Welcome to ChurchPlantingMovements.com. I’m David Garrison. If you’re a church planter, pastor, or just someone wanting to learn the best practices in church planting from around the globe, you’ve come to the right place.

A definition for Church Planting Movements (CPMs) that has held sway for more than a decade is: “a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.”¹

No one recalls who first coined the term “Church Planting Movements,” though it appears to be a modification of Donald McGavran’s landmark “People Movements” adapted to emphasize the distinctive of generating multiplying indigenous churches.

2.  What are you calling a church?

With more than 40,000 Christian denominations in the world today, it’s not surprising that there is no consensus on what constitutes a church. Some mission agencies and denominations have very precise definitions for a church while others have no definition whatsoever.² Church Planting Movements exhibit a wide range of sizes and types of church, varying with the cultural context in which they emerge. For this reason, what some may call a church, others might classify as simply a gathering, home fellowship or ‘new work.’

But this FAQ is what do you call a church? In my 2004 publication, Church Planting Movements, I allowed significant latitude in church identification by accepting self-designation. In other words, if those involved in the movement see themselves as a community of believers or church, I am unwilling to contradict them. This is not to say all churches are of equal quality. Churches can be more or less healthy.

At its core, a church is a community of believers seeking to obediently follow Jesus Christ. From God’s perspective, church is a continuation of what Jesus began 2,000 years ago. This is why Paul and Luke frequently refer to the church as “the body of Christ.”

In CPMs we have seen churches range in size from an average of 11.3 baptized members in Ying Kai’s Asian T4T movement to 85 in the Bhojpuri movement of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to 35 members assessed in 2002 in the average Isa Jamaat of Bangladesh.

Though size and expression may vary, good ecclesiology is vital to healthy CPMs. More than one rapidly growing movement has evaporated as a result of inadequate church formation. Church matters.

In South Asia, we developed a CPM ecclesiology teaching tool called “A Handy Guide to Healthy Churches” as an orality-friendly way of teaching new believers how to develop healthy reproducing churches.³ In northeast India, CPM missionaries Jeff Sundell along with Nathan and Kari Shank have developed a simple and ingenious “Church Health Mapping” tool for tracking and developing churches from inception to maturity.⁴

3.  What are CPM Best Practices?

Because there are better and worse examples of CPMs and CPM churches, why not learn from and emulate the best? The problem is that our work often occurs in isolation, particularly when we labor in restricted access fields where everyone communicates in a very guarded manner. Our knowledge exists in silos that do not allow for interchange with the broader community of learning.

Nowhere is this more true than in the world of CPMs. A CPM breaks out in one corner of the world with dramatic speed and vitality, but with weak doctrine and orthodoxy. In another corner of the world, a movement exhibits tremendous fidelity to Scripture but struggles in community transformation. Someone has said, “If the body of Christ only knew what the body of Christ knows, the body of Christ would know all it needs to know to do the work of Christ in the world.”

CPM Best Practicing is about the body of Christ learning from the body of Christ the most effective practices in being, doing, and multiplying churches among every nation tribe and tongue. How do we do this? If you’re reading this article, you’re off to a good start.

4.  When did CPMs start?

Undoubtedly Church Planting Movements have been around since the first century of the Christian era. You only have to read between the lines to see Church Planting Movements as the back-story for the rise of Christianity from Christ to Constantine. In his Book of Acts, Luke reported that: “all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord” (Acts 19:10) and Paul commended the Thessalonians through whom “the Lord’s message… has become known everywhere” (1 Thess. 1:8), and then near the end of his life could declare that “there is no more place for me to work in these regions” (Romans 15:23), because of his desire “to preach the gospel where Christ was not known” (Romans 15:20).

Pliny, the governor of the distant province of Bithynia writing to the emperor Trajan about 50 years later warned that “…many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. [Pliny to Trajan ca. AD 111]⁵

Later that century, Tertullian spoke confidently to his Roman persecutors of the remarkable spread of the still fledgling church:
We are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all the places that belong to you — cities, islands, forts, towns, exchanges, the military camps themselves, tribes, town councils, the palace, the senate, the market-place; we have left you nothing but your temples. (Tertullian’s Plea for Allegiance, A.2)⁶

K.S. Latourette’s History of the Expansion of Christianity⁷ chronicles scores of movements to Christ through the Church’s 20-century history. But by the 19th and 20th centuries, the belief in movements was on the wane in Western missions.

