CHAPTER 99
David Garrison
David Garrison served as the associate vice president of global strategy for the Southern Baptist International Mission Board for five years. His work with global missions has taken him to more than 80 nations, and he has taught at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Hong Kong Baptist University. His books include The Nonresidential Missionary, Something New under the Sun, and Church planting Movements.
From Church planting Movements: how God is redeeming a Lost World, 2004. Used by permission.
Look to the nations, watch and be utterly amazed for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told. (Hab 1:5)
Many years ago this verse came to life in ways I never dreamed possible. It was the time of year when missionaries sent in their annual reports to agency headquarters. Missionaries are busy people and rarely enthusiastic about stopping long enough to tell how many new believers were baptized, how many new churches were started, or how many unreached people groups they had introduced to the gospel. Each year these reports typically show modest growth in each of these key areas.
But this year was different. David and Jan Watson, serving in India, made an incredible claim. Their report listed nearly a hundred cities, towns, and villages with new churches and thousands of new believers.
Headquarters was skeptical. “This can’t be,” they said. “Either you’ve misunderstood the question or you’re not telling us the truth.”
The words stung, but David held his tongue. “Come and see,” he said.
Later that year, a survey team headed by Watson’s supervisor arrived in India to investigate. They visited Lucknow, Patna, Delhi, Varanasi, and numerous towns and villages listed in David’s report. The supervisor later commented, “I went in very doubtful, but we were wrong. Everywhere we went it was exactly as Watson had reported. God was doing something amazing there.”
Amazing . . . difficult to believe. Those are the very words of Habakkuk. They took on a surprising new relevance. “Look to the nations, watch and be utterly amazed for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told.”
Amazing Reports of Movements
A year later, another report from Southeast Asia described a similar eruption of new churches. The following year, missionaries serving in Latin America witnessed the same sort of spontaneous multiplication of hundreds of new churches. Two more similar reports came in from China. We began to refer to these amazing phenomena as church-planting movements.
The reports haven’t stopped coming. As He promised, God is doing something extraordinary in our day. As He draws a lost world to Himself, church-planting movements appear to be a large part of how He’s doing it.
In East Asia, a missionary reported:
I launched my three-year plan in November. My vision was to see two hundred new churches started among my people group over the next three years. But four months later, we had already reached that goal. After only six months, we had already seen 360 churches planted and more than ten thousand new believers baptized! Now I’m asking God to enlarge my vision.
Chinese Christians in Qing’an County of Heilongjiang Province planted 236 new churches in a single month. One church-planting movement in China brought about fifteen thousand new churches and baptized 160,000 new believers in a single year.
“Look to the nations, watch and be utterly amazed for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told.”
Christians in a Latin American country overcame relentless government persecution to grow from 235 churches to more than four thousand churches with more than thirty thousand converts awaiting baptism.
A pastor in Western Europe wrote:
Last year my wife and I started fifteen new house churches. As we left for a six-month stateside assignment, we wondered what we’d find when we returned. It’s wild! We can verify at least thirty churches now, but I believe that it could be two or even three times that many.
After centuries of hostility to Christianity, many Central Asian Muslims are now embracing the gospel. In Kazakhstan, the past decade has seen more than thirteen thousand Kazakhs come to faith, worshiping in more than three hundred new Kazakh churches.
A missionary in Africa reported: “It took us thirty years to plant four churches in this country. We’ve started sixty-five new churches in the last nine months.”
In the heart of India, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, one church-planting movement produced four thousand new churches in less than seven years. Elsewhere in India, the Kui people of Orissa started nearly one thousand new churches during the 1990s. In 1999, they baptized more than eight thousand new believers. At one time they were starting a new church every twenty-four hours.
In Outer Mongolia, a church-planting movement saw more than ten thousand new followers. Another movement in Inner Mongolia counted more than fifty thousand new believers.
Over the past few decades, many millions of new believers have entered Christ’s kingdom through church-planting movements. We’ve seen them in every part of the world.
What Are Church-Planting Movements?
A concise definition of church-planting movements is a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.
