Lately, many people have wanted to know how in the last two years Loving All Peoples has planted 100 Discovery Groups, most of which were started in the U.S. and are now spreading to other countries and cities. So, I thought I would share these keys that have been so influential for us and then follow it up with several lessons that I have learned that hopefully will be helpful for you. We are incredibly grateful to be at this stage and we pray and ask for your prayers for the sustainability of these groups and the continued multiplication. For those of you who do not know, a Discovery Group is a group of people who are discovering God together through the Bible, learning how to be Church together, how to love and serve each other, and together how to fulfill the Great Commission. If you have any questions we would love for you to contact us.
There have been TWO VITAL KEYS that have been incredibly effective for us in church planting.
1. The most effective way we have planted churches inside a community or a certain people group is to have leaders from that community/people group do the church planting! We cannot overstate this enough. We didn’t see breakthrough in planting churches until we started empowering people from within the communities/people groups instead of trying to do all the work ourselves. Cross cultural work is a major obstacle when it comes to church planting. An even bigger obstacle is realizing that there are others out there who can do the church planting better than us. The transition is humbling. The transition is difficult. The transition is vital!
2. Another key component was to build a multicultural team who work with our target people groups/communities. We call these team members Insiders. Yes, it is going to take a considerable amount of time, effort, training, and resources to build a multicultural team. But when it comes to church planting and reaching people, we were always taught to ask this important question: “What is it going to take?” And for us, the answer was to build a multicultural team. That might sound overwhelming to some, but we know a lot of people are stuck when it comes to church planting. The temptation is, we get excited about church planting and we go recruit and train a lot of people thinking that is the way to plant a lot of churches, but we do not think about the most effective ways to plant churches.
We do not have it all figured out. We are constantly learning from others and we have a desire for people to learn from our failures and successes for the purpose of reaching people. We will be posting a series, “Church Planting Lessons”, so watch out for those or follow our blog. Thanks!