A prophetic voice to the contrary was sounded by Anglican missionary Roland Allen whose 1927 The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church⁸ envisioned churches multiplying exponentially throughout the world. A generation later, Donald McGavran showed how such a movement would occur with his 1954 Bridges of God.⁹  A generation later, missionaries saw the realization of these insights with the appearance of Church Planting Movements.¹⁰

5.  How many CPMs are there?

Dr. Jim Haney, director of the IMB’s Global Research Department, regularly tracks several thousand people groups and cities. Reports come through the IMB’s more than 5,000 missionaries serving in 185 countries as well as a partnering network of evangelical sources called HIS, the Harvest Information System.¹¹

The Global Research Department monitors key result areas in evangelism and church planting. When a population meets three key result criteria, they automatically register on what the Global Research Department calls its “CPM Watch List.” The three criteria are:

• A 25% Annual Growth Rate in Total Churches for the past two years
• A 50% Annual Growth Rate in New Churches for the past two years
• Field-based affirmation that a CPM is emerging.

Based upon these three criteria, as of the end of the 2008 calendar year, there are 201 people groups or population segments that have risen to the CPM Watch List.

6.  What is the fastest growing CPM?

The fastest growing CPM assessed to date is occurring today in a restricted access country in Asia. The movement which began with a new missionary assignment in November 2000 has exceeded any other movement we’ve seen with more than 1.7 million baptisms and more than 150,000 new church starts. The missionary God has used to catalyze this movement is a Chinese-American named Ying Kai. Kai calls his work “Training for Trainers” or T4T.¹²

7.  How long do CPMs last?

This varies from place to place. We have instances of CPMs that began more than a decade ago and continue to grow at an annual growth rate that would qualify as an ongoing movement. We also know of movements that surged rapidly, only to halt and even implode after just a few years. This points to the importance of learning and implementing best practices.

8.  How do you assess CPMs?

Great question! Rather than answer that question briefly here, we will direct you to Jim Slack’s longer article on the topic in this same publication (p. 12). Jim has years of missionary experience as the Southern Baptist International Mission Board’s Church Growth Analyst.

9.  Have you ever been duped?

In short, yes. Jesus warned us to be “wise as serpents.” In both formal and informal CPM assessments we continue to be surprised by what we uncover. Consider these five of many that could be described:

1. In Western Europe, a missionary reported an emerging CPM in great detail for more than a year before his fabrications were unearthed, and he was dismissed from his organization.
2. On the other hand, a missionary in India reported at least 50,000 baptisms only to have a thorough (and skeptical) CPM assessment determine that there were at least 200,000 baptisms and perhaps as many as 400,000.
3. An Internet charlatan claiming to be a CPM catalyst in China and associated with the website www.ChurchPlantingMovements.com was exposed when he solicited donations from a Finnish Pentecostal missions organization. The Finnish agency discovered the truth when they sought a reference from the www.ChurchPlantingMovements.com webmaster who exposed the deception.
4. A missionary serving in Nepal reported thousands of house church plants. An assessment a few years later revealed that the house churches had been assimilated into 32 mega-cell churches that had formed in the wake of the CPM.
5. The missionary reporting the fastest growing CPM in the world with 1.7 million baptisms and 150,000 church plants in less than a decade, was found to be under-reporting his numbers by nearly 40 percent, in order to avoid any charges of inflation, duplication or exaggeration.

In addition to the occasional bogus movement are the aborted movements. In several locations, well-intentioned foreign dependency has intersected a promising movement, sapping it of its vitality.¹³ In other places, it has simply been impossible to ascertain whether a movement is underway or not. When this is the case, it is always best to simply say, “We don’t know.” The cause of Christ is never advanced by wild speculations or hype.

