These brothers and sisters have been at work across the globe for several decades.  If you are not aware of what they are doing, check out their site and their missions magazine, The Gleaner.

One of the matters that I admire most about this association is their heart’s desire for church multiplication.  In fact, the theme of the event was this topic.

I was delighted to spend some time with Larry Barker, Director of Operations for North America, and Executive Director, John David Smith. These men–as well as others in the association–recognize the importance of healthy theology and missiology to support their strategies and methods.  Here is an association that is taking the lead, setting wise goals, and desiring to keep church planting highly reproducible–even in North America.

Sound, Simple, and Reproducible.  Such is a rarity today–but desperately needed.  May others learn from the saints of BMAA.

During my first presentation, I was able to share with many of their missionaries.  I addressed the topic of three necessary shifts in church planting circles in preparation for any possible church multiplication, particularly in North America: 1) Shift in Definition of Church Planting; 2) Shift to an Apostolic Paradigm; and 3) Shift to Multiplication Strategies.

For the evening plenary session, I was also asked to address church multiplication, but with a general audience in mind.  During this gathering, I discussed that while the Church has no control over God’s sovereignty or the local contexts in which she finds herself, she does have control over her institutional factors that help or hinder possible multiplication.  It was a time for prayerful introspection and change where necessary.  While we read through many passages, we used Acts 16:1-15 as our primary text.

I promised those who attended that I would post both of my presentations on the blog.  Here they are for the taking:

Missionary Presentation

Missions Symposium Plenary

A big word of appreciation goes to the BMAA folks for their hospitality and friendship.  It was great being with you.  Keep pressing on!

Today, I am releasing my latest e-book Leading Your Church in Church Planting: Taking the First Steps. 

This 62-page work is designed to encourage and provide some guidance for pastors considering such missionary work. While some elements of this book will be of value to pastors who are already leading their churches in church planting, this resource was not written with them in mind.  The content is very basic.  It is written for those approaching the starting line–not those  already in the race.

Chapters include:

• Seven Reasons for Leading Your Church in Church Planting
• The Other Wing of the Airplane
• Some Resources to Get You Started
• Avoiding the Nestea Plunge
• Five Steps for Vision Casting for Multiplication
• Anticipating Objections to Church Planting

Each chapter concludes with questions to assist with developing and taking contextualized action steps.

This work is FREE for the taking.

My only request–if you would please–is that you would be kind enough to subscribe to my blog feed and tell at least three other people about this free resource (tweeting it to your millions of followers will suffice).

I truly appreciate your assistance in spreading the word on this book.

The book is available in pdf, Kindle, and Epub formats.  I prefer the pdf.  At this point in time, Kindle and Epub remove some of the aesthetic value of the book.

So, take it, use it, give it away, make photocopies of it, tweet it, etc.!

GET THE PDF HERE: Leading Your Church in Church Planting: Taking the First Steps

GET THE KINDLE and EPUB VERSIONS HERE: Leading Your Church in Church Planting: Taking the First Steps

If you get a chance, please let me know how you are using this book.  I always look forward to hearing from you guys out there.

If you did not get a copy of the other e-book I gave away last month, you may find it HERE.

Happy Thanksgiving!

And a few of you pastors need to consider sending future church planting teams there.

Now, if you track with my writings, you are probably asking yourself why I am urging a few churches to consider sending future teams to such a place.  While the county does not have a recommended Evangelical church to population ratio of 1:1000 (urban context), it is very close (and not too far off from the rural recommendation of 1:500).  Also, it is striking within the 10-20% Evangelical range.

So, why Williston, North Dakota?

Last night, I caught an amazing report on Rock Center with Brian Williams.  The 9 min. 22 sec. story–which you can see HERE–profiled the small North Dakota community that is now a boom-town.

An exceptionally massive amount of oil has been discovered around Williston.  New technology is allowing it to be extracted.  This is a major game-changer, not just for the city, but for the country as well.

