Week 14 - Pioneer Church Planting
2022-11-28
A Church In Every People
Donald McGavran
- The conglomerate church approach is slow to multiply in an organic indigenous way and tends to uneccesarily ostracize new converts from their kinsmen.
Encourage converts to remain thoroughly with their people in most matters. Please note that word “most.” They cannot remain one with their people in idolatry or drunkenness or obvious sin. (630)
- Encourage group decisions for Christ so new converts are not ostracised.
If only one person decides to follow Jesus, do not baptize him immediately. Say to him, “You and I will work together to lead another five, or ten, or God willing, 50 of your people to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour so that when you are baptized, you will be baptized with them.” Ostracism is very effective against one lone person. But ostracism is weak indeed when exercised against a group of a dozen. And when exercised against 200 it has practically no force at all. (630)
Between the two evils of giving them too little Christian teaching or allowing them to become a sealed-off community that cannot reach its own people, the latter is much the greater danger. We must not allow new converts to become sealed off. We must continue to make sure that a constant stream of new converts comes into the evergrowing cluster of congregations. (631)
A Movement of God Among the Bhojpuri
David L. Watson and Paul D. Watson
- David Watson cried out to God for two months to revoke his call to church planting after witnessing 6 of his workers martyred in the past 18 months and having his family expelled from India.
- He prayed for 5 Indian believers to help him plant churches. Things started really slow.
Without persistent prayer, I am convinced there wouldn’t be a movement among the Bhojpuri. (698)
They asked, “How much time do you spend in prayer?” As they went around the room reporting, my jaw dropped. Team leaders spent an average of three hours a day in personal prayer. After that, they spent another three hours praying with their teams everyday. One day a week the leaders fasted and prayed. Their teams spent one weekend a month fasting and praying. Many of these leaders maintained secular jobs while engaged in their church planting. They got up to pray at 4 A.M. and were at work by 10 A.M. (689-699)
- They had obedience-based discipleship. The tenth generation of Bhojpuri Christians were just as spiritually mature and strong as the first generation. They had a cycle of hearing, obeying, and sharing which developed mature believers.
An old man sat on the edge of the road approaching the village. When he saw me, he seemed startled. He slowly stood up and came to meet me. "Finally!" he exclaimed. "You are finally here." Before I could say anything he took my arm and pulled me into the village. "Here is the man I told you about." He told people as he pulled me along. "Here is the man I dreamed about every night for the last 20 years. My dreams told me that we must listen to everything this man tells us." I shared the gospel and a church now meets in that village. God is at work in people's hearts, even before we walk into their lives. According to this man, God told him 20 years before that I was coming to his village. Twenty years prior to that moment, I was studying to be an engineer. I had no desire and no call at that time to be a minister or a church planter. (699)
Planting churches is easier if you’re working with God and the people He has prepared, rather than trying to force the gospel on people who aren’t ready. (700)
The C-Spectrum
John J. Travis
| C1 | C2 | C3 | C4 | C5 | C6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Features of Christ-centered communities | Traditional Church; Using culture, both language and other forms, which are foreign to local Muslim culture. | Traditional Church; Using culture, foreign to local Muslim culture, but using daily language. | ||||
| Socio-Religious Self-Identity of Believers | Christian | |||||
| Muslim Perception | Christian |
Going Too Far?
Phil Parshall
- Referring to the C-Spectrum above, does C5 communities slide towards syncretism? The article discusses where the line should be drawn for contextualization and syncretism.
The mosque is pregnant with Islamic theology. There, Muhammad is affirmed as a prophet of God and the divinity of Christ is consistently denied. Uniquely Muslim prayers (salat) are ritually performed as in no other religion. These prayers are as sacramental to Muslims as partaking of the Lord’s Supper is to Christians. How would we feel if a Muslim attended (or even joined) our evangelical church and partook of communion… all with a view of becoming an “insider?” (666)
- One group from Phil’s group had entered a village of Muslims and befriended them. He desired to learn from them their rituals and forms of prayer. Later, he was found praying in the front row of the mosque praying to Jesus unbeknownst to anyone. When people found out, they were enraged and threatened to kill him until their imam asked for forgiveness in teaching him their prayers.
- There was a missionary to Muslims who met the author annually for some time. He had crossed the line into syncretism by still affirming Muhammad was a prophet of God. Now, he is out of ministry and divorced from his wife.
Cross-cultural communicators must beware of presenting a gospel which has been syncretized with Western culture. The accretions to Christianity that have built up over the centuries as a result of the West’s being the hub of Christianity should be avoided as far as possible. (667)
- Personal note: we have to realize how syncretized our gospel is with Western culture.
Culture, Worldview, and Contextualization
Charles H. Kraft
- The apostles participated in contextualization when they translated the Christian message from Aramaic language and culture to Greek. They used Greek words and concepts for fundamental topics like God, sin, and “word” (logos).
Biblically, the contextualization of Christianity is not simply to be the passing on of a product that has been developed once for all in Europe or America. It is, rather, the imitating of the process that the very apostles went through.