10.  Where can I learn more about CPMs?

CPM understanding is more of a journey than a destination. As such, the call to CPMs is a call to learn, and the learning curve remains steep. One of the great challenges to CPM understanding is that so many of them are occurring in countries that are hostile to Christian witness, prompting the necessity of pseudonyms and obscured reporting. This, in turn, has led to some falsified reports by individuals seeking to benefit from riding the CPM bandwagon, resulting in legitimate doubts about CPMs by skeptics.

We do no favors to the kingdom of God when we inflate or trumpet unrealistic reports of kingdom growth. Nor do we advance the Kingdom when we refuse to believe, despite the evidence, the existence of movements that are nothing less than our birthright as New Testament people.

In May 2010, missionary innovator and CPM trainer, Wilson Geisler, launched a new website: www.ChurchPlantingMovements.com as a clearinghouse for all things related to Church Planting Movement best practices. The site is just getting underway, but already has more than two-dozen contributors, nearly 100 articles, PowerPoints, case studies and resources, and has been tapped by more than 38,000 viewers.

Geisler has constructed the site to allow iron-on-iron interaction between CPM aspirants and practitioners the world over. As a forum for participation in the growing CPM learning community, http://www.ChurchPlantingMovements.com is unparalleled.

Edited by David Garrison with contributions by Bill Smith, Jim Haney and Wilson Geisler.

…the yearly total would be equal to an average of planting one new church a day.

The initiation and spread of the movement was due mainly to the agricultural approach.  The success, stability and strength of the movement came in the wake of an integration of radio broadcast and follow-up employing Chronological Bible Storying, with on-the-ground agricultural development steeped in evangelism and church planting methodology. Read more about the movement that produced a new church a day here.

While the Cuban movements conform to universal characteristics that we have come to associate with CPMs throughout the world¹ their distinctives are found in the socio-political environment in which they have emerged. Unlike many of the movements we are monitoring around the world, Cuba’s population enjoys a life expectancy rate of nearly 79 years and boasts a literacy rate approaching 100%.² By all measures Cuba is a modern developed Western society, albeit an impoverished one. Despite isolation from the U.S., Cuban society is engaged with the broader modern and post-modern culture of Western nations.  Church-planting movements have been all too rare in this type of setting.

Factors such as socialized education, economy and health care that have so eroded the role of the church in Western Europe have done nothing to diminish the spread of the gospel in contemporary Cuba. The church planting movement in Cuba is by no means perfect, but given their vitality perhaps their experience holds lessons and insights that can be instructive for other Western nations that face an increasingly hostile and secular future. 
What follows is an excerpt from the “Mission of God in Cuba” authored by Dr. Kurt Nelson, president of East-West Ministries, and Dr. Bob Garrett, missions professor at Dallas Baptist University. Their chapter will appear in the forthcoming book: Discovering the Mission of God, edited by Columbia International University missions professor, Dr. Michael Barnett.

“The most dramatic church growth in all of Latin America in the 1990s occurred among the Protestant churches of Cuba. The human agency for this Protestant revival may have unwittingly been Communist Cuban government leaders at the highest level.³  When evangelical church leaders approached the Office of Religious Affairs in the early 1990s, the Castro dictatorship authorized the believers to conduct meetings in their homes since they could no longer fit in their authorized buildings and the crisis in gasoline importation curtailed all but essential travel.⁴  This government directive resulted in an estimated 10,000 house churches springing up throughout Cuba over the next ten years.⁵

The growth of Protestant churches in Cuba began in 1990 and was evidenced across denominational lines. Between 1990 and 1994, Methodist church membership increased almost 50 percent, while overall attendance increased over 400 percent.⁶ The Nazarene church in Cuba grew 115 percent between 1991 and 1992, adding 18 new churches and 61 new house churches.⁷ A local Alliance church grew from 6 to 140 members in 1996.⁸ The Western Baptist Convention described the 1990s as “the one with the most growth in our history” accomplished “without strategy,” “without temples,” and “without equipment.”⁹

