Shining the spotlight on the IMB's church planting movement

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The first in a two-part series on international mission work.

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RICHMOND, Va. — In his book, Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World, David Garrison, the International Mission Board’s Regional Leader for South Asia, tells how the first- century explosion of Christianity has been reborn in the 21st century.

The sudden eruption of hundreds of churches and the baptism of multiplied thousands of new believers among certain people groups has many Southern Baptists rejoicing in the Lord and others scrutinizing the phenomenon with skepticism.

Garrison defines a church planting movement as “a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.”

Garrison reports that 30,000 believers are baptized in China every day and in Qing’an County of Heilongjiang Province 236 new churches were planted in one month. He also asserts, “In the summer of 2001, Chinese house church leaders reported baptizing 500,000 in the province of Inner Mongolia over a 12 month period.”

Similar reports have come from Cambodia, India, and certain people groups like the Maasai in Africa where 15 percent of the 600,000 Maasai in Kenya now profess to be followers of Christ.

“During the decade of the 1990s,” Garrison proclaims, “Christians in a Latin American country overcame relentless government persecution to grow from 235 churches to more than 4,000 churches with 40,000 converts awaiting baptism.”

The most remarkable statistical information provided by Garrison is relative to the church planting movement in the Muslim world. He declares, “More Muslims have come to faith in Christ in the last two decades than at any other time in history.” From the mountains of North Africa to the war-ravaged Himalayan state of Kashmir hundreds of thousands of Muslims gather in thousands of house churches, or Isa Jamaats (Jesus Groups).

Garrison begins the first chapter of his book by citing the promise of Habakkuk 1:5: “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.” He declares, “Today this ancient prophecy is being fulfilled in ways never before dreamed possible. This book reveals how God is turning millions to new life in Jesus Christ through the miracle of a Church Planting Movement.”

In his book Garrison contends that the CPM reproduces rapidly, outstripping the population growth rate as the movement races toward reaching the entire people group.

 

Sidestepping tradition

It is at this point of the CPM that some of the missionaries on the field have begun to register their most vehement complaints. They contend that the rapid reproduction facet of the CPM sidesteps the traditional method of planting churches through a series of sequential steps: accept an assignment, go through an orientation process, learn the language, develop relationships, evangelize, disciple, draw converts into a congregation, and train leaders before starting all over again.

However, Garrison is not attempting to fashion a church planting strategy including this facet of rapid reproduction as much as he is simply reporting what he has seen happen in China and in other countries where churches are erupting in an accelerated succession.

Jerry Rankin, president of the International Mission Board, defends this facet of rapid reproduction by stating, “We believe the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. When that gospel is anointed by the power of the Spirit and communicated cross-culturally in an understandable way, it produces a radical, life-changing experience that must be shared. You can’t contain it.

“Therefore,” Rankin added, “when one living in spiritual darkness, hopelessness, and despair suddenly discovers salvation and hope in Christ in a life-changing experience, it cannot be contained and it is shared with family, friends, and neighbors, and often in spite of persecution.

“When the Holy Spirit draws people to Christ through the proclamation of the gospel, He will draw them together into a fellowship of believers. They have that commonality,” the IMB president stated.

 

Quantity versus quality

George Robinson, a member of Hebron Baptist Church in Dacula and a former IMB missionary in Southeast Asia, remarked, “The question of quantity versus quality has been around for a long time. From what I have seen and experienced in CPMs, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Sure, there have been times when well-intentioned people have sacrificed church health on the altar of church growth, but we have to remember that the church is a living organism made up of people that have been made spiritually alive.

“A cursory study of biology tells that when the human body stops growing, it starts dying,” Robinson continued. “A similar study will show adolescence (youth) is when healthy reproduction is enabled. The older the human body gets, the more complicated reproduction gets. The same can be said of the living body of Christ. As local churches grow older they often crystallize and reproduction becomes more painful, unlikely, or impossible.”

George Patterson in his Church Multiplication Guide professes, “Church history, Scripture, and current field observations reveal that church multiplication is God’s norm. Sterile church bodies that fail to reproduce are the abnormal ones.”

The IMB leadership rightly acknowledges that no rapid reproduction of churches can be contrived or manipulated by human ingenuity or programming. An explosive eruption of legitimate churches is the work of the Holy Spirit; but often takes years of patient planting until a rich harvest is reaped.

Clyde Meador, IMB executive vice president, addressed this issue in an article entitled The Left Side of the Graph. He indicates that when measuring the exponential growth of the CPM the charting of the movement typically begins only a very few years before the CPM begins to take off.

“Most church planting movements have a ‘left side of the graph’ lasting 20 or 30 or even 100 years or more,” Meador writes. “That ignored left side of the graph represents many years of faithful labor by often unheralded servants of the Lord.”

