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.”