Church Planting Archives

What should we read to learn best practices in church planting?

The Mission Round Table, Volume 13 #2 (May-August 2018) was titled, “To Make the Word of God Fully Known”: The Bible in Mission and the World. In the editorial Walter McConnell wrote: As in other matters, the Bible should be our final authority regarding mission and the church. Those of us who strive to be reflective practitioners of mission must make it our aim to base our thinking and work on God’s written Word as we present his living Word to the world so that all may have an opportunity to experience his blessings. To do this we must drench ourselves in God’s Word, saturating our thinking and practice with its message. Mission Round Table, vol.13, #2, p 3.… Read the whole post

July 23, 2019June 3, 2021

Gary Ridley1 min read

Books, Church Planting, DMM, Hardship, Islam, Training, Book Reviews

Book review: Stubborn Perseverance

Stubborn Perseverance: How to launch multiplying movements of disciples and churches among Muslims and others (a story based on real events) by James Nyman with Robby Butler. How-to manuals are generally difficult to read, and those who purchase them are not often motivated to read them from start to finish. Stubborn Perseverance is a different sort of how-to manual. Now in a second edition, the book explains a step-by-step process of starting a church planting movement among an unreached Muslim people group. But it is presented as a story, a novel that walks through the experience of a small group of Indonesian believers who work together to start such a movement among their own people group. The story is based on real events. The characters and their experiences were created by combining various people and their situations, both to protect their identity and to better illustrate a number of principles… Read the whole post

May 14, 2018August 31, 2020

Ken Guenther2 mins read

Church Planting, Disciple-making, Islam, Missiology, Contextualization, Insider Movements, Missiological Issues

Insider Movements: Understanding the Issues

“Over the past fifteen years missiologists have produced a massive amount of literature related to the contextualization debate surrounding the proposals of Insider Movement proponents.” So begins J. Henry Wolfe in his article, “The Development of the Insider Movement Paradigm” (published July 2015, www.GlobalMissiology.org). I have tried to digest a good portion of that material over the last few months and add my testimony to the truth of Ecclesiastes 12:12 – “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” The definition of Insider Movements John Jay Travis defines an “insider” as “a person from a non-Christian background who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior but retains the socioreligious [sic] identity of his or her birth.” (Understanding Insider Movements, kindle loc. 827). His working definition of Insider Movements (IM) then is:… Read the whole post

June 1, 2017November 11, 2021

Gary Ridley1 min read

Gospel, Church Planting, Training, Book Reviews

Keeping urban church planters centered

This blog post was written by Dr. Rick Perhai, who serves with SEND in Ukraine and teaches at Kyiv Theological Seminary. Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012. By Richard J. Perhai, Ph.D. Church planters face many challenges in the God–ordained work of establishing new churches. Cross-cultural church planters face even more challenges that demand serious calling, prayer support, and teamwork all led by the Holy Spirit. Mission agency leadership can spend months and even years mentoring new recruits and retooling missionaries for cross-cultural church planting. But one area is often overlooked, namely that many missionary candidates from rural or suburban upbringings are unprepared for planting churches in the foreign culture of the city. Enter Timothy Keller and his book Center Church. The book is considered by many a compendium of much Keller has written before. For example, his… Read the whole post

January 17, 2017August 28, 2020

Richard Perhai1 min read

Church Planting, Leadership, Evangelism

Plans that seem like nothing

It is that time of year again, when we are asked to develop annual ministry plans for the coming year. We dream about what we would like to see happen in 2017 – and then we face the reality of our limited financial and people resources. We do not want to discount what God can do, and so we seek to set goals that call for faith and utter dependence upon God. But we are also told to make sure that our annual goals are SMART: S – Strategic (How clearly does it propel our vision forward?) M – Measurable (How will we know when we have completed the goal?) A – Ambitious (a faith-stretch) (Does it require us to depend on God?) R – Realistic (Do we have at least a rough idea for how we could work towards accomplishing it?) T – Time-bound (Have we determined a deadline… Read the whole post

January 10, 2017March 5, 2020

Ken Guenther1 min read