Church Planting Movements

I took the opportunity to re-read David Garrison's Church Planting Movements booklet. Not only is this little booklet very inspirational, it also provides a simple guideline to rapidly reproductive church planting. You can download a pdf of the booklet at the link above.

David identifies ten key elements in a CPM:

• Prayer - the vitality of the missionaries personal life is key
• Abundant Sowing - cpms do not emerge where evangelism is rare or absent
• Intentionality - must be deliberately engaged in church planting
• Scriptural Authority - Bible (not training or men) must be the guiding source doctrine, church polity and life itself.
• Local Leadership - not the church planter, but the local leadership
• Lay Leadership - key leaders emerge from the people being reached. They reflect the same demographic
• Cell or House Churches - vast majority of the cpm churches are small. 10-30 meeting in homes or other locations not associated with traditional church.
• Churches Planting Churches - "members have to believe that reproduction is natural and that no external aids are needed to start a new church." (or movement I might add).
• Rapid reproduction - "When rapid reproduction is taking place, you can be assured that the churches are unencumbered by nonessential elements and the laity are fully empowered to participate."
• Healthy Churches - worship, missions, evangelism, fellowship, discipleship are all taking place.

So how does this transfer to 'movements everywhere' on university campuses in the US and abroad. It seems that we have a few of these key elements, but we may unintentionally prevent a few others. Prayer, scripture, health and decent sowing exist. We have a degree of planting intentionality, but more of our efforts seemed geared toward growing what currently exists. We struggle to see movements start new movements (in Campus Crusade language, a movement correlates with what David calls a church) and we do not rely on student leadership over our direction and coaching. We have very little expectation that we could plant a new student group and then come back to find that it has planted six more. In my experience, this is basically unheard of . . . but it does not seem that far fetched if we expect it to be so.