Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 1.

The purpose of this chapter is to clear away hindrances and let your church--or the church of those you train--to reproduce in the normal way, for these reasons:

• Reproducing churches is the quickest way to win many people to our Lord Jesus Christ.
• Jesus compares your church's God-given power to grow and reproduce to that of plants, in Mark 4.
• He intends his kingdom to be reproductive, and has given us a part in this process. If your church--or the church of those you train--has home groups, this guide should help them multiply, too.

May God strengthen your vision and resolve to help your church--or the church of those you train--to multiply locally and in neglected fields.

Churches that' reproduce rapidly in daughter and granddaughter churches do so through the power that God gives them, and do not rely on money. Those who do most of the work seldom have academic degrees. Church multiplication requires no institutions apart from the churches. It does not depend on powerful leaders. Ordinary people can do God’s work when they simply obey Jesus' commands in love and are enabled by the Spirit of God.

There are many examples of spontaneous church multiplication-- church planting movements--happening among people of all major culture groups. It happens by God’s power wherever we find good soil for church growth. What is good soil? For genuine church growth— that is, growth through conversion— good soil is bad people! Where sin abounds, grace abounds even more (Romans 5:20). Church multiplication is happening, to some degree, within every major religion and cultural category, although some people groups within them are still highly resistant.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 1.

We see church growth by both addition and multiplication in the book of Acts:

• Acts 2:41 tells about growth by addition: 3,000 new believers were added by baptism to the new church in Jerusalem.
• Throughout the Book of Acts, growth starts with a small seed, a new believer or his family, or a few people who formed a powerful core.
• God soon enables them to spread the Good News through their network of relatives and friends. God then adds these new believers to the small core.
• Acts chapters 8, 10, 13, 14 and 16 tell about growth by multiplication. God causes small groups to multiply as nuclei around which addition easily takes place.
• The church—through its apostles or ‘sent ones’—soon penetrates other social networks, near and far, to reproduce itself.
• This process leads to more and more increase as daughter and granddaughter churches were born and reproduced thirty, sixty and a hundred times, like the grain in Jesus’ parable of the farmer.

Today also, a healthy church multiplies because:

Many traditions, especially Westerner ones, can hinder church multiplication:

• Often these traditions are activities that are beneficial under certain circumstances, but take the place of other activities that are far more important.
• We could list hundreds of helpful things to start churches, but we can count on our fingers and toes those few essential things that make the difference between reproductive churches and sterile ones. Blessed is the Christian worker who knows the difference!
• The purpose of this Guide is to help you to build your ministry on those universal New Testament principles that God blesses consistently in different cultures.
• These New Testament principles take on surprisingly different forms as the Holy Spirit leads workers to apply them in distinct ways, in different cultures, to multiply churches.

Lord, help us to discern what is truly important in your sight, to multiply churches among our people.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 1.

Such natural flow of the gospel happens when certain conditions are in place. Some of these conditions are beyond our control; they are in God's hands alone. Other conditions are within our reach; they are the things that God has revealed in His Word for us to do. We must do what we can do and must leave to God his supernatural work. Among the things that we can do are to pray and to work closely together with others. Neither Jesus nor His apostles worked alone.

As you learn the New Testament principles presented in this Guide, please, share them with your coworkers, then pray and plan together. Plan activities that your coworkers and their churches will do, not merely what you personally will do. Prepare them to think seriously about church or cell multiplication. This Guide is designed for you and your coworkers to help you to apply principles to your ministries.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 1.

Plan for church reproduction and chart your churches’ progress. Know which of your churches or cells grow and reproduce, and notice what they do. Know which churches or cells fail to grow and reproduce, and find out why not.

Churches reproduce if their leaders make plans that are easy to explain and to implement:

• Man-made traditions are an enemy of church reproduction. Often church leaders respond to an urgent need by establishing programs or requirements that help for a time. But if they continue long after the need is met, then they become hollow traditions that absorb resources like a sponge and make church planting a heavy burden.
• Honest evaluation detects and eliminates from the church body these parasitic growths.
• Many pastors have greatly improved their ministries by spending a few hours keeping records and reviewing what has happened.

Lord, give us courage to examine our church's traditions and compare them carefully with the corresponding activities in your Word.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 1.

Leaders acquire more church planting skills by working as a body with others, than from lectures or books—including this book. They cannot learn these skills in a classroom where you use only the gift of teaching. They will best acquire skills within an obedient congregation. If you hope to be an exception, prepare for failure, for you might as well try to learn high diving in the same classroom.

You might find it helpful to train leaders to work another culture in a temporary training church:

• They practice doing things in the way they will need to do them in the other culture.
• To form a temporary training church, name temporary elders, lay hands on them and pray for them.
• Meet with these elders to plan the worship that they will lead in small groups.
• Then start doing the activities described in each chapter of this Guide, including celebrating Communion.
• Let everyone in the group serve one another in love with their different spiritual gifts.
• Let the Holy Spirit harmonize their gift-based ministries in a living church body in love, as described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Cross-cultural church planters need "stretching". God stretched Peter in Acts 10 by telling him to eat unclean food. This prepared him to spend several days eating food not allowed by Jewish law while in Cornelius’ gentile home. Let the temporary training church stretch you and your apprentice missionaries. The strain of doing so will reveal tensions that everyone faces when adapting to another culture. Make your mistakes now where they will not do permanent damage!

• Prayer
• Praise
• Teaching the Word of God
• Confession of sins with assurance of forgiveness
• Communion, in Lord’s Supper
• Giving
• Fellowship

These are dealt with in detail in Chapter 07.

Church planters need to know what these essential elements are, in order not to confuse them with external worship forms that have evolved in their own culture. They will learn to discern them in a temporary training church as they adapt worship to a small group without electronic sound, skilled musicians or a large sanctuary.

The value of church-centered training will become more apparent as you work with a training church. You will not only learn the skills for church reproduction but will also experience the kind of church life that sustains normal reproduction.

Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 1.

Most traditions are good. We must recognize those that are bad. As you read this Guide, please examine prayerfully your church’s traditions. You will probably find that some of them hinder what Jesus and His apostles require you to do. Those bad traditions may include the following church practices:

• organizational structures that hinder normal church body life and the harmony of gift-based ministries,
• evangelistic methods and follow-up procedures that do not lead to faith,
• Christian education methods that ignore families,
• worship practices that are impossible for small groups,
• worldly church spending priorities and attitudes toward money,
• an academically-oriented leadership training philosophy,
• resistance to formation of small groups and to their activities,
• ignoring the church’s responsibility in missionary placement ,
• poor mission agency management as it deals with spiritual gifts,
• unbalanced ministry team or task group formation,
• lack of authentic inter-church cooperation,
• insensitive or unwise corrective disciplinary policies,
• leading in a way that is more culturally determined than scriptural.

Please ask God's help now for you and your coworkers, to courageously change any practice that is not His first preference.