"We sent Timothy, who is our brother and God's fellow worker in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith" 1 Thessalonians 3:2
Click the explanation you want now, of why and how God wants your church to serve as a 'mother church':
A. Let Your Church Be a Mother Church
B. Form Task Groups of Those who Have God’s Apostolic Gifting
C. Arrange for Bivocational Workers to Serve with Task Groups
D. Provide Unbiased Mission Career Counseling
E. Help Workers to Love and Esteem God’s Church
F. Pray for God’s Help to Grow by Multiplication as Well as by Addition
G. Give Missionary Trainees Practice in Effective Witnessing
H. Arrange for Activities That Will Help Your Church to Reproduce
15A. Let your Church be a 'Mother Church' (Church Reproduction from the Viewpoint of a Sending Church)
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
The purpose of this chapter is to explain why and how God wants your church to serve as a 'mother church'.
Mr. 'Traditionalist', startled, asks, "Start daughter churches? Not now! First, let’s help our own church to grow bigger and bigger. That’s success! Let’s not even think of starting new churches until we’ve built a strong home base here!"
Mr. 'Foresight' sighs, "But we’ve been building our home base here for 38 years! You’ll never think it’s big enough! We would never do what Jesus says in Acts 1:8 if we did as you say!"
Find in
Acts 13:1-3 how God moved a "mother" church to send a church-based missionary task group:In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, 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. (NIV)
Is your church--or a church of those you train--ready to reproduce? If not, pray for God to help you and your coworkers to deal with what is lacking.
15B. Form Task Groups of Those who Have God’s Apostolic Gifting
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
God promises to give to a church people gifted as apostles, that is, the missionary gift (Ephesians 4:11-12). You must mobilize those people to use their gift to help churches to reproduce. Put them to work using their gifts. Release them to disciple neglected nations and people groups. Help them to train new workers by first working with neglected ethnic groups nearby.
You may ask how to help a "sending church" to prepare and send a task group that will reproduces their church in a neglected area. If you follow New Testament guidelines while helping a church to multiply, then the reproducing church does not need many of the things that people often assume they need.
These are not needed to be an effective sending church:
Churches in every major culture group often multiply without any of those things. However, a reproducing church does need:
Patterson found how to convince the Honduran churches to reproduce:
At first, our Honduran pastors insisted that it was the missionary’s job to start new churches. But at the rate we were going, that would have taken two or three thousand years to plant churches in all the villages in our area. So we had another meeting with those pastors.
I explained that a mission agency is not God’s choice to make churches reproduce. He wants churches to produce churches. I told them that I was not going to plant any more churches, and that I would help them do so.
The pastors drew on a large piece of cardboard a rustic map of the villages and cities in the area. Each worker signed his name beside those towns for which his church would be responsible. Each worker prayerfully committed himself to mobilizing a church-planting task group from his church. That proved a turning point in the work; God used it to give to the pastors a vision for church multiplication. The national workers were in charge, and I would be their servant.
How can you help your home church to develop a task group with a mentality for church reproduction? Church-based task groups sent by a loving, caring church, or by several churches working together, usually have a high view of their church’s ability to reproduce. They see reproduction as normal. If task group members will work together before going overseas, harmonizing their gifts and building relationships, then they will have an advantage. Workers sent out by their church usually maintain strong accountability to it. Even in Western churches, God is awakening a vision of church reproduction that take Acts 13:1-3 seriously. Mission agencies can more easily mobilize for church reproduction those workers that are sent as task groups from a church or from several churches in partnership.
Please take a moment now to plan how you and your coworkers with the task group will expedite your plans.
15C. Arrange for Bivocational Workers to Serve with Task Groups
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
Paul the apostle, like his employers Aquila and Priscilla, worked with their hands to support themselves. Aquila and Priscilla were permanent 'tentmakers' and had churches meeting in their home in at least three cities--Rome (Romans 16:5), Ephesus (1 Corinthians 16:8, 19) and Corinth (Acts 18:).
If your church cannot support members who are gifted as apostles, this does not mean that it has to stop sending them. Neither does it mean that you must seek financial aid from other churches. Self-supporting, bivocational work is an option for those who are gifted as apostles. Having secular work is the best way to work among many, perhaps most, of the remaining neglected peoples of the world. Therefore, consider asking businessmen in your church, together with others who have had cross-cultural experience, to develop plans for your "tentmakers" to support themselves fully or in part while on their mission field. Be creative!
