Winning the World

28 Wi nn i ng the Wor l d: Fac i l i tat i ng Urban Chur ch P l ant i ng Movement s

b. Church growth movements tend to direct missionaries to “responsive fields” at the expense of unreached and what may appear to be unresponsive fields, p. 25.

c. Church growth movements advocate pouring resources (especially missionaries) into responsive harvest fields; in CPMs missionaries are dominant at first and less and less dominant while the new believers become the primary harvesters and leaders of the movement, p. 25.

5. They are not just a divine miracle , but CPMs recognize the vital role that Christians play in the success or failure of these movements, p. 26.

6. They are not a Western invention , that is, they didn’t originate in the West, nor are they limited to one type of culture or another, p. 26.

7. They are not an end in themselves but rather a means to an end, merely “a way that God is drawing massive numbers of lost persons into saving community with himself,” p. 27.

D. Why is the study and understanding of CPMs so important?

1. They are important because God is mightily at work in them (e.g., see the numbers on p. 16).

2. We need to learn all we can of CPMs because of the critical role God has reserved for us to play in launching them. “The difference between CPMs and near -CPMs is often the difference between God’s people properly aligning themselves with what he is doing or failing to align themselves with what he is doing,” p. 28.