World Missions & Evangelism, Inc.

In the list of critical elements, number 6 is "Miracles". I must admit, I was surprised to find this as a critical element. Not because I doubted that miracles happen in church planting movements. Quite the contrary, from the stories I have heard, especially from India and West Africa, I knew that miracles are a regular occurrence in cpms . In fact, it was miracle stories that first gripped me to begin the change in our church planting paradigm 3 years ago. I was taking the Perspectives class, from the U. S. Center for World Missions, as an intensive class in June of 2005. (Incidentally, if you have never taken the Perspectives course, please go to Perspectives.org and find a class near you. It will be the most important next step in your preparation for mission ministry). On the 4 th day of the class (I think) the teacher was deeply involved in cpm ministry in West Africa and the miracle stories he told, including of resurrections from the dead, got my attention as did th...

First, a quick update on the Honduras team. The last couple of weeks have been very difficult because of weather in Honduras. Rain has come in massive amounts all across the country. Many homes have been evacuated and some people have died in the flooding. This is a not unfrequent problem in Honduras, because of the effect of the mountains and valleys geographically. Our team is safe, but has not been able to travel to our village areas because of the weather. Instead they are working on well drilling until travel becomes better. Please pray for the team for safety and success in the well drilling and for a quick return to the villages for inductive Bible studies in early November. Now, let's talk about the rain of the Holy Spirit. In fact let me introduce another critical element of church planting movements. Using the list from Bob Robert's book, as given in the first article for September on this blog, I am referring to the 14th critical element. It is, "The Au...

The 2nd critical element of a church planting movement is The Authority of Scripture that leads to Obedience. Remember that these are "critical elements". That means that as far as we know, no CPM is occurring that does not evidence all of these characteristics. These are not "steps" in a plan, nor should they be understood as "strategies". The critical elements are basically "descriptions" of what we are finding where God is at work multiplying His church in a variety of cultures worldwide. These CPMs are (to use David Garrison's definition) "rapid and multiplicative increase of indigenous churches planting churches within a given people group or population segment." When God began to bless His work with this kind of multiplication of churches in the 1990s, the missionary leaders tried to understand what was happening and began describing what was occurring. These descriptions are the critical elements. So please understand that th...