Be wise when combining business with church planting. As a general rule, pastors and missionaries make poor businessmen. Likewise, businessmen often make poor pastors and church planters. One solution is to work as partners in the spirit of 1 Corinthians 12, not alone, each one doing what God has gifted him to do. They may both work in the church as well as the business, but the main overseer of each activity is the one with the corresponding ability.
Does your church--or a church of those you train--commission bivocational workers? If not, please think now of people who might serve effectively this way, and pray for guidance. Let your people know that the option is biblical.
15D. Provide Unbiased Mission Career Counseling
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
Help your home church to arrange career counseling to be done by a mentor who is unbiased. A career mentor must be one who has no motive to recruit for his favorite agency, training approach, method or field. Otherwise, missionary candidates, advised only by recruiters and promoters of mission agencies and training institutions, will continue to be channeled by default into existing programs and will be sent to fields already well evangelized.
Do not perpetuate the present imbalance. Most new missionaries go to fields that already have indigenous, national churches that are fully capable of reaching the rest of their people. Too few missionaries enter those areas where authorities are hostile, even though that is where the greatest need is, where the response is often greater, and where most of the remaining, totally neglected populations dwell. A career advisor must honestly inform potential missionaries of all options. For more about this see Chapter 18 Mentoring Potential Church Planters, Evangelists and Missionaries.
Stop a moment to think about who might serve as an unbiased mission career counselor for your workers. Who in your area has knowledge of the different avenues of service, and is not merely recruiting for their own organization or field?
15E. Help Workers to Love and Esteem God’s Church
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
Church planters must love the church and its ministries in order to plant healthy daughter churches. Some workers have had a negative experience in a stagnant church, or have never attended a warm, active church. They lack a clear concept of what they are planting. Other workers in church planting task groups come from Christian organizations that are not churches; some of these workers have a strong anti-church bias and fail to recognize it. These need serious training for church planting and need to experience a good church model. They cannot gain all the necessary church planting skills in a classroom.
For people who lack solid experience in a loving church with normal church body life, you can create a temporary training church. Let them practice leading small group worship including the Lord’s Supper, family-oriented evangelism and apprenticing leaders on the job.
Some schools provide lectures on different aspects of church planting. If their students lack experience in a reproductive church, then lectures alone will not prepare them. The teaching may be excellent, but a live model is also essential for workers who will help churches to reproduce. Practicing one’s spiritual gift — in this case the gift of teaching by a lecturer — without harmonizing it with the use of other gifts given to the church body, is a bad model that hinders church reproduction. Speakers who present evangelism, community development, or other ministries without integrating it in the church body as 1 Corinthians 12 requires, can make it harder for students to plant churches, even though their teaching content is accurate.
If there are several people in your church, who have had sad church experiences or have been taught to distrust the church, you may need to form a special group for them. You might do the following:
Do your people and coworkers love the church? If not, pray and plan now how you will help them to practice and enjoy loving church body life.
15F. Pray for God’s Help and Plan to Grow by Multiplication as Well as by Addition
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
Most church planters find it helpful to draw a map showing their vision. Please, fetch a large piece of paper and do so right now.
Find how the mother church at Antioch commissioned its apostles and how they remained accountable to her:
While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, 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. Acts 13:2-3 (NIV)
From Attila they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed. On arriving there, they gathered the church together and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. And they stayed there a long time with the disciples. Acts 14:26-28 (NIV)
Church planting is essential to accomplish widespread evangelism for several reasons:
Do not be tempted by the false success syndrome that shouts "bigger is better." The hard fact is that the percentage of ministry time given to evangelism and other shepherding ministries in proportion to the membership decreases drastically as churches grow larger and become well funded. The average member of a very large with hundreds or thousands of members does almost no evangelism. Most people who join a very large church are already Christians, being attracted from smaller churches that cannot compete with the bigger church’s expensive, more attractive programs.
Missionaries with ample training and resources sometimes hesitate to start a new church, because they feel the need for more money, educated workers or official backing. They are suspicious when they see uneducated converts start churches without those advantages. New believers who simply trust the Holy Spirit to convert their friends in another neighborhood or town often give birth to new churches quite apart from any missionary’s efforts.