This massive response to Christ is estimated to have resulted in 10 percent of the Cuban population, over 1,000,000 people, becoming active evangelical believers during the last decade of the twentieth century.¹⁰ This represents a rate of unparalleled church growth in Cuban history. The Southern Baptist International Mission Board has identified at least two church-planting movements in Cuba during this decade. One is between the Eastern and Western Baptist Conventions, and the other is among the Assemblies of God churches in Cuba.¹¹

These church-planting movements can be attributed to the shift towards house church meetings as a more reproducible method for harvesting the many interested seekers, coinciding with a dramatic increase in church growth, which “freed the church from physical limitations and thrust the gospel witness into the community.”¹² Also, ironically a positive result of persecution in Cuba was that ‘persecution weeded out those who were not serious followers of Christ.’¹³ Operation World summarizes this spectacular growth of the evangelical churches in Cuba during the 1990s:

Evangelicals now outnumber church-going Catholics. The 1,250 evangelical congregations in 1990 has increased to possibly 4,500 congregations and a further 10,000 house groups in 54 denominations. A high proportion of the new Christians are young people.¹⁴

God on Mission in Twenty-first Century Cuba

In an attempt to curb the movement, the Communist regime has targeted house churches since 2000. In September 2005, the government began enforcing restrictive new regulations aimed at curbing the growth of house churches.15 The regulations require all house churches to be officially registered or risk closure or confiscation.¹⁶ As a result, some churches have been closed, and house church leaders have been harassed.¹⁷

The new regulations, though unevenly applied in practice, restrict the locations, times, and frequency of house church meetings; forbid foreigners from attending these meetings; and require information on attendees to be provided. If complaints are filed against a house church meeting, the church can be disbanded and the members arrested and imprisoned.¹⁸

Other tactics include the destruction of church buildings, baseless accusations, arrests, interrogations, and imprisonment of church leaders and other forms of harassment and intimidation.¹⁹ In 2003, prison authorities in Camaguey, Cuba, banned the Bible from being distributed to prisoners.²⁰ Family members (including children) of pastors continue to be harassed and intimidated.²¹

Despite continued Communist efforts to repress Christianity in Cuba, the Church continues to proliferate. Although comprehensive statistical reports are largely unavailable, indications are that since 2000 Protestant churches in Cuba are growing at an annual rate of over six percent.²² The 2006 annual report of the Western Baptist Convention indicates that the total ‘Baptist community’ (church attendance) has doubled between 2000 and 2006!²³

Evangelical churches regularly engage in aggressive evangelism and outreach with prayer being foundational to their efforts. For example, one church used ‘Operation Andrew’ where each believer makes a list of ten friends and prays for them to become Christians, and then commits to invite them to church. The church implemented the program for one month, inviting all the friends to church on the fifth Sunday. So many new friends came to the church that morning that the pastor asked ALL of the members to get up and leave their seats to the newcomers. The church members went outside and lined up all around the external wall of the sanctuary, placed their hands on the wall, and prayed for their friends inside while the pastor explained the gospel. Scores came to faith that morning.

The incredible influx of seekers has meant that many new home Bible studies have been started. These are held in every imaginable venue:  a public garage, a flimsy tent lean-to, a living room with boards for benches, etc. Churches often fill to capacity with some now experimenting with multiple services.Churches are equipping ‘lay missionaries’ to become the leaders of these cell groups.”

Nelson and Garrett have much more to say about how God is at work in Cuba. Unfortunately, this is all that can be excerpted in this brief article. You may obtain a copy of the book (with the working title: On Mission With God) when it is published later this year. Clearly God is at work in Cuba, revealing what happens when the spiritual hunger of a godless society is met with an obedient church that is willing to pay the price to live and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What began a century ago as a colonial byproduct has emerged today as arguably the most vibrant expression of Christianity on earth,² a truly indigenous and exponentially spreading contagion of churches planting churches touching every country and nearly every tribal community of sub-Saharan Africa. As recently as the mid-20th century, African Christianity was still largely an alien extension of European and American colonial religion, as Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Baptist missionaries carved out denominational fiefdoms within the territorial holdings of their respective Western powers.

