Working Together to Reproduce Churches

The Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off . . . John was with them as their helper." Acts 13:2-5

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

The purpose of this chapter is to prepare, or serve as, an effective mission task group. The church in Antioch separated Paul and Barnabas to make disciples of the nations with prayer and fasting (Acts 13:1-3). Churches today likewise should send workers through the power of the Holy Spirit. This will assure workers of their church’s prayerful support and will ensure better accountability to the church. Doing so also encourages workers on the field during hard times. Churches should separate workers for church planting in another field both physically and emotionally from their home church, family, mission base, and friends. Weeping relatives and friends often need this separation ceremony also, to help them release loved ones and coworkers for the job to which God calls them.

Some organizations lay hands on workers for blessing and power for ministry. The separation ceremony should be a very serious and special event. Everyone should see that the church body through the power of God’s Spirit has truly sent its apostles, that they really are ‘sent ones.’ That is why the church in Antioch fasted first.

Find in Mark 3:13-14 what Jesus did before naming his disciples, and what he appointed them to do:

Find in Acts 10:23-24 who served with Peter’s task group that started the church in Cesarea:

Find in Acts 13:2-3 how the church in Antioch formed a task group for distant fields:

The apostle Paul’s cross-cultural church planting task groups furnishes us a model to imitate:

• God sent Paul to make disciples of neglected people groups. He and his coworkers established or strengthened churches that multiplied wherever they worked,
• He worked with temporary task groups that focused on the task of discipling local people rather than on building permanent missionary organizations,
• They immediately sought and worked with seekers’ families and friends,
• They started clusters of small congregations that multiplied,
• They willingly worked in dangerous fields with hostile authorities,
• They worked with their hands to support themselves in jobs that kept them close to the people,
• They prayed fervently for the sick and for those whom they taught to be disciples.
• They trained local leaders on the job without delay and left them in charge.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Both the team members from the outside and the new leaders in a new church usually find it helpful to have a checklist for their church or group to follow. Here are activities that you might include in a progress chart for new churches. Note items that you plan to give special attention.

A good pastoral training program will provide such a progress chart, a menu for selecting studies and activities to deal with the immediate needs and ministry opportunities of a new church. A progress chart for a new church should list Jesus’ commands and other ministries required by the New Testament. Chapter 17 of this Guide explains the duties of church leaders relative to those activities. You should add activities to the progress charts as needs and opportunities for serving arise.

You might provide another progress chart for a church planting task group. Key activities are listed below. Add activities as you see the need or as opportunities for serving arise. Note items that you plan to give special attention.

Make sure before all else that new churches obey Jesus

Some missionary teams fail because their members focus too much on what they will do as a team and on each other. They plan only what they will do. They fail to plan what the new believers and churches should do. Thus, they cannot lead the new leaders because they have no clear vision of where they are going—so they only teach them. They may do good teaching but bad leading.

Some missionary teams make the fatal mistake of pulling new church leaders out of the churches to serve with the missionary organization in less productive roles. Do not forget that a foreign team or task group is merely a scaffold—like the temporary structure that construction bricklayers set up around a tall building. The national congregations are the only ‘building’ that God tells us to construct. Missionaries avoid this mistake by drawing up and following the progress chart for new churches described above. It lists what the disciples and new churches should do, to will help the task group workers to focus on the people and on the people’s tasks rather than on themselves.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Please read Acts 10 and 11:1-18 to find guidelines for church planting. Notice things that God, Cornelius, Peter, or Peter’s task group did to give birth to the new church.

Did you find the following?

• What first prompted God to move? What were both Cornelius and Peter doing at first?
• What did workers from the mother church in Joppa do? How was a church-based task group involved?
• How did God cure Peter’s cultural prejudice?
• Who was invited to the exclusive meeting in Cesarea, apart from Peter and his companions?
• What reputation did Cornelius have with relatives and friends?
• What was the content of the Peter’s message?
• How did the task group confirm the new believers’ salvation?
• How much time did they spend with the new church?
• How did Peter deal with the Jewish Christians’ objection to his cross-cultural approach?

