November 12, 2024
Church Planting, Disciple-making

You Are What You Do, Not What You Eat

In October of 2014, on my first trip to Japan, I was able to ride a bullet train, visit SEND church planters in the Tsunami stricken region, and attend the Asia Regional Equipping Seminar (ARES) hosted by SEND Japan. The topic of this training was Disciple Making Movements (DMM). I was confronted by a number of ideas about church planting, which rocked my thinking a bit. One of those ideas had to do with approaches to help integrate learning and doing, a key area of interest in my graduate studies on adult learning. In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus says “make disciples of all nations … teaching them to obey everything…”. For me, when I studied diligently and taught accurately, I was quite satisfied with myself. Teaching in a seminary for over 10 years has helped to reinforced this view. But that is not the whole of the great commission (see Gary… Read the whole post
Church Planting, Disciple-making, Training, Book Reviews, Leadership Training

Reaching and Teaching in Animistic Oral Cultures

A review of M. David Sills’ book Reaching and Teaching the Highland Quichuas: Ministry in Animistic Oral Contexts In my last post we looked at Sills’ book Reaching and Teaching: A Call to Great Commission Obedience. This book is clearly a follow up to this work. It is in essence an application in practice of the principles in the earlier book. “This book explores how the Lord led missionaries to minister effectively among a specific people whom he called to himself: the Highland Quichua people of Andean Ecuador.”(pp. 2, 3).The book highlights the challenges of reaching and teaching an oral people group with a long history of syncretism:… Read the whole post
Leadership Training, Church Planting, Disciple-making, Book Reviews

Are We Reading All of Matthew 28:18-20?

A review of M. David Sills, Reaching and Teaching: a Call to Great Commission Obedience, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010. This book has sought to bring awareness to those who have been lulled into thinking that God wants us to simply reach them. He doesn’t. He wants us to reach and teach – reaching them with the saving gospel message and teaching them to observe everything that He has commanded. (220). So ends Sills’ book.… Read the whole post
Church Planting, Leadership Training

Still Learning from Roland Allen 100 Years Later: Contemporary Applications

At the SEND Family Conference in July, I led a workshop on what we can still learn from Roland Allen’s book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? a hundred years after it was first published. Allen’s key principle of submission and dependence on the Holy Spirit and the Word of God was the focus of the first blog post. In this blog post contemporary application of Allen’s principles will be the subject.… Read the whole post
Church Planting, Holy Spirit

Still Learning from Roland Allen 100 Years Later: Key Principle

At the SEND Family Conference in July, I led a workshop on what we can still learn from Roland Allen’s book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? a hundred years after it was first published. I’m going to highlight our discussion in two blog posts for the whole SEND family. Why bother with a hundred-year-old book?   J.D. Payne wrote in 2012, Roland Allen was “One of the most controversial, yet most influential, missionary thinkers of all time… it was Allen’s insights into the expansion of the church that sometimes equated him as being a prophet, a revolutionary, a radical, or a troublemaker.” (J.D. Payne, Roland Allen: Pioneer of Spontaneous Expansion, Kindle Edition, location 126.)… Read the whole post
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