.

1. It all starts with Prayer. She tells how she was burdened to see churches planted, and prayed for church planters for various communities with populations in the hundreds of thousands that had no church.

2. Anyone can be the catalyst that starts the movement. After all this praying, Lorraine said,

“Finally God said, ‘You, I want you to do it’ I was so shocked. I was horrified. I didn’t tell anybody. I’m a children’s worker! I’m not a church planter.”

If you google Lorraine Dierck, you will come up with numerous web pages that detail her work as a children’s worker in Thailand because she has been doing that work for many years. You will find almost nothing except 3 youtube videos on her CPM work.

3. The emphasis was on training others to do the work. Not seminary or Bible college type training, but the MAWL (Model, Assist, Watch, and Leave) CPM methodology is seen clearly in her approach.

“You lead somebody to Christ, and then you train them how they can lead somebody to Christ. You baptize them, and then you train them how they can baptize somebody. So it becomes like a chain like that. And in the early years I might have been involved in leading a few people to Christ, but pretty soon it wasn’t me doing the evangelism, it was them doing the evangelism.”

4. The LEAVE in MAWL is seen clearly in this video, even though she has not left the country yet.

“I just keep myself totally in the background and normally you would never see me. You just see the Thai’s, John and Nok and….”
“Now they are totally responsible for their own work. They are leading their own work. They are like apostles, they are like pastors, so they are leading their own work. So I think it is really good because it has taken the westerner and the foriegner out of the picture.”

Street Deacons

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements

The most important central theme of both CPM and DMM is the determination to push ministry out of central control or central leadership to every believer.  Every time I come across another story of a leader who entrusted others with ministry opportunities, it illustrates how embracing the principle of 2 Timothy 2:2 always leads to significantly greater impact of the gospel.  This little story comes from the book Misfits Welcome by Matthew Barnett, who started a ministry to street people in Los Angeles.  Obviously this is a very different type of ministry than CPM / DMM, but the principle of 2 Timothy 2:2 is illustrated none the less.

Let me tell you about some people God used. When my church finally started to grow, we were hitting an attendance level of around fifty people. The challenge is that more than forty of those fifty were people who came on our buses from Skid Row. Skid Row is a place where people line both sides of several streets in the Los Angeles business district, sleeping around bonfires, cardboard boxes, and tents. Sadly, women and children occupy these cold, dark streets. There are pockets of Skid Row where people line up against walls and practically inject needles until they die— hence the name Skid Row. Many years ago, our church received its first donation of a brand new bus. We were so excited. We took that bus down to Skid Row, and during the course of a few months forty homeless people began regularly meeting us for rides to church. Can you imagine looking out on Sunday morning and nearly every person in the church being homeless? I was a pastor who didn’t understand anything about homelessness, and I had a congregation of homeless people who just came for the free food after every service. A misfit pastor and a misfit congregation. We were all out of place. Shockingly, the people started to come to church and bring their friends. Since 80 percent of the people in our church were homeless, we didn’t have many volunteers, so God gave us an idea for a position called “Street Deacons.” (Don’t judge. You have to work with what you have!) I appointed these guys as church staff to help me get as many people on the bus to come to church as possible. You should’ve seen the smiles on the faces of some of these men. They couldn’t believe someone would love them, believe in them, and give them such a great title. One man cried when I told him that he could be a Street Deacon. Several of the men stopped drinking because they were so honored that they would have this chance. Many of the guys sobered up, dressed up, cleaned up because a pastor had given them a chance to have a role in the church. They went out on the streets and gathered up friends. Every week they would check in with me and give updates on their progress. They lived for this chance and they made the best of it. They just needed someone to believe the best in them. The first staff members who joined me were an interesting collection of individuals. However, they were the seeds that would later grow into the miracle we now call the Dream Center.

According to Wikipedia,

“When the church began in September 1994, there were 39 members. The congregation grew from an average attendance of 48 on Sunday morning to reaching more than 35,000 people each week in the Center’s 40 services and 273 ministries and outreaches.”

So giving ministry to skid row “misfits” seems to have worked!

