Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ROLOGUE • 15

“What Is the Reference for This?” One of the problems of an anthology of materials within a set community is that, if you do not know the special terms, acronyms, and references which the community is acquainted with, you can lose the original meaning. To comprehend the meaning, you need to know the referent, the initial object or thing to which the reference looks back to. Unfortunately, with more than thirty years having passed, many of the individual articles and the original referents no longer exist; page numbers may be superfluous, reference to articles and essays may be irrelevant, and specific mentionings of previous materials no longer have any foundation. While we have sought to make this perusal of material easier to digest by citing the original referents we could find, alas, there will be citations within many of the documents where the original is lost, misplaced, renamed, or subsumed into another document. Forgive us when you encounter this phenomenon; our desire is to help you access these materials, include the referents where we could, and hope that the original documents are clear enough to navigate through the materials. One notable exception on the original referent has to do with the letters CPM which means “church planting movement(s).” Also, the citations about C1 , C2 , and C3 refer to our thinking about the sub-strata of cultures that interact in the overall American context. (You can understand the original source for this thinking and discussion in a document entitled Interaction of Class, Culture, and Race .) The numerous references to the C1 and related cultures go back to our forty-year use of this thinking grid to comprehend and discuss the implications of culture in urban missions. Please refer to this diagram for our most direct communication on these cultural interactions. Another issue you should be aware of as you go through this Anthology relates to the use of designations and terms . Since Planting Churches among the City’s Poor is essentially an anthology, we sought to preserve our earlier documents in their original form, and did not go back through the documents and revise the language used in our earliest schools. This is not a major difficulty, however, because although we use different terms than our earlier schools, we have maintained the same functions for the positions. Two terms need to be defined: • In previous materials, the term used for the church planting supervisor or mentor to whom the team leader reported or received input from was called a Multiple Team Leader or MTL . Now, in this volume and in our schools, we refer to this role as Coach . All references to MTL or Multiple Team Leader in this