The Timothy Conference

T H E T I M O T H Y C O N F E R E N C E

2. PLANT - The Stages of Missionary Activity.

How to PLANT a Church Across Cultural Barriers

PREPARE

Form a church-plant team

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Pray

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• Select a target area and population

• Do demographic and ethnographic studies

LAUNCH

Recruit and train volunteers

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• Make contact with the target population

• Share the Gospel (evangelistic events, door-to-door evangelism, relational evangelism, media, etc)

ASSEMBLE

• Form cell groups, Bible studies, etc. to follow-up new believers, to continue evangelism, and to identify and train emerging leaders • Announce the birth of a new church to the neighborhood and meet regularly for pubic worship, instruction and fellowship

NURTURE

• Develop individual and group discipleship

• Fill key roles in the church; identify and use spiritual gifts

TRANSITION

• Transfer leadership to indigenous leaders so they become self-governing, self-supporting and self-reproducing (appoint elders and pastors) • Finalize decisions about denominational or other affiliations

Commission the church

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• Foster association with World Impact and other urban churches for fellowship, support and mission ministry

Our PLANT acrostic is a way to organize the material found in Acts which Hesselgrave refers to as the Pauline cycle. It is easily memorized, easy to communicate and gives all World Impact church-planters a common language to use in discussing what may be very different types of church plants. The most essential point about the PLANT model is this: It is a way to organize the BIBLICAL pattern. In other words, this is not “World Impact’s way of doing church planting” but rather World Impact’s way of describing how Pauline cross-cultural church planting is done.

Notice that while the nature of the task is defined by the PLANT acrostic, the way of accomplishing those goals is left open. . . .

No model, whether circular or linear, will ever fully approximate reality. It helps us in our thinking and planning but it has limitations. Some things to remember while using the PLANT model include. . .

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