Illustrating his point, Meador explains, “I have had the privilege of witnessing a few of the great movements in recent decades. One of the most dramatic church planting movements in Asia has grown to a reported 900,000 believers, with the number of house churches possibly moving toward 100,000. This movement began in the early 90’s, with a major focal point being a group of 28 or 29 churches. The graph of that CPM is thrilling.

“Yet it is essential that we realize that those 28 or 29 churches were the result of almost one hundred years of faithful service by a small group of missionaries from a European Baptist sending agency. The left side of the graph was long for that people group, and foundational for what was to come. That kind of history is typical in many church planting movements.”

One missionary who viewed the CPM with a cautious eye said, “Missionaries not experiencing the rapid reproduction of churches get discouraged. This methodology sets up 99 percent of missionaries for certain failure, because if no CPM occurs, most missionaries feel as though they have failed.”

 

Memo to field personnel

In his memo to all field personnel, Meador stated, “We who are missions leaders have talked so much about CPMs that sometimes we have caused missionaries who are not in the midst of a CPM to feel that they are second-class missionaries, or that they are not adequately carrying out their responsibilities. Yet certainly the great majority of missionaries – probably 98 per- cent or more – are not yet experiencing a CPM among the population whom they are seeking to reach.

“For instance, the missionaries of the International Mission Board are working among 1,200 people groups. Yet, there are fewer than thirty ongoing church planting movements among those people groups. [The great majority of our] missionaries are living on the left side of the graph.”

Critics of the CPM state that the rapid reproduction of churches does not allow for the development of adequately-trained leaders or significant discipleship programs and the result is churches going off into heresy.

Rankin responded to the criticism by saying, “God’s Word teaches that the Spirit of God gives the gifts that are necessary for the growth and edification of the body of believers: and while you don’t turn a congregation over to novices, you must learn to practice what God’s Word says in Acts 14: 23.”

The aforementioned verse says, “And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed.” When Paul had ordained the elders or pastors he commended them to the Lord not because he had confidence in them, but because he had confidence in the Lord to anoint them and equip them for service.

Don Dent, IMB regional leader for the Pacific Rim, related, “Every time I hear Baptists criticizing these concepts, I just want to remind them of our history. It wasn’t long ago that our forefathers were thrown in prison because they hadn’t been to seminary, because they didn’t have the sanction of a certain body of believers. Back in the frontier, wherever people went, they started churches.”

So the argument that programmed training, formal education, and some kind of official sanction ensures theological correctness for burgeoning churches is not necessarily valid.

 

Heresy from older, stagnant churches

Patterson weighs in on this argument by saying that history shows that most heresy emerges from older, stagnant churches, rather than rapidly reproducing ones. The 1960’s and 70’s in our own Convention should be proof enough of that.

Explaining how the CPM phenomenon has been observed, Rankin added, “This is not really something we devised, but something we saw happening in China. When someone leads a friend to Christ in China, he trains that new convert on the spot to go and share his faith just the way it was shared with him. There is accountability and an insistence that the new believer come back and report on his witnessing experience the next day.

“When the new believer has won enough people to Christ to begin a Bible study they begin to meet and subsequently begin other Bible studies or house churches.

“Why do we say that someone must be a believer for a year or go through some kind of a training session before they are mature enough to witness to those who are lost?” Rankin asked.

Interestingly, IMB statistical information indicates that last year there were 509,000 new believers in discipleship training. That number exceeds the number of new believers who were baptized. The IMB president stated, “That probably includes some new believers from the previous year, but there is no duplication. These are new believers in churches who are being discipled subsequent to their baptism.”

Then Rankin asked, “What do you think that ratio would be in the normal church in the United States or in all of our churches – the ratio between those who are baptized and those who are actually in discipleship classes?”

Rankin opined, “Our missionaries are taught to multiply themselves by training others to disciple as he disciples. It’s the II Timothy 2: 2 approach. The problem with the church in America is it’s often artificial. A professional has got to do it with special training and funding. We’ve just totally forgotten that the DNA of a church should be to multiply itself.”

 

Growth by multiplication

Garrison insists that another facet of the CPM is multiplication. Critics of this part of the Church Planting Movement are willing to admit that there is a flurry of new churches being established, but protest that many of them are short-lived and soon become non-existent.

The Global Research Department of the IMB provides statistical information that dispels that notion. For example, the number of churches increased globally by 21.5 percent in 2005 from 111,286 to 135, 252 for a net gain of 23, 966 churches. Since 2001 the number of reported churches has more than doubled, reflecting a five-year average annual growth rate of 18.1 percent.

