World Missions & Evangelism, Inc.

Let's get back to a discussion of the critical elements of a church planting movement. In August's 2 nd post and in September's 1st post, we began discussing this subject. A critical element of a church planting movement is a characteristic that seems to be present in every single cpm that is occurring in the world today. These were first identified in the late 1990s and continue to the present day. The latest most complete list in print is in the 1st appendix to Bob Roberts new book, "The Multiplying Church". The complete list was given in the 1st blog posting for September. Although, new critical elements have continually been identified since the late 90s, the 1st element has almost always been the same: Passionate, Extraordinary Prayer. Without exception, prayer has been critical in every cpm that we know of worldwide. This prayer has been practiced on many different levels. The leaders of the cpm are people who prioritize prayer. The movements ha...

Readers, here is an additional report concerning the Honduras church planting movement project. The previous blog updated the progress through the end of August. Here is the report for September and the advance plans for the coming weeks. In the last report, we told you that the team has had 75 inductive Bible studies. In the first 3 weeks of September, they have conducted an additional 118 inductive Bible studies for a total since July 23 of 193 inductive Bible studies. These studies have occurred in 36 villages or communities and have been with as few as 1 person or as many as 20 persons. The project has seen its first 2 conversions during the first 3 weeks of September and the team collectively travelled around 25,000 kilometers during those 3 weeks. Praise God for the beginning of fruit for the Kingdom of God. Please pray for more to become obedient disciples of Jesus Christ and for groups of disciples to be formed in all of these villages and communities. The team will now ...

On July 23, the Honduran church planting team began to deploy into the villages of Western Honduras. Here is a report on progress in the first month and a half. Within days, by entering the villages 2 by 2 and with a view to help communities, the team made numerous contacts of friendship. Looking for men and women of peace, that is people who would have an open heart to form a relationship of friendship, the team quickly established relationships with 22 different individuals or families. Within the first couple of weeks, 5 inductive Bible studies were held in homes. The teams engaged in a number of community building work including: Entering villages as vendors...selling a variety of goods. Giving children's vitamins to needy village children. Assessing a community's need for water and if needed offering well drilling. Through these kinds of access ministries, relationships have been built with a number of people in 5 states. Between July 23 and August 31 the team: 1. Cond...

In 1999, several missionaries who were seeing rapid multiplication of churches in their ministries, sat down together and began to compare notes on what God was doing. These rapid multiplying movements were named "church planting movements" and that title still applies. In the last blog posting, I gave some key definitions of church planting movements and the basic understanding in that post is the foundation of this article, so please read it before you read this one. At any rate, when those missionaries sat together, they identified elements that were common to the movements that they were involved with. They identified 10 characteristics that were in every cpm and 10 that were present in most cpms. This was published in the booklet, "Church Planting Movements" by David Garrison and later in a larger book by the same author with the same title (I highly recommend that you obtain these and read them). Later when I took cpm training with David Watson, he shared...