While jobs are hard to find in other parts of the United States, the demand for workers in Williston is far exceeding the number of people available.  Thousands of well-paying jobs need to be filled immediately.

And if last night’s report is accurate, then Williston must brace itself for a massive influx of people and businesses over the next several years.  Life in this small community will never be the same.  This is one reason future teams are needed.

Whenever something of this magnitude occurs, the need increases for gospel advancement into such areas.  And I fear that our brothers and sisters making up those 17 churches will quickly become overwhelmed–if they are not already.

Here is another reason for church planting teams:  Consider for a moment the growth of the darkness.  Whenever the population of well-paid men (living in “man camps”) grows dramatically in a community with little post-work opportunities to overcome boredom, you can imagine the results.  The media reports that crime is on the rise in Williston, doctors are witnessing an increase of chlamydia cases, and strippers are making $2000-3000 per night.  Here is one article recently published in the Wall Street Journal.  Other recent reports are out there; I’ll let you do the searching.

Where the darkness is great, oftentimes, the receptivity to the light is greater.  Our Lord has been known to breakthrough the thickness of blatant wickedness, despair, and hopelessness, to most glorify Himself.  But, someone has to share this great news of His love.

It is amazing how fossil fuel fuels the need for missional opportunities.

Keep an eye on this community.  Pray for our brothers and sisters serving there.  Pray for laborers to go, love, and serve the people as this town expands.

This brief work (55 pages) provides some guidelines for church planters to establish healthy approaches for teaching new believers to obey all that Jesus commanded.  Chapters include:

• Set the Example
• Keep It Simple
• Begin at the Individual Level
• Teach Obedience
• Teach Healthy Disciplines as Soon as Possible
• Return Them to the Field Immediately.

Each chapter concludes with several questions to guide teams in their conversations regarding the approaches they will use for discipleship training.

While I have published via the traditional route, the e-book world is new territory to me.

As promised, this work is FREE for the taking.

My only request–if you would please–is that you would be kind enough to subscribe to my blog feed and tell at least three other people about this free resource (tweeting it to your millions of followers will suffice).

The book is available in pdf, Kindle, and Epub formats.  However, I like the pdf the best.  At this point in time, Kindle and Epub remove some of the aesthetic value and space to write in your responses to various questions raised at the end of each chapter.

It is my prayer that this will be of assistance to you and your team in your Kingdom labors.  Keep up the great work in the trenches!

So, take it, use it, make photocopies of it, tweet it, etc.!

GET THE PDF HERE:  Discipleship in Church Planting Ebook

GET THE KINDLE and EPUB VERSIONS HERE: Discipleship in Church Planting Ebook

If you get a chance, please let me know how you are using this book.  I always look forward to hearing from you guys out there.

Check out the video here regarding this week’s release of my first e-book.  Stay tuned.

In the late 1990s, I had significant interactions with individuals who served as missionaries in countries other than the United States.  During that time, I came to believe that the Church in the West could learn a great deal from those who had labored to advance the gospel in the non-Western world.  Believing there was much for North Americans to learn from those serving “over seas”, I wrote my doctoral dissertation (in 2001) on this subject.

It was during those days as a pastor and a doctoral student that I came to recognize that many other brothers and sisters (much wiser and more experienced than I) had been thinking along similar lines–for several decades.  In fact, I soon realized they had written articles and books on the topic, and even created a networks to assist churches in the West to engage their contexts as missionaries.

Though Lesslie Newbigin wrote about such missionary encounters in the West several years ago (his book quoted above was published in 1984), there still remains a great deal of change necessary for the development of a robust missionary encounter with those living in the West.  While we in North America have felt Newbigin’s influence and have experienced the Missional Church Movement, both leading us more in the direction of  “a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture,” we remain well behind where we should be in our missionary thinking and work.

