Cross-Cultural Church Planting Training tagged: , , , , , , ,

Cross-Cultural Church Planting Training

Posted by in Church & Missions

I’m forced to write this post several days in advance because (as you are reading this) I am currently outside the United States. I am leading my church’s third team of the year to the Pachitea Province in Peru. We are meeting up with our student summer missionary who is already in Panao, the capital of the district. He just called me a few moments ago to inform me that the internet set-up is largely limited. The internet “cafe” that we used before has recently closed its doors. So don’t count on me being able to respond or interact for several more days.

Anyhow … our mission is pretty simple. The other five members of our team (my wife, another adult from our church, and three college students) will focus upon ministries to children, door-to-door evangelism, friendship evangelism, and “building bridges” by all possible means.

My primary responsibility will be training church planters. I will be using a resource from the IMB’s South American Resources site to train indigenous Christians in starting house churches. The goal of our church, as a Church Planting Strategist Church through the IMB, is to help facilitate an indigenous Church Planting Movement (CPM) among the Pachitea Quechua people of Peru. (Interestingly, our people group was one of the sight chosen for this year’s prayer emphasis. If you get a set of the prayer cards, check out our card!)

We have made contacts with a tiny group of faithful evangelical believers there, and are seeking to help them understand how to reproduce their churches. I will be training men (and women) from the Christian Missionary and Alliance church, the Church of God of Prophecy, and a tiny Assemblies of God congregation. There will, most likely, be others who travel from various evangelical churches in other places.

For those readers who stand ready to wave their red flags in the face of potential ecumenism … understand me … we are not planting churches. We do not live there. We are simply assisting the fewer than 2% of evangelical believers among this people group of 52,000 souls (that’s 1,000 true Jesus-followers) share their faith and reproduce their churches. We are working under the assumption that these churches will have a cultural expression that is appropriate for the Quechua people.

But, personally, I do not care whether that Pachitea Quechua are saved in a Baptist, Church of God, Alliance, or Assembly of God Church … just as long as they’re saved. I would much rather greet them in heaven someday instead of have them die and go to hell while waiting to become Baptists. But, then, that’s just my point of view.

And, to be sure, I don’t give a rip about anyone’s statistics … except for that list of names in the Lamb’s book.

Pray for us, and pray for the unreached Pachitea Quechua people.