With the upheaval of two world wars, Western control weakened and the ripples spread rapidly around the globe. What began as a trickle of nation-birthing, soon cascaded into an avalanche as 32 new African nations gained their independence between 1960 and 1968.³ A young doctoral candidate, David B. Barrett, captured the religious dimension of this phenomenon in his 1969 book: Schism and Renewal in Africa, an analysis of six thousand contemporary religious movements.⁴

CPM of Uganda

Uganda’s story was typical of the neo-national wave sweeping across Africa. But the enthusiasm of independence from Britain in 1962 was quickly followed by two decades of chaos as Milton Obote and then Idi Amin savaged the country until 1986 when Museveni came to power ushering in an era of relative calm that continues to the present.

Uganda’s population of just over 30 million has been plagued by internecine wars and an AIDS epidemic that has cut life expectancy for men to around 48 years and 52 years for women. Though 70-80 percent of the country claims to be Christian, the church is rife “with dependence and corruption within churches, mega churches preaching prosperity gospel, high levels of violence from the ‘Lords Resistance Army,’ a still raging AIDS death toll, a variety of Muslim insurgencies in the north – in short, not a likely place to see a CPM.”⁵

Into this unlikely field God brought four unlikely partners: Rev. Julius Ebwongu (pastor and head of Uganda Assemblies of God), Rev. Rick Seaward (pastor of Victory Family Centre in Singapore), Rev. Ray Belfield (septuagenarian retired UK Overseas Missions chairman of Assemblies of God UK) and Baptist-background CPM trainer, Bill Smith.

As leader of Uganda’s Assemblies of God denomination, and pastor of 2500-member Victory City Church in Kampala, Julius Ebwongu seems an unlikely catalyst for a movement of multiplying new house churches. In a similar irony, only when past chairman of the UK Assemblies of God Overseas Missions program, Ray Belfield, retired from the UK in 2001 and joined the staff of Victory Family Centre in Singapore did he begin to see a multiplying new movement of churches characterize his missionary ministry in a number of foreign countries, including Uganda.

Rick Seaward, an American AOG missionary kid who started Victory Family Centre (VFC) in 1977 as a hotel outreach in Singapore now leads a congregation of some 6,000 members. Today, VFC is linked to thousands of multiplying churches that have been planted all around the world. “In 1992-1993,” Seaward explained, “I got a prophetic word from someone that the Lord would give me nations….About the same time I got a burden for the whole nation of Uganda.”⁶

Seaward and a small team from VFC Singapore journeyed to Uganda to help the six Assemblies of God churches they found there. They initially planted a Victory Family Centre church in Kampala, but then became burdened to saturate the entire city with the gospel. This led Seaward into a deeper partnership with Uganda’s AOG head, Julius Ebwongu.

In 2008, Ebwongu launched an aggressive church-planting initiative called Project 300 aimed at sending 300 teams to 300 Ugandan sub-counties to plant 600 churches in two years.⁷ It was around that time that veteran CPM trainer, Bill Smith accompanying Rick Seaward and his nearly 80 year-old missions pastor Ray Belfield, challenged pastor Julius to raise his vision even higher.

Asked how he came to elevate his vision from planting single churches to launching church-planting movements, Seaward replied:

We learnt this from the Baptists! You can go on their website and find out about it. Basically some of their missionaries began to dabble and experiment going to minister to unreached people groups and then these phenomena began to happen. Their leader, Bill Smith, did training of our leaders in Singapore and when I heard him, I was like, “Wow! We have to get him to Uganda.”⁸

Encouraged by his Singapore friends, Pastor Julius asked 300 of the senior pastors in the Uganda movement to train up two assistants each and bring them in for two years of mentoring in missional church planting. The teams were given an initial seven-day training in CPM by Rick’s friend Bill Smith, and then sent into the field to plant 12 churches each in 18 months – a total of 3,600.