The definition above attempts to describe what is happening in church-planting movements rather than trying to prescribe what could or should happen. After studying scores of these movements, we’ve come to identify four characteristics: rapid multiplication, the planting of churches, indigeneity, and occurring within a people group or its equivalent.
1. Multiplies Rapidly
A church-planting movement multiplies rapidly. Within a very short time, newly planted churches are already starting new churches. The next generation of churches usually follow the same pattern of rapid reproduction.
“How rapid is rapid?” you may ask. Perhaps the best answer is, “Faster than most would think possible.” Though the rate varies from place to place, church-planting movements always outstrip the population growth rate as they race toward reaching the entire people group.
Church-planting movements do not simply add new churches. Instead, they multiply. Surveys of church-planting movements indicate that virtually every church is engaged in starting multiple new churches. Perhaps this is why church-planting movements rarely aim to start handfuls of additional churches in a particular area. Instead, these churches are satisfied with nothing less than a vision to reach their entire people group or city.
2. Indigenous
A church-planting movement is indigenous. Indigenous literally means generated from within, as opposed to started by outsiders. In church-planting movements, the first church or churches may be started by outsiders, but very quickly the momentum shifts from the outsiders to the insiders. Consequently, within a short time, the new believers coming to Christ in church-planting movements may not even know that a foreigner was ever involved in the work. In their eyes the movement looks, acts, and feels homegrown.
3. Churches Planting Churches
Church-planting movements are characterized by churches planting churches. Though church planters typically start the first churches, at some point the churches themselves get into the act. When churches continue to plant new churches, which in turn plant even more churches, something changes in the character of the incipient movement. No longer does the mother church control what takes place amidst the great-grandchild churches. When new churches begin to surge with exponential multiplication, a certain critical point is reached. Some have likened that critical moment to a “tipping point,” or to dominoes falling, or to a dam breaking that releases cascading rivers as flowing movements.
When churches continue to plant new churches, which in turn plant even more churches, something changes in the character of the incipient movement.
Every genuine church-planting movement is in some respect an out-of-control movement, which mushrooms with multiplying life from church to church to church. Many near church-planting movements fall short at this critical point, as church planters struggle to control the reproducing churches. But when the momentum of reproducing churches outstrips the ability of the planters to control it, a movement is underway.
4. Within People Groups
Finally, church-planting movements occur within people groups or interrelated population segments. Because church-planting movements involve the communication of the gospel message, they naturally occur within shared language and ethnic boundaries. However, they rarely stop there. As the gospel works its changing power in the lives of these new believers, they take the message of hope to other people groups.
God’s Work and the Vital Role of Christians
In church-planting movements, the role of the missionary or outsider is heaviest at the beginning. Once the people group begins responding, it is vitally important for outsiders to become less and less dominant while the new believers themselves become the primary harvesters and leaders of the movement.
Church-planting movement practitioners have been quick to give the glory for the movement to God, so much so, in fact, that some have described the movements as purely an act of God. “We couldn’t stop it if we wanted to,” one fellow remarked. His humility was admirable but misleading. Reducing a church-planting movement to a purely divine miracle has the effect of dismissing the role of human responsibility. If God alone is producing church-planting movements, then God alone is to blame when there are no church-planting movements.
The truth is God has given Christians vital roles to play in the success or failure of these movements. Over the past few years, we’ve learned that there are many ways to obstruct and even stop church-planting movements. In many instances, well-intentioned activities that are out of step with the ways of God have served to slow or even kill a movement. Church-planting movements are miraculous in the way they transform lives, but they are also quite vulnerable to human tampering.
That is why we must become students of the ways God is at work in these movements. We need to learn how God is using church planters, missionaries, insiders, and outsiders to bring about these movements.
We must also learn what factors can slow, cripple, or even halt church multiplication. To study such factors does not indicate a lack of faith in God’s lordship over salvation history. To study and actively pursue church-planting movements demonstrates that we really do believe in Christ’s commission to “Go and make disciples of all nations.”
As one missionary so aptly put it: “We know the outcome of the story. We know that God will be glorified among all nations. But how this will come to pass? That’s the unknown; that’s the mystery; that’s the adventure.” 