Planting Churches

According to the Lausanne 1982 Convention, for evangelistic purposes, a people group is "the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance". A people group segment is a subset of a people group, where understanding may not much of a problem, but acceptance is.

In round figures, 3,000 non-Christian peoples still need cross- cultural pioneer church planting ministry. Many already have this, but the breakthroughs for which we pray are yet to come among the Fula of West Africa, the Turks of the Middle East, the Hindi speakers of North India, and others. There are already many working among these peoples, however, with increasing cooperation of effort.

Consider when a Western unbeliever comes to faith, he or she will already be aware of some biblical stories and teaching.  It is part of our cultural background, whether or not we were “raised Christian.” As a result, expatriate workers in developing countries can sometimes take for granted a minimum biblical understanding. That, of course, is a mistake. We mustn’t assume anything. For example, according to Islam Abraham’s most important son was Ishmael; people don’t sin, they just make mistakes; there was no “fall,” but rather man has always been immoral (no pre-fall sinless Adam and Eve); blood sacrifice is only a ritual with no atonement meaning; Jesus did not die on the cross; and no man—even al-Masih (Christ)—can pay for the sins of another. The point is, every important truth must be explicitly taught from the Word.

But neither do we want to minimize the cultural and linguistic differences that often exist between the sent- out-ones and the unbelieving context where pioneer church planting takes place. I like to say that any assembly that is planted in a Muslim background context will probably make me a little uncomfortable, even if I had a hand in helping establish that church. If it makes someone uncomfortable who knows the language fairly well and understands the culture well enough to be considered an acceptable outsider, how much more uncomfortable might it make the visiting elders, pastors or guest from the West. What I mean is that pioneer church planters cannot make the comfort of short term visitors or sending churches their motivating goal as they undertake to practice biblical contextualization in showing and telling the gospel. They need the accountability of dialogue with trusted outsiders for sure. But it needs to be a dialogue, I think, and contextualization, even good contextualization often makes outsiders clearly uncomfortable, as perhaps it should.

There is a book authored by Roland Muller which I have not read yet, but want to. It is titled, The Message, the Messenger and the Community.   It begins by looking at what it takes to be accepted as a 'messenger' with something of value to say. He then moves on to look at the gospel message that we share, and ends up examining the community of believers that we want to gather. This book includes a frank look at shame- based cultures, and also the importance of building a sense of community into a new group of believers.

I am always challenged how I can learn these truths in my own home before I head out to the unknown. Especially now that I am working with SAT-7 in Canada.  One idea I saw today was to take the extra room in my home and open it up to a refugee. 

I also come across this blog - Church Planting Movements – Ten Common Elements - it is rarely simply stated and yet incredibly powerful.

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