Category: Evangelism

Within three months, thirty of his neighbors had become believers in Jesus….

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism / Uncategorized

One of the best resources to learn about DMM/CPM is free.  It is the doctoral dissertation that David Hunt wrote about how he was used to catylize a DMM/CPM in East Africa.

When he was twenty-two years old, Ibrahim turned from being trained as a sheikh to becoming an ardent follower of Jesus. He was so thrilled that he had ―found the truth‖ that he could not stop himself from telling others about it. First he led his wife to Christ, then his cousin Eyobe. Within three months, thirty of his neighbors had become believers in Jesus, creating no small stir in his Islamic community where his father was the current sheikh. Needing to band together, this small group of believers met regularly to support each other, study the Word together, worship their new-found God, and talk about how to reach still more. Ibrahim and Eyobe met regularly with the local church planter for discipleship, but the church planter was not regularly in the village and did not lead any church services. After a few more months, Ibrahim had a passion to take the ―truth that he had recently discovered to the next community so he took his cousin Eyobe and began to look for an open listener in the neighboring village. After initial resistance it was the sheikh of that community who first responded to the gospel, and through his witness a new community of believers quickly emerged. Ibrahim and Eyobe moved on to the next community where again God moved and a church was born. Eyobe planted three churches in less than twelve months because no one told him he couldn‘t! He did the thing that naturally came out of the passion of his heart to share Jesus with his community and those around Him. Today these communities of believers are continuing to grow and mature as the people learn how to become obedient follow of Jesus.

David Hunt

      Church Multiplication in East Africa

What are you willing to do?

TimothyDisciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

I sat in a room of about forty church leaders gathered to hear one of the crosscultural missionaries I work with talk about church planting movements in Asia. He’s been in the middle of the action for over a decade. He knows how to mobilize new believers to share their faith and plant churches. This man told us that one of the key elements of a church planting movement is to ensure that every new believer has a simple way of immediately sharing their story and the gospel with friends and family.

The church leaders wanted to dissect his model of evangelism. They wanted to discuss our cultural context. They wanted to go deeper. They wanted to lead this brother into complexity and abstraction where we felt safe. He listened for a while and then asked patiently and repeatedly, “But who could you share the gospel with this week? What are you willing to do?” We were the ones with the theological degrees, the ministry experience and the resources. He was the one with the new believers and the new churches.

from Movements That Change The World
by Steve Addison

Billy Graham on Discipleship

TimothyDisciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

the leading evangelist in the world today, Billy Graham, recognizes the tremendous potential of this plan when used properly in the church. In response to the question “If you were a pastor of a large church in a principal city, what would be your plan of action?” Mr. Graham replied: “I think one of the first things I would do would be to get a small group of eight or ten or twelve people around me that would meet a few hours a week and pay the price! It would cost them something in time and effort. I would share with them everything I have, over a period of years. Then I would actually have twelve ministers among the laypeople who in turn could take eight or ten or twelve more and teach them. I know one or two churches that are doing that, and it is revolutionizing the church. Christ, I think, set the pattern. He spent most of his time with twelve men. He didn’t spend it with a great crowd. In fact, every time he had a great crowd it seems to me that there weren’t too many results. The great results, it seems to me, came in this personal interview and in the time he spent with his twelve.”

from The Master Plan of Evangelism (1963)
By Robert Coleman

The best work is always done with a few….

TimothyDisciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

We should not expect a great number to begin with, nor should we desire it. The best work is always done with a few. Better to give a year or so to one or two people who learn what it means to conquer for Christ than to spend a lifetime with a congregation just keeping the program going. Nor does it matter how small or inauspicious the beginning may be; what counts is that those to whom we do give priority in our life learn to give it away.

from The Master Plan of Evangelism
By Robert Coleman

 

 

The Acid Test…

TimothyDisciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

Here was the acid test. Would his disciples carry on his work after he had gone? Or what might be even more to the point, could they do as good a job without his bodily supervision as they could with it? This may sound like asking too much, but the fact is that until this point was reached in their Christian nurture, Jesus from a purely human point of view could never be sure that his investment in their lives would pay off for the Kingdom. If the disciples failed to impart his Spirit and method to others who would keep this work going, then his ministry with them all these years would soon come to naught.

from The Master Plan of Evangelism
By Robert Coleman

 

The Master’s Plan

TimothyDisciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

This answers the question of how it is to be done, but it is necessary now to understand that this method can accomplish its purpose only when the followers practice what they learn.