How did they do? “We have started quite a few churches!’ Julius says with a hint of understatement, ‘But in the last 24 months, our goal was to plant 3,600 churches which ended in the first week of August (2010). We hit 3,671 in July, a month and a half ahead of target.”⁹

Pastor Julius continued, “Our long-term goal is much larger than that. Project 300 was just one of the components that we came up with in 2005 to help reach our goal, but we got halfway there. We’re looking to double the number of new church plants again in the coming months, from 3,671 to 7,200 at least.”¹⁰

Lessons Learned

Asked to help interpret the Uganda movement. Smith replied, “My read of Uganda is that this was a process:

• More than a century ago the gospel entered Uganda with martyrdom and good start
• Sixty-five years ago (1935 Pentecostal Assemblies of God entered Uganda) AOG entered the country with lots of false starts and restarts
• The arrival of Singapore pastor Seaward coupled with new leadership by pastor Julius Ebwongu signaled a new beginning
• Continuous Singapore involvement in CPM training, goals setting, and coaching and correcting led to great results
• Ray Belfield with decades of experience and relationships maintained continuity with the AOG identity while also modeling an openness to learning new ways    
• Rick Seaward cast a vision for doubling the size of the denomination
• Initial sparks were struck during CPM training that Smith conducted with Rick for East Timor nearly 10 years ago; it was during this time that Rick first caught the vision for church multiplication
• The first vision for Uganda was cast in Kampala during a training that Ray, Rick and Smith conducted four years ago
• Julius, Ray and Rick and others took about a year to make the vision truly Ugandan, working out details of how to adapt universal CPM and Book of Acts principles and make them fit into the Ugandan AOG context
• Emphasizing lots of monthly trainings at a regional level, continuously adjusting and tweaking as various challenges arose were indispensible to the movement

Net results: Lots of new churches; Many more local leaders trained; Hundreds if not thousands of small training events held all over the country.

From what I can determine there is a tremendous growth in faith that God can reach every village in Uganda and beyond. So my question about where else really can such a movement occur, can only be answered where there is mature yet open, aggressive leadership on the ground like Julius that has a vision for seeing thousands of new churches rather than just bigger churches. Another contribution of Julius was his wise and decisive exercise of his authority. Unlike what we have conventionally believed about CPMs, the Uganda movement was a top down movement. It did not arise from the grass roots. Left to themselves most of these pastors and assistant pastors would not have voluntarily picked up their families and moved them to new villages.  So quite a few unique things came together for Uganda these past four years.”¹¹

What do CPMs, Church Planting Movements, look like up close? What would we see if we went right down into the living room of a house church that was in the middle of a rapidly multiplying movement of new churches?

There are a wide range of church types found within the world’s many different Church Planting Movements, and they are not all of the same quality. We have little to gain from imitating the least exemplary churches in these movements. Let us look instead to some of the best practices in Church Planting Movement churches.

What is a church?

First things first: what are we calling a church? We could fill dozens of volumes responding to this question. With more than 40,000 Christian denominations in our world today, you can bet that there are many forms of church in existence.

Though a church may develop many expressions, it is, at its core…

Read more…

P-O-U-C-H

In the palm of the hand we drew the five letters P-O-U-C-H to remind us of the kinds of churches we see in healthy Church Planting Movements.

The P reminds us that healthy CPM churches engage in participative Bible study and worship, rather than passive listening to a pastor/preacher.

The O recalls the mark of success for the CPM church. It is not size or wealth or style; it is obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ and His word, the Bible.

The U points to the fact that in healthy reproducing CPM churches, there are multiple unpaid leaders. Unpaid leaders are only realistic when the church size remains small and leadership responsibility is shared.

At the time of the church planting movement (CPM) assessment, the CPM was occurring in different geographic locations of the people group.  The initial and largest segment revolved around Sharif, a local businessman and former Muslim.  Another more recent and thus smaller growth segment centered on a career IMB Strategy Coordinator (SC) and his small team.   The IMB SC had entered with the knowledge and encouragement of Sharif.  By the time of the assessment was conducted, the movements had grown to the point that they were overlapping.

After on-site interviews were conducted by the CPM assessment team in March 2002, a detailed confidential report was written to document the existence of a CPM.  It was found that there were 50 district-level evangelists operating in the districts covered by both segments of the work among Muslims.  The team also concluded that there were 395 local evangelists, 2,439 pastors, 3,138 churches, and 93,453 members.  In 2001, the movement produced 25,274 baptisms.