Brothers and sisters across the globe have assisted us in thinking about the United States in relation to missionary matters such as understanding cultures, interpersonal communication, contextualization, and church planting.  And in light of these recent adjustments to our approaches, we have experienced some healthy gospel advancement.  However, certain systemic shifts (e.g., ecclesiological, strategic, and methodological), conducive to the multiplication of biblically-faithful disciples, leaders, and churches across the third largest country in the world, are still necessary.  Much of our activities still reflect missiologies that result in the development of structures, strategies, and methods that approach our contexts as if they are already “reached,” rather than resulting in activities better geared for gospel engagement within highly diverse, globalized, post-Christianized, post-industrialized contexts.

Are we in the West learning from the rest?  Yes.  But, we are learning slowly, much, much too slowly.

What are your thoughts?

Now, I recognize this is a strange statement for a church planting professor to make, especially one who has written books and articles on this topic.  So, let me explain.

No Command

There is no command in the Bible to go into all the world and plant churches. The Church is never told to plant churches until the end of the age or search out all people groups and plant churches among them.

It seems everywhere we turn today, both churches and mission agencies in North America and outside this continent, are training and sending missionaries to plant multiplying churches across the globe. Over the past twenty years in North America and Europe, numerous books and articles have been published addressing this topic. Conferences and practical resources are being provided every year to potential church planters. More and more seminaries are offering courses and emphases in church planting.

Then why is there so much talk about church planting if there is no scriptural mandate?

Missionary Endeavor

Our Lord is very clear about the Great Commission.  The Church is to make disciples of all nations (literally, “peoples,” not nation-states). The best way to fulfill this mandate of evangelizing, baptizing, and teaching obedience is through the planting of contextualized churches among the various people groups and population segments of the world. For it is in the process of evangelizing, baptizing, and teaching that local churches are planted.  Church planting is a missionary endeavor.  Our Lord gave the Great Commission before his ascension; and it was the apostolic Church that later followed in obedience, setting the example of church planting for others to follow.

Start in the Fields, not the Barns

Biblical church planting is evangelism that results in new churches.  But, churches can be planted with little to no evangelism being done.

For example, if our annual goal is to plant 12 churches, then all we need to do is gather some long-term Kingdom citizens together into twelve groups, lead them to covenant together as 12 local churches, and we have accomplished our goal.  And if we do this, people will sing our praises and invite us to speak about church planting, telling them how they can plant 12 churches in a year.  And no one will ask us about making disciples.

But it’s not about church planting.  We are called to make disciples—and the first step in making disciples is doing evangelism.  For it is out of a disciple making movement that churches are birthed (e.g., Acts 13-14).

Unfortunately, most church planters in North America are more involved in gathering together long-term Kingdom citizens than doing evangelism that results in new churches.

Try This

Let me give you a little exercise.  The next time you hear about churches being planted, I want to encourage you to be radically biblical and simply ask, “How many people recently came into the Kingdom of God before these newly planted church came into existence?”  If you are talking with church planters in North America, do not be surprised to find out that the answer is generally few to none.  Rather, than finding a church planter who saw a church birthed out of the harvest field, you are more likely to find a church planted by the shuffling of the saints around in the Body of Christ.

Today, we plant the church first, and then (hopefully) lead the church to do evangelism.

If our goal is to plant a church, then our goal has been accomplished.  Let’s have a party and celebrate.

But it’s not about planting churches.

The Coolness Factor

But planting churches is cool!  It is cool to quickly start a worship gathering with high quality music and preaching.  It is cool to quickly develop church programs for kids, families, outreach, missions, etc.  It is cool to be able to write to our partners in the ministry and show them “tangible” things that prove we have been at work—making good use of the resources they have sacrificed for our labors, and hoping such partnerships will continue.

But it’s not about planting churches.

Our mandate is about evangelism, baptisms, and teaching those new believers how to be the local church in their context.  It is about teaching those new believers how to gather for worship.  It is about teaching those new believers how to preach, how to pastor, how to lead children, families.  It is about teaching those new believers how to do missions.  There is not much that others can see, feel, and hear in the early days of a church recently birthed from the harvest. . .