Note that Peter took other Christian brothers from Joppa to plant the new church in Cornelius’ house in Cesarea, as seen in Acts 10:23. As always, they related the essentials of the gospel, as summarized in verses 6-43:

• Who Jesus is. He is Lord of all, anointed by God to do good and to heal (Acts 10:36-38),
• His sacrificial death. By His death God provides forgiveness of sins (Acts 10:39),
• His resurrection. He rose from death (Acts 10:40-42.
• How we are to respond. We are to believe with repentant hearts (Acts 2:38; 10:43)

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

You can eliminate a major cause of missionaries burning out by having churches send task groups. Neither Jesus nor His apostles worked alone. They formed task groups, as seen in Mark 3:13-15 and Acts 10:23-24 and 13:1-3. The apostolic bands that accompanied Peter and Paul were spiritual "midwives" who enabled churches to produce daughter churches. This church reproduction is a function of the body of Christ, not of individuals laboring alone.

Some Western missionaries show excessive individualism, failing to understand ministry teams. They came to Jesus as individuals and new serve with an organization that deals with them as individuals. They work alone on a mission field until they learn—if they ever do—that it is far easier to plant churches working as a team. They must learn to work with others who have gifts that balance theirs. It is foolish and sometimes dangerous to do God’s work alone.

Sending out church-based task groups as the Antioch church did (Acts 13:1-3) has several benefits. Task groups can work on fields that they chose, among a neglected people, whether or not a mission agency is cooperating with their project. A church body can take the responsibility of sending task groups rather than a mission agency. When church members participate in sending their own people as missionaries, the sending church will have much more concern for reaching the nations. So doing makes it easier to raise support for the workers, creates opportunities for training in the sending church, can provide for better accountability, and can provide a more balanced distribution of spiritual gifts in the task group. Finally, a church-sent group can avoid much of the stress that causes missionaries to burn out.

Church planters do better work when they coordinate their spiritual gifts with the ministries of other workers. For example, the Holy Spirit normally works far more powerfully though a task group of four than through four persons working alone. The church is repeatedly represented in Scripture as an active army and as a united body—never as a school or as several individuals.

A church-based task group does not join an existing "team" already put together on a field by a mission agency for its own administrative convenience. Rather the missionaries’ home church will form a task group as an extension of its own church body. The church will see the missionaries’ work as a branch of their ministry. Sometimes, several sister churches will form such the task group in cooperation with each other and send it through a mission agency. When a congregation loves its missionaries, it will more readily see the need for a church-based task group as opposed to the tradition of sending their people to the mission field only as individuals or family units.

When the task group arrives on the field, it should reform into several task groups that include national workers. These may be new believers or evangelists from another field that are culturally closer to the local people group and will help to start the work.

Churches that form apostolic task groups, even though they work through a mission agency, must take responsibility to support them and to hold them accountable to plant new churches. In the New Testament, churches are viewed as living bodies that reproduce by giving birth to new living bodies. They bear daughter churches through task groups made up of members from different churches.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

A married couple should agree on what the wife will do in ministry, in order to avoid tension in the home. Misunderstanding about what the wife should do causes stress. Wise couples will discuss this frankly. A husband and wife may have quite different roles, and those roles can vary as family circumstances change. If a couple has no child then both may give more time to evangelism and to making disciples. When children arrive, the mother will give more time as a homemaker, as taught in Titus 2:5, and will give up some ministry activities.

Dedication to her home and family can make a wife feel unimportant if her husband does not value her role as a wife and mother. Also, her dedication to a ministry can lead to frustration if her husband perceives her role to be a wife and mother. This confusion creates severe tension in the home, especially if neither partner understands the source of the tension. They need to talk it over.

Missionary couples from Western societies that minimize the differences between the sexes, sometimes fail to respect their God-given roles of husband and wife with disastrous results. Sometimes an unwise mission field supervisor expects women to consider their God-given role as mother and wife to be secondary or inferior. William Carey, one of the first English-speaking missionaries to India, felt it was spiritual to neglect his wife in order to serve God. This was common thinking among ministers of that time. Consequently Mrs. Carey had a nervous breakdown. Carey had violated the command to husbands in Ephesians 5:25-29, that tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church and treat them as they would their own bodies. Women missionaries, both single and married, often need encouragement to live out God’s calling, rather than to fulfill the expectations of their college professors, friends, or a misguided spouse.

