“Global Church Planting—Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication” by Craig Ott and Gene Wilson

This missiology textbook gives a complete look at all stages of mission work and multiplication, from the selecting and forming of a mission team to the unstoppable movements that sometimes occur around the world. I found the book to be balanced and helpful as the authors would often highlight opposing views on numerous topics.
I was happy that the book was not given to overt Biblicism (the tendency to feel obligated to find a biblical passage for every good thought, whether the passage’s point teaches it or not). They did introduce a new category of interpretation to me. They talk about prescriptive, descriptive, and representative passage of the Bible. I was familiar with prescriptive (commands) and descriptive (simply the recounting of events), but not representative. Representative sections of the Bible are when patterns, repetition, and literary devices call typical, instructive practices to our attention. They aren’t commands but we can find value in them. Some examples are the way that the apostles would find local leaders for recently planted churches and strategically use cities as hubs for work.
Another set of categories I learned in this book were three types of church planters—Pastoral Church Planter, Catalytic Church Planter, and Apostolic Church Planter. Pastoral church planters focus on “plant[ing] the church and pastor[ing] it until it is large enough to call and pay its own pastor”. Catalytic church planters have the goal “to plant a church that will become the catalyst for mothering many other churches and launching a movement”. Apostolic church planters work “to multiply churches that are not dependent on the church planter or outside resources”. Although the authors examine all three and show their pros and cons, depending on the situations, they advocate, in the majority of the cases, to strive for an apostolic church planting strategy (91).
I appreciated the clarity and simplicity of the themes highlight throughout the book which focus on reproducibility, local training, and finding the resources in the harvest. These are good quotes to summarize:
• “As we have argued throughout this book, a key to long-term church multiplication is the ability to plant churches using locally available resources and locally sustainable structures” (264).
• “Real multiplication occurs when workers trained by the planters in turn train others” (273).

Best practices for church multiplication:
1.) Immerse your community in prayer
2.) Saturate your community with the gospel.
3.) Cling to God’s Word.
4.) Fight against foreign dependency.
5.) Eliminate all non-reproducible elements.
6.) Live the vision that you with to fulfill.
7.) Build reproduction into every believer and church.
8.) Train all believers to evangelize, disciple and plant churches
9.) Model, assist, watch, leave
10.) Discover what God is going and join him (77).
I was impressed at how often the book encourages prayer as the top priority for church planters and church multiplication. Perhaps a bit of a touch of the law for me personally! Just as a thought experiment, it would be interesting to see how BWM would react if we requested another missionary because we wanted to dedicate more time to prayer. “This new missionary’s third bucket would be to pray.”

Some useful quotes:
An unhelpful, but common opinion that distracts from the training and empowering of all the members: “Be our pastor! That’s what you are trained and paid for” (92).

“Indeed mission history up to our own day has demonstrated time and again that the most dynamic church-planting were lay led and not encumbered by the “how can we pay a pastor” dilemma” (93).

“Apostolic church planters must learn to ask, “Could national workers work in this way? (82)”

“Often church planters who have relied solely on personal evangelism among friends and neighbors have an aversion to less personal approaches, especially mass evangelism. Although personal evangelism may be a good approach, in many cases it will not be adequate because the number of one’s personal contacts is simply too few and none of them are ready or yet willing to hear the gospel” (216). I appreciated this correction. I have inadvertently pitted personal networking against mass communication in church planting, making the personal connection the overwhelming moral good. But they can work together!

“One-on-one relationships are an important but not exclusive means of discipling in church planting” (233).

“Unfortunately cross-cultural church planters often choose leaders who appeal to their cultural standards and personality but who lack the respect of the local people within the culture” (247). I’ve heard this from both Terry Schultz and Phil Strackbein!

“As we have argued throughout this book, a key to long-term church multiplication is the ability to plant churches using locally available resources and locally sustainable structures” (264).

“Real multiplication occurs when workers trained by the planters in turn train others” (273).

“Though the reproduction of new congregations begins here, multiplication at every level of ministry should have been built into the church from the start. Reproduction begins by teaching new believers how to share their faith, teaching disciples how to disciple others, teaching leaders how to train up new disciples and other leaders, and reproducing cells as the spiritual building blocks of the church” (287).

“I discovered that as soon as a group bases its church multiplication on how much money is available, they stop planting churches” (291).

Develop, Empower, and Release Local Workers, Recruiting from the Harvest (79).

Guidelines for subsidy:
1.) Give in ways that eventually lead to church multiplication based on local resources.
2.) Prioritize efforts that have no natural local constituency to support the ministry.
3.) Avoid giving in ways that stifle local initiative or create long-term dependencies.
4.) Do not give the impression that ministry depends on money, buildings, or paid professionals.
5.) Know the local culture, customs, and needs, and listen to local leaders (393-394).

Concerning why churches plateau—“More often it is because the energy of the church is diverted from evangelism to the needs of the members. Also the church structure, the gifts of the leaders, expectations of the members, location, and other limitations do not allow for consistent growth beyond a large family-sized church” (30).

Describing a church planting movement called DAWN, “Their goal is one church per thousand residents or, in rural areas, within easy traveling distance of every person (33).” According to that goal, we need over 3,000 churches in Quito!!!

In Peru church planting is called el siembro de iglesias (43).

“Today, many church-planting teams attempt to function democratically, seeing their leader as a coordinator without much authority. While understandable, this cultural adjustment can lead to stagnation when it comes to church planting” (335). ( )