. . . not much other than a group of new Kingdom Citizens, agreeing to learn and live by this new Kingdom Ethic in covenant community.  And this is messy, oftentimes slow, gives us little to report to those back home, and is definitely not cool.

Planting churches is cool. . . making disciples from out of the harvest that will become local churches is not.

But it’s not about planting churches, is it?

While I originally thought I would simply set up the links to the presentations, I soon came to believe that I needed to share some information about this new network.  And since the group is comprised of Southern Baptists, I am specifically directing today’s post to those within my tribe.

If you are a Southern Baptist leader involved in church planting, then you need to keep an eye on what is happening among this group of brothers and sisters in Mississippi.  I was very surprised, blessed, convicted, and encouraged by what I saw and experienced.  After spending time with the leaders and participants, I am convinced that exciting things for the Kingdom are happening in Mississippi, things below most of our radars.

(Some people, however, have super-sensitive radars.  For even at this inaugural event, I encountered other Southern Baptist leaders–from outside of Mississippi–who were present to observe and learn what was taking place in this new network.)

The One8 Network is primarily located in the northern part of the state, but another like-minded network is presently developing in the central region as well.  I expect others will follow across Mississippi, and that similar networks will quickly begin to pop up across the Southern Baptist Convention and the Canadian National Baptist Convention.

Here is some information about One8:

ONE8 is a cooperating network of likeminded SBC churches across Mississippi and the Mid-South working together to advance the gospel by planting new churches and equipping existing churches for multiplication. Along with the Mississippi Baptist Convention, our vision is to partner with churches, associations, and state conventions to plant at least 30 churches over the next three years. Through an intensive application and assessment process, we seek to provide church planters with internships, coaching, networking, and resources.

The convictions of this network are closely aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention:

ONE8 Church Planting Network is a committed partner with the SBC. All ONE8 Network Churches and Church Plants affirm the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.  The ONE8 Church Planting Network also affirms the following distinctives:

• We believe in the Sufficiency of Scripture

• We Practice Systematic Exposition

• We Seek Regenerate Church Membership

• We are Committed to Biblical Community

• We are Committed to Practicing a Biblical Worldview

• We are Committed to Evangelism, Missional Living, and Church Planting.

140 participants were present this week, with the majority representing younger Southern Baptists.  The meeting had to be moved to a larger location due to an unexpected increase in the number of participants.  The organizers invited several plenary speakers, representing church planters, missiologists, and pastors, as well as numerous speakers leading breakout sessions.

I spoke on the following topics, with each linked to my Power Point slides (.pptx files):

The Good News: Bridging the Gap through Evangelism

Equipping the Church Planting Family

Who Can Bridge the Gap? The Barnabas Factors: Essential Practices of Church Planting Team Members

I do not claim to know the future of this nascent network.  But, if Monday and Tuesday are representative of the cooperation, enthusiasm, and missional engagement to come, then I am very excited about its future potential.

Mississippi Baptists are offering something to younger, Southern Baptist church planters, involving at least partnership/cooperation, respect, wisdom, assessment, coaching, training, encouragement, and accountability.  They have invited them to pull up a chair and have a major seat at the table.

Laurie Fortunak Nichols, A. Scott Moreau, and Gary Corwin have done an excellent job editing this book.  The work consists of six sections: 1) The Church Planter; 2) Biblical Guidelines for Church Planting; 3) The Church Plant; 4) Church Planting Strategy; 5) Partnership and Church Planting; and 6) Case Studies.

The editors sent me a pdf of the first 16 pages of the book that includes my Foreword (don’t let this keep you from purchasing the book), Table of Contents, and the Introduction.  I have linked this document HERE to give you an idea of the contents of the book.

Let me strongly encourage you to get a copy of this book.  It contains the “best of the best” of EMQ’s articles on church planting.