It did not matter how small the group was to start with so long as they reproduced and taught their disciples to reproduce. This was the way his church was to win—through the dedicated lives of those who knew the Savior so well that his Spirit and method constrained them to tell others. As simple as it may seem, this was the way the gospel would conquer. He had no other plan.

from The Master Plan of Evangelism
By Robert Coleman

Lessons from one of the first CPM’s in Cambodia

TimothyChurch Planting Movements / Disciple Making Movements / Discipleship / Evangelism

Five years ago I watched a little youtube video that completely changed my life and redirected my approach to ministry. This is that video:

The video introduced me to the idea of Church Planting Movements (CPM), or rather the development of Disciple Making Movements (DMM) that lead to Church Planting Movements. I got the book that was behind the video (Church Planting Movements by David Garrison) and it started a major paradigm shift in my thinking. One of the CPM’s in Asia mentioned in at the beginning of the video was started by a Southern Baptist missionary in Cambodia named Bruce Carlton. Here is what David Garrison says about the DMM Bruce started in Cambodia:

Instead of planting a church himself, as had previously been his custom, the missionary began a mentoring relationship with a Cambodian layman. Within a year, he had drawn six Cambodian church planters into his mentoring circle. In 1993, the number of Baptist churches grew from six to 10. The following year, the number doubled to 20. In 1995, when the number of churches reached 43, the Cambodian church leaders formed an association of like-minded churches which they called the Khmer Baptist Convention (subsequently changed to the Cambodian Baptist Convention). The following year, the number of churches climbed to 78. In 1997, there were 123 Baptist churches scattered across 53 of the country’s 117 districts. By the spring of 1999, Baptists counted more than 200 churches and 10,000 members.

I have 21Wed2NI6-Lsince read much about CPM and DMM, but wasn’t aware that Bruce Carlton had written anything on the subject. Therefore when I came across a book written by him (Amazing Grace: Lessons on Church Planting Movements From Cambodia by R. Bruce Carlton) I had to get a copy. Unfortunately, the book is not available in digital format and is out of print, but used copies can be found.

The book is certainly not a textbook on DMM or CPM. It is really just a book about his experiences from his 7 years as a missionary in Cambodia. However, that 7 years of ministry resulted in an amazing harvest of souls and numbers of churches planted, and I felt there must be some nuggets of wisdom hidden in those stories. I was not disappointed. Three characteristics of DMM that leads to a CPM came through loud and clear as he told the stories. (1) He recognized the need to focus not on doing ministry or planting churches himself, but rather on discipling a few men and women who would become the church planters and who would disciple others in the 2 Timothy 2:2 paradigm of ministry. In other words, his focus was on multiplication through making disciples that make disciples. (2) His emphasis on prayer as the only way to find those people to invest his life in (what some CPM practitioners call “persons of peace” based on Luke 10). (3) His emphasis on obedience based discipleship and involving the disciple in hands on practice. Teach something. Wait for the disciple to put it into practice or teach it to others. Then teach some more. I will just place some quotes from the book that will give you an idea of what made all the difference and resulted in an amazingly fruitful ministry.