A church that gives a good part of its time, ministry, prayer and funds to give birth to daughter churches will, within a generation, easily win ten times as many people to Christ than if it had concentrated all its energies inward. Multiplication is exponential, like a chain reaction. It can create a movement of people towards Christ. Multiplication happens where pastors let it happen with a sacrificial spirit, begging their strongest tithe-payers and worship leaders to leave the mother church and help to start a daughter church nearby.
Please take a moment now to ask God to show you how you can help your church, or other churches in your area, to reproduce in the normal way.
15G. Give Missionary Trainees Practice in Effective Witnessing
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
A sending church must prepare its missionaries to witness for Jesus with the power of the Holy Spirit. It perseveres in intercession for the unsaved, trusting God’s power to transform those who will receive His forgiveness (Romans 1:14-17). It communicates the essential points of the gospel. This is the Good News, the historical facts about Jesus’ miraculous life, sacrificial death, and life-giving resurrection. These are the truths that the Holy Spirit uses to bring people to faith and repentance in all cultures (Luke 24:44-48; 1 Corinthians 15:1-8).
A sending church can train its foreign missionary task groups by planting churches among nearby ethnic groups, thereby fulfilling the Great Commission in its own "Samaria" (Acts 1:8).
A sending church should look among its member for those with the itchy feet, their apostles who gifted to go across cultures and multiply churches. They may be businessmen, engineers, teachers, or common laborers. A congregation should imitate the Antioch church which recognized and sent out the first long-range apostolic task group, Paul, Barnabas, and John Mark, with prayer, fasting, and laying on of hands (Acts 13:1-5).
A good sending church will seek a healthy balance between career workers and short term ones. A short term is good for testing workers’ spiritual gifts, enriching their vision and surveying a field. Short-term workers can also help with temporary projects that do not require much language and cultural sensitivity. But career workers are needed to foster a movement of church reproduction, workers with the commitment to go and do what Jesus says, no matter how long will take.
Take a moment to think about the workers that your church plans to send to another field. Are they witnessing effectively? If not, plan now how you or your trainees will help prepare them.
15H. Arrange for Activities That Will Help Your Church to Reproduce
Cited from Church Multiplication Guide, Patterson and Scoggins, William Carey Library, Pasadena, chapter 15.
It helps to develop a checklist or Progress Chart of key activities for a sending church. Do that together with your coworkers. The list below is just an example; your chart will have more items that fit the particular circumstances of your church and of some neglected people group. Note items to which you aim to give more attention.
Instruct the entire congregation to obey Jesus’ Great Commission to disciple all nations, by cooperating in some way. Ask all teachers and small group leaders to help communicate this duty.
Arrange for people in all ministries, classes, departments or groups to pray, give and share information for their missionary outreach. Help them to identify the areas where Jesus says to be witnesses (Acts 1:8), Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.
Jerusalem = our own local race and culture.
Judea = people of our culture in nearby communities.
Samaria = peoples of other cultures nearby.
Ends of the earth = distant, neglected people groups.
Study neglected fields to adopt, to pray for, and in which to start churches.
For example, encourage businessmen to start, advise or serve businesses that provide entrance and residence in otherwise inaccessible fields.
Mobilize missionary candidates in local cross-cultural church planting and New Testament mentoring. Help all ages to participate in some kind of mission service. Children, too, can learn about, pray for and prepare for future mission service of some kind. Let them participate frequently in mission related projects.
Task group members must remain accountable to their church to help churches to reproduce in their chosen field and to serve in a ministry that utilizes their spiritual gifts and natural strengths. A church-based task group might include members from like-minded sister churches.
After prayer — with fasting if you like — lay hands on those whom the Holy Spirit separates for foreign outreach, as the Antioch church did in Acts 13:1-3.
Continually pray for the task group and the people it trains.
Keep giving sacrificially to support missionaries and meet needs as they arise.
Fields of restricted access need career "tentmaker" church planters who are experienced in cross-cultural church planting, including businessmen. Small businesses especially can enable church planters to be in touch with the common people who are generally the most responsive. Self-employment makes the missionaries believable with the local people. If they see you living comfortably without earning your living, then they will assume you are a secret agent, or are paid to make proselytes from their religion, a racketeer or simply lazy.
Are there items above that need attention in your church, or the churches of those you train? If so, please take a moment to plan how you and your coworkers will deal with what is lacking, to help your people to mobilize their church as a sending church.