Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ART I: D EVELOPING U RBAN C ONGREGATIONS • 29

This strategy created indigenous, self-sustaining and self-reproducing churches that were part of the local culture but like the mission station strategy, the indigenous church strategy faced lingering problems such as transporting Western denominationalism, syncretism with indigenous religions, and failure to balance evangelism and social action. 17 In spite of these difficulties, the indigenous church strategy has been extremely dynamic. It has produced healthy national churches and genuine indigenous leadership for those church bodies. Therefore, in the years following World War II, most faith missions have again adopted the strategy of “indigenous church planting.” The practice of indigenous church planting attempts to follow the example of the Apostle Paul in establishing self-multiplying indigenous churches. The Apostle Paul had amazing success in planting a network of self-sustaining churches, some of which were evangelized, taught and commissioned within a few months. This was true even though Paul had no advantages over present-day missionaries. 18 He faced many of the same moral, social class and cultural barriers that we face. And he used the same resources available to us – God’s Word and Spirit. The Apostle Paul focused on a simple and brief content of preaching and teaching and exercised great faith in God and in his new converts. Paul trusted that God’s Spirit would continue to teach the young church after he moved on and was unavailable to help them. Modern missionaries who employ Paul’s strategy emphasize several church-planting essentials: an absolute dependence upon the work of the Holy Spirit, the simple gospel message communicated with a view to transforming people who respond, the calling and church-planting vision of the church planter and the need to plant in fertile soil among people who are willing to embrace Christ. When these essentials are there, church-planting will result. 19

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17 See J. Herbert Kane, A Concise History of the Christian World Mission (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1982), pp. 161-164

18 See Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 1-95

19 See Charles Brock, The Principles and Practice of Indigenous Church Planting (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1981), pp. 21-28