Those who would deny women missionaries a significant role as leaders, should note that Priscilla, a woman, helped to train Apollos as a leader (Acts 18:1-4). Philip’s daughters prophesied (Acts 21:8-9). Apostolic instructions forbidding women to teach or to lead men in the church are not absolute prohibitions, for God enabled women to lead under male authority. Christian work around the world would be very small indeed if God wiped out all that has been built on foundations laid by women missionaries.

On the other hand, those that place women on the same level with men in every way, denying any significant differences in their respective God-given roles, should note that extremely few cultures in the neglected fields of the world want women in high profile positions of leadership. Sometimes workers will often respect a foreign woman because of her education and professional poise, but not their own women. In Honduras, Patterson had to establish strong male leadership in order for churches to multiply healthily in that male-dominated culture.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

No permanent missionary teams appear in the New Testament, only temporary task groups. A task group made up of outsiders will normally phase out as local or inside leaders take on responsibility. Do not let your church planting task group become an end in itself. Remember it is only a midwife. It is a temporary scaffold that enables a local mother church to reproduce. If no mother churches exist yet on a new field, then raise them up as soon as possible. A new church on a new field might have as few as two or three new believers. Yet even during this formative phase, task group members from outside the culture must not outnumber new believers in the regular meetings, lest the new church fail to keep its identity with the local community. Some task group members may need to make themselves absent from some meetings until the newborn church senses its identify within its own culture, and the surrounding community sees it as a part of its own society. Otherwise, new believers may feel that they are joining a group of outsiders and the church may take on a distinctively foreign quality that will fail to reproduce within the culture. The best church planting team normally is a group of workers from a nearby mother church having the same culture as the daughter church, and the workers have friends or relatives in the local community.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Except for short-term service, seek to serve under a task group leader who wholeheartedly encourages you to minister in a way for which you are gifted and where God has called you. Seek to serve with a task group that puts loving obedience to Christ ahead of all other rules, including its own policies. Join an existing task group only if its leader assures you that your gifts and ministry are needed, wanted, and likely to be productive. Make sure you will not be sent aside into a ministry for which God has not gifted you. That happens often in mission organizations. Avoid leaders who, for the sake of control, force you to follow human policies, especially if they confuse conformity with "team spirit" or "unity". Power hungry leaders show contempt for New Testament, Spirit-empowered unity in Christ. Biblical unity avoids blind conformity, values workers’ differences and frees them in love for distinct ministries in the united body, as seen in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

God loves the distinctive features of different races and cultures. He created the nations, tribes, tongues, and people groups. All these will be recognizable in glory with their wonderful differences, in foreseen in Revelations 7:9. All of God’s creation displays a magnificent variety. Heaven certainly will not be a boring place!

Workers violate God’s plan when they force two cultures or sub-cultures to integrate in the name of Christian unity. When they force two cultures to mix in one church, the cultures never integrate. Rather the stronger one with more money and political power, even though it may have fewer people, suppresses or cancels out the weaker one. True unity in Christ retains cultural differences in loving harmony with each other. Sister churches with different customs can love one another and can cooperate in God’s work. Trying to integrate two cultures rarely unifies them; doing so brings about the death of one of them. Forced unity destroys something that God loves. How ironic and tragically sad that some missionaries, in the name of Christian unity, have led cultures into extinction!

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Before planning in detail how to reach a culturally distant people group, you must discern what are its main culture and subcultures. Then recruit from the same class of people, or a very similar society, persons who can witness for Christ, matching church planters with people of similar background and culture. Except in tribal work, if you violate this rule you will cause a delay of many years, while the new churches overcome the stigma of having a foreign religion and break loose from your foreign methods to start working in a way that fits their culture.

The first question to ask about a neglected people group might well be, Who can easily reach them? The most effective witness comes through people who are culturally near to them. This does not rule out the participation of a foreigner in evangelism. Patterson discovered when working in remote villages that:

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

To enable church reproduction, you must work within a people group. By "people group" we mean the largest number of people among whom the gospel can spread without being hindered by barriers of any kind, including class or cultural differences. Missionaries seldom plant a national church that reproduces spontaneously in a new field unless they focus first on a specific class of people. When workers of another economic level, social class or subculture outnumber the new believers in their meetings, the local people fail to see the church as theirs.