Read the entire Jedidistan CPM assessment here.

CPMTF_2010_301_Absolute Minimums for CPM (word doc)

CPMTF_2010_301_Absolute Minimums for CPM (pdf file) Recently we had a meeting of CPM trainers from around the world. We were seeking to identify what God is doing in movements around the world. Our focus was on is really happening, not on theory or opinions. This is the first of several summaries. The following document (word and pdf format) shows the groups summary of “The Absolute Minimums for starting CPMs.”Recently we had a meeting of CPM trainers from around the world. We were seeking to identify what God is doing in movements around the world. Our focus was on is really happening, not on theory or opinions. This is the first of several summaries. The following document (word and pdf format) shows the groups summary of “The Absolute Minimums for starting CPMs.”

The first adjustment was to move away from terms like “house church,” “simple church” and “organic church,” and we ended up calling the process Discipleship Cycle.

Every week, we would meet using the T4T pattern of 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd for our meetings¹ with the content being what every believer needs to know, with whom to share his story in the community, what to say, how to share his story and the Gospel, and if the person with whom he shared believed, how he would disciple them.

We used the Seven Commands of Christ for the discipleship content based around an inductive Bible. The first six weeks went by looking more like a Bible study than a T4T group. We had prayed weekly for our lost friends in our oikos and consistently held everyone accountable to share their stories, but, for the most part, no one was sharing his story.

We had many tell us they did not know any lost people. The reason for this was that people could remember 40 years ago when little Johnny walked the aisle in a church, even though now Johnny was living like anyone else in the world. So, we quit using the term “lost” and began to ask people if they knew 10 people who were “far from God.”  Now everyone had friends who were far from God and so could write down many names. This was a huge breakthrough for all of the groups.

Next, based on the House of Peace model, we asked them which person of the 10 on their list had God working in their life right now so that they could share their story with them that week. All of a sudden, everyone understood with whom to share, and so began to grasp the concept of a house of peace.
We do not discourage people from going to church, but we do encourage our disciplers to keep discipling these people in small T4T groups. The Great Commission commands us to make disciples; that means the buck stops with us! This is still an ongoing struggle, but we are making great progress.
We were brainstorming one day for new ways to get into people’s homes to do evangelistic Bible studies. We decided to reverse the food pantry, so the guys from the group distributed flyers in the community asking people to donate food if they had extra, but if a person needed food, they would call the phone number and it would be delivered to them.

We decided to go into the homes and listen to their stories, then share our stories of how Jesus changed our lives, then share Jesus’ story. In the first home there was a young couple who shared that they had been addicted to drugs but were clean at the time because she was pregnant. But, she also shared that DSS (Dept. of Social Services) had taken her other two kids and she wanted to get her life together and not lose this baby and eventually get her kids back from DSS. We prayed with her and her need for a job, crib, baby clothes and food. The following week, we shared this need in our T4T groups, and one of the men in the group said that he and his wife wanted to meet these personal needs of this young lady. They took a crib to her and took her shopping at Wal-Mart.

Soon a healthy baby came, and this couple moved out of the house they were sharing with other people and into their own house, but had no power because she had a huge unpaid electric bill ($450) that needed to be paid to get back into the house. We began to pray again. The couple went to DSS and local charities looking for help to pay the bill; in the end, the couple in the T4T group gave the last $40 to get their electricity back on. The young husband shared with the T4T couple that in the past he would have gotten the money one way or another, legally or illegally, but he wanted to change and have a new life.

Four months later, the husband gave his life to Jesus and is being discipled, working to overcome many difficulties, but the young lady in this story is still struggling as we continue to pray and reach out to her. He is now sharing his story and learning how to reach his friends by sharing his story and Jesus’ story.

In the 12 months, since starting the first T4T Discipleship Cycle in small-town North Carolina, I and my fellow trainers have seen nearly 40 discipleship groups started and seen many who were “far from God” draw close to him once more.