My Journey to Church Planting Movements - Part 2

In my last post, I described my journey to receiving a vision for church planting internationally. After years of local church ministry, I was on my first short term mission trip in Honduras, when the burden for church planting crystallized in my life. When I returned from that trip, I got in contact with one of our mission agency's affiliated missionaries. His name is Randy Travis and he had been a part of WME since 1988. He had planted four churches in Honduras by that time and was also working in southern Mexico. Randy and I spent some time together while he was doing some itineration in May of 1994. From that time on, he and I became strategists together to understand and plan the most effective methods of church planting that we could find. This collaboration ultimately came to total fruition in September 2006, but that is a story for a little later. Meanwhile, Randy shared his research with me and over the next few years he helped educate me on cutting edge missiological insights, especially in relation to church planting. Over the next few years, not only did I imbibe the insights of Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner, but also Ralph Winter, David Hesselgrave, and Tom Steffen. I did not meet these people, but studied their writings deeply. In 1995, I became a Senior Pastor and spent several years with a lot of focus on local church growth and the cell church model. Bethany World Prayer Center in Louisiana was a mentoring church to ours and the G-12 model was tested in our work. I even traveled to Colombia to see the G-12 model at it's fountainhead.Meanwhile our mission agency WME grew and grew. We developed partners all over the world during the late 1990s. (As I describe some of these partnerships here and in other posts, I will sometimes use pseudonyms in discussing them for security reasons). One such partnership was with Joseph Paul Karnataka (or JPK as I like to refer to him). He was a successful church planter based in North India. JPK and I met through a network of churches that we both had a relationship with and our initial face to face meeting was in December of 1994 (apparently a year of turning points in terms of my church planting experience). JPK became the official rep for our mission agency in India in the latter years of the 1990s. Between 1988 and 2007 his ministry has planted close to 1000 churches in his country. His training schools became the model that our agency adopted as a strategy for church planting. WME took his model and used versions of it in Romania, South Africa and Indonesia, as well as continuing partnership with JPK in India. Between 2000 and the end of 2006, we had planted over 200 churches in these countries. Then came the last piece of the puzzle that moved us from church planting to church planting movements. In early 2000, our mission agencies field director picked up a copy of a small booklet called "Church Planting Movements" by David Garrison. He brought me the book and after I devoured it, I knew that this was what we were after in terms of our strategy. When I compared what I read in the booklet with the strategy of JPK, I thought it was the same thing. Only after about four years did I really realize that while our strategy was planting churches, they were not becoming "Movements". Something had to change.
More to come in Part 3.