In early 1993 I had the opportunity to sit at the feet of a man who, in a sense, would become my mentor for the next several years. While in my home one day, this man spoke the following words of wisdom to me, words that would reshape and refocus our entire approach to church planting in Cambodia. He said, “Most people working cross-culturally usually ask themselves, ‘How can I reach these people with the gospel?’ This question narrows their vision and places the responsibility of the enormous task on their own shoulders, as if they were the ones who had to do it all. What we should ask ourselves is, ‘What is it going to take to evangelize these people?’ This question broadens our vision and opens new opportunities in that we no longer carry the burden by ourselves. We realize that there are more resources out there than just us. One key is figuring out how to multiply yourself. If you must plant every church yourself, in a good year you may be able to plant three or four churches. However, if in that one year you multiply yourself in the lives of three or four men, they may be able to start three or four times more churches in one year.”

and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses

entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.
2 Timothy 2:2

I soon began to pray, “Lord, raise up some men and women in whom I can invest my life — those who have the desire to reach their own people with the gospel of hope and who have the burden to plant Cambodian Churches.” I did not know what God was going to do. I did not know from where God would call those whom I could mentor, but I tried to keep the faith that God in His wisdom would provide. I prayed, “Lord, I only want to work with the men and women whom you have called for this task…. I will not actively seek out those for this task. Lord, send them to me.” Within several months, the Lord raised up the first man.

The first man the Lord raised up for Bruce to disciple was a man named Rith.

Each week, I went to Rith’s home, and our studies focused on one step in the church-planting process. I always instructed Rith that before he could learn the next step in the process he must teach the material to another person. From the beginning, I tried to instill the concept of 2 Timothy 2:2 into Rith’s life.

I am not criticizing other cross-cultural workers, but I am reflecting on a truth that God revealed to me about my own life and ministry through my work with Rith. For example, in the beginning I sometimes treated the Khmer believers as children who were not capable of making decisions. I also expected them to consult with me about where to start new churches and became upset when they did not do so. I have witnessed many such paternalistic patterns in cross-cultural work and found none of them ever to be truly successful. I had to abandon my paternalistic patterns of dealing with Cambodians. This involved daily checks on my words and actions as I worked alongside the Khmer people. This is a continuing process. As I checked my words and actions, God did teach me increasingly more about the capabilities of the Khmer believers. Consequently, I shared with Rith another vision I had for the ministry in Cambodia. The vision was that every church birthed out of our church planting ministry would be birthed and led by Cambodians….. To this day, every Khmer Baptist Church started in Cambodia through this church-planting ministry or through the Khmer Baptist Convention has been started and led by Khmer men and women.

In 1994, I traveled to Battambang Province to visit churches in that area and to do some work with one of the local church planters working there. When we arrived in Battambang, several church leaders asked me to conduct a baptismal service for them because they did not know how to do it. My conviction was that only national believers should be involved in church leadership, so I refused to baptize the new believers. However, I did agree to teach the church leaders how to conduct a baptismal service. Then the church leaders themselves would be responsible for baptizing their own people.

The common qualification they shared was not capability but availability. These Cambodians have given themselves to God to be used of Him. One of the greatest blessings I received through the ministry God gave me in Cambodia was the realization that the same Holy Spirit who lives and works in my life is the same Holy Spirit who lives and works in in the lives of my Cambodian brothers and sisters. All of the churches that I have been a part of planting through the ministry in Cambodia have been planted by and are being led by Cambodian people themselves.

Some said that it cannot be done this way. They told me that Cambodians were not ready to lead these congregations. They said that the Cambodians were not spiritually mature enough to handle the responsibility. I refused to believe them. Many of these naysayers were measuring the capability of the Cambodian brothers and sisters according to our Western ideas. I saw what God could do and was doing in the lives of so many Cambodian people. I learned that the Holy Spirit does not work according to our Western thinking. The Holy Spirit works as He always has, calling out committed people who make themselves available.

Nice Christianity

TimothyEvangelism

“If Christianity is simply about being nice, I’m not interested. What happened to radical Christianity, the un-nice brand of Christianity that turned the world upside-down? I’m ready for a Christianity that ‘ruins’ my life, which captures my heart and makes me uncomfortable. I want to be filled with an astonishment which is so captivating that I am considered wild and unpredictable and, well, dangerous. Yes, I want to be ‘dangerous’ to a dull and boring religion. I want a faith that is considered ‘dangerous’ by our predictable and monotonous culture.”

— from Robert Capon in his book, The Astonished Heart

Taken from an excellent blog post found HERE titled Church Aflame.

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.

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)

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.