On a new field, the most responsive people are normally of the working class, but not necessarily the poorest. For example, the apostle Paul at times worked with people of a socially rejected middle class, that is, hard-working folk who had been successful economically but who could never raise their social status. These included freed slaves like Onesimus, merchants of non-aristocratic birth like Lydia, and exiled Jewish merchants like Aquila and Priscilla. The most responsive people in a new field are those who not only are open to change but earnestly seek change.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

You will need workers who are of the same or a compatible culture as the people group you are evangelizing, or are willing and able to adapt to it. Workers from another country or race who join your task group will nearly always need help to gear their communication methods to the local community, even if they come from a culturally-near people. They will always find some significantly different customs that they must learn to respect, and they often find that they lack experience in evangelizing families. Even if you mobilize for a task group workers from another country who are culturally nearer to the local people, they will almost always need some orientation. The first thing you must explain is that they will not be preaching in the churches. They will train the local nationals to serve as pastors and to preach. You may be surprised at how many volunteers suddenly forget their "call" when they hear this!

New local workers joining your task group might need vocational training to learn skills needed for self-employment or for operating small business, especially for where authorities prohibit missionary work. Do not expect outsiders to reproduce churches, even if they are culturally nearer than you are. The impulse for spontaneous multiplication will comes from the Holy Spirit to the local people. Outsiders from any culture must train local leaders from behind the scenes.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Jesus did not send His apostles only to people who responded to the gospel. He did tell them, however, to ‘shake the dust off their feet’ as a sign of God’s judgment against those that did not respond (Luke 10:4-16). He told them to open our eyes and see the fields that were ripe for harvest, that is, responsive (John 4:35). On most neglected fields, this means that you must carefully search for those who will respond and not waste your time with the others. Do not expect that the first people you meet will be responsive, for they might not be. You need to find those who seek God’s forgiveness and will trust Him for it. Faith faces facts and does not pursue empty dreams. Some unwise missionaries stubbornly persist in working with people whom God has not chosen for salvation, neglecting others nearby whom God has prepared. This waste of time—sometimes years—sometimes becomes evident when others start working with another community or people group nearby and see fruit after only a few weeks.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

As soon as you start training a pastor or elder, give him more and more responsibility as he grows. A church seldom reproduces if it depends on outside control or subsidy. The Holy Spirit will move local leaders to start daughter churches, if they will freely take the initiative to do so. New pastors in a new field should be trained on the job to ensure church multiplication. New leaders in new fields who are trained in traditional, classroom-only institutions almost never think in terms of church growth by reproduction. This weakness of institutional training is a danger everywhere, but not as serious on fields where there are mature churches and elders.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

When churches begin multiplying, task group workers will have to deal with more and more stressful situations. All effective church planters experience pressure. Likewise, new pastors and elders will try to solve all their problems by themselves instead of sharing their burdens with others. Problems always accompany new churches, just as they did in New Testament times. Paul agonized over the infant churches in Galatia, writing "My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth" (Galatians 4:19). After listing perils and painful adventures experienced in his church planting work, he added, "Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?" (2 Corinthians 11:28-29).

To avoid too much stress, the task group workers, especially their leader, must do what Jethro advised Moses to do, as recorded in Exodus 18:13-27; they must share the pastoral care with other trustworthy men. Paul advised Titus and Timothy to do the same (Titus 1:5 and 2 Timothy 2:2).

New leaders usually try to deal with too many minor problems. One of the best ways to prepare new elders is to let them deal with the small problems. The more experienced shepherds should have to deal only with the harder problems. Let the new leaders make some mistakes. Do not ask an elder to tackle a stressful problem alone; rather arrange for him to handle it with help from other elders, including from other nearby churches. Some churches avoid inter-church organization, but newly born churches in a new field need it, just as a newborn baby needs a lot of attention.