One critic stated, “I would predict that if someone were to take the thousands of church plants that have been reported to trustees and try to pinpoint them on a map – that maybe 5 to 15 percent of them could be found and it would be impossible to locate the others.”

However, the criticism seems to be invalid simply because the leadership of the IMB insists upon a meticulous and precise accounting of churches in their Annual Statistical Reports. The substantial increase in the number of churches reported annually belies the possibility of such attrition. Furthermore, each church that is reported must meet the standards of the IMB definition of a church. Outreach groups and preaching points are not recognized or counted as church starts or plants.

 

Church planting mentality encouraged

Those who have viewed the church planting movement with a critical analysis also contend that the IMB presently seeks to commission only those missionaries who want to be church planters and that anyone else who might apply for missionary service is looked upon with less favor.

In an interview with The Christian Index, the IMB president replied, “That is a distorted perception and we’ve got the statistics to prove otherwise. We are appointing more medical personnel, more agricultural development personnel, media people, humanitarian workers, and theological educators than ever before. However, we do want our missionary personnel to go out with a church planting mentality.”

“If I’m working in a hospital doing medical work or helping somewhere in disaster relief,” Rankin asserted, “Why would I deprive those people of something of eternal significance and fail to share the gospel?

“In fact there are some places that we cannot send people in as missionaries, but we send them as business consultants, computer analysts, or maybe as educators who teach English as a second language, but the ultimate purpose is to share the gospel.”

Rankin continued, “There were cycles in our missions history where those assignments and ministries became an end in themselves and we seemed to forget that our whole purpose was to gain a presence in order to impact lostness. Baker James Cauthen and Keith Parks, former presidents of the Foreign Mission Board (precursor to the IMB), emphasized evangelism that results in the establishment of churches and that is the theme of this administration.”

Rankin indicated that all too often we try to impose our Americanized conception of congregational life upon churches in other cultures. We tend to think a church must have certain programs, organizational components, and some kind of structure with officers and parliamentary law governing the body. He stressed that in other countries the important thing is that the Holy Spirit draws saved people together into a “koinonia” or fellowship.

 

Worldwide strategy

Recalling his service as a field missionary, Rankin commented, “When we consolidated South Asia with Southeast Asia, my second term on the field, we had our hospital in India. They were having great evangelistic results, but they weren’t seeing any significant church growth because all they had were medical personnel. They were not suppose to have church planters in the country, so they asked for an experienced church planter from Southeast Asia to come over and help develop a strategy for planting churches.

“So, we went to India to help them develop a strategy for training their missionaries and national evangelists. We discovered that they were using a strategy that was being used all over the world. They were subsidizing pastors, building church buildings, and implementing programs. That was the method used to plant a church. However, in the use of that method the budget limitations soon become restrictive and you max out on what you are able to do.

“Our first 10 years of Southern Baptist work in India through the Bangalore Baptist Hospital resulted in 21 church starts. They had built every church building. They were continuing to pay every pastor. Consequently, they could only start new churches as they had additional funds.

“However, when I went to India, there was an indigenous movement of churches multiplying. This movement didn’t require a trained, paid pastor. The church was simply a baptized group of believers gifted of God to worship, witness, and serve.

“It was not long until these churches began to plant other churches and in this kind of responsive environment it is easy to start churches. Within ten years the 21 churches in that part of Indonesia had multiplied to 440 churches because there was no obstacle, no dependency on some outside mission agency and churches began to spring up everywhere.”

In Rankin’s book To the Ends of the Earth he quotes Matthew 24: 14 where Jesus said, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.”

In the book the IMB president also says, “The kingdom, which began with Jesus and his small band of disciples, is to grow until it encompasses the whole earth.” He speaks of the need to “expand our potential and accelerate the harvest.”

Some have read Rankin’s book or heard his message and concluded that his eschatology drives his missiology. The IMB president insists, “As people groups are reached with the gospel the prophecy of Matthew 24:14 is being fulfilled, but we don’t have anything to do with it. It is all a matter of God’s providence. We can’t change God’s time frame. There is nothing we can do to hasten the fulfillment of the Great Commission. In fact, Jesus said to his disciples, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, but you are to be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

Obviously, any large agency or corporation is not without flaws and frailties. The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention is not perfectly proficient in every way, but it remains the greatest Christian missionary force in history. The Church Planting Movement discussed in these paragraphs may be vulnerable to some criticism, but all those who view the movement with an analytical eye must make sure they don’t bypass the obvious evidence of God’s approval.

It would be tragic to fit into the role of one who critiques and condemns and miss the most important question: What if this really is of God? The prayer of Augustine would be a good prayer for the hypercritical person: “Lord, deliver me from the lust of self-vindication.”

 

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