The Importance of Obedience Based Discipleship

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

In this video (part 2, see part 1 here) Jerry Trousdale (author of Miraculous Movements) covers counter intuitive aspects of Disciple Making strategies. Some highlights for me were:

  • discussion of the importance of obedience based discipleship (starting at 18 minutes)
  • “This is what a Discovery Bible Study looks like…” (starting at 24.5 minutes)
  • “David Garrison is the author of Church Planting Movements.  David and I were together comparing notes as he was writing his new book A Wind In The House of Islam.  As we compared our data, we realized that from Indonesia to Africa and all over the world the same thing is happening.  And then David said, You know Jerry, since I wrote Church Planting Movements people often ask me to come and see the movement that is happening where they are.  And often times I’ll go and discover that it is not really a movement, because it is not really multiplying rapidly.  It is more like church growth on steroids.  It’s good, but its not really a movement.  You know what is the one thing that makes the difference, the one thing that makes the difference between a church planting movement and church planting on steroids?  It is obedience.  When you have the obedience [based discipleship] DNA, you get movements, but when you don’t have it you can have good church planting but you’re not getting multiplication because you’re not having the dramatic transformation.”  (from 34 to 36 minutes in)

“Now the side benefit of this is, that this makes enormous numbers of disciples” (starting at 29 minutes)

“Replication and multiplication happen very naturally” (30:30 minutes)

Rapid Multiplication of disciples among Muslims in Africa

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements

In this video Jerry Trousdale tells stories from Church Planting Movements in Muslim countries of Africa, including his own journey from preaching and teaching to becoming a catalyst for Disciple Making Movements in Africa. His book Miraculous Movements is one of my favorite books on DMM/CPM, but he fills in some of the gaps in this video.

“In this process, maybe 300 people have lost their lives.
Many of those were only one or two days old in the Lord.”

“Often the most difficult places yield the greatest results”

Giving Up Control: Why Movements Are Preferable to Revival (Book Review)

TimothyBook Review / Church Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

givingupcontrolThis little e-book is available on the Kindle for only 99 cents, and it may be the best money you’ve ever spent.   Author A.J. DeJonge was a staff member with Cru (Campus Crusade) in Australia, and this book details his own journey from the traditional Cru approach of staff led campus ministry to the Catalyzing of student led movements on campus. Although his ministry context is the university campus, the principles that drove this change were derived from the CPM and DMM approaches to cross cultural ministry, and he mentions various authors that anyone with knowledge of CPM / DMM would be familiar with.

One of the counter intuitive practices of DMM / CPM is the necessity of giving up control. In most churches and ministries, the mindset is that control is necessary to prevent heresy and enable growth to maturity of babes in Christ. But control leads to several problems that most of us in ministry are blind to. For one thing, control limits the size of the ministry. If you need a Bible College or Seminary trained man to be a pastor or to plant a church, the growth of your movement will be severely limited. There are a very limited number of them.   DeJonge saw this in his own campus ministry. The growth of the ministry was directly constrained by the number of people they had on staff to disciple students, lead Bible Studies, and organize activities. The ultimate goal of multiplication wasn’t happening, and would never happen unless they had access to hundreds of full time staff (they had 3).

Giving up control is scary. Giving up control means there will be a lower level of quality and professionalism. It means giving people room to make mistakes. In our western business mindset, control is good. If we want to produce a high quality product, we need strict quality control to make it happen. And we want quality. High quality is good. But ministry is not business. The Holy Spirit fills and works through weak people.

Strong quality control can lead to a big ministry, but it cannot produce a movement. Consider the mega church. If you’ve ever been to Willow Creek (or similar mega church), you know that everything is done at a high level of quality and competence. The weekend service is a production, and a very good one at that. It is polished. But it isn’t reproducible. At least not for most of us. There are a few people in this world who have the natural leadership talents and intelligence to take Bill Hybels’ model and implement it in a new city with success. Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley are what business writer Jim Collins would call a “Level 5 Leader”. Since there are very few leaders of that caliber, we will never win the world to Christ that way. Most people who visit Willow Creek will go home saying “If that is what an effective church is, I could never start a church”. High control means low reproducibility.

His own journey into experimenting with the catalytic approach to campus ministry resulted from his own disillusionment with the results of his ministry and his experience of burnout in having to make it all happen. These opened him up to exploring other options, which were at the time being encouraged by the leadership of Cru. In addition, he sort of discovered the effectiveness of the student led model by mistake when he gave his wife permission to develop an international student ministry on the side IF she only gave it 4 hours of her time each week. That necessitated giving control and responsibility for that ministry to the students, and relegated her involvement to a training / equipping / support role. The result was a dynamic and growing ministry among the international students that far exceeded their expectations.

DeJonge details in the book how he applied the principles of CPM/DMM to campus ministry. He borrowed the concept of MAWL (Model, Assist, Watch, Leave) from Curtis Sergent and tells stories of how they applied this and the challenges they faced in doing so. It became clear to him that many of their discipleship or Bible study methods were not very reproducible. Church planter Peter Roenfeldt told him:

“When I started teaching church planting to people, I wrote manuals on the topic that became thicker and thicker over time. But the complexity became their downfall, and I realised that if what I want to impart is going to be transferable, it has to be simple. So simple that one could fit them on a bookmark. So now I limit myself to a bookmark and use the Bible for our manual.”

DeJonge took this to heart and applied the same thing to their campus ministry. Roenfeldt also challenged him to think wider and deeper than just evangelism and discipleship. What was the ultimate goal, and how would they get there? He says:

“In Cru we often speak of WIN- BUILD- SEND as a strategic progression for spiritual multiplication and the path to seeing every University student reached with the gospel. But for many years of my staff career, I saw SEND simply refer to the process of graduating students into the workforce as more mature believers. Catalytic methodology is in my mind a sharpening of that focus on SEND – recognising the need for students to be empowered and released not at the point of graduation, but during their University careers.”

How many churches are doing the same thing? So much energy is focused on Bible Studies and preaching and worship services and programs, but where is the reality of sending people out in ministry?

Another core principle of CPM/DMM is to invest time and discipleship energy into those who put the training into practice.   Some DMM practitioners call it “Obedience Based Discipleship”, and wait for the disciple to put what has been taught into practice before teaching the next thing. This principle is seen in the book as well, but possibly not to the extent utilized in most CPM / DMM contexts. The Cru catalytic approach that he was learning (or developing on the fly) was certainly a hybrid of historic Cru programs and practices and CPM/DMM philosophy, and this was one of those areas that they had to wrestle with. In my opinion, from what he described in the book it appeared that this area needed more work.

Along the way, DeJonge faced some significant challenges in the transition. These included questions such as:

  1. How do we staff pull back and get students to step up?
  2. When they did pull back, they made mistakes in how to communicate to the students the new approach
  3. They made mistakes in selecting, retaining, and training leaders. He shares lots of real life experience in this area.
  4. When they did pull back, they had to redefine what their job as full time ministry staff was. What would they do with all the additional time they now had on their hands?

In his 1927 classic The Spontaneous Expansion of The Church, Rolland Allen discussed at length how the fear of losing control hindered the spontaneous expansion of the church that Paul and the apostles experienced:

By spontaneous expansion I mean something which we cannot control. And if we cannot control it, we ought, as I think, to rejoice that we cannot control it. For if we cannot control it, it is because it is too great not because it is too small for us. The great things of God are beyond our control. Therein lies a vast hope. Spontaneous expansion could fill the continents with the knowledge of Christ: our control cannot reach as far as that. We constantly bewail our limitations: open doors unentered; doors closed to us as foreign missionaries; fields white to the harvest which we cannot reap. Spontaneous expansion could enter open doors, force closed ones, and reap those white fields. Our control cannot: it can only appeal pitifully for more men to maintain control. There is always something terrifying in the feeling that we are letting loose a force which we cannot control; and when we think of spontaneous expansion in this way, instinctively we begin to be afraid. Whether we consider our doctrine, or our civilization, or our morals, or our organization, in relation to a spontaneous expansion of the Church, we are seized with terror, terror lest spontaneous expansion should lead to disorder. We are quite ready to talk of self-supporting, self-extending and self-governing Churches in the abstract as ideals; but the moment that we think of ourselves as establishing self-supporting, self-governing Churches in the Biblical sense we are met by this fear, a terrible, deadly fear.

Pastors, missionaries, and Christian workers of all varieties will have to choose between control and greater fruitfulness.

This is not a long book, but anyone interested in DMM/CPM practice will enjoy reading about AJ DeJonge’s journey into Catalytic Student Led Movements. The book appears to be written primarily for Cru staff, but anyone in ministry from pastors to missionaries in any context can learn from this book. It is an illustration of how the principles of CPM / DMM being rediscovered in our generation (previously well known to Roland Allen and John Nevius) can be applied in other ministry contexts.

DMM vs. T4T

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

Two approaches to Church Planting movements have emerged.  When I was just beginning to learn about CPMs, I learned about both and since the whole CPM paradigm in general was a new way of thinking, it took me some time to really sort out the difference between the two different approaches to Church Planting Movements.  The first is DMM (Disciple Making Movements) pioneered by David Watson in India and now being used extensively around the world by several organizations, especially CityTeam.  The book Miraculous Movements by Jerry Trousdale is an excellent introduction to this approach, as well as Contagious Disciple Making by David and Paul Watson.  The second is T4T (Training For Trainers) pioneered by Ying Kai in China and explained in the book T4T: A Discipleship Re-revolution by Ying Kai and Steve Smith. Both have been extremely effective and have much in common, but also have some significant differences. This little video is an excellent explanation of the two approaches.

For those interested in a more in depth analysis, Ted Esler’s article Coming to Terms With Two Church Planting Paradigms is also a good analysis.