Patterson explains how he learned to deal with stressful situations and too much work:

God knows that a church planter lacks time to worry about all the problems that new churches have. That is why Paul told Titus to establish elders in all the churches, so that he could turn over the pastoral work to them. Things that you cannot do without neglecting your family, or that burn you out physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually, are not God’s will! Delegate them to others or simply drop them! Do not "dance with the devil" by running to put out every fire that the old dragon ignites!

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Effective church planters aim simply to do what Jesus said: to make disciples of a people group, no matter how long it takes or what sacrifice God requires. If your church has adopted a neglected people group and prays for it, then God will raise up people with apostolic gifts whom your church can send. If your church is small, it can cooperate with sister churches to put together an apostolic task group. To help foster cross-cultural church reproduction, especially in difficult new fields, it is essential to have a strong determination to do what Jesus said. For persons who know that God has given them the apostolic "sent one" gift and has called them to make disciples of a particular people group, a commitment to serve only for a limited number of years is usually futile. The only commitment that God can bless is to commit to go and do just as He says--make disciples of the people. Short-term service in a distant field is good for gaining information, for testing one’s spiritual gifts, for confirming a call from God, and for gaining experience that will enrich the home church—but seldom results in church reproduction.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Lay aside methods, attitudes, and equipment—including the ways we teach or preach—that are not easy for the new workers to imitate and pass on at. Patterson explained this filtering process to church planting task groups in a rural part of Asia:

In many of the remaining, neglected fields in the world today, only criminals can plant churches, because their laws make it a criminal offense. On these fields, you must work secretly. There your methods must be radically different from those used on fields having freedom of worship. You must be stricter in filtering out unnecessary traditions when you move into cultures that are very different from our own. What you must filter out will become obvious if you use the New Testament as your filter. When going into a very different culture for the first time, filter out whatever is not required by the New Testament. The greater the cultural difference and the more hostile the authorities, the more carefully you must filter out what the New Testament does not require. Later, as the new believers mature, they may add new forms of worship, teaching and organization that are peculiar to their culture, as churches have always done all over the world.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

When seeking or recruiting new coworkers, look for persons who:

• Work well together without letting Satan tempt them to have long disputes about philosophical issues,
• Are willing to work in a secular job when necessary as bivocational workers like Aquila and Priscilla, especially if working in very poor fields or in fields with hostile authorities,
• Are recommended by those who know them well and who pray continually for them in their home church,
• Are called by God to start churches,
• Readily bond in love with the people of a new culture,
• Submit willingly to their task group leader,
• Agree on objectives and general methods,
• Agree on basic doctrinal and church practices,
• Accept ongoing training and evaluation,
• Can teach the way Jesus and His apostles did, delegating responsibility to new local leaders,
• Pray and resist Satan, recognizing that the ultimate battle is not against culture, Islam, or other religions, but against the devil and his demons who corrupt culture, as revealed in Ephesians 6:11-13.
• Are willing to "carry a cross", that is, to suffer and give their life if necessary to extend the Kingdom of God among the people, as Jesus taught in Luke 9:23-24.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 12.

Ask the Lord to help you see what your churches will be doing in the future, so that the task group members know how to prepare the believers. If you lead a church planting task group, then a Progress Chart or checklist will make doing that easier. It should includes these activities for task group members:

• Prayerfully select and focus on the specific people you seek to make disciples, preferably people who are culturally similar to you or to some of your task group members.
• Separate the task group for their task with a serious ceremony with laying on of hands.
• Bond with the people and their culture.
• Maintain constant, fervent prayer for the unsaved and for new believers.
• Seek good contacts, in persons of peace.
• Witness for Jesus in a way that new believers can immediately imitate and pass on to others.
• Baptize without undue delay. When possible, baptize entire families as the apostles did.
• Break bread. Celebrate your participation in Christ’s body.
• Teach in a way that new leaders can immediately imitate and will pass on to other new leaders.
• Organize by building on relationships, not just following rules.
• Let worship be an edifying, inspiring celebration.
• Give responsibility to the local leaders and avoid the over-control that often comes with subsidies from outsiders.
• Arrange for clear, regular accountability for everybody.
• Arrange for new churches to start evangelizing in new areas, to start their own daughter churches, without delay. The longer you wait the harder it